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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

So can you name one software vendor outside of Microsoft and Adobe making any real money selling desktop software - besides games?

How fast do you think a startup founder would get laughed out of an investor’s office of he started his pitch with “I have this great idea for a Windows Application”?

On the development side, it would be crazy for any developer to tie their horse to .Net Framework when MS has publicly said that it is in maintenance mode.

There were still a few jobs for Windows CE developers as late as 2014 even though MS abandoned it after VS 2008 (2007?). It would have been foolish for me to take such a job.

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Plenty of companies selling medical and industrial control equipment with Windows 10 or Qt based UIs.

And a big bunch of Fortune 500 buying consulting for internal applications.

So if you want names just pick random companies from Fortune 500 list, whose main business is completely unrelated to selling software packages.

And again, .NET Framework and .NET Core, are as we say in Portugal, sand out of the same bag, .NET.

Finally, Azure runs on Hyper-V, not Linux.

No they aren’t and you know this. .Net framework is in maintenance mode and not being actively updated with new features. That’s like saying .Net Compact Framework and .Net Core are the same thing.

As far as Azure running on Hyper V and not Linux, that’s irrelevant since developers of Azure are running in Linux VMs more than Windows VMs.

You are the only one here fighting hard to make the distinction between .NET Framework and .NET Core, as if that would matter to Fortune 500's.

They don't care for one second, we keep getting greenfield projects with deployment requests on top of 4.7.2. And brownfield projects still using 4.5.

For them even having the possibility to migrate to 4.8 would be a dream come true, let alone something like .NET Core.

So no matter what Microsoft wants to push, they have to keep these guys happy.

I’m not the only one “fighting hard to make the distinction”. Technically the distinction isn’t minor. One runs only on Windows, is in maintenance mode according to Microsoft and won’t get any major updates going forward and one is cross platform, actively being improved upon, and is the future of Microsoft’s development platform according to Microsoft

And you’re in Europe, do you really have an on the ground pulse of what most Fortune 500 American companies are doing? I’m frequently looking at the job boards and most greenfield projects are (unfortunately it’s my favorite language) not focused on C#/.Net at all and those that are trying to get from under both Windows licensing and the increased resources requirements and are moving toward .Net Core.

There are still holdouts for VB6 and I still see jobs wanting people to maintain them. But would you say maintaining legacy VB6 code was a good career move?

Most Fortune 500 operate world wide.

As for VB 6, if they pay alright and offer nice remoting package, why not.

Actually I did a couple of VB.NET (.NET 4.5) support activities during last year.

See, most people around this side of the pound aren't career obsessed.

We get to work, enjoy our IT unions (in some countries), 30 day vacations and have a life outside job.

As long as it pays the bills, most people are happy with what they get.

Until the company decides to change directions, you suffer from salary compression and inversions because HR decides to pay new employees market rate and (the hypothetical) you only get cost of living raises.

The last thing I want is to be tied to a company because I am not competitive in the market and then start complaining about “ageism”

And I’m on the opposite side of the country from the west coast FAANG and startup culture. I’m the definition of a standard “enterprise developer”.

What do you consider "real money"? There's a whole bunch of industry-specific software vendors like Autodesk and The Mathworks that have plenty of dependent companies still buying licenses for desktop software.

Autodesk had a net income of a whopping $40 million last quarter.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ADSK/autodesk/net-...

And MathWorks revenue is about a billion.

Compare that to even your middling SAAS company. I’m only saying that it is silly for someone to invest their future employability on a platform (desktop Windows) and a runtime (.Net Framework) that even MS is moving away from. Everything they announce is about Azure, .Net Core, and heck even Android these days. I’m not even saying that Windows as a server OS is the worse thing in the world - even though it’s a lot cheaper in both licensing costs and resources to use Linux even if you use .Net Core.

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