:: The death of the application - Part II ::

We agree that most of your applications are Microsoft apps. So? Well, one thing which really made Microsoft what it is not winning the browser war. Its winning the IDE war. Once, you had Symantec, Borland, Watcom even the Israeli Aladdin, all of them making development platforms. Today? You have Microsoft Visual Studio. That's it. Wether you develop in C, C++, Visual Basic or ASP. Its all the same.

Now, Microsoft launched the new version of Visual Studio last month. Is it called Visual Studio 7? 6.1? Nope. Visual Studio .NET. That's Microsoft's new mega strategy. .NET. Microsoft don't want you to develop applications anymore, they want you to develop distributed applications, web services, components, anything but applications. So - why should you bother. Its so much easier to develop another web service, then to actually sit down and design an application, is it? Those pesky exe's.

Need more proof? Check out the wanted ads. Everybody is looking for ASP developers, VB developers, HTML/XML developers, and of course - the latest trend, cellular-related developers (I just can't wait for the cellular bubble to burst). Oh yes, everybody is also looking for Java developers for servers. No one is looking for MFC/C++ developers. On one hand, its harder to develop applications, on the other - Microsoft don't want you to develop applications, so why bother?

I'll answer that one on the third and last installment.

Wadi Writer # 3 (Maroon)
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