"0!0110!"... In my hysteria, I may have lapsed into binary for a moment there.

I didn't go there above, but you are ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. Microsoft's PR and Marketing people bear a HUGE amount of responsibility for the failure of Microsoft's consumer hardware offerings. I was the one guy who got an original black Zune 30GB - Xmas gift. Still have it, use it occasionally. It was good hardware, not at all what you'd expect from MS. The HD upgrade made it even nicer - and it had a really slick OS on it, too! Last month I upgraded my phone - initially picked up a Lumia 920. I thought it was a GREAT phone. I had been using an iP4 and an Atrix 3G, and between the three I can honestly say that I strongly prefer WP8 over iOS and Android. That said, before the week was up I went back and traded for an iP5. I did so for a combination of reasons, but they can all be boiled down to this: I have a lot more faith in Apple continuing to execute its "vision" than I do in Microsoft executing it's own. They frankly suck at marketing to the consumer. The Surface ads were their worst yet. Short of having Lindsay Lohan go around promoting Surface 2, I don't know where else they'd go from here. Who knows where they would be, had someone competent actually run that marketing dept?

Is 31 too young to start on my "damn kids" rants?

Apple has nowhere to move UP from there though, in an enterprise setting... your execs can walk around on iCrap all day long, but even they (hopefully) aren't pushing to put Apple in your datacenter. Apple isn't making that push itself! Give them credit, they even decided to cut the xServe line + related, despite the fact there were some devoted fans out there, and focus solely on the consumer side.

:laugh: No, I think they called out for pizza and ordered the PayPerView event.

Very true... and it makes it possible for people, e.g. me, to be subjected to many more of them. :) The problem is when asinine claims become some sort of "inherent truth" or "common knowledge", and anyone trying to sound intelligent spouts off the same thing whenever Apple, Android or Microsoft come up. Some people don't care, some pity the poor idiot, and some people like me react as if we just saw the ratings for "Duck Dynasty".

Absolutely correct. I've run through multiple Androids and iPhones, as well as an iPad and even a Nook Color. I used a Nokia 920 for a week recently too - and in every case, the sole meaningful differentiation between them (ignoring phone functionality) is native applications - not screens or storage or fingerprinting or really even network speed. And at this point, like you said, we're reaching commoditization - an iPhone 3G and iPad 1G run a browser just as well as the newest ones, and unless you need the crappy social eating app that just took off, you're going to be reaching for "Plastic!!!" for your value proposition.

You are definitely right, journalists get paid for clicks + views, not intelligence. That said, you deserve rebuke and intellectual dis-assembly when you pass off specious arguments, illogical assumptions and sheer idiocy as rigorous analysis. And what good is a Soapbox, if not a place to express to anyone but your target audience, your displeasure at them or their actions? :) Regarding your views regarding CEOs, I DO think it is a relevant thing to many in IT because skills and talent are often specific to given platforms. Those responsible for said platforms are the ones who will either make said skills/talents worth developing and having, or make them utterly worthless. For me, it's several years of experience developing on the Microsoft stack, and if they run that into the ground, I could end up in the developer demographic who's top skills are now "legacy". It works for some, but I don't know many that thrive on or enjoy classic ASP coding. Despite also developing skills on other platforms with other frameworks, etc., you're still behind the guys in the job market who started on the "winning" stack and now have that much more experience in it than you do. So I think the CEOs DO make a big difference and we should care, at least when we use/rely on/depend on/are skilled on what they're shipping.

A part of the problem there might be that Web Forms has been tossed to pasture and they probably have no interest in fixing issues with it, especially where the Designer is involved and ASP.Net MVC + related stuff has been really deprecating both. I do agree we'll probably seen an uptick (if there isn't one already) in the bug fix backlog after a release or three in rapid release mode. On the other hand, it's POSSIBLE that a continually-evolving code base, being constantly iterated on, could mean the more rapid inclusion of larger bug fixes rather than patching here or there in between releases. POSSIBLY. Your optimism may vary. :)

I think it definitely would make sense for them to refocus and cut out/spin off the consumer stuff. It seems as if they've misread the Bring-Your-Own-Device movement within businesses as somehow a threat to their enterprise server offerings - but until Apple starts replacing Microsoft on data center servers, why does it matter what the device being used is? My iPhone and iPad, in Safari or in a native app, have NO IDEA what stack is pushing them content. The consumer has NO idea. So why in the world would Microsoft not push to dominate the server side, and let the consumer brands duke it out over platforms that are often just acting as web clients?? Especially when they have very little leverage in that consumer area anyhow?!

I don't feel that's true though... I look at Azure, the newer features and more rapid release cycle for Visual Studio + Windows Server + SQL Server, and I believe they DO realize that they need to continually develop their enterprise product stack. They just can't seem to keep themselves from competing in areas they a) have strong competitors in, and b) often have no real experience in (shout-out to Zune, Bing, Danger - props to Xbox for being a general exception). Those examples you cite are all those same CONSUMER market products they are showing a good deal of ineptitude in building a market presence with. It's not surprising you're not using a WP8 phone or a Zune, and Xbox and Playstation are both established enough it's a tossup as to which a gamer might prefer.

Am I the only one who keeps seeing these ridiculous articles about Microsoft dying, and reading only blindered screeds about how Microsoft's CONSUMER efforts are an utter failure, and wanting to scream, "LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE MARKET, YOU MORONS!!!"? Do these people have any clue how much the SMB market has invested in Microsoft's enterprise stuff, and CONTINUES to invest in their product set? And not only on the infrastructure side, i.e. Office/Sharepoint/Exchange - the platform's development stack as well! When many, many companies rely on your server OS running your web development stack backed by your relational database offering, to drive big, long-life-cycle LOB and web-facing applications, you are DOING PRETTY WELL. Every business offering they make, they have legit competitors, no question. But no one can question that they are putting a TON of resources into improving those offerings, especially on the web side, where they have dumped a lot of time and effort into making ASP.Net a much better, more competitive offering. I really like Linux, and completely understand why it has the mindshare among the startup-type crowd. And Google is offering a compelling Office + Exchange alternative, especially for smaller setups. And SQL Server's got "NoSQL" on it's tail. But in all these cases, Microsoft is the Top Dog - and those competitors have had enough time to mature that it seems to me Microsoft still has the edge and the position of strength. I personally have worked off numerous platforms, but keep coming back to .Net because it's where the overall developer demand is, and where a lot of innovation is still taking place. Somebody with a bigger voice than me, PLEASE tell these Apple/Android idiots that whether or not Microsoft is loudly and publicly pushing "Consumer" over "Enterprise", AT LEAST GET YOUR ARGUMENTS RIGHT. Microsoft will die when somebody (or somebodies) takes away that ENTERPRISE play, NOT when they make a subpar tablet and can't sell it!!! And all kids should get off my lawn. Thank you.

Had a great experience at one last year (the Lehigh Valley Hackathon in Bethlehem, PA). To me it had two big appeals. First, spending a full straight day and a half or so working on a project you've really wanted to do but never gotten a chance to. Second, being with your people - not developers, HOBBYIST developers, the guys who do this for FUN and thus will happily prattle on with you about Django for 45 minutes. From my perspective as a full-time developer with two small kids, a house, and all such attendant responsibilities, these are rare moments for me nowadays. I'm at the point where I am old enough that work-life balance has become important, and am not able to do these sort of marathon coding sessions like my younger compatriots can at will. And I don't have much opportunity to interact in any fashion with these guys anyway on a regular basis. And it certainly helps that (at least at the event I attended), the food was damn good and plentiful, so you can basically pound power drinks and eat mozzarella sticks til your colon rebels! My perspective on it, but for me, it's something to look forward to whenever I can do one, a break from 'real life'. :)

The problem I have with this is that no one uses an OS in a vacuum. It's somewhat like evaluating a car in the lot without driving it and using it in day-to-day situations for a while. That's when you realize the blind spot over your left shoulder sucks, the shape of the frame around the back seat doors makes getting your kids in and out of your car seats difficult, and there's not quite as much room for groceries as you thought. Or, you discover all the nifty little features missing in your old car that make this one so much better than you thought it would be. Over the last two years I've had a lot of experience in all 3 big OSes. I used Linux almost exclusively for a year and a half (Ubuntu 9-11), working on Rails stuff and Linux servers. I bought a MacBook to dual-boot, and used that for 9 months. And around that, I've been a Windows guy doing .Net programming. What I've found is that my experiences had a lot less to do with what I liked or disliked about the OS, and a whole lot more about what I did with it and how much difficulty I had doing so. For Linux, the regular stuff was great. And I really appreciated being able to run a very similar dev. environment on my laptop as on my server. What sucked for me was mostly proprietary stuff that just did not exist for Linux. Printer drivers were hit and miss. Utilities for configuring some electrical meters I worked with were Windows only, and Wine didn't work for them. I had an iPhone and thus needed iTunes, and had a Nook so I used its desktop version a decent amount. And I did have issues with driver support on some of my hardware that I either had to spend a good amount of time Googling for, or simply couldn't fix and just annoyed the crap out of me. Most of this was not Ubuntu's fault, of course, but the driving experience was just not as good as I could expect from either OS X or Windows despite the stuff I really liked about Ubuntu. In the end, my startup decided to take advantage of the MS BizSpark program, so I chose Win 7 over OS X. I would have stayed on Ubuntu had we gone the FOSS route. But all else being equal, I would choose 7 over Ubuntu for every day usage, even with the added license cost.

My personal choice recently was a Lenovo Thinkpad T520. I was able to get a base model from Provantage that currently retails for $838. This included an i5, 4GB RAM, Win 7 Pro, and the stock Intel graphics for 1366x768. This is a 15" notebook that is easily upgradeable, at purchase or later, and still has some of that solid Thinkpad DNA in it. My criteria were pretty similar to yours, and it performs well for these - maybe grab another 4GB for ~$30 to make it ideal. My eyes prefer 1366x as opposed to 1600x, and I know I can always use an external monitor. The keyboard is nice, and it has the thinkpoint if you're into that. And it has a quiet business feel that I prefer to the shiny consumer crap a lot of laptops have. I did look at the Dell Latitude and HP business models, and after checking out my wife's Latitude E6520 I thought they were pretty much the same - and Dell is so variable in quality, I felt Lenovo had the better reputation. A lot of people still recommend the Thinkpads despite the claim that they've gone downhill since the Lenovo purchase. If you want any more details about my experiences, you can DM me, but my only regret is that I'm not using the MacBook Pro I was - it just blows any other laptop away in build quality. Hope this helps!

I will definitely check him out. And thanks for the offer, I know I'll be taking you and CP up on it!

Possibly, I want to get more into the community, and I'm trying to on sites like http://answers.onstartups.com just for conversation... Once I have gotten somewhere with our project, I'll definitely consider it.

:) Truly sorry, it sounded like you were just getting going after being an admin, starting out with PHP and Ruby. My mistake, I don't want to denigrate anyone's experience - I'm only on my 6th year, after all!

Yeah, it's definitely a relative thing. If you do a lot of admin work, Linux does have a distinct advantage. From a dev's point of view, where admin is not your real focus and you are basically just trying to make your code run, it's not as friendly as Windows, but for the experienced I understand. My conclusion is influenced by my inexperience with Linux too, so it's an additional roadblock I have to deal with beyond just coding in a new language. In your case though, between your experience, your political situation regarding licensing, and so on, I think FOSS is definitely the right choice. Good luck on your journey to becoming a developer!

It's interesting... in both good and bad ways. I switched platforms while at the same employer because it was in the best interests of the product I'm developing (solo, I might add). I'm also working on a startup that I hope to go full-time with soon, and it's quite difficult for me to decide which I'm going to use going forward there since I'm working from scratch. I did move to this current employer two years ago, and even today you're going to do much better at least here in Pennsylvania, USA with ASP.Net training due to both pay amounts (PHP will get you literally half of what ASP.Net will) and job openings (Ruby will get you close to ASP.Net, but there's almost no openings for it other than small startups in Philadelphia). My startup work at the moment involves some consulting projects, and those always seem to fall under Drupal-centered web-based stuff, or small businesses with Microsoft infrastructure. I find Drupal just irritating, as a developer - I won't go any farther than that here and now. The Microsoft stuff so far I like, mainly because a) I'm familiar with it, b) I like having GUIs to do my work, and c) there's not often a question of what the best practices are to accomplish something. The monetary cost of PHP, Ruby, and Linux development is null, and posting to the web via systems like Heroku or Linode is a lot easier and cheaper than Microsoft solutions. This is a part of the draw for startups. Time-wise, though, I get really frustrated trying to figure out when building something in Rails and ten people tell me ten ways/libraries to authenticate a user, and in PHP when there's seventy different frameworks that are different only when you go beyond a "Create a blog in 15 minutes!" level of familiarity. ASP.Net may be considered by some a dinosaur, or some slowly plodding platform that doesn't keep up with the times, but you get a solid platform, a solid database, a pretty comprehensive web framework that is incorporating (albeit slowly) popular ideas like MVC, and a very good IDE whose code editor (which I use exclusively, no drag/drop) is great. And there's no end to the documentation, books, tutorials, etc. that will help you get where you need to go - there's a lot of stuff in FOSS that has no or crappy documentation only available on their website. Microsoft's stuff has some issues, and some methods of configuration can be just stupid and obtuse. And you'll pay for the right stuff, either now or later if you grow. But frankly, for me at least, I think I'd probably go t