Frans gets it too, about communities

I think Frans more or less agrees with me in his post, although for slightly different reasons, that Microsoft sponsored communities are a mess of doomed kingdoms. I already said my peace about it.

The only thing I might slightly disagree with is that all Microsoft initiatives are doomed to fail and that the people in the trenches really drive the community. I don't totally think that's true. Like I said, eliminating duplication of effort would be a good start.

I thought GotDotNet was very cool when it started, and my login there is one of the earlierst. I racked up hundreds, perhaps thousands of posts. Then it stopped working because the site was (and still is) a poorly coded mess that doesn't work half of the time. Then I stopped going to the ASP.NET forums because they weren't working half of the time. I guess the reasons there were technical, and not community driven at all!

3 Comments

  • My "Piece" not peace



    S

  • Uh... no. I said what I meant.

  • One of the problems that I see with GDN is that MS treats it like they treat all of their products... rather than making incremental updates in between major code refactors, they wait it out. People have to suffer and use a system that just can't compete with sourceforge.



    Yeah, MS is working on it... But as always, they're going to drop a huge update on everyone and expect people to love them for it. Personally, I find this VERY annoying.



    Need another example? Look at .net. They could have released many parts of the 2.0 code base as point releases to .net 1.x. Master pages isn't that difficult to implement in 1.x.

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