Steve Ballmer: Developers

How?! They delivered the product in the first place Yes, at Microsoft, where programmers are profit centers [1]. At GEICO, JP Morgan, Disney, Pfizer, Alcoa, etc, they are cost centers, on a level with accountants and HR. (What is the profit center at GEICO? Actuaries? Salesmen? Warren Buffet's kindly pig face? Talking lizards?) [1] Hence this: [VIDEO]

There's a heading that reads: > Developers, Developers, Developers I've always cracked up whenever I see Ballmer's developers video, so I was pretty happy that Microsoft's IoT team has a sense of humor and was able to get that approved (if they had to) reference if you haven't seen the original Ballmer video: [VIDEO]

our commitment to enabling developers to build on our platform I think a lot of developers would question whether or not you guys even have such a commitment at all. Twitter does NOT have a good history in this regard. If anything, you guys need to bend over backwards, sideways, upside down, and any other way you can think of, to treat developers well and woo them. I mean, somebody needs to go full Ballmer and start screaming "Developers, developers, developers!!!". [1] Seriously, you guys are so behind the curve in terms of developer perception that "good enough" isn't even close to good enough. You should probably be reaching out to developers, offering to fly them to Twitter HQ, and treating them to steak and lobster, etc. And that's just to get back in the good graces of the development community. Developers do not compete with Twitter, developers make the Twitter ecosystem larger and stronger and better. Twitter needs to embrace that mindset and go all in on becoming a desirable platform to develop for. As for myself, our app offers limited Twitter integration, but we're damn sure not going to spend a lot of time and energy on Twitter given the history and what-not. My advice? Kill Gnip, make it trivially easy to access the firehose, commit to adhering to open standards[2][3][4][5] across the board, and put developers front and center. If you want to charge for firehose access, fine, but kill any notion of some complicated application / approval process. Make it as simpl

There will be room for a good number of niche frameworks, some of which could be highly profitable for their creators/maintainers. I don't disagree with that :-) My point was -- and still is -- that the competition to become the dominant framework has already been won, by TensorFlow, because it has captured the hearts and minds of the most developers. Most new AI services are being built atop TensorFlow -- not DL4J, nor Torch, nor Theano, nor Caffe, nor CNTK, nor anything else. Let me finish by sharing a video of Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, in which he emphasizes the importance of attracting developers to a stadium packed with Microsoft employees: [VIDEO]

There's something comically evil looking about Ballmer, almost the Emperor from Star Wars. A former Microsoft exec wondering what the government does with money? A lot landed in his pockets I suspect, but it's good he's philanthropic now. [VIDEO] .

Developers, developers, developers! [1] That has always been Microsoft's strength: their ability to bring developers to their ecosystem. It doesn't matter if your OS is the best, most modern and revolutionary: it means nothing if you can't do anything with it. The same mistake almost bit the iPhone when it was launched.[2] [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]

This is not new -- Steve Ballmer understood this viscerally (ahem) over 10 years ago: [VIDEO] Granted, they weren't releasing much open source then, but it was all free to use, and the quality was far above open source alternatives (e.g. think the Visual Studio debugger vs. GDB wrappers). I think they just naturally figured out that there's zero advantage to keeping developer tools closed source.

MS has always been super developer friendly as far as I can remember. The difference was in the past you had to buy into their ecosystem and way of thinking. Once that was done, VS was by far the most superior experience. Now MS embraces a greater variety of developers, not just those who bought in. Anyone remember DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS...? EDIT: found a clip: [VIDEO]