once again joel spolsky minces no words – this time it’s m$’s .net proposal :
“Microsoft’s latest announcement, called Microsoft .NET, while touted by the likes of Fortune Magazine as a huge “revolution”, is really nothing but vaporware, and I think it proves that something has gone very, very wrong in Redmond.
With vaporware, you promise all kinds of features and products that you simply can’t sell because you don’t really have them. Of course, Microsoft doesn’t have one line of .NET code. But .NET is worse than vaporware. In their blasé loftiness, Microsoft isn’t even bothering to provide the vapor itself.”
“Ya see, the bright side of vague documents like the .NET white paper is that they are a kind of Rorschach test. People read them with preconceived ideas, and since the document is so vague, they think that Microsoft is reiterating their ideas. Dave Winer, president of UserLand software, has many
interesting, innovative ideas about software. When he read about Microsoft .NET, he assumed that Microsoft was finally recognizing the same ideas that he’d been talking about for two years. Dave, you give them too much credit. They are completely clueless compared to you. They are playing the
trick of psychic hotlines and newspaper horoscopes: by feeding you cloudy, meaningless generalizations, you fall into their trap of thinking that they read your mind. “Today the planetary alignment is such that you will take a big step forward to achieve your goals.” The difference is that Dave has real, concrete ideas that can translate into real software, while Microsoft is still in the kind of lalaland they were in 6 years ago when they were talking about how “Cairo” would provide “Information At Your Fingertips,” a vision that the Internet fulfilled and Cairo didn’t.”
[via rc3]