Will Steve Ballmer show up at the WWDC keynote? | Hacker News Reader

Will Steve Ballmer show up at the WWDC keynote?

blogs.barrons.com

14 pointsadw23 comments

Hmm, I'm dubious. I can see XCode on Windows, as it increases the developer market share and primes people for a move to Mac. I don't know how they'd do it technically, though - most of the good bits of XCode are based on kernel level dtrace support.

I just can't see them wanting Visual Studio support. It is, pretty much, just better than XCode. Overnight, the superior development platform for an Apple device would be a Windows machine. Unless they're really planning on EOLing OS X and their non iP* businesses, why would they want the best developer environment to be hosted on a rival platform? Killing or abandoning OS X seems insane - desk/laptops still account for 50% of their income, and currently most OS X developers are also targeting iP* devices in parallel with their desktop work. Moreover, the iPhone halo effect is getting them more Mac sales and Mac developers. Whilst they're not hurting for iPhone apps, why give developers the incentive to stop buying Macs, buy Windows, kill off their OS X development, and throw out a hugely profitable segment of Apple's business to gamble on Android not eating their iPhone lunch?

I suspect this is just an analysts "blue sky" nonsense, or a confusion over e.g. development environments for Office 2011 Mac. For reference, this same guy claimed there would be no Mac updates in 2009, and that they'd release a small OLED laptop by the end of 2009. 0 for 2 so far, and I'm guessing 0 for 3.

> Visual Studio [...] is, pretty much, just better than XCode.

How so? (Genuinely curious, I have too little experience with either platform to judge.)

Mostly, it's that the intellisense and interactive debugger systems are streets ahead. Intelisense is basically useless on XCode, and the debugger support is a thin UI layer around GDB (which, very often, just doesn't work. The number of times it'll tell me that a variable is out of scope when it's quite clearly right in front of its nose is insane).

Call me insane, but I kind of like GDB + Xcode's wrapper. Yes, once or twice it has said dumb things about variables, but no more so than Visual Studio.

Likewise, I can't remember a time when I've seen Xcode's Intellisense-like feature fail, though I can recall several times when Visual Studio's has. (Xcode's method to advance to the next parameter--Ctrl-slash or something--is pretty non-obvious, though.)

I think the more significant halo sales are coming from consumers, not developers. How much would Apple really lose by opening up another iPhone developer platform? I use VS at work all day and a Mac at home. Even though I can (and do) run Windows/VS on my Mac, I wouldn't switch away from Xcode (admittedly, I just dabble in Mac development). I don't making VS an iPhone development platform would lead to a significant loss of Mac sales or a downturn in OS X app development, I think it would just encourage Windows developers to create iPhone apps. It's also possible that Objective-C and the Cocoa framework could win over some developers and give them cause to try their hand at OS X development on a Mac. I guess I just don't see the downside to providing a supported development environment on an alternate platform.

At the end of the day, the more quality apps Apple gets on the iPhone, the better it is for them. Better apps = more phone/iPad sales = more halo sales.

I do have to agree with you on your 0 for 3 call, but what do I know. It'd definitely be exciting.

And how would they test apps without the simulator? You'd have to port pretty much all of Cocoa to windows for the simulator to work. It's not an emulator running the real ARM code and iPhone OS; it's more like a compatibility layer between iPhone objects and OSX objects.

No doubt followed by 6 minutes of rms promoting the ipad.

I'd pay to see that.

(Seriously; VS2010. If you assume it's about new-developer mindshare then at the moment Android has one huge advantage - you don't need to buy a Mac.)

It seems entirely plausible to me. Much like iPod/iTunes support for Windows in the past. It's inevitable. Apple's world does not revolve exclusively around the Mac. Even if 50% of mobile developers used a Mac, which is certainly an overstatement, that's too many Windows developers to ignore. Apple is already giving away XCode so no conflict of interest there. I'm not sure what Microsoft's motivation would be except trying to lure some potential Android developers to the iPhone in the short term because they envision WM7 and Android competing directly with each other.

Microsoft are really strong in office software and in developer tools. Those are businesses which are actually reasonably weakly coupled to the OS business and barely coupled at all to their devices business units.

I'm suspicious of the idea that any company of Microsoft's size and maturity has a coherent strategic direction. Apple's an exception, but it's not a business: it's a totalitarian command economy with shareholders.

I laugh because so many C# developer I know have suffered learning ObjC to be with the cool kids... And it's such a pain.

It would be quite a slap to Adobe's face to say that ActionScript is not a valid source language, and then embrace C# as one. I don't know if Adobe's face can withstand any more slappin'.

If Ballmer were to show up at a WWDC Keynote, (which I very much doubt) I can think of a better reason than a technically impractical dev tool announcement: integration of Bing services into iPhoneOS. Given the current friction between Google, this would be a huge finger in Google's eye.

So 6 months before they release their new phone OS, Microsoft is going to announce that they are Supporting the iPhone with their superior (personal opinion here) development environment, thus giving up one of the (very?) few areas that WP7 has an advantage...

I'm going to go out on a limb as say, probably not.

Does this guy not know that Visual Studio 2010 has already been released?

obviously a NOP operation

If you enter the Konami code during startup, you get the iPhone dev tools.

If this were to happen, the only reason it would is to bring Bing to the iPhone. Bing Search, Bing Maps, and perhaps Bing Travel if Apple announces their travel app plans (longshot).

while this would be AWESOME, I doubt it's true.

I'm with you on this. It would be totally AWESOME and would bring major hype to both companies, and possibly shift the discussion away from I/O + Android.

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

No.

No. This is insanity.

There's the growing theme that Apple and Microsoft are pals in their fight against Google. This is positively insane. Apple is absolutely devastating Microsoft's core foundation in a way that some shitty online spreadsheet hasn't.

Not to mention that this is the antithesis of pretty much everything that Jobs recently said about Adobe.

Apple doesn't need to woo developers, or expand their development platform. They have a lot of top notch apps, an overflowing app store, and everyone is rushing the door to get their chance at having their app denied. Maybe in a few years, if Android or WM7 really takes off, this will be a concern, but not now.

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