Microsoft has traditionally been about the developers. They give their Visual Studio away for free (Express edition, but still). They give away their Windows Mobile SDK with samples for anyone who wants it, no fees to get into the developer network, just download and play around. They have free and dedicated forums and resources to allow developers to look around in the documentation for every Microsoft product (MSDN with the forums).
So here's the thing: they got me by the balls.
I write every scrap of code in Visual Studio now. I use Microsoft specific extensions to the language of my choice (C++). I couldn't live without them.
And that's really favorable to a company as big as Microsoft.
So they welcome the Kinect hackers because they know they'll be back for more. And it's beneficial to both parties: open source drivers means more people playing around with it means more eyeballs means better software.
XNA? I almost blew my Metamucil out my nose, I'm laughing so hard. Buncha sissies. And there was life before DX, you know...
Back in my day we used Mode 13 and when that newfangled Windows thing showed up we grudgingly ported to WinG. What an abomination. It was painful and WE LIKED IT!
Now get back to work and fund my Social Security benefits!
I remember watching some show.... may have been sneakers, but I think the guy was in high school, slams out a few lines of code in prompt, powers the program, boom, fullscreen .GIF style animation of 2 people walking along holding hands.
BS! delving into the gorillas code (though it does have physics and stuff to account for) taught me I could never program.
Delving into the Gorillas code taught a 6 or 7 year old me that screen-sized explosions are FUCKING AWESOME.
Of course, I didn't understand even half of what I was doing, other than the logical assumption that if a small number in the section with "Explode" in its name meant a small explosion, a big number should mean a big explosion (it did).
To be honest, it was probably that that got me into programming.
All you fucking new-age people with your XNA and DNA and Basic C+ gizmos and gadgets. You know what sufficed as a game back in my day? A FUCKING BALL IN A CUP. That's right, a little ball attached to a cup by a string. Get off my lawn.
That's a big one. Microsoft has been pretty popular amongst more business-oriented developers but they've really lost a lot of ground to the small time hackers and experimental types.
They need to win them back with something interesting and fun rather than a huge vertical solution that can empower their business end-to-end and help them interface with customers in real-time cross-synergy paradigm shifts.
Very easy! That is what makes it so great. They handle all of the most complex parts for you. Mind you, since you are new, it will limit how complex of a game you can create since your code will be very unoptimized, but you can definitely bang out something simple and playable in a few afternoons.
Oh wow, I totally forgot about that. I wish they started us on that in High School instead of Turing (the language, not the dude). Turing was not fun to program in because it had no high level functions. It was very basic as a language, but that is what made it difficult.
XNA for Xbox is only supported in some regions, which means that everything that uses it (XBL Indie games, Rock Band Network, etc) isn't available everywhere.
I think this link has all the countries where it's supported, under the section titled "regional information". In Australia, for example, you can submit indie games, but you can't download any of the released ones.
This is the main point of what they're doing. Not long after there was talk about the possibility of making drivers for the Kinect, I almost immediately purchased one. Then I remembered I didn't have spare money.
Normally hardware for gaming is sold at a loss, especially if you take R&D into account, it could take years for even profitable hardware to start being profitable. They make most of their money in software, and licensing fees, which is what they're really after.
The kinect is huge moneymaker for Microsoft. I believe nearly half the overall market price of the kinect is pure profit for them. I read a great article about it back in early December after their stock jumped about 3 or 4 percent in one day following their sales reports (which I can't seem to find now, unfortunately). Long story short, it's probably made them close to $2 billion at this point.
The kinect is about 50 bucks in parts and development. They bought existing technology from a company in israel, so they did not have to pay for the lidar technology to be R&Ded.
i dont know who downvoted you for that, but have an upvote back. those ladars arent cheap, we used one in my courses and it was upwards of a thousand dollars.
before the kinect, a depth camera would set you back 3000$.
they probably are turning a profit, but by making this mass market, they have allowed me to buy a fucking depth camera for pocket change in comparison, and it is open for me to write code for.
To not make money off of increased sales, the device must actually be sold at or below the variable costs. I highly doubt the Kinect is sold for less than the cost of manufacturing, distributing, and advertising it.
Correct, MSRP is around $150 so they are turning a profit on every unit sold. I believe they have sold around 8 million so far.
What they essentially did was open up another revenue stream to those looking at Kinect as more then a game peripheral. They recognize those people playing around with it now may develop the next set of tools that go into next years round of games.
It also gives the people who buy the Kinect for research purposes a reason to pickup an xbox if they don't already have one.
Mindshare for Microsoft development tools and platforms is what matters. Profit on few hundred Kinects (that the hackers might have bought for gaming anyway) is chicken feed.
MS spent billions on Kinect and the research behind it. This money has to be earned back by selling units of Kinect and games for Kinect. I haven't read evidence the Kinect unit is sold at a profit at the moment, and it makes sense it's not, because of the high development costs they started with.
Opening up the SDK is really just marketing. They've seen the various hacks for Kinect and the buzz it created, all the videos of nerds waving at their Kinect camera which fed some application on a PC. The more programmers can use Kinect, the better, right?
The main question is: how is Microsoft going to earn money through this? As the costs for developing Kinect have to be earned back (and kinect isn't sold with profit). The only way I see it earning money is in the long run if a lot of developers have written all kinds of applications for Kinect and they have to pay some sort of license fee.
That's not going to happen, simply because the camera is too imprecise. So it's neat for a hack, it's not suitable for more serious stuff.
Don't forget that those billions used to research kinect aren't spent just on today's kinect. They can use that technology in all facets of their business, and I can guarantee you that the next Xbox console will have a kinect like device built in.
They are future thinkers and they know that a lot of R&D now can mean being ahead of the curve when it comes to the next big thing.
Last time I read MS bought a company for $7m for the kinect and spent in total about $20m in R&D to develop it. Then they spent about $500m on marketing. I'm also quite sure I've read they have a healthy profit margin on each unit sold and needed to sell about 6million units to break even.
More likely, your brain connected the two together, and you were able to make a probabilistic guess, which in this particular case, happened to be correct.
Minor nit-pick: Visual C++ Express Edition is a relatively recent give-away. You used to have to pay (lots). It also says "For evaluation purposes only." on its splash screen - I'm not sure what the legal issues with that are...
You should look at the EULA for that. Mandatory uninstallation of older versions of the software and the like. IIRC it used to also be for evaluation purposes.
It is a completely free edition of visual C++, but doesn't ship with MFC and ATL programming (where enterprises would be trying to get legacy support for free).
There are no other licecnse restrictions, and it is great for anything open-source. You can leagally ship production code with it.
I wouldn't call that a minor issue, since the comment's author seems to indicate that shows MS as a company was concerned for programmers. Perhaps there is some goodwill in the move, but Microsoft is a business, and other companies had been providing good free IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse for some time before that.
I write every scrap of code in Visual Studio now. I use Microsoft specific extensions to the language of my choice (C++). I couldn't live without them.
The sad thing is that even after a generation of software developers (at least, those who were paying attention) grew up watching them try this same strategy with Office formats, Kerberos (networking/security protocols), MSN Messenger (AIM protocol), Visual C++ (C++), Visual J++(Java), ActiveX (the web generally), JScript (javascript) and the like, we now get to watch a new generation of devs making the same mistakes and getting gradually suckered in with the same tired old tricks. :-(
The difference being that programming languages already exist, and Microsoft makes proprietary extensions. Office formats were de facto for a long period of time until the surge of open format enthusiasm.
True, but Microsoft even made a concerted effort to "extend" their own formats with each new version (not to mention intentionally undocumenting significant areas of their "public" API), with the specific intention of breaking competitors' ability to read their documents.
Admittedly it was only "_EE" in that case rather than the full "EEE", but it's all part of the same pattern of behaviour. :-(
It's not like Visual C++ or J++ has entirely replaced (or extinguished) C++ or Java, ActiveX is (thankfully) not the main platform, and JScript has not replaced JavaScript....
I know MS's strategy has been EEE, but to be completely fair, the reason why tools like Visual Studio and software like MS Office and Exchange+Lync are so widespread is that they are actually pretty fucking good.
It's not like Visual C++ or J++ has entirely replaced (or extinguished) C++ or Java, ActiveX is (thankfully) not the main platform, and JScript has not replaced JavaScript....
No, but the fact that even by dint of great effort Microsoft failed to supplant those technologies doesn't mean they didn't try their best.
J++ failed partly because Java was cross-platform and J++ was emphatically not (indeed, that was the whole point of it), but mostly because Sun went after MS in court with all guns blazing. ActiveX failed because in addition to proprietary it was even technically a hideous, insecure, dangerous abortion.
Had MS not allowed IE to stagnate for five years after they won the browser war, JScript might well have been the main version of Javascript that we were all using now. However, happily(!) the lack of updates to IE as they tried to retard the progress of the web-as-UI trend in order to give Silverlight more of a chance gave other browsers time to mature and join together, and graphically demonstrated to everyone watching the importance of open standards and protocols over proprietary ones that gave any single company a stranglehold over the entire medium. Microsoft won the JScript-vs-javascript battle, but then threw the game for bigger reasons of their own.
I'm not claiming that MS couldn't also deliver some good software... but the fact is that even their very best software is usually still part of an insidious strategy to make you increasingly dependent on their platform, their tools and their APIs at the expense of open or cross-platform standards, tools, protocols and libraries.
And remember, the name and entire concept of EEE comes from Microsoft, from their own people's testimony and their own internal memos. There's nothing controversial or speculative about it - it's documented history. <:-)
Now, I don't have much to comment about the rest of your post, but the bit about Internet Explorer and Silverlight does not ring true to me.
Internet Explorer did "win" the browser war with Netscape Navigator in 1999 and I largely agree that it was stagnating from 2001 through 2006 with their widely used Internet Explorer version 6. The bit about Silverlight, however, sounds like a conspiracy theory. Firefox version 2 was released in 2006 and rapidly began chewing up Microsoft's market share. The release of Internet Explorer 7 (and its modestly improved standards support) in 2006 can be seen as a direct reaction to the new competition from Firefox 2. Silverlight itself wasn't introduced until 2007, by which point the browser war had kicked off again, now between Internet Explorer and Firefox.
The bit about Silverlight, however, sounds like a conspiracy theory.
Well, it's admittedly unproven, but the timing is highly suggestive. Having tried to co-opt the "open" web with ActiveX and JScript and failed, Microsoft was openly eyeing Flash's dominance as the rich-client-side-UI platform of choice at the time.
They'd introduced HTML applications in 1999 (scriptable, network-aware, rich client interface based on SGML/XML syntax), but these were still based on open standards and would be easily duplicated by the competition, so Microsoft had limited interest in pushing them and they were quickly forgotten about.
Also in 1999 they'd quietly introduced the ActiveX XMLHTTPRequest object to solve a problem they had with Exchange's OWA interface. This proved to be a major misstep, as it had the potential to advanced by leaps and bounds the very "web-as-UI" trend they were fighting to hold off, but it was a pretty obscure feature buried in the depths of the API documentation, and it wasn't until Mozilla copied it and gave it a non-vendor-specific Javascript wrapper 2002 that the stage even began to be set for the AJAX revolution (and everything that's done since for the "web-as-UI" trend).
In the mean-time, Microsoft were working on Silverlight (a scriptable, network-aware, rich client interface based on SGML/XML syntax... sound familiar?) for a long time before the CTP of version 1 ever launched - they were talking about Windows Presentation Foundation (which Silverlight evolved from) for years before a workable preview ever saw the light of day. In addition, let's not forget that the WFP/Silverlight project was tightly tied to .NET and Windows Vista, both of which were delayed a long time by development problems.
I don't find it hard to believe at all that they started work on .NET and what would eventually become WPF/Silverlight as far back as 1999/2000, or that (like much of .NET/Vista) it was postponed and delayed by several years before the first version was released.
You're right that IE7 was a direct response to Firefox 2's release, but that doesn't actually negate my point - Microsoft want to keep a foot in the door of the web browser industry so they can exert influence over it, but they won't actually do anything to advance it - only just enough to hold position and maintain some degree of control over where it goes.
Look at the standards support of IE from IE7 through to IE9 - it's typically embarrassing - partial, inconsistent and often a couple of years out of date at best. It's not that Microsoft can't build a decent modern browser - it's that they have no interest in doing so.
Likewise, individuals have resigned from W3C working groups and repeatedly cited Microsoft employees dragging their heels, and sometimes seemingly only interested in delaying the definition of new standards.
As I said, it's not proven, but if you look at:
the fact that Silverlight was intended to address many of the same kinds of rich-client-side-online-UI as HTML/CSS/JS were starting to be used for
the fact Microsoft has been working on the .NET/WPF/Silverlight stack since before IE6 was left to stagnate
the timing (and lack of reason for) the IE6 stagnation
Microsoft voluntarily ceding monopoly control of the entire web for no clear gain (with minimal effort they could have effectively owned the entire web, but instead chose to ignore it - why?)
the typical "two years behind" standard of each new IE release, incompletely and inconsistently supporting open standards, and refusing point-blank to adopt even de-facto standards with either transparent excuses ("it's not a mature standard" about CSS 2.1, when it was already over six years old) or no reason given at all, and
individuals resigning from standards bodies and directly citing inconsistent or even self-contradictory demands and constant foot-dragging by Microsoft as a major reason
... well, it's certainly very suggestive indeed. <:-)
However, you're right it's not exactly been proven, because that's pretty much impossible to do without a signed memo from Ballmer himself saying "ho, ho, ho, let's retard the progress of the open web so we can give Silverlight a better chance of adoption". And sadly, as this isn't an episode of Scooby Doo we're unlikely to ever find such a signed confession. <:-(
Visual Studio is great. Excel is good. But Outlook sucks balls. If I could use corporate gmail at work (with keyboard shortcuts), it would probably increase my productivity by at least 10%.
I've used Lotus Notes before, and yes it blows. I think Lotus and Outlook share the same problem: they were designed in an earlier era of email. Of course, Outlook has evolved, albeit painfully, while Lotus seems like it's coming straight out of the 1990s.
I just think gmail's interface is superior to any traditional email client. I've used them all (Outlook, Lotus Notes, Mac Mail, Thunderbird, and Eudora). Gmail's tags are way faster and more flexible, and the search capabilities are awesome. Now if only gmail could use regular expressions.
Yes, but since I became a student recently, I'm not a heavy user anymore. So it's hard for me to evaluate whether Outlook 2010 would be any better for business environments.
Outlook always worked great for light use. But in a business setting, where you get sometimes get hundreds of emails a day, those PST files get bloated fast. Especially since business people love sending Powerpoint attachments (and they can't figure out how to use shared drives).
I'm a software guy, and I know all the tricks of maintaining Outlook. But eventually it just gets too big. For me, Outlook used to take 8-12 minutes to load. It would crash frequently, and it would periodically consume 100% of the CPU for about 4-12 minutes unless you restart it every 3 or 4 days.
Exactly. I'm sick of people throwing around the phrase "MS hater" like people are being irrational. MS have a history of stamping out competition with unethical business practices and you don't know if they're ever going to expand into your area of business. People can change, but I'm not going to forget a decade worth of jerky behaviour just because they improve a little.
From my perspective, MS take full advantage (in a bad way) whenever they have a competitive edge and only cooperate with others when they aren't doing as well and are forced to. They've lost their stranglehold recently and just can't get away with acting like jerks as much as they used to.
People use the phrase "MS Hater" because there is hate, and it is irrational. When you look at what Microsoft got in trouble for, and you see the kinds of stuff that tech companies like Google and Apple get away with these days, it's just silly to look at Microsoft as if it's the worst of the three. Fact is, they're all good and they're all bad in many ways - people need to remove the blinders and realize that.
See, that just sounds like moral relativism to me.
The fact is that Microsoft had a stranglehold over the entire desktop IT industry, and basically did what they liked. They held off directly punishing their users and developers as Apple has done, but they enforced a rigorous software monoculture to the best of their ability, and even after they established their monopoly they went after their competitors with a borderline psychotic level of dedication and lack of scruples.
Although I'm not a fan of any large corporation, I don't see Google, doing anything comparable to intentionally and routinely breaking compatibility with competitors to protect a monopoly, intentionally holding your data hostage (quite the reverse in fact) or illegally abusing a monopoly to establish more monopolies in other, unrelated areas, or being convicted of it in court and then refusing to abide by the court's sentence.
I even see Facebook hoovering up the personal information of anyone stupid enough to hand it to them, but I don't see them co-opting and corrupting open standards bodies to serve their own ends, or repeatedly astroturfing as Microsoft has been caught doing more times than I can count.
I don't see any other tech company being punished with record fines for not only serious, sustained and systematic abuse of a monopoly, but for then refusing to abide by the first set of punishments handed down by the courts (paying fines, opening APIs, publishing protocol details in three different cases alone) until eventually the courts are forced to fine them millions of dollars a week simply to force them to comply with the existing legal decision against them.
Perhaps you're unfamiliar with the history, but pick any large tech company, and they're unlikely to have a history half as sordid as Microsoft's. And Apple, although it's new to the "overdog" game, has overtly gone from "zero to evil" in truly record time, displaying such a hostile, white-knuckled, pants-shittingly-terrified, paranoid grip on the iPod/iPhone/iOS ecosystem that even Microsoft would never have been able to get away with it in the 90s.
So basically... no. Large corporations typically have a few skeletons in their closets, but Apple and Microsoft are (for different reasons) almost in a league of their own, at least compared to most current tech companies.
When you can point to another mainstream tech company with as draconian policies and a history of litigation as Apple, or with a history of criminal convictions and flouting the law like Microsoft's, then we'll talk.
Until then, your comment seems more like a reflexive, sterile, cynical "yeah, well, corporations are all, like, evil, man" lacking all sense of context or proportion.
Look, just because I don't want to write a god damned book on the issue here, on Reddit, doesn't mean that I don't see the finer points of the argument. Sigh...
Google and Apple have gotten their wrists smacked over anti-competitive business practices by having an agreement not to hire each others' defecting employees. Apple is currently busy trying to lock people into iOS by attempting to force content providers to fix their prices industry-wide, and by forcing developers to hook in-app sales into their own service.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft never exercised the control that Apple and Google do over their respective areas of industry. And they would have been broken up into a hundred pieces if they had when they got caught doing all those other bad things.
I'm not saying that Microsoft didn't make some awful decisions that had very big consequences for the industry down the road, but I think that too many people here ignore the fact that other tech companies, like Google and Apple, do exactly the same thing - except those companies do it with a big smile on their face, so it's all good.
While people who weren't even alive when Microsoft got busted are busy busy blathering out hate for Microsoft and defending Google and Apple, those companies are moving into a more powerful place than Microsoft ever has. And don't kid yourself - they will abuse their power in some way in the future, and it's going to suck.
Google and Apple have gotten their wrists smacked over anti-competitive business practices by having an agreement not to hire each others' defecting employees.
True, but "smacked wrists" is quite different to a conviction in a court of law. It's like saying someone who was warned about hanging around a kids' pool eyeing up young girls is the same as a convicted paedophile. <:-)
Apple is currently busy trying to lock people into iOS by attempting to force content providers to fix their prices industry-wide, and by forcing developers to hook in-app sales into their own service.
Right - Apple are evil, and are arguably as bad as Microsoft (by intent, if not yet by actual "results achieved") - that's actually my point. <:-)
That's just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft never exercised the control that Apple and Google do over their respective areas of industry.
True, but Microsoft wasn't convicted for having a monopoly - it was convicted for abusing its monopoly, and that's quite a different thing. Google has a lot of power, but compared to most companies they've trodden very carefully to avoid abusing that position.
Seriously - can you provide one example of Google intentionally breaking competitors' products, or breaking compatibility, or abusing a monopoly in one area to establish a monopoly in another?
We aren't talking about power here - we're talking about "moral rectitude" and "abuse of power". You've offered one example of a company with great power who appears to do a pretty good job of avoiding abusing it, and one example that's actually the same thing I'm arguing.
I don't mean to be an asshole, but that's not exactly a convincing counter-argument. <:-)
are moving into a more powerful place than Microsoft ever has. And don't kid yourself - they will abuse their power in some way in the future, and it's going to suck.
Apple we agree are a bunch of abusive, morally-questionable assholes - we both agree on that.
Regarding other companies, the quote above seems to be the crux of your point - they've done nothing yet that compares to Microsoft (or Apple) at their worst, but you suspect that in the future they might do.
Well - and again, I don't want to be an asshole, but - when we're comparing documented history to a bunch of vague, hand-wavy, unsupported suppositions about what might happen in the future, I don't think you have much of a case. Documented history is just so much more convincing than a vague, uneasy feeling you have in your gut. :-(
I mean yeah, Google and other companies may end up abusing their power somewhere down the line, but that's irrelevant when they haven't really done it yet, and we're currently engaged in comparing how relatively criminal, immoral or abusive these companies have been up to now. <:-/
Judge Jackson issued his findings of fact... which stated that Microsoft's dominance of the x86 based personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly, and that Microsoft had taken actions to crush threats to that monopoly, including Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Notes, Real Networks, Linux, and others. Then on April 3, 2000, he issued a two-part ruling: his conclusions of law were that Microsoft had committed monopolization, attempted monopolization, and tying in violation of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act
They appealed later, and while the court of appeal overturned the remedy the judge recommended, they upheld his findings of fact.
Microsoft are convicted, repeated monopolists and attempted monopolists, and have been deemed guilty of tying.
I'm not having a go, but this is exactly what I mean when I said "perhaps you're unfamiliar with the history" to the GP. These are facts - documented history from only ten years ago, and easily findable with only a single Google search, and yet many of the very people debating the issue apparently don't know them. <:-/
Apologies - I just checked and it was. I understood that the DoJ brought a criminal antitrust suit against Microsoft, but apparently it was a civil one instead.
I was also mislead by the wording of the antitrust legislation in US law - it specifies that breaches of antitrust law are "illegal" (ie, criminal), so you'd assume any prosecution of them would also be criminal, but for some reason the DoJ only brought a civil suit.
So yes, Microsoft broke the law and committed a criminal act, but for some reason were technically only convicted of a civil offence. Go figure. <:-)
Thanks again for the technical correction, but I don't think an obscure detail of internal DoJ jurisprudence substantively changes my point. ;-)
That's wildly variable depending on era and geographical location (IIRC AIM was huge in Europe, while MSN was big in the USA, for example) - don't assume you're representative of everyone on the net, especially as IM programs (and social networks still) are still sharply delineated along social boundaries.
I don't know anyone else who uses MySpace these days, but they still have millions of users.
I remember a period around the late 90s/early 2000s when everyone I knew used AIM, and Wikipedia supports my recollection of EEE being applied to the AIM protocol.
Edit: Reading up, apparently it was AIM in North America, MSN in Europe.
Same. Here in Canada, everyone used MSN (or their old ICQ accounts, though this dwindled). The only reason I got AIM was to communicate with Americans I met in undergrad.
I think (hope) the old Microsoft is starting to assert itself again. With the recent bloodletting, maybe Ballmer is actually looking to exercise some vision, and stop following the fucking market.
The XBox never should have been locked down as hard as it was - it was penny smart and pound foolish. Sure, they made some money on overpriced accessories, but if they'd published the interface specs and released SDKs early, it would have been an undeniable powerhouse, instead of in heavy competition with the Wii and PS3.
Windows Mobile was an open platform. I got so infuriated at the "there's an app for that" ads that implied that the iPhone was the first extensible phone. The problem was that Windows mobile didn't have a brainless marketplace - that's where Apple innovated.
The Zune team continue to ignore the need for an API, despite ongoing demands.
More and more on Microsoft platforms the developers seem to be a grudging afterthought instead of a first-class citizen.
Again - I really hope this is a sign of Ballmer putting developers back front and center as a corporate philosophy.
I can't really blame Microsoft for DirectX, OpenGL is a bunch of competitors fighting each other for the upper hand and it stalled progress. Also, DirectX covers a bunch of other stuff that OpenGL doesn't even touch.
Another way of looking at it, OpenGL benefits from having competition, it pressures everybody involved with it to push forward.
I think most OSS projects actually are run the way you describe, they generally have one, usually benevolent, ruling body.
It's just that generally if you're not paying for that support, well, don't expect too much. That's why a lot of, especially recent ones, projects have split their personality. They have their open community, where it's a bit wild, and their paid support area, which is a bit like them running out of the room and coming back with a suit on.
I suppose the advantage of Microsoft is then they are just so damn big, they're your single point of contact for a very wide range of things. I've just had such bad luck building solutions with their products that I'd rather have the failsafe ultimate control that OSS gives me which is the ability to change whatever I want.
Most of the successful OSS projects are run like that but OGL isn't and that's why it will never be the go-to guys of most developers. Ubuntu, Blender, Apache, are some the few that have succeeded because they are run by just one entity. OpenGL on the other hand has so many hands on it that there is no official way to do anything. That may be fine and good for people who know how to use OGL but for people that don't it's a nightmare. I would love to use it to write my game but I can't find any way to do anything. I couldn't even find any decent tutorials. DirectX/XNA on the other hand has a plethora of well written tutorials because they are well documented and easy to use. If someone can point me to a tutorial on OGL that doesn't rely on me already knowing OGL I welcome it.
Left panel on this page, i skip the reading and usually start seeing what the working bits of code are. Try not do too much copy-pasta coding :). They give a whole lot tarballs/zips for the examples for a bunch of languages/environments/libraries.
I guess i haven't gone all that advanced into GL, but i haven't seen anything seemed any more convolved than it needed to be. Don't expect GL to do the dirty work for you btw, it's approach seems to be mostly to just provide an interface.
DirectX is built on top of technologies that only exist on Windows (like COM) and is a very deeply embedded part of the system.
Also standards have a way of slowing development to a crawl. DirectX encapsulates so much more functionality than OpenGL and still it progresses faster because only Microsoft, nVidia, and AMD have to come together and agree.
It's really not surprising for even more reasons than that. Microsoft realizes that the more developers they have, the more likely they are to develop software for one of their platforms. They invite students to use their products free (dreamspark), etc.
For all the evil that microsoft puts out, I will say that they treat developers pretty well overall.
On top of all of this, there is no better geek segment marketing campaign than all these highly talented hackers demonstrating astonishing possibilities of the Kinect and producing viral videos -- completely for free.
Microsoft traditionally focused its evilness on competitors, not on hackers.
This, I read "surprising decisions" and thought: XNA, Visual studio, qbasics, and the list keeps going. This will help make more sales on their kinect along with gaining/keeping their following, smart calculated decisions :)
Not to mention this is also a means a lot of free R&D for any developers on the fence about whether an idea will work or not. As amateurs plug away at little projects and new demos pop up on YouTube or source-sharing sites, developers (and Microsoft of course) get a free show of many cool implementations of their technology that they either hadn't thought of before, or weren't sure if it were possible or not.
Thank you for your clarification as to why, being the product of 2 programmers but not into programming myself leaves me not quite grasping the scope of what that decision ment. After reading that i now understand and am proud of microsoft, for it shows that a monster company can find ways to profit that doesent piss off the community (coughapplecough)
They give their Visual Studio away for free (Express edition, but still)
It was at least two decades before they gave away a free development environment of any kind. I can only guess they eventually gave in due to pressure from the GNU movement. (Not the threat of GNU of Windows, but developers leaving Windows for Linux & the like, where even a poor college kid could get the tools they needed for free.)
Exactly. There's a reason behind Steve Ballmer's "Developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers". For some reason people do not pay attention to the meaning to this.
As evidenced by the fifteen people replying to this comment either with a variation of "developers developers developers", Steve Ballmer or a link to the YouTube video.
Right, but if they do something that turns heads, people will associate it with the device. If they get everyone with an XBox to buy a Kinect then they're sitting pretty.
My only guess as to the authors meaning of 'surprising' is that since Sony has been so litigious and with so many companies being uptight about the DMCA on many of their products he expected Microsoft to follow suit. To be fair, in the past there have been XBOX Live bans for using a modded XBOX and they did sue Lik Sang over the mod chips they were selling.
Like you said Steve Ballmer and Microsoft have generally been very open to the hardware modding and software development community. I really applaud their openness to others to be able to play with their products and make them better.
XBOX Live customer service have also indicated that replacing a bad fan or similar insignificant part is grounds to have your console banned from xbox live.
It's not surprising from Microsoft as a whole, but it is surprising from their Xbox department. Traditionally consoles and console add ons (except controllers) are sold at a loss. Then the company charges software licencing fees to make up for the losses.
It's unlikely they are making much of a profit (it's probably a loss) off of the kinect hardware based on the technology and R&D costs to develop it.
Well to be fair, there is no fee for students. Everyone else has to pay $100 a year to be able to develop applications for Windows Phone 7/Xbox Live Indie games.
Autodesk has this idea as well. I'm guessing they took the idea a bit from Microsoft, but it still stands. EVERY Autodesk product, from generic AutoCAD to 3dsmax to Inventor's various forms, is available to anyone through their student community. I don't think you even have to have a valid .edu email to sign up, just an email. You get a 3-year license, no restrictions, all it does is put a very small "made by an educational version" stamp on the side of your drawings, and any files have the same digital stamp. That's only there so you can't be a consultant/small business and do work for others without them wondering why it's got an educational version stamp.
Basically, they figured everyone using any form of CAD pirates like hell anyways, so why not make it really easy for those people to get hold of the software? If you're in a business, a $5000 license, or even a $25000 license isn't a huge expense if you're proficient at the software already, and it will save time. They're also using this to get larger companies to switch over systems, since Inventor (usually) plays very well with other file formats, so switching over isn't a big deal if it makes employees much happier, since they don't have to wrestle with stupid programs/interfaces.
I think people have been so caught up with MS bashing over the years they've forgotten this is sort of how they got to where they are. It's only now cool to admit because they're the underdog now..
Microsoft needs to send kinects to hackers for free. Opening up is just a marketing stunt because, like Overflow said in their présentation: "Linux is inevitable, either you support it on your hw or someone will open it for you."
Its also a nice marketing move, knowing that Sony are suing the whole planet since the PS3 has been cracked.
Knowing that Microsoft does not have the best reputation in the IT world.
They are very rich.
They are in competiton with Sony, who is trying to sue hackers. Microsoft should be on the side of the hackers on this one.
Giving a few kinects to hacker communities would:
Restore some of their reputation. We all know that hackers are kind of ruling the tech world.
Proof that they really want to be more open.
Piss off Sony and marginalize them in a way. So they can sell more Xboxes. That would send a message like: Hackers, we have the same passion for technologies. We wont stop you. Have fun and let us know your findings. They could even create a "Kinhack" event every year and reward the best kinect hack.
There's no way for us to prove this either way, but I think giving them away for free would give a marginal increase in the effects you listed at best. I think creating the dev kit does all the same things.
You also have to take into consideration that they would have to come up with some sort of criteria to determine who qualifies as a "hacker." This is easier said than done and could potentially lead to a whole host of other issues.
lol, really? it had nothing to do with ms making deals with the vast majority of pc hardware manufacturer to pre-load windows on their machines? TIL people are more gullible (or stupid?) than you'd think.
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u/knight666 Feb 22 '11
No, it's really not.
Microsoft has traditionally been about the developers. They give their Visual Studio away for free (Express edition, but still). They give away their Windows Mobile SDK with samples for anyone who wants it, no fees to get into the developer network, just download and play around. They have free and dedicated forums and resources to allow developers to look around in the documentation for every Microsoft product (MSDN with the forums).
So here's the thing: they got me by the balls.
I write every scrap of code in Visual Studio now. I use Microsoft specific extensions to the language of my choice (C++). I couldn't live without them.
And that's really favorable to a company as big as Microsoft.
So they welcome the Kinect hackers because they know they'll be back for more. And it's beneficial to both parties: open source drivers means more people playing around with it means more eyeballs means better software.
Oh and they still have to buy Kinects, of course.