If I run Dev Div…
time to read 4 min | 691 words

I found this post interesting, so I thought that I would try to answer it.

If I run Dev Div, I would:

  • Utilize CodePlex Foundation to a much higher degree. Right now CPF manages about 6 projects, all of them seems to originate from Microsoft. None of them are actually useful for CPF in the sense of creating an excitement around it. If I run Dev Div, and given the indication of the lack of will from within Microsoft to maintain the DLR, I would give the CPF the DLR, along with a small budget (1 million annually should more than cover that) and set it free. That 1 million? I would put it down as marketing, because the amount of good will that you’ll generate from doing that is enormous. And the level of publicity that you’ll get for CPF is huge.

 

  • Sit down with marketing and create a new set of personas, based on what is actually happening in the real world. Mort, Einstein and that Elvis dude might be good when you are building the product and designing the API, but there are other aspects to consider, and acceptance in the community is important. A lot of the public blunders that Microsoft has made recently has been just that, marketing mistakes more than anything else.

 

  • Build for each project a set of scenarios that appeal to each group. For the PHP crowd, point out how WebMatrix makes their life simple. For the ALT.Net crowd, show them how they can use IIS Express to run their unit tests without requiring anything installed. Right now what is going on is that pushing to one side alienate the other.
    Let me put this another way, when someone asks me why use NHibernate instead of Entity Framework, I am going to inform them that Microsoft continues their trend of new Data Access framework every two years, and they have gone retro with Microsoft.Data.

 

  • Kill duplicated effort before it goes out the door. Linq to SQL & Entity Framework are a great example of things that should have been developed concurrently (because either project had a chance of failure, so hedging your bets is good, if you can afford that), but they should have never been allowed to both see the light of day. The marketing damage from moving Linq to SQL to maintenance mode was huge.

 

  • Simplify, simplify, simplify! Microsoft does a lot of good things, but they tend to provide solutions that are wide scoped and complex. Often enough, so complex that people just give up on them. Case in point, if at all possible, I wouldn’t use WCF for communication. I would rather role my own RPC stack, because that makes things easier. That is a Fail for Microsoft in many cases, and one of the reasons that they are leaking developers to other platforms.

 

  • Forbid developers from arguing with customers publically about policy decisions. The reasoning is simple, devs don’t have a lot (if any) impact on policy decisions, they can explain them, sure. But when there is disagreement, having an argument about it tends to end up with bad blood in the water. Such discussions should be done at a level that can actually do something. Case in point, recent WebMatrix arguments in twitter & blogs.

 

  • Focus some love & attention toward the non entry level segment of the market. There has been a worrying set of events recently that indicate a shift in focus toward the entry level market, and the rest of developers are feeling abandoned. That shouldn’t be allowed to remain this way for long.

If you’ll not, except for the suggestion about turning simplification to an art form and applying it ruthlessly, most of the suggestions are actually about marketing and positioning, not about product development.

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