Why Microsoft wins

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.

Marvellous

My machine chooses the day before a LAN party to crash, for the first time in about 6 months.

This had better not be a harbinger!

End of an Era

Dragon to cease publishing.

Alas.

Animated GIF of the week

(courtesy of ps238principal and bugshaw)