I got in the mood for a rant, so I posted the following comment over on David's blog concerning Robert Scoble's list of perceived problems with Microsoft web development products. I'm copying it here because I forgot to trackback and I wanted to make it more visible. Some of it refers to other comments on David's post.

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Though I respect people's opinions -- and some are quite interesting -- I find it amazing that people waste their cycles on arguments like this, especially when the conversation actually starts on the topic of why "Web 2.0 entrepreneurs like Ross tell me that they aren’t using Microsoft’s stuff" and actually *not* "why the Microsoft suite of tools just doesn't cut it for web-application development".

I'm not dismissing Web 2.0 as a fad but let's not ignore the hype. Scoble (and a lot of other bloggers) have a habit of jumping on hype in the guise of expediency, so I'll let it slide as blogging status quo. It's a knee-jerk and somewhat panicked reaction and companies like Microsoft don't respond to that sort of thing with any kind of speed. That's actually a good thing for the thousands of OTHER companies that DEPEND on Microsoft's web technology "stack", not that they were worried about Microsoft moving too quickly.

There's absolutely no reason why Microsoft should worry either. Large-scale enterprise development, the core of Microsoft's "web business", is not under attack by Rails (or it's cousins) yet and I doubt it would ever be. Enterprise web development moves at a calculated and glaciated pace and allows for changes at an even slower pace. Let's not kid ourselves and think that large organizations will suddenly remove their self-imposed internal war-zones and all agree to be agile and play nice together for the sake of the company, cause it just doesn't happen like that. People have their own internal agendas and careers that trump all of that. People also have a justified fear of being obsoleted by new technology, furthering agendas.

A great example is the cordoned off database camp that springs up in some big companies, to "protect data" at the expense of developer flexibility. Incidentally, that kind of situation is exactly why an MS SQL Server adaptor for Rails would be needed.

There are no upper managers with enough clout to do a systematic far-reaching change like that in a large company salivating over agile sofware development practises and especially new open source software like Rails. Nevermind that they are probably just ignorant of new and relatively unproven technology, it would just never work in a large company, where managers rule and so do checks and balances.

For you sofware process geeks out there like me, think Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and the higher levels of CMM some large companies aspire to. Rails does not shoehorn into the CMM and neither do agile practises, let alone iterative processes. The CMM is a dinosaur but it's proven to make reliable software (and money, just ask Motorola, who are CMM 5 in some areas).

Rails is great work and has innovative uses, but let's not pat each other on the back just yet for destroying the old paradigms that were the "Web 1.0". Rails is still a niche product and it's fabulous for small companies because it integrates a lot of agile best practises, which also work well for small companies.

Should Microsoft be worried? I'm not sure they should be. Like other people have said, small companies can't afford Microsoft stuff anyway so they prefer "free" software. Why would Microsoft want to bother trying to compete in this space against a community that can respond as quickly as Rails can? It's not a race worth getting into. Can David teach Microsoft some things about Rails? Definitely, I'm not discounting that. But it's more about getting to business value faster than a technology war of Ruby and Rails vs C# and .NET vs Java and J2ee. They are all different animals, with specific target "markets".

Like Scoble emphasizes after his list, they are PERCEPTIONS and everyone's got a different one. Scoble is describing marketing problems, not technical ones, that Microsoft needs to overcome. I think he hits it mostly on the head, except that everyone's been intepreting the list as technical problems.

If Microsoft responds with a software solution to the "Web 2.0" any time soon (ie. less than 2 years), I'd be very surprised. By that time, Rails will be onward and upward, the "Web 2.0" will be long forgotten and Microsoft won't care about catching up until their enterprise customers wake up and care about it first, which is perfect timing for their glaciated pace.

Everyone wins, and I can go back to not caring one way or the other ... except from a software process geek standpoint, of course.