Visual Studio kerfuffle: Is Microsoft suicidal or out of good options?
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This is all because both companies have realized something we developers haven't grasped yet: they will be making their money as gate keepers, not as innovators. In fact, innovation is frowned upon - nothing illustrates this better than the OS X Sandbox mechanism and the politics of the App Store. Microsoft, already grappling with the looming specter of irrelevance, will have to copy this. It seems that for OS vendors in this decade it's either "become an autocratic despot or die".
If this keeps up, computers will become seriously limited devices in the near future.
I think the HN crowd has seen this coming a million miles away.
Now, what can we do about it?
I strongly believe that Microsoft was already trying to become a gatekeeper a decade ago setting the stage with Hailstorm. Only the fear for anti-trust authorities blocked them IMO.
Now Apple cleared the way and Microsoft already has a much stronger infrastructure in place to become a gatekeeper. I'm pretty sure they will fail at becoming THE gatekeeper, but I think they will still become A pretty large gatekeeper.
People should have voted with their wallet back when the walled garden xbox and iphone were released. But we are talking about the huge mass of consumers that simply don't give a damn.
Consumers swallow pretty much everything, just think about DRM and e-books. We were lucky enough that the industry got caught pants down by Apple with music but they learnt immediately from that.
Besides, both Microsoft and Apple were smart enough to let people think that, after all devices, can't really be locked down. The first xbox was a joke with a very convenient place to insert mod chips and the iphone was immediately jail-broken. But we all know this can be fixed by their side.
Unless things changed, the xbox 360 has very limited hacks to run game backups, but can't run unsigned code (it certainly can't run XBMC which was the reason why I bought the original version).
Apple TV, if rumors materialize in something real, will be the next big appliance following this path. Then, when times will be mature, jail-breaking (hacks in general) will magically become useless and that's it.
Also: Apple has been a little bit more evil by tricking a whole generation of developers (and developers wannabee) that they can make the ultimate app and become uber-rich while we know from numbers that for the vast majority of them income is ridiculous.
As I said, I'm not sure something can be done by us. Of course states should be there to prevent exactly this kind of behaviors but we all know how it works with politics and lobbies.
With very few exceptions, phones and video game consoles have always been "walled gardens".
True. The problem comes when people try to use them as general computing devices. Or even, when manufacturers treat general computing devices like phones and consoles.
Before the generation of consoles that includes the xbox, I can't remember of any real attempt to lock them down by preventing unsigned code the be run (and I don't consider not releasing an SDK really a walled garden).
I also don't remember Windows Mobile preventing people to run homebrew code and Symbian enforced signed-only code roughly when Nokia N82/N95 came around.
Anyway, locking some API/functionalities is different from requiring all code to be signed which in turn is different from requiring that all code must be distributed by a single entity (that can apply arbitrary terms of conditions to distribute it).
Although In logic "slippery slope" reasoning is a fallacy, in -real-life, it happens all the time. Draconian rules are introduced one step at a time so I still think that was about the right time to vote with your wallet.
The original article states that VS 11 will require the professional version to build other than Metro applications. The free version will only build Metro applications.
However, VS 2010 free edition can be used, as the article notes. I don't see any confirmation that Microsoft is going to stop distribution of VS 2010 free edition.
Is it really a problem to use VS 2010 if you want to do non-Metro development?