Tom Yager

Microsoft Corp.

IT is undergoing the kind of cultural evolution that companies endured when they first pushed computing technology out to the bulk of their workforces.

Major vendors are getting better at donating source code to the public. But by and large, companies engage in code charity in safe and limited ways. They incorporate existing free code into their commercial products, giving their nonproprietary enhancements

Most enterprise development tools vendors have remarkably little interaction with developers. That grows from two principles that guide the tools market: Developers don't make buying decisions, and it's impossible to make any two developers happy. For PR's sake it's a good idea to create a forum or a newsgroup for developers to complain to one another, but for sanity's sake, don't let anyone from the company participate in it.

Let's settle this up front. Microsoft Corp. has let its developers down. During the past few years, the company has left a trail of broken promises: a .Net-centered operating system; a broad stack of managed, .Net-based server applications; effortless targeting of everything from servers to cell phones; an egalitarian approach to programming languages; and a new, revolutionarily productive, framework-aware IDE.

Fresh corporate investment in it infrastructure is a welcome signal of a budding recovery. Purse strings are loosening, but in some shops the change is so gradual that spending on new technology might seem irresponsible.

At the SunNetwork conference held recently, Rich Green, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s vice-president of developer tools and Java software, led his pitch for the Java Enterprise System (formerly Orion) by saying,

The IT world has been turned upside down in the past three years. When the Y2K terror died down, the economy tanked and chief technologists re-evaluated their priorities.