Posted in Development | February 21st, 2008 | 2 Comments »
… to code in their languages. In an effort to gain some market share from the amateur developer world, Microsoft is courting students with their free offering of many major Microsoft development tools including Visual Studio 2008, Expression Studio, and XNA Game Studio. With tools like Eclipse and other free IDE’s, users have little incentive for using Microsoft’s Visual Studio for anything outside of .NET development. As Microsoft sees the world of development opening up, perhaps they are seeing their development audience migrating toward tools that embrace open rather than exclusivity.
Is this Microsoft’s attempt at becoming more “open”? Will we see student’s flocking to download Visual Studio or Expression Studio for development? I’ve used Visual Studio as the primary development tool through most of college and at work from time to time. I certainly see the value in having it, but is this enough to steal users away from Eclipse and other open/free IDE’s?
Posted in Development | January 30th, 2008 | No Comments »
With the recent announcement of MySpace’s extended Developer Platform, its easy to see how open development has become one of the great cars pulling the train that is Web 2.0. The push for open development and open standards is so prominent that we are seeing giants like IBM, with its support for Open Office, and Google, with the addition of Star Office, pumping millions into investing in Open.
With the advent of simpler API’s and developer platforms, these tools factor heavily into the success of common Web 2.0 companies who would otherwise go unused. What good is Flikr if you can’t integrate it into our blog? How must more popular are digg stories that can be dugg directly after reading an article? Tools like these are crucial in fully embracing the social aspect of Web 2.0. Even Microsoft is starting to grasp the concept with Office Live attempting to find its mark on the internet. But even as Microsoft has the technologies down, they still don’t embrace the social.
As the web becomes more interactive, I predict we will continue to see easier to use API’s coming from both start-ups and big companies alike.
