Comment by personZ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by personZ | Hacker News Reader

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While the announcements may be very exciting if your lot is in with Microsoft (^1), for people on mixed platforms and with real technology choice it just seems reactionary. That Microsoft moved configuration files from XML to JSON is really Microsoft's technology choices in a nutshell.

I have programmed on the Microsoft stack for many, many years, and still make a good deal of coin in .NET and SQL Server, so I'm not coming at this with an agenda. At the same time I can as easily leverage other technologies so I don't feel as grateful when Microsoft catches up.

^1 - I was working at a shop when .NET was first introduced and one chap was making a case for why we should adopt it. His case made a very compelling case for why the shop should have adopted Java years earlier, and it was actually eye opening to me because it was a demonstration of an organization and a team who saw their universe of choices as being defined by Microsoft.

Of course it's reactionary; the entirety of ASP.Net MVC is a reaction to web frameworks on other platforms. The key, I think, is that it's a very positive way to react. In the past Microsoft always took the negative road, trying to destroy competition, rather than the positive road of integrating and collaborating with competition and letting their products stand on their technical merits.

>In the past Microsoft always took the negative road, trying to destroy competition, rather than the positive road of integrating and collaborating...

Wait, what? Have you never heard of the phrase "embrace, extend, and exterminate" before? What you describe is simply step one of their modus operandi.

I think the only difference between the 1990's Microsoft and the one we have today is they aren't as good at the exterminating part. They still extend things like crazy, but either they really are trying to play nice or they just don't have the weight to exterminate much any more (that wasn't already swalloed by them). My opinion is it's likely a mixture of the two.

It may also be a product of age / experience. If you were involved in the 90's tech industry, it's very hard to forget MS's era of "embrace, extend, and exterminate".

I view Apple's closed ecosystems with a similar sense of apprehension.

Personally, I think if the roles were inverted, the computing world would be much worse.

ASP.NET MVC is a case of embrace, extend, exterminate?! Please think rationally.

This way we can get a better designed evolutionary version of concept, rather than a pioneering early version, e.g. C# vs Java.

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