There is a fight underway and it was very clear to me on the floor of the MVP Summit expo hall yesterday.
Bryan Stafford took me aside and gave me (actually Microsoft, but I was the proxy available) a harsh talking to. And that’s putting it nicely. He’s a VB 6.0 developer. And feels like we’ve abandoned him. But really what he’s noticing is that his world is colliding with other visions of how software development should be done and he doesn’t like it.
I was working in the Channel 9 booth. Tons of other MVPs were coming along and thanking me for pushing Microsoft into the Web 2.0 world and into the WinFX/Windows Vista world.
You could see markets colliding right in the same room.
And I felt for the first time how Microsoft is being pulled in different directions. Here’s the directions:
1) Are the tons of developers who have bet their lives on Windows and have built tons of business apps that use Visual Basic 6.0. Bryan said that there were millions of such developers who still have VB 6.0 apps (even Google has VB 6.0 apps — the new Word for Blogger plugin was built with VB 6.0)
2) The new developers who see the possibilities that Web 2.0 stuff brings. These are the folks who build Web Services at companies like Amazon and eBay, along with the folks who remix and remash services like Google’s Maps, MSN’s Virtual Earth, along with Craig’s List and others. And the folks who are using AJAX and other Web development techniques (hey, the Hotmail and Start.com teams were on the floor too). One guy, for instance, showed me something he’s working on that mixes photos from a variety of services like Flickr and others.
3) The new Windows developer who is pushing us to get rid of the “old gray” apps and get into the new .NET/WinFX/Windows Vista world. These were the folks who were coming along saying “dude, that Sparkle video rocked!”
But what got me interested is these three separate communities don’t see eye-to-eye. They don’t even like each other. Web-focused guys can’t understand why anyone would develop a Windows application — you see that in my comments all the time. And Bryan Stafford didn’t want to hear about the “new Windows world” other than he wanted to know how Microsoft was going to get his existing applications into that new world and he certainly didn’t want to hear that the world was gonna be run by Google and its band of Web Services. On the other hand the new guys can’t understand why the old guys are griping.
It’s in these conflicts that there are business opportunties.
Training companies, for instance, will do the hard work of helping Bryan move his apps to WinFX. It won’t be easy. If you watch the Sparkle video you’ll see that the entire architecture and development process for building these new apps has changed from the VB 6.0 world. That’s why Microsoft hasn’t built a porting application yet. Just like there weren’t good porting apps from Apple II to Macintosh apps. Or why there weren’t good porting apps from DOS to Windows. Or why there aren’t good porting apps that’ll take you from a Windows app to a Web Services app.
There are also business opportunities for companies that make development tools and systems that bridge these three communities together.
Bryan had some very biting things to say. He said something like “I feel like you’ve left me behind.” I told him I’d heard this before in my career. I remember hanging out with Apple II developers and they used to complain about the new Macintosh. They didn’t like that they’d need to redevelop all their applications for a new platform. At the camera store I worked at I remembered when Canon switched the lens mount. I had a lot of unhappy customers who said “I’ll never switch to EOS and I’ll never buy another Canon product again.” But today they are the best in autofocus because of that switch. When Microsoft went from DOS to Windows in the early 90s Ethan Winer told me he was done with software development and would never switch to Windows. He learned to play the Cello and joined an orchestra. Even today he’s hawking his DOS BASIC add-on products.
I asked Bryan “why don’t you just stick with VB 6.0?” I pointed out that your VB 6.0 app will probably run forever just like that 25 year-old version of Lotus that we demonstrate running on Windows Vista and that there are things he could do to modernize his VB 6.0 apps so that newer .NET apps could talk via COM and Web Services. No need to rewrite from scratch. I also pointed out that the London Train System was still running on a character-mode app (translation: looks like DOS to me) even though it was running on Windows XP computers so even with 15 years of pressure to upgrade to newer development methodologies some clients will be perfectly happy sticking with what works.
My arguments weren’t working. “My clients won’t pay for that,” he said. Pointed out that his clients were pressuring him to update his application to have features that only WinFX could provide and look like a top-grade Windows Vista application.
I felt the pain of someone who realized they were going to have to learn new skills to get into the new world.
Me? I’m off to push Microsoft to make it as easy as possible for Bryan. He gave me some great ideas and I really appreciate him for taking us to task for not doing enough.
Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.
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