I think the pendulum has been swinging from Apple towards Microsoft for developer friendliness for some time now. This is definitely an active strategy on MS's part, and a huge misstep by Apple. Some key parts of the MS strategy:
- Embracing Linux. Beyond what's mentioned in the article, there's the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and the new Terminal app. Being able to run Ubuntu (or whichever distribution) natively on a windows machine, accessing the same file system, is huge for developers. The new Terminal app will make interacting with it even better.
- IDE dominance. Visual Studio (classic) combined with the .NET environment languages is very, very powerful. Visual Studio Code has taken web development by storm. A lot of what makes these two so powerful is Intellisense, which is extremely good at what it does. Compare this with XCode.
- Premium first party hardware. The Surface line of laptops / 2-in-1s / etc is at least as good as the recent Macbook Pros. They also innovated in an actually useful way (the detachable tablet on the Book), as compared to the developer-hostile "innovations" from Apple (replacing the escape key with a skinny phone, a universally reviled keyboard, etc)
I really have to give Nadella credit for the way this has all been orchestrated.
MS has always been super developer friendly as far as I can remember. The difference was in the past you had to buy into their ecosystem and way of thinking. Once that was done, VS was by far the most superior experience. Now MS embraces a greater variety of developers, not just those who bought in.
Personally I never found the heavy IDE approach compelling and I'd much rather just build up a Makefile than rely on what VS and co are offering. MacOS used to be better in that case because you had native POSIX on top of a machine with excellent driver support and good ergonomics.
But now the winds really have turned. MacBooks turned to crap, Windows laptops improved and we have WSL with perfect VS code integration. I recommend anyone to try WSL, install VS code, install its remote extension and then go to a git repo in bash and type "code ."
> Why should I invest in the Microsoft stack? I'm done. Microsoft is no longer a platform I will work on and I will recommend open source products and frameworks from now on.
> The Windows tech hegemony is a graveyard. XNA. Silverlight. WPF. DirectX. Managed C++. C++/CLI. Managed DirectX.
What changed I guess is that they switched to embrace Linux full on. And now extending it as well. I trust that Linux is safe from extinguishing though - too much of the world runs on it, and free servers are just too compelling.
Not extinguishing perhaps, but appropriating and building upon Linux for their own benefit without giving much back is certainly possible. Google's already done it with Android.
Quite a lot of Google-developed code goes back into the Linux kernel. Look at cgroups - the entire containerization revolution sprung from code Google gave back to Linux.
Did that come out of Android? Google uses Linux itself as a desktop OS too.
Android hasn't led to anything like a mobile Linux. Google took Linux, built Android on top of it, and now owns the mobile space. Apple did something similar using FreeBSD inside OS X.
I don't play too much in the MS ecosystem but from what I read they seem to have moved away from the embrace, extend, extinguish methodology. Which is a good thing.
I have to add Git. They seem to have a dedicated Git performance team. I recently sent a patch to improve git performance, and have mostly been collaborating with friendly Microsoft engineers. Not what I expected at a first glance.
What changes here would meaningfully change the competitive balance? A macOS subsystem for Linux doesn't sound interesting. Neither, really, does a new IDE for building macOS and iOS applications. What's the real misstep here? The crappy Apple keyboard?
I think the misstep by Apple was to focus so heavily on iPhones that they stopped paying attention to the developer experience on Mac. Look at the fucked Catalina release, the slow MacPro update cycle and the abandonment of the Mac Mini, the obscene SSD pricing (especially combined with the way Docker likes to eat gigs...), and yes, the shitty Macbook Pro keyboard and stupid touch bar. Lots of things that together add up to a poor developer experience.
Obviously, Mac doesn't need a subsystem for Linux because it's already a *nix and all the tools work there already. Microsoft was playing catch up, but they're starting to look pretty well caught up.
Now, this isn't to say Apple is doing poorly, obviously they make ungodly gobs of money and are usually the most valuable company in the world. My original comment was about developer mind share, though, which I think is swinging back towards MS after being thoroughly owned by Apple from, say, 2008-2016. By not making the developer experience a priority, I think Apple is losing ground that they didn't have to cede.
The parent comment just reads like an ad for windows. Having recently had the displeasure of developing on Windows, WSL is terrible and buggy. I’ve tried it on two different occasions and both times I just ended up going back to PS. That comment will get upvoted because hating Apple is so popular here that even shilling Microsoft will get upvotes when framed like this (I guess the “year of the linux desktop” memes got tired?). Apple still makes the best dev machines (unless you’re writing a .NET app), the keyboard is the only legitimate complaint I can see against them, but most people I know actually kinda like it. Even then, for that to be a deal breaker, you have to pretend as though we don’t all have our MacBooks plugged into two monitors and a mechanical keyboard at work (and have you ever used a Surface keyboard? Yikes...).
How is this different than every other company doing business in China, including Microsoft?
>Keep your data within datacenters located in China with an Azure China account and stay compliant with international and industry-specific compliance standards. Access to your customer data is controlled by an independent company in China, 21Vianet. Not even Microsoft can access your data without approval and oversight by 21Vianet.
Actions that are legally required of every company doing business in a particular country do not invalidate their actions elsewhere.
Google, for instance, bragged on their blog to their real customers in advertising that they now buy a copy of everyone's credit card transaction history.
Actually I think they do - if they're ever legally required to give up data here they seem to not really put up a fight, or have an incentive to make the data useless for the govt.
What I'm saying is expecting Apple to have your back sounds meh.
Do any serious developers who are not already steeped in the MS ecosystem actually clamor to work in that environment? Half of the tools I use on a daily basis are not MS friendly.
Most developers work for companies that go where the money and eyeballs are. They are both on web and mobile. No matter how “friendly” MS is, if you want to develop for iOS, you have to have a Mac.
The entirety of Mac revenue is around 10% of Apple’s revenue. If it does lose the love of developers, it doesn’t make a difference.
That being said, I’m mostly all in on Apple - the Watch, iPhone, iPad, AppleTV, and soon AirPods Pro. But I don’t see any purpose for buying a Mac. My tooling and other apps would be the same and you have a lot more options at better prices on Windows.
- Embracing Linux. Beyond what's mentioned in the article, there's the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and the new Terminal app. Being able to run Ubuntu (or whichever distribution) natively on a windows machine, accessing the same file system, is huge for developers. The new Terminal app will make interacting with it even better.
- IDE dominance. Visual Studio (classic) combined with the .NET environment languages is very, very powerful. Visual Studio Code has taken web development by storm. A lot of what makes these two so powerful is Intellisense, which is extremely good at what it does. Compare this with XCode.
- Premium first party hardware. The Surface line of laptops / 2-in-1s / etc is at least as good as the recent Macbook Pros. They also innovated in an actually useful way (the detachable tablet on the Book), as compared to the developer-hostile "innovations" from Apple (replacing the escape key with a skinny phone, a universally reviled keyboard, etc)
I really have to give Nadella credit for the way this has all been orchestrated.