> Their fundamental problem is (which they realize pretty well i seems) that they have lost developer's mind share. .NET may be a fine ecosystem and C# may be a great language but in all practical senses it is Windows-only. All these Mono/open source CLR games are not even the slightest blip on the radar for a practical day-to-day backend operations running cross platform (which is mostly Linux, but Windows as well).
The JVM has certainly had a lot of time to mature, and certainly has a fairly entrenched position, but when you look at all the developers who were willing to hop on board the Go train with no supporting infrastructure, it's pretty clear that support from powerful entities can go a long way.
> but when you look at all the developers who were willing to hop on board the Go train with no supporting infrastructure
I think that speaks more towards engineers that like shiny new things that do something in particular in a new way which then help drum up excitement and an ecosystem around it.
C# is a very good language, but there's nothing new or shiny about it now. The tools and ecosystem around it are well established and managed by Microsoft and often involve spending some money.
The excitement for new things like Go, Rust or Julia etc are really not a signal for new support for C#. I think if anything Microsoft should continue their new support for llvm[0]. Windows is a fine operating system, I'd like to use it to do development and the closer I can get to developing things that then run on linux the easier my life will get and the more likely it will be that devs use Windows.
You know, people say that Windows is a fine operating system, but I find it constantly annoying and terribly inefficient. Maybe it because I know there are other, better things, or maybe it's because I use it "incorrectly". As a desktop OS the GUI constantly annoys me with tiny little cuts; you can't manipulate file names properly as it disallows names starting with a period (among other things), the UI is terribly inconsistent, the console(s) don't interact with the mouse well, etc. I know they are small things, but they really add up to some serious frustration with the OS as a whole.
As a server OS it's not much better. I can't find a way to force a NTP sync; things that should be simple (creating a service with logon rights) takes 10's of lines of PowerShell; you can't use SSL with the core image because it requires IE, which is not included in the core image. Its full of little surprises which make it difficult to understand (.../windows32 == 64bit, .../SysWOW64 == 32bit). It takes 10 minutes to fully boot a Windows instance in AWS, which is mostly the result of how large it is, and the fact that it has to recompile its DCOM DLLs (or some such thing).
I know that no OS is perfect, but Windows has had years and years to mature and a company with billions of $$$ and thousands of developers behind it. I expect more.
The Windows desktop comes in last in any reasonable comparison with OS X and a modern desktop-oriented linux like Ubuntu or Mint.
The focus on backwards compatibility means, among other things, Windows is carrying around multiple ways to render fonts. None of them deliver sufficient clarity. In Windows 10, Cleartype does not affect "Modern" apps.
All the applications I use 90% of the time are available for Windows and Linux. Text in each is more difficult to read in Windows.
I find, on a Dell 27-inch 2560x1440 display,that I can see individual pixels in normal fonts from my usual viewing distance. Bold fonts are often smeary, especially at smaller sizes. Segoe UI looks acceptable in parts of the Windows interface. But, in apps that use older font rendering approaches, it's poor.
If you spend your days reading and writing, as I do, this is an important issue.
Go is probably one of the least interesting languages released lately IMO, certainly when you compare it to Rust (and I don't know a whole lot about Julia), and yet the amount of attention it has gotten is pretty huge.
So I think MS is just as capable of throwing new shiny things at developers as anyone else. Typescript and free Xamarin are recent examples.
The JVM has certainly had a lot of time to mature, and certainly has a fairly entrenched position, but when you look at all the developers who were willing to hop on board the Go train with no supporting infrastructure, it's pretty clear that support from powerful entities can go a long way.