I have had a mostly hate/hate relationship with Microsoft. I know that there are wonderful people who work for them but as an organization they are sometimes setting the bar too low for the technology the deliver which in my view is probably hindering humanity as a whole. I mean rather than doing things like you would do on a unix based platform you have to worry about so many other stupid things, I can argue that if all of the planet was standardized on some unix based system, we would probably have more robust systems. But still they do deserve the credit of being the market leader and innovator in lots of areas of technology. I like Windows 7, have heard good things about the new Visual Studio 2010 and am overall impressed with BingMaps and it’s integration of SeaDragon. Microsoft may be just a huge company looking after it’s interests as they just need to defend their title as the “World Leader”. But all of this is not enough for me to commit my self to Microsoft and explore a career using their stuff, why, oh because I am lazy and don’t want to put double the effort on things (usually in my experience, working with any Microsoft solution costs twice or more in terms of time after you get over the superficial initial productivity gains, but I am opinionated and a n00b with M$ stuff). Also I think opensource is the future for humanity, earning huge loads of money is a good idea, but evolving technology in an open way is much more important. Open standards and open technologies are some things which form the very backbone of the internet as we know today.
Being open is good, and so is using open source technologies. But I think the most important thing is to be “Not Evil”. I know I just stole Google’s motto and to some extent I believe that even they are not truly angelic. But these days Evil is not M$, it’s Apple and Facebook in my opinion.
Apple has been involved in lots of questionable activities in the past few weeks alone. They think that they have made it and users will follow them blindly what ever they do. They make good products for a high premium price and don’t necessarily care about the end consumers (like telling people when new iphone will be released so as to milk off from the old versions, controlling all the channels of their distribution to make sure that who ever they like gets a better treatment and who ever they deem un-likeable, regardless of their stature gets kicked out without any explanation). Apple is plain arrogant, they think they know better, they think they can continue mesmerizing the public with their flashy products. There are few gimmicks that could help them in short run, but they need to focus on being less of a control freak.
Facebook is probably even worse than Apple. I think Steve Jobs just thinks that he knows better what users want, but Mark Zukkaburg has no regard for his end users. He thinks he owns them some how. The privacy policy changes of Facebook reminds me of the Animal Farm, it keeps on getting more and more shady and towards the dark side of the force. Then there are these absolute waste of time games which make billions of dollars go to utter waste. What good is a virtual fence for, some uber looser’s way of escaping the real world? I think Farmeville should be banned and no company should be allowed to waste young peoples time and money like this. Leo Laporte deleted his facebook account which has got me thinking I might be doing that too.
So conclusion: for the forseeable future I would not develop for technologies like Apple and Facebook, not because they are not financially attractive, but because they exploit/control people, which is one thing we have learned is not a good idea.
