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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

> @Balmer: Get rid of .NET.

In Q4 2009 the Server and Tools division had a revenue of 3.5 billion, bigger than their Client division, their online services or their entertainment devices.

.NET is one of their best products. It's one of the few reasons developers might develop for Windows Mobile 7. It's the single reason I actually thought about deployment on Windows servers.

With a single platform you can target the web, desktop clients (even clients running on Mac OS X / Linux), rich intranet web apps (Flex-like) or mobile apps (Silverlight has been released for Symbian, WinMo7, MeeGo and probably Android following).

Getting rid of .NET could be the stupidest thing they ever did, and probably the last nail in their coffin.

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The server and tools revenue doesn't say anything about .NET. I didn't say get rid of SQL server or their server OS.

Compare the popularity of C# + VB.net to other languages to see .NET has less than 1/20th of the market. And that for a company that not so long ago dominated the software market.

.NET is useless for

* desktop applications, since the forward and backward compatibility is not guaranteed.

* Downloadable applications, because a 250mb library pack download is just too much.

* Web Startups and/or social applications, because of the (sql) server costs.

So the only use .NET has is for small corporate applications.

The only thing Silverlight is good for is playing DRM protected media.

On Window XP the download for .NET 3.5 Client is just ~28Mb for machines with no framework, ~ 40 MB for .NET 4 (again, with no other version) and the web installer is only ~800 KB.

Over 80% (or even 90%) of Windows clients have some version of .NET installed, and since it's being pushed through Windows Update, some stats are reporting .NET 3.5 at more than 60%.

The Windows 7 marketshare is bigger than 10%, which means there are more Windows 7 clients out there then OS X, and I haven't seen OS X developers complaining about a lack of users willing to try out their apps.

> Web Startups and/or social applications, because of the (sql) server costs

Yes, but it really depends on your needs. PlentyOfFish / StackOverflow are doing just fine.

Details missing the point. Yes it's possible to use .NET, but Microsoft development tools aren't automatically the best choice anymore, and often even the worst choice.

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