Robert Scoble asks how to deal with the problem of "how Microsoft isn't solving current problems and is overhyping tomorrow's technology".
Well there are some fairly obvious ones - firstly there should be a great big huge wall in MSDN between material for current/released products and that for forthcoming projects. If I run search today for help and support it should by default only return results for products I'm can currently develop for/with.
Actually this works both ways, one should be able to filter out historical stuff too - but it needs some kind of timeline based window and to be very easy to pick.
Secondly, fix the current tools - have people working on them aggressively for as long as possible (which is way longer than perhaps those in microsoft will feel is necessary). In terms of the .NET framework I'm not sure whether I want it to be incrementally upgradeable as this leads us to a variation on .DLL hell... but then again this problem has to be fixed for Longhorn!
Thirdly - give Joel his linker... this will help in all kinds of ways in buying mindshare from wavering developers - and that, ultimately, is how you get .Net apps onto the desktop.
Finally, and this is a generic issue not too a specific one, Microsoft needs to understand that no matter how good its latest and greatest techology the days of the "must have" upgrade are gone - for all its faults Windows 98 does a more than adequate job for a great many people now and when longhorn arrives WinXP will still be doing and will continue to do a far more than adequate job for a long long time thereafter. So in dealing with its developer community MS needs to remember that for every one who gets the opportunity to run with cutting edge platorms there are two or three or four or more of us for whom the entry level target is Win98 (or possibly 2K).
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