Sysadmin Field Notes

May 31, 2007

Jamie Cansdale's problems with Microsoft are why, as much I've come to enjoy working with some of the Microsoft technologies over the past two years, I suspect the developer relationship is always going to be dysfunctional. Which, put simply, makes developing on the platform much less fun. It's exactly what Martin Fowler observed about Microsoft's Ruby efforts.

Less fun platforms are harder to attract talent to. It may not matter for most IT shops, which are their bread and butter. But it certainly makes it un-fun enough for me to want to avoid it unless it's a mandate.

So maybe in the short term it doesn't matter that a ton of Thoughtwork's business is moving to Ruby. The immediate influence isn't going to be huge. But guess what? Those "alpha geeks" (and oooh...how I dislike that term) is your next generation of Technology VP's, directors of engineering, and CTO's.

It will take time, but without improving the way it treats the open source development community, I think Microsoft is eventually going to find itself wondering why the CTO's and decision makers started asking better questions, and why they can't seem to close deals on that golf course anymore.

Update: I should mention that I'm not 100% sure Jamie can (or should) win this fight. My point is simply that it's only in an ecosystem dominated by a single company that sets all direction, without much influence from the community, can this sort of thing happen at all. The problem isn't that the TestDriven.NET add on works or doesn't work with Visual Studio Express, the problem is that there is no other IDE. Here I think Jamie's efforts to bring more functionality to the entry level offerings is noble, if not necessarily completely legal or authorized.