Steve Ballmer: Developers

How?! They delivered the product in the first place Yes, at Microsoft, where programmers are profit centers [1]. At GEICO, JP Morgan, Disney, Pfizer, Alcoa, etc, they are cost centers, on a level with accountants and HR. (What is the profit center at GEICO? Actuaries? Salesmen? Warren Buffet's kindly pig face? Talking lizards?) [1] Hence this: this video

There's a heading that reads: > Developers, Developers, Developers I've always cracked up whenever I see Ballmer's developers video, so I was pretty happy that Microsoft's IoT team has a sense of humor and was able to get that approved (if they had to) reference if you haven't seen the original Ballmer video: this video

our commitment to enabling developers to build on our platform I think a lot of developers would question whether or not you guys even have such a commitment at all. Twitter does NOT have a good history in this regard. If anything, you guys need to bend over backwards, sideways, upside down, and any other way you can think of, to treat developers well and woo them. I mean, somebody needs to go full Ballmer and start screaming "Developers, developers, developers!!!". [1] Seriously, you guys are so behind the curve in terms of developer perception that "good enough" isn't even close to good enough. You should probably be reaching out to developers, offering to fly them to Twitter HQ, and treating them to steak and lobster, etc. And that's just to get back in the good graces of the development community. Developers do not compete with Twitter, developers make the Twitter ecosystem larger and stronger and better. Twitter needs to embrace that mindset and go all in on becoming a desirable platform to develop for. As for myself, our app offers limited Twitter integration, but we're damn sure not going to spend a lot of time and energy on Twitter given the history and what-not. My advice? Kill Gnip, make it trivially easy to access the firehose, commit to adhering to open standards[2][3][4][5] across the board, and put developers front and center. If you want to charge for firehose access, fine, but kill any notion of some complicated application / approval process. Make it as simpl

There will be room for a good number of niche frameworks, some of which could be highly profitable for their creators/maintainers. I don't disagree with that :-) My point was -- and still is -- that the competition to become the dominant framework has already been won, by TensorFlow, because it has captured the hearts and minds of the most developers. Most new AI services are being built atop TensorFlow -- not DL4J, nor Torch, nor Theano, nor Caffe, nor CNTK, nor anything else. Let me finish by sharing a video of Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, in which he emphasizes the importance of attracting developers to a stadium packed with Microsoft employees: this video

There's something comically evil looking about Ballmer, almost the Emperor from Star Wars. A former Microsoft exec wondering what the government does with money? A lot landed in his pockets I suspect, but it's good he's philanthropic now. this video .

Developers, developers, developers! [1] That has always been Microsoft's strength: their ability to bring developers to their ecosystem. It doesn't matter if your OS is the best, most modern and revolutionary: it means nothing if you can't do anything with it. The same mistake almost bit the iPhone when it was launched.[2] [1]: this video [2]: link

This is not new -- Steve Ballmer understood this viscerally (ahem) over 10 years ago: this video Granted, they weren't releasing much open source then, but it was all free to use, and the quality was far above open source alternatives (e.g. think the Visual Studio debugger vs. GDB wrappers). I think they just naturally figured out that there's zero advantage to keeping developer tools closed source.

MS has always been super developer friendly as far as I can remember. The difference was in the past you had to buy into their ecosystem and way of thinking. Once that was done, VS was by far the most superior experience. Now MS embraces a greater variety of developers, not just those who bought in. Anyone remember DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS...? EDIT: found a clip: this video

Microsoft understood, and still understands strategy wrt developers. Microsoft went Open Source because that is where devs go, why do they go there? Access, control and agency. Why do you think they make VSCode? With VSCode and Github, Microsoft has access to probably > 40% of all developers in the world! How did they do it? Open Source. this video

All in the name of UI cleanliness and simplicity . Like how there's no way to manually trigger the firmware update for the AirPods. You just have to keep them plugged in next to your iPhone and ... wait ... until some magic pixie in Apple's cloud decides it's time to push the update to you. Steve Jobs used to say it over and over again when criticized by angry developers[1] that their main focus will always be users instead of developers and that the latter will just have to suck it up if they want to get a piece of the lucrative Apple user base pie. In comedic contrast, here's a sweaty Steve Balmer shouting "Developers!" for half a minute.[2] Ah, the early 2000's, with Apple and Microsoft battling it out, what a time to be alive. [1] link [2] this video

> "we need to spend spend spend to revitalize the economy" Yeah, I'm showing my age but I'm reminded of a comparative ethos regarding developers this video

From the article: "Surprisingly, setting up kernel debugging is extremely easy on Windows." Microsoft (at least used to) take developers very seriously. The OS actually plays along when you're trying to debug things, and Windows error reporting actually sends you data that you can work with. Say what you want about their business practices, but I'd deal with Microsoft's developer support over Apple's anytime. And mandatory Youtube: this video

> As someone who owned a Windows phone around that time, and knew others who did as well, the shared opinion was that it was a pile of crap. and had no apps. Windows Phone/Mobile had atrocious developer share. There few apps that were available were of terrible quality. Ironic, considering this happened in the era of a sweaty Balmer screaming "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"[1] 1. this video

Developer! Developers! Developers! this video One can say a lot about Microsoft and Windows, but they were always keen on building a platform which enabled others to build upon.

> Steve Ballmer They have some really good blow in Redmond. If anybody could win an award for being coked up and sweaty on stage... this video

No one is talking about it because developer tools is literally the core business Microsoft is in and was founded as such, 48-years ago. Yes, they have expanded in many ways - but developer tools/languages/IDEs/libraries is their bread & butter. The famous “Developers Developers Developers” by Steve Ballmer. this video

It's self-serving of me to like this clip by Balmer, but maybe Microsoft gets it some times. "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, [...]" this video

Wondering how this affects Apple employees. Back in the day, working for Apple seemed cool. (Pirate flags on building etc). Previously MSFT used to be (maybe they've turned that around?) the most hated tech company (becz of their very aggressive attitudes to competitors especially Netscape). One thing they didn't FU and is represented by the infamous sweaty Balmer video [0] of him shouting "Developers, developers, developers", is pissing of people who build on their platform. Well Apple seems to have topped that with this and other malicious compliance shenanigans in the EU. I can't every imagine developing an iOS/native app on that platform going forward. [0]: this video

The people here are also the ones who tell grandma which computer to buy. You need mass market adoption, but you really also need the "developers! developers! developers!" (or sub "power users" for "developers") [0] [0] this video

> Steve Ballmer: developers developers developers developers developers - this video If you haven't seen the remix, here you go: link