Leo Laporte and TWIT are getting out of touch: "Web developers don't like Microsoft"

I was listening to TWIT #136 and, wow, Leo Laporte is totally out of touch. Patrick Norton is not far behind. Listen starting around 36:30. I've found that lately these guys are hanging out in Pundit Valley and completely missing what's going on in the rest of the world. He's actually got the balls to suggest that Web developers don't like Microsoft, and that believing in Silverlight is akin to drinking the Kool-Aid®. Had Leo actually gone to Mix08, I think he'd feel differently.

You can throw all kinds of sites out there that use ASP.NET today, like Chase, Match.com, Sharebuilder, Schwans, Ars, and this little start-up I work for called Insurance.com, and he still would believe something different. The funny thing is when they go on to say only a million people who use Twitter, which, I know this comes as a shock to the non-blogging valley types, most people don't have any desire to use. Put the Calacanis Twitter attention whoring aside and put it in perspective.

Mix08 was certainly a coming out party for the part of Microsoft some of us already knew about. Going back to 2004 when I started writing my book, I was surprised at the way things were opening up. Today, you can debug the .NET Framework code, the very sweet MVC framework is being developed with full source exposure, and (gasp!) unit testing. Silverlight is cross-platform and finally nails down the designer vs. programmer problem. We can make fun of Windows Vista and Office all day long, but if you're paying attention, you'll see that Microsoft has amazing tools, shipping, today.

I'm not qualified to say that they're better, because I don't have time to learn every new technology that comes around. But, Patrick Norton, .NET has been shipping and improving now since 2001's "go live" beta license. I have a site written using ASP.NET v1.0, and running on v3.5. Before you start pontificating about the platform, maybe you should talk to people who actually use it.

This Web developer loves Microsoft, in particular Scott Guthrie's entire division. Come to Mix next year, Leo and Patrick, and get clued in. You guys cease to be credible pundits when you stop paying attention.

9 Comments

  • As much as I like TWIT, they've gotten so inside and so fringe, I feel they no longer understand what happens in the real world. Perhaps if someone outside of their world actually used Twitter, they'd find out.

  • Twitter. ugh.

    But I digress. It's hard to imagine people not realizing that a TON of people love the Microsoft world. Even a ton that once where Java/Other Technology Stack people. .NET isn't shrinking and it by no means has lost interest.

    I guess I could be a fan boy or whatever. The fact is I use the tool that works best, .NET has very few situation where it doesn't work as good or even better than anything in the Java/JSP/PHP/Other technology universe. All while being much more cohesive from a toolset point of view.

  • Jeff,

    I had the same reaction when listening to this podcast. Too much inside baseball going on in the show. I guess only time will tell, but it seems to me that Silverlight is going to be the real-deal. Very compelling to me.

  • Actually, a lot of Web developers don't like Microsoft, but it's because of the extra workload one encounters when developing Web pages for Internet Explorer, not because of ASP.NET (which many Web developers like) and Silverlight (which almost nobody uses -- everybody still does Flash).

    MIX 2008 was a coming out party but for a different reason: Internet Explorer 8 purports to show much love for the Web developer with its Firebug-like developer toolbar and its adherance to W3C standards (though that is still shaky, which is OK since it's a beta, and leaves much to be desired, e.g., attachEvent vs addEventListener, JScript slow as molasses compared to SpiderMonkey and WebKit).

    Silverlight has almost no market share, but that shouldn't discourage Microsoft, because, at one point, Firefox had no market share, and they've made significant strides since its inception. Anybody can beat anybody else if you bring a good enough implementation to market.

  • I think Leo and Co. were referring to the small guy web developers who eschew Microsoft simply because the cheap hosting environments aren't there, and the tools (Visual Studio, SQL Server) are pricey in comparison to free (Komodo Edit, MySQL). Couple this with Microsoft's tactics (OOXML) and you do have a fair chunk of web folks that don't like or user MS products.

  • Visual Web Developer is still free, right? If not, well, they give away Visual Studio at pretty much every event. I can get a Windows server at The Planet for $65 a month, and that's not some shared crap. I don't understand where the illusion of a price barrier comes from.

  • I sometimes watch Leo Laporte's show on Stickam but he ignores the room so I prefer other "radio shows".

    Anyone can create a show now using social
    broadcasting tools so we don't need to watch old media experts who just talk at us.

  • I almost drove off the road while listening to this. When Leo said that most hosting companies allow things like cron jobs and and are written in Perl and PHP I was wondering what he was smoking. There are just as many hosting companies out there now that do IIS services. I also don't know if it is still the case, but there used to be no way in heck that a hosting company was going to let you run a scheduler unless they set it up.

  • Yeah I'm starting to wish that Leo would stick to telling me which digital camera has the best feature set and stay away from areas he doesn't seem to grok.

    But on second thought I think I'd prefer watching Cali Lewis tell me which digital camera has the best feature set...

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