On 11/5/2012 11:44 AM, Brian Wood wrote:

From: Paul Mensonides

...

In that last announcement talk alone together with the follow-up Q & A there are numerous "subtle" bits of marketing. The entire general trend is one of attempting to turn a product (software) into a service. That is an anti-consumer nickle-and-dime model which is just as anti-consumer as trying to trick people that can't afford something into making payments. It is just as anti-consumer as many other related things occurring in the software industry nowadays--microtransactions being one of them.

I bet MS investors would think differently. Is there another option available to them than services?

There isn't anything wrong with services. There is something wrong with taking something that is fundamentally a product and artificially turning into a service. For paid software, as with any other product manufacturing, the solution is providing a product at a "reasonable" price that people want to buy and are willing to buy at that price. Obviously, "reasonable" price can vary all over the place depending on what it takes to do the R&D and create the software. Regardless, creating products which people want ends up coming down to innovate or die. A constant cycle of innovation, in fact. My concern is not MS investors, nor is it really consumers in general. My concern is the future of software and its value to all of humanity--both businesses and consumers alike. The pressure to innovate is necessary for that. That's hardly to say that all innovation is successful or all risk results in reward. Taking a few things in particular. Cloud computing and the service of using cloud services is valid, but it is way oversold. Most software would not benefit from it and likely never would. The Windows 8 Metro UI, is another example. In a usability sense, the UI is fine for phones and tablets (i.e. devices that are not really productivity devices), but the real problem with it is the app store. That is essentially MS earning money for other people's work (instead of innovating)--just as they do with (e.g.) the 360--which is an unethical abuse of power. Beyond that, it devolves into the same broken single point problem that Linux distros have--which stifles progress. Even worse that that, with Metro, MS has gone out of their way to force it on consumers--e.g. intentionally disabling the ability to opt-out and intentionally removing would be alternatives such as menu. Obviously, MS is far from the only company to perform these kinds of shenanigans. But it is because of these and similar shenanigans that I distrust MS. These things have nothing to do with C++ other than that MS has tried to exploit the C++ community in pursuit of these things. In turn, when Herb goes around evangelizing these types of things, it comes off as untrustworthy. Several days ago we were notified on this list of this big announcement talk that is relevant to Boost and C++ in general. A small part of that talk was. The rest of it was a gigantic MS advertisement. Regards, Paul Mensonides