article

How one announcement damaged the .net ecosystem

[WHAT]

1.  ] by Alan Melendevich @ailon.org - Alan hypothesizes on how msft lack of public clarification on the future of its XAML markup language for front end application development ended up hurting the entire .net ecosystem as vendors pulled away from many xaml projects and looked elsewhere

[WHY]

1. ] 

[WHERE]

1. ] READ THE FULL ARTICLE
1. ] https://blog.ailon.org/how-one-announcement-destroyed-the-net-ecosystem-on-windows-19fb2ad1aa39#.z04sj2nkw 

[WHEN]

1. ] 2016-07-08

[EXAMPLE]

1. ] This post is based on events that happened 5 years ago. I had the basic points of it in my “drawer” for years, but thought it’s water under the bridge and there’s no point in actually writing and publishing this anymore. However, last week the main character of this story was “wrong on the internet” and apparently still unaware of the effect that announcement had on the ecosystem. So, I decided it is important to write down the effect these events had on me personally and the whole vendor and developer ecosystem in the client .NET developer community.
2. ] The focal point of the story is the first public announcement/demonstration of Windows 8 at the AllThingsD D9 conference back in the spring of 2011. Specifically, a part of it that provided both vague and, at the same time, pretty specific details on how native Windows 8 apps will be written (emphasis mine): Windows 8 essentially supports two kinds of applications. ] One is the classic Windows application, which runs in a desktop very similar to the Windows 7 desktop. ] The other type of application, which has to be written in HTML5 and Javascript, looks more like a mobile application, filling the full screen.
3. ] OP was developer for .net charting controls package, revenue fell to $0 on the .net side after the announcement
4. ] The problem is that D9 happened on June 1st and for the next 3+ months Mr. Sinofsky and co. did very little to publicly dispel the sentiment that XAML is being relegated to “legacy” platform on Windows 8.
5. ] What this meant for every sane developer team? It didn’t take long for all of them to decide to park all the new client-side XAML development projects until the situation clears up. And that, obviously, included investing into XAML based components and component suites.
6. ] As a result we’ve seen many of the vendors lower their investments into the .NET space. And that doesn’t just mean less attention invested into building products. That also means less marketing and evangelizing for the native Windows 8 and now Windows 10 development. And Microsoft is a very partner driven company, so the whole community was affected even if they didn’t notice it explicitly.
7. ] I would also argue that these events had a major effect on accelerating the processes. I, for one, had to quit .NET control development as a direct result of that announcement.
8. ] Mistakes happen. That’s normal. As long as you admit them and learn from them. It is impossible to learn from mistakes when you think there were no mistakes made. Maybe there really was no intention to support XAML-based apps on Windows 8 in May and the announcement was the truth of the moment.
9. ] Fast-forward 4 years. At Build 2015 Microsoft announces that they will create “bridges” to bring iOS and Android apps to Windows 10. For many, this meant they were out of a job. Their clients called them and asked: “Why would I pay you to create a Windows 10 app, if I can just take our Android app and run it on Windows?”. And there was no good answer to that, since there weren’t that many details about the Android bridge at the time.
10. ] As we know now that bridge never really happened. But the damage was done. I’ve heard people quite high up the ranks admitting that underappreciating the effect of the announcement was an oversight and even trying to mitigate the fallout. And that was encouraging to see despite the actual mishap.

[HOW-TO]

1. ]

[REFERENCE]

1. ] SRC=hn(157)/comments(95) 
2. ] https://blog.ailon.org/?source=logo-lo_dnt_e3e9f3bf947f-2064044b1a74

 

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ID: 5177

NAME: how-one-announcement-damaged-the-dot-net-ecosystem

DESCRIPTION: ] by Alan Melendevich @ailon.org - Alan hypothesizes on how msft lack of public clarification on the future of its XAML markup language for front end application development ended up hurting the entire .net ecosystem as ...

AUTHOR: article.author/s

EDITOR: article.editor/s

PUBLISHER: article.publisher/s

STATUS: Write

PRIORITY: -5

OWNER ID: 75

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