“…navigating the waters around Redmond, Wash., could get
trickier for developers. Microsoft is roiling from within over
long-standing assumptions in its business plan: Customers today
are more concerned with Internet bandwidth than PC operating
systems, and its server products are under attack from Oracle
Corp. (stock: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems Inc. (stock:
SUNW) at the high end and from Linux at the low end.”
“In order for us to reach Unix, Macintosh, and Linux machines,
we need to work in an Internet-friendly way,” said Dave Mendlen,
lead product manager for Visual Studio at Microsoft. … The
current version of Visual Studio, release 6, requires writing
low-level code to drop data into a Web page. Visual Studio.Net
replaces that with point-and-click interfaces for handling server
requests and generating XML code.”
“Java has a big head start over Microsoft’s evolving Web
environment. … Other non-Microsoft languages, such as Perl and
Python, are popular for Web development as well. Also, many younger
developers entering the workforce prefer to run their apps on
Linux, not Windows, which leads them to different development
communities — groups that share source code and ideas.”