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Comment by jamesaguilar | Hacker News Reader

Lesson I would get out of this is: developing in Microsoft technologies where they don't already have a strong or dominant position in a market is risky. These days their embrace extend extinguish tactic isn't working so well. What's included in this? Winphone? Surface? Don't really know what else.

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This. I'm a solution architect at a Microsoft gold partner (a loveless job). We are forever getting screwed. We've just managed to get through the windows workflow engine rewrite that appeared in WF4 and deprecated a shit load of stuff still hanging of asp and vb6 which is falling to bits.

This is all changing though.

Shockingly, management are starting to buy the fact that we're getting screwed. We already have 25 Linux machines and a few postgres machines in production. They all run OpenJDK on them and infrastructure items such as memcached, Postgres, couple of MQ solutions. That and we've thrown TFS out, moved to mercurial+JIRA, have Eclipse on more workstations than visual studio and are not renewing our partner package next year.

This is what happens when you treat your customers like shit and force them through costly audits so they can pay you more money for not understanding very ambiguous license terms.

It's not just Microsoft. If you tie yourself to proprietary technology on the web, you run the risk of having the carpet pulled out from under you. Sometimes that risk is worth it; most of the time, it is not.

Exactly. Other than Netflix, what well-known applications did Silverlight back? None come to mind for me.

There are a lot of private enterprise applications built on it. Its strength was that you could build complex tools relatively quickly. For example, I know of a local company that builds law enforcement software on it. I believe Netflix only uses a small portion of the 'Smooth Streaming' technology in Silverlight.

It ran (past tense) MLB.com's streaming games, but they abandoned it in favor of Flash.

As I recall, recent X Games and Olympics had all their online video content accessible only through Silverlight players also. I remember trying to watch some of these events and being annoyed because the Silverlight player was locking up Firefox.

Also the Feynman lectures on physics. It’s a shame that they went through the effort to put it online only to release it in an inaccessible format. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.HTML

Playboy

Certainly winphone. They migrated platforms from winmo 6.5 already, although the development ecosystem was tiny for it (part of the reason why it crashed and burned when the iphone came out). Now there's the upcoming switch with winphone 7 to 8, which introduces an entirely new way of doing things, with limited backward compatability.

The funny thing is that MS built their business on comparatively open platforms (closer to the android model), but they've gotten too greedy and out of touch, I think.

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