Oren joins the 'MS losing the Alpha Geeks' debate
Scott started it ... then Oren replied ... and I'm bored so I thought I would reply :)
To be honest .. I don't think MS is listening to the BIG companies, so much as it is busy trying to attract the LAMP brigades ...
Switching to MS development isn't easy from a LAMP background, and a *large* percentage of LAMP developers are the junior / school / home user types that are just beginning development. LAMP is basically free ... and that attracts people who just want to learn.
Making MS development free (think VS express versions, C# and .NET, Silverlight, Popfly) and simple drag and drop (ASP.NET, particularly .NET 2.0 things like ObjectDataSource) makes it very easy to get into.
And we all know that a percentage of those developers will go on to become development professionals, and will tend to champion whichever development system they grew up on - so for MS it is a way of securing their future userbase.
Personally - I think ASP.NET 1.1 was pretty damn good, but ASP.NET 2.0 really was almost a retrograde step - rather than streamlining things and making better ways of doing thigs (like they did from C#1.0 to C#2.0), they just seem to want to make it far more drag and drop and hide far more of the real code behind the scenes. And that is a mistake ... becasue if you don;t know how horribly ObjectDataSource is doing it's work behind the scenes, how can you possibly know where your performance problems lie, or how to fix them ...
But ... is MS losing the Alpha Geeks? I think Alpha Geeks always want to be pushing the envelope, and MS is about the here and now stuff ...
I think MS has some killer products on the way, Silverlight is so far the Flash killer application, and Popfly could be a killer application of it's own ... perhaps MS is just looking away from the Alpha Geeks and to the average Joe Internet User for a while ...