Microsoft dumping .Net for HTML5/Javascript

Mike James wrote a blog entry about this. My immediate thought: what did you expect? Microsoft sets their roadmap based on their business needs and what'll benefit them, not what'll benefit their developers. And Microsoft is focused on one thing: insuring that Microsoft controls everything. When they think "cross-platform", they mean "across all Microsoft platforms". They want it to be easy to have apps run on all their platforms, from desktops to phones, and to be as hard as possible to make those things run on any other platform. If things do run on other platforms, they want to insure that Microsoft is a required part of the infrastructure anyway.

C# and .Net and Silverlight are problematic for Microsoft because they can run on other platforms, and when they do other Microsoft products and platforms aren't required. It's not easy but the Mono project has demonstrated that you can create a C# compiler and .Net runtime for Linux, and once it exists for Linux it's a lot easier to port it to any other Unix variant. Silverlight will likely fall into the same category. But HTML5/JS has one big advantage: it's limited enough that you can't create an entire complex application in it. You can do the UI part, but you're going to need a back-end to handle things that just can't be done in Javascript. Microsoft's hope is to use the standardized nature of HTML5/JS to sell management by making sure the "standards-compliant" checkbox is checked, while doing some things under the hood and in the client/server communication with the back-end to insure that you'll need a Windows system in the mix to successfully run one of their new apps. Think back to ASP and how it got tied into IE-specific bits of Javascript and HTML to the point where it was hard to make ASP webapps work right anywhere but in IE. How successful Microsoft will be with this is up in the air, but I think their goal is what it's always been: to make sure it's Microsoft and Windows everywhere, for everything, to the exclusion of everything and everyone else.

As a developer, make no mistake: Microsoft does not care about you. You are important only insofar as you buying into their roadmap is needed for it to succeed. Once that's no longer needed you're at best unnecessary and at worst competition to be eliminated (every sale of software you write is the loss of a sale of something Microsoft wrote or could write, and you selling your software at the expense of Microsoft doesn't benefit Microsoft).