Microsoft: .Net Beat Java, Who's Next?

Yes, they really have.
But it's not over yet. With comments like this one:

"As we focus on the enterprise segment, we have the ability to drive up our revenue share."

...I worry. I understand that you need to generate revenue for shareholders. And frankly, I don't begrudge you that. Go ahead. Cater to the enterprise.

But... "Who's next?" you ask?

The lightweight RAD-that-doesn't-blow stuff like Django/RoR/PHP. Of course this is selfish on my part. I realize my tiny segment of uber geeks is hardly a market-share worth pursuing. However, we're a barometer and an early warning system. As we go, so goes the industry in the near future.

And comments like this, really don't encourage me:

Moreover, looking beyond J2EE, Microsoft has to deal with issues like AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)-style development, as well as lighter-weight frameworks such Ruby on Rails.

Ozzie said Microsoft must create frameworks for different types of development. For instance, in the Web development space Microsoft has ASP.Net, and for AJAX-style development Microsoft has its Atlas tool.

*sigh* - Ozzie, everyone knows you're a genius, but you've obviously never looked at Atlas and you don't understand the crowd that uses (or wants to use) RoR. Atlas is fairly decent at mass-market buzz-lover appeal, and I suppose you'll get some VB6ers to convert over to it and get all excited. But no one in the serious web developer community can take Atlas seriously. It's too abstracted, too black box, too sealed. We don't want more black boxes and heavier frameworks we want (as you said) lighter-weight frameworks.

Comments

[Mark Turansky]

Ok, so I ran across this article a long time after it's been posted, but still... are you kidding?

The single article you reference as "proof" that .NET has beaten Java is eweek, who's single source of information is a MSFT Sr. VP for Server Products. What do you think he's going to say? "No, we're still getting our asses handed to us in the server arena."

I've done both JEE and .NET projects. There is no silver bullet. .NET is not magic. There are pros and cons to each platform, but they are largely equivalent in power and ability.

Now, if you said .NET is beating JEE at marketing, then I'd be forced to agree. MSFT is a marketing behemoth and they are good at their job.

I've recently written a sophisticated message bus using Java and Terracotta server that's deployed to dozens of Linux nodes across a network with code that's downloaded at runtime via bootstrapping.

Java = free, Terracotta = free, Linux = free. That means our cost to scale is just the cost of hardware. Come back when you can say the same for a large grid-based .NET program.