Why Microsoft wins

[andrewducker]

Following much raving by sbisson about Adobe's development tool "Flex" and the associated runtime "Apollo" I was tempted to give it a look and see if I could knock up something nifty in it.

And then I noticed it was $499 to buy a copy.

Which is _twice_ the cost of the standard version of Visual Studio.

And there's also the Express versions of C#, C++, Web Developer, SQL Server etc. Which are _free_.

They made fun of Steve Balmer for his "Developers, developers, developers." chant, but he was exactly right. People go where the applications are. You don't get applications without developers. And if you want developers then you make it easier for them to get your toolkit and make something with it.

If you'll excuse me I'm off to play with C# for a bit.

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

You don't actually need to pay for the IDE (which includes all the functionality of the Flash development tools) as Apollo can be built using any HTML editor and the free SDK - and if you've already invested in Eclipse you can take this approach to get started with MXML and ActionScript coding...

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

HTML + JS is unencumbered. Why use anything else?

[andrewducker]

Nice IDEs and development speed.

Plus strong typing and huge wodges of library code.