So long as there are businesses willing to invest in the latest Microsoft blessed framework there will be a community of people willing to learn them and sell their skills to those companies.
For me, the real question is, why are business still willing to make investments in the latest Microsoft blessed framework?
Actually, I think since Longhorn there are signs that businesses are a bit more sceptical about these bold technology announcements from Microsoft. They used be able to pretty much control the weather but these days they have a hard time getting people to use things like Silverlight, WPF or XNA.
Their dominance is still strong in the enterprise though. SharePoint does not deserve the market share it has. But business are hooked on using the Microsoft tool for whatever it is they want to do. Need an intranet? Well Gartner says we need an enterprise CMS... so we'll hire our preferred Microsoft Gold Partner and give them a budget of 200k to build us a clustered SQL Server environment on which we can run some load balanced SharePoint app servers, all for a two step content approval workflow and a few thousand hits per day. Everyone in that process is too busy making a living to question the "we'll just buy whatever Microsoft has for X" assumption.
Funny, I've been working on a Sharepoint project the last two months. This could have been a 3 man-day PHP/MySQL job yet it required 1 Project Manager and 2 devs (one full-time, 1 part-time) 2 months of work! The reason it took so long is that we couldn't touch code (think paranoid Fortune 50 company).
And then they talk of TCO and miss profits: they throw money down the drain, what do they expect?
"Why are business still willing to make investments in the latest Microsoft blessed framework?"
For me, the real question is why are they willing to make bad investments in technology. SharePoint is designed to make it easy to set up a cluster. One of our clients has thousands of users on a single SharePoint front end, because there's "something wrong" with their load balancer. So they don't even do round-robin DNS. Surprise - it's slow!
In other words, they don't even have the ability to run SharePoint well, and you want them to put something together themselves? The SharePoint admin is already outsourced, so it seems like they don't even have the ability to identify quality outsourcing. How are they supposed to figure out a better solution?
Please tell me you didn't sell this to your client.
Every single day I have to deal with vendors pushing bad technology on the Department of Education because they are trying to make a buck. In cases like this, it is not the businesses fault. They saw something they thought was cool, some vendor told them "sure, we can do that" and a few hundred-thousand later, guess what... it doesn't work.
We didn't sell them SharePoint, but everything I've seen there says that SharePoint isn't the problem. SharePoint could have worked well for them if they just had one person on staff who knew what they were doing and were allowed to do it. The bad investment is in the whole IT organization and not the software.
> Actually, I think since Longhorn there are signs that businesses are a bit more sceptical about these bold technology announcements from Microsoft. They used be able to pretty much control the weather but these days they have a hard time getting people to use things like Silverlight, WPF or XNA.
I have had the same observation, but it seems to me that companies are stagnating on technology rather than innovating on different platforms. They still use Microsoft, but they're using increasingly old Microsoft.
Others in this thread have pointed out that MS has other technologies that are very well supported for long periods of time -- the core C# stuff, and in their OS releases they are fanatic about never forcing you to rewrite your app, sometimes going to great lengths to be bug-for-bug-compatible.
For me, the real question is, why are business still willing to make investments in the latest Microsoft blessed framework?
Actually, I think since Longhorn there are signs that businesses are a bit more sceptical about these bold technology announcements from Microsoft. They used be able to pretty much control the weather but these days they have a hard time getting people to use things like Silverlight, WPF or XNA.
Their dominance is still strong in the enterprise though. SharePoint does not deserve the market share it has. But business are hooked on using the Microsoft tool for whatever it is they want to do. Need an intranet? Well Gartner says we need an enterprise CMS... so we'll hire our preferred Microsoft Gold Partner and give them a budget of 200k to build us a clustered SQL Server environment on which we can run some load balanced SharePoint app servers, all for a two step content approval workflow and a few thousand hits per day. Everyone in that process is too busy making a living to question the "we'll just buy whatever Microsoft has for X" assumption.