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Comment by siglesias | Hacker News Reader

>> In fact, the acquisition by most accounts sounded more like a move by Ballmer to buy something that others may have wanted to own — just for the sake of others not owning it.

This struck me because I'm presently reading Stephen Levy's In the Plex, in which he reports at great lengths about why Google decided not to purchase Skype when eBay had it up for sale: mainly owing to Skype's peer-to-peer technology not being compatible with Google's existing centralized infrastructure. What reason would Microsoft have to think that this reasoning had changed?

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If you look at Microsoft's words and actions in regards to their competitors, they are clearly completely clueless.

In fact, "Microsoft people" are often completely blind to everything not made by Microsoft. Reading HN you may never know, but if you've met actual .NET stack developers, or MSCE's or anyone else similar, and you'll find people who make websites and don't know what apache is. Or they'll dismiss open source technologies with ridiculous reasoning.

That's what I see when MS speaks.

(To be fair, IBM can be the same way, if you are in certain industries, and I would imagine Cisco has the same effect in networking, but that's outside my knowledge)

Way to paint all .NET developers with the same brush. Have you ever actually met any .NET developers outside of your fevered imagination?

There are certainly company men in the, ahem, company, but one of the problems is that MS makes so many tools that are good enough that using open source tools is really hard to do.

Internally, we're told to use MS technology whenever possible. Using open source tools is also a nightmare from a legal perspective, and there are some non-trivial process because of that. It's not hard, but it requires due diligence on our part to ensure we don't expose the company to liability.

For the above reasons, it's frowned upon in company culture. I'm facing an internal side-project and am tempted to take a swing at it with nginx, apache and RoR for learning purposes, but the last thing I want is my manager to demo it and get a non-IIS error message along the way.

You could of course make the errors that RoR shits out look like IIS. In the interest of familiarity, of course, not because you're trying to conceal anything :)

I wish an outsider would write a blog about these bizarre worlds (the IBM mainframe and the all .Net stack guys). As a guy that rarely ever touches any MS products, it would be really freakish and odd.

Thank you. I'm a .NET developer by trade. (ASP.NET MVC).

Yes, I know Haskell. Yes I know python. Yes, I've used django. Yes I've programmed in PROLOG and EIFFEL. Yes I can use a shell and succesfully configured a linux server countless of times. Fuck me, totally unrelated, but I even know MATLAB. Yes, I had my hands on SOLARIS servers. Yes, I programmed a SPH solver with CUDA. Yes I know javascript, not just jQuery. ETC.

So here I am, an actual ".NET stack developer". Ask me anything.

I am doing some work with C# right now, and I would agree with "are often ..." in my workplace.

I'll ask the obvious: Why do you use .NET?

>If you look at Microsoft's words and actions in regards to their competitors, they are clearly completely clueless.

Clearly they have a clue. They realize that it's perfectly feasible to deploy large-scale applications using only the Microsoft stack. There's even a lot of evidence it might be the most efficient way to do it.

Personally, I try to avoid using Microsoft technologies - but I wouldn't be surprised if, making the switch, life suddenly became a lot simpler.

Well Skype is built on Linux and Postgres, so they might have to look at that stuff. Will be interesting if they try to do a Hotmail and rebuild it in Windows...

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