The title couldn’t be truer: If You Already Hate Windows 8 Then You Hate Technology.
If you’re not intrigued by Windows 8 and Metro, if you can’t recognize that it’s a big leap forward, if you’re not excited about what it means for you, personally then you don’t really care about technology; you care about brands. You care about platforms. You care about politics. You’re a fanboy.
Bam. And I work in this environment. Fuck me.
Guys, it’s retarded. The Windows Phone/Windows 8 Metro UI is great, no question about it. The tile system with direct information is much better than a boring icon grid. Sorry. You’ll see when you’ll try for a while.
But it’s made by Microsoft. So the tech world just can’t process that the company they love to hate is doing a better job in UX than the companies they love to love. Some people are still bitching that XP is lame and yet are still running the ten year old OS. Retards.
It’s plain sad to see someone saying “so I tried Windows Phone/iPhone/Android, the Windows Phone is the best but Jesus it’s made by MS so your cock is going to fall and your kids will die in a fire”.
I thought we were not in high school anymore. It’s business and innovation is welcome from anywhere, shutting it down just because it comes from one particular company or another is so childish, it’s embarrassing! I can’t believe I have to protest that shit.
How a developer/designer -yes you too Adobe sluts- could not get excited at a brand new UI running through new devices like Kinect, tablets, phones and not-so-distant Surface, for all of which you can use the language you want to build cool stuff, using the computer you want, sorry they were probably short on blow and hookers… It is exciting, like the iPhone was too. But bigger, by scope and possibilities. The only thing that should be booed is the future Windows Appstore and its 30% BS. That, sucks.
There’s so much denial, for obscure personal, stupid reasons (“loved that brand hated that brand when I was young” shit).
It’s the same in the sub-tech world that is game development. Developers defend Nintendo to death but there’s nothing to defend right now: Wiiware/DSiware are more than underwhelming, developing for Nintendo today is a terrible experience compared to others and the 3D in the 3DS was LAME. It was gimmicky. It wasn’t as big as touch screen or motion control. We all know that. It was Nintendo saying “shit, we are printing money with the Wii/DS but we need to stay at the top; let’s do something trendy”. Wrong move. High price, wrong, showing the world that you expected to make a shitload of money out of tech demos and remakes. Sony called, they want their business plan back.
Nintendo is just getting old and greedy as every single leader in the tech world is getting at some point. They might get back, they might not. We shouldn’t give a damn you know? Nintendo has sold more games and more game systems than anybody else in history, why the hell would I care that much about them making mistakes, because they don’t want to see or listen? I don’t. I want them scared so that they move their asses.
Meanwhile, a dude from Sweden offers three fucking files on his website, minecraft.exe minecraft.zip and minecraft.jar, makes insane money and people are like “oh my god I never thought it could work, I always wanted to develop for [that brand] anyway so I win” . No, you don’t. You are interested in the social status of bragging about developing for [that brand] and don’t care about the business part, crucial for your job. You can’t afford to say I don’t give a damn, see current layoffs. And the business is massively shifting, terraforming these days.
How development became so shallow that you have to code in the trendy language du jour or a specific platform if you want to have some friends? What happened? Did the web inject this superficiality?
It should not be about the name or emotions tied to a brand, it should be about what tools are offered to us, the creators. Nothing more, nothing less. We have to review the tools available and compare them to build these crazy complex experiences and computer games. If Nintendo had helped game developers like MS or Apple did instead of being a bitch who doesn’t even want to talk to indie developers who don’t own an office, they would be in a situation where they’d have a clue today.
I never wanted to work on Xbox or 360 that much, but I knew they were dead serious by looking at their second gamepad, while Sony the King was dicking around with a boomerang. I saw Apple having no clue about what to do with their iPod Touch until they saw that people were downloading so many games. They hate games at Apple, they never, ever got it. They probably think games as things chimps do. As long as it allows them to sell hardware… Anyway, it was pretty cool to make a game on their stuff because at least they understood that ease of access to build and sell apps was kind of a big deal.
I wanted to love Android development and it turned out to be pretty bad in many ways. I’m still watching.
I don’t care about brands and loyalty, I care about what all of these huge players have to offer, if they are really trying and not just faking it, and what I can do with that. So when I see an opportunity like the new Microsoft eco-system is showing, and that people are dismissing it just and only because of the “Microsoft” part I’m like, “what a bunch of whore ass bitches”. Competition kicked MS ass, they got busy and brought something nice and innovative. It should be positively welcome. That’s how things move forward.
It’s funny because tech people are the most atheist-like people I know and yet, they are more religious and afraid of change than a scientologist mixed with a zionist.
For real.
4 replies on “Nut up, developer”
Hey Harold,
You are totally right: it isn’t about technology, it’s 100% about politics.
Devs got ass raped too many times by Microsoft over the years.
The latest offense being the recent Silverlight mess. No one believes MS anymore, no one trusts them.
So if they want people back on their platform, they need to start showering lots of dollar bills over devs. I bet they’ll do that eventually (like they did with Xbox at a time): they won’t get people back just with cool tech so they’ll have to pay. Until then, they are dead in the water and I couldn’t care less. As a dev, my biggest hope is that, in the end, the web washes over all the proprietary crap pushers.
Reread Dan Cook on the platforms game…
Olivier,
The web isn’t washing anything, it’s getting siloed. After a decade of hopes, it didn’t happen. I don’t know if you read this link:
http://joehewitt.com/2011/09/22/web-technologies-need-an-owner
I know we as developers can do with a democratic organization of tools -though not all of us-, but users don’t fucking want that at all. Ever. They want something simple, as the success of Facebook/Apple/Google not only suggest, but prove the point. Like Ian Bogost wrote about Apple, people love dictatorship. They don’t have to do anything! That will not change, maybe even less with kids growing up in these silos.
So with the platform game in mind -and I read Danc’s slides a couple of times-, I see MS as a not-so-bad player. I see a player which has been for good or bad reasons beaten up for over a decade and had to listen, learn and innovate, starting with the dev side .NET and C# (used so often and strongly appreciated through all dev platforms) and now the user side with Winphones and Kinect. There was no Silverlight mess, it was just whiny developers whining. MS tries to please everybody from the 45 year old Win32 dev to the young HTML5/JS dude and all the Silverlight/WPF in the middle. All the WPF/Silverlight knowledge is going to be useful in Windows 8 (C#/XAML). Yes, they also want a plugin-free browser to satisfy users. They try to please everybody on every front and it’s obviously risky.
Then I compare with other players and I don’t see where they are so blatantly worse, sorry. Especially with game developers! Nintendo and Sony never opened their console like MS did, Sony is catching up on that right now, showering devs with money they don’t have. I never wanted a Xbox and I think they should have stuck with the PC. I’m sure shareholders would agree. Nonetheless, the box is pretty huge in the US and people start to see a nice ecosystem shaping up. It’s an opportunity. Some take or took it, I would not for the same consistent reason I have: if you can, avoid heavily closed platforms.
Now, the Windows PC. I can build and distribute whatever the fuck I want while reaching a large audience. Pretty cool, right? Where would be Steam or the Humble Bundle without this platform that screws dev since forever? Nowhere near where they are.
I mean, the situation is already complex so we have to be really honest about it. And the truth is that it’s not like other platforms are so much better that I can forget or dismiss everything about MS, Windows and PCs. Companies this size don’t disappear because we don’t want to see them anymore, especially when they still are innovating -I didn’t expect them to go for something new on the smartphone front-. My dad used to say that IBM would die in 5 years when Microsoft was still small; IBM is still here and making more money than ever. And again, when I see the mess that is true openness like the web and Linux, I kind of understand what Joe Hewitt says…
The biggest issue with Windows 8 is the app store and its 30% cut on every Metro app. I wonder where they got the idea that it would be awesome…
I strongly disagree. :)
I don’t think people love dictatorships at all, that’s just Ian being curmudgeon and I completely disagree with the “people need a strong leader” view of Joe Hewitt. That’s exactly the mindset that leads to dictatorship.
I think you are looking at too short a time frame both in the future and in the past.
Regarding the past, MS has pulled unbelievable crap like no one else in the tech industry ever did – not even IBM at its worse, not even Oracle. I’m not saying Apple or Google or Facebook are necessarily better, I’m just saying that collectively they haven’t done 5% of what MS did. Relationships are built on trust and MS lost pretty much everyone’s trust. You are quick to forgive them (or is it forget), most of us aren’t.
Regarding the future, you have to give it time: you can’t expect the world to change over night. I would argue that we’ve already made phenomenal progress in the past 20 years. So my bet is still squarely on democracy, people and the web. It’s all the same after all. ;)
Right :)
But in terms of the now, building software and stuff, I still think that as everybody is bad and that we have to arm-wrestle all of them, MS/Google/Apple/Facebook, when one has been stomped over for a decade, they are usually listening to developers. Ask Sony, who just got the memo recently :)
We can see how the others, boasting “perfect cred” do whatever the hell they want and don’t listen to us. Nintendo comes to my mind.
Like usual, it cycles. And as technology changes faster, cycles are faster too. Google went from outside to MS-like position in the web in ten years instead of 25.
The problem with FB and silos on the web is that they are potentially much more powerful than MS having Windows everywhere and they gain this information faster than ever before. Windows on computers in a house is not as scary, to me.
I expect the change to not come from Western countries as we will not be capable to resist silos and voluptuousness :)