Dot Net, Not Yet for Some Hot Outfits
March 29, 2011
Microsoft is selling, licensing, or installing tens of thousands of SharePoint servers with a heart beat like that of a healthy mastodon. The problem that most of the cheerleaders in search and content processing overlook is that SharePoint is a giant services generator. Think of SharePoint as a digital money machine for English majors, failed Web masters, and journalists reinventing themselves.
I read “Why We Don’t Hire Dot Net Programmers.” Interesting information for sure. Here’s a snippet:
See, Microsoft very intentionally (and very successfully) created .NET to be as different as possible from everything else out there, keeping the programmer far away from the details such that they’re wholly and utterly dependent on Microsoft’s truly amazing suite of programming tools to do all the thinking for them. Microsoft started down this path when they were the only game in town, explicitly to maintain their monopoly by making it as hard as possible to either port Windows apps to non-Windows platforms, or to even conceive of how to do it in the first place. This decision — or this mandate for incompatibility, perhaps — has produced countless ramifications. Small things, like using backslashes in file paths rather than forward slashes like any dignified OS., or using a left-handed coordinate system with DirectX instead of right-handed as was used since the dawn of computer graphics. Big things, like obscuring the networking stack under so many countless layers of abstraction that it’s virtually impossible to even imagine what bytes are actually going over the wire. And a thousand other things in between: programming tools that generate a dozen complex files before you even write your first line of code, expensive servers that force a remote GUI terminal on you to do essentially anything despite a few keystrokes being perfectly adequate for everybody else, a programming culture almost allergic to open source licensing. The list goes on and on. None of this makes you a “bad programmer”. All these differences are perfectly irrelevant if you just want to make 1.6 oz burgers as fast as possible, and commit the rest of your career to an endless series of McDonalds menus. But every day spent in that kitchen is a day NOT spent in a real kitchen, learning how to cook real food, and write real code.
Will Microsoft agree? Nah. Will Microsoft certified companies and people agree? Nah. Will poobahs and mavens focused Microsoft SharePoint governance agree? Nah.
Who would agree? Maybe outfits like Facebook, Google, and Oracle.
Stephen E Arnold, March 29, 2011
Freebie unlike unemployed journalists reminted as SharePoint experts.
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