Sometimes, people ask me to justify just why I say Microsoft is about 4 years behind in technology. I can not think of a better example of this than Heroku, a Ruby on Rails web host.
- Cloud Computing
- Instant App Creation and Editing
- Ruby on Rails Native
- Live Code Editing and Database Modification
- Completely Elastic Cloud using Amazon S3 and uh, the Elastic Cloud
- So Easy it is Frightning
Microsoft does not even come close to competing with this type of thought process. While they may be good in some fields, they are so out of touch with modern web programming and design, it will take them years to get ASP.Net to where Ruby was 4 years ago. This Heroku company just took Microsoft’s Web Hosting Partners and kicked them not just to the curb, but instead kicked them off the planet.
If you program and plan on continuing as a programmer for the next few years and you do the web app gig, you really, really need to do at least some Ruby on Rails and Cloud stuff.
Every time I go over to Microsoft and see my friends that work there, I feel like Cassandra. No one listens or if they do they just smile, nod and turn going back to doing what they always have done. Then, one day, sometime about 2 or 3 years from now, they will decide “OH! Look that Cloud thing is cool. Let’s do that now. Who can we copy?”
We see this now with the ASP.Net MVC project’s wholesale theft borrowing of just about every idea in Ruby on Rails from 2 years ago or so. The current Ruby on Rails thought not so much, they are probably having too hard a time reverse engineering the older stuff.
I would certainly expect Microsoft to continue this trend and they sure seem to be living up to that expectation. Look at LINQ and ADO.Net Entity Framework. They act as though this stuff is new and hot and they invented the Sun and Moon. Uh, I hate to break it to them, but Hibernate and WebObjects (introduced in 1994) and others have been doing this for YEARS, like 14 years, so don’t get all superior on me there buddy. Wow, that’s some innovation, 14 years and you are finally releasing what we have been doing with NeXTSTEP and OS X all along. Nice. Sigh…
So, to sum it up. Once again, Microsoft shows they do not innovate–they copy and don’t copy well at that. This might be fine if they didn’t shout from every rooftop that they do.
Sadly, this is a lie.
