> Microsoft went insane with .NET so VB6 was killed in the process.
I'd love to hear more about this perspective or any links to get more of it.
I did a (very) little hobby VB6 and loved it. Never made switch to .NET at that time (I was young, it was a hobby).
Having recently worked through part of a .NET book, I was pretty impressed by how far MS took it (although it seems extremely mind-numbing). Obviously it took a long time and had false starts, but MS stuck with it. On a personal level, I am very opposed to the entire model in an ideological sense, but it does seem to make a lot of business sense for MS, and it seems to cover a lot of cases for a lot of businesses.
So, was Microsoft's insanity with .NET just the obsession part, or doing things poorly for a while, until eventually getting it "righter", or is the insanity still pretty apparent?
I really would love to learn more about the historical-technical aspects of this specific comment quote, from VB6 to modern day, because it fits my experience perfectly, but I've had second thoughts about the position more recently. The more the specifics the better.
The insanity was to abandon the advantage they had with VB/COM, in order to challenge Java on its own ground. They threw away the baby with the bathwater. The C# pivot also slowed down their desktop efforts pretty dramatically, doubling the blow.
They were lucky Sun squandered the opportunity they had engineered with Java, focusing on the hardware side and missing the boat on browser, virtualization and services. If Sun had bought Netscape and then focused on building something like Azure, instead of fighting the inevitable commoditization of server hardware, they would have eaten Ballmer's lunch.
Disclaimer: I am not a .Net programmer, so these are just my thoughts and impressions as someone on the outside who followed the development from a distance.
I think a lot of the focus on .Net was driven by MS and Balmer's fear of Java. At the time, almost all desktop computers were running Windows 9x/2k. If 3rd party applications were developed with cross-platform Java, the customers would no longer be locked in to Windows.
First they tried the famous embrace/extend/extinguish approach by creating a Windows-specific version of Java. Sun fought back, and MS decided to push .Net instead.
It seemed to me that the initial strategy was to claim .Net was cross platform, but focus more on Windows and let open source projects like Mono be their cross platform "alibi". They changed strategies after a while, and now I guess the cross platform is more real.
I'd love to hear more about this perspective or any links to get more of it.
I did a (very) little hobby VB6 and loved it. Never made switch to .NET at that time (I was young, it was a hobby).
Having recently worked through part of a .NET book, I was pretty impressed by how far MS took it (although it seems extremely mind-numbing). Obviously it took a long time and had false starts, but MS stuck with it. On a personal level, I am very opposed to the entire model in an ideological sense, but it does seem to make a lot of business sense for MS, and it seems to cover a lot of cases for a lot of businesses.
So, was Microsoft's insanity with .NET just the obsession part, or doing things poorly for a while, until eventually getting it "righter", or is the insanity still pretty apparent?
I really would love to learn more about the historical-technical aspects of this specific comment quote, from VB6 to modern day, because it fits my experience perfectly, but I've had second thoughts about the position more recently. The more the specifics the better.