The client side tools have been in purgatory for years, as things were in stasis when MS screwed up the XP to Longhorn or whatever they were calling the next generation client then.

The server side is a totally different story. Windows Server, system center, sql, etc have been going gangbusters for years.

Agreed. On the client side, a lot of effort was put into WinJS and the whole ModernUI experience.

Speaking as an ex-Microsoftie, my guess is that you'll see some of the innovation behind ModernUI apps back-propagated to thick client desktop stuff in the next major release of Windows.

As seen from outside, Microsoft seems to move very slowly. If you look it up close, you may be aware of smaller changes than those that don't pay attention and give them more importance than those on the outside, as those changes affect your work, but don't affect anyone else's.

Microsoft has been moving, but there is so much more movement outside the Microsoft ecosystem that it's easy to miss when Microsoft makes changes to its technology, even those that shake their entire ecosystem. Microsoft is just one more ecosystem among many and a very insular one.

No Microsoft launch since .NET has had any significant impact on my daily life and it would be perfectly rational to completely ignore them.

> No Microsoft launch since .NET has had any significant impact on my daily life and it would be perfectly rational to completely ignore them.

By this I can say that Apple is stale and dormant. No launch since the iPhone has any impact on my daily life, and even that is simply because it's influence on Android.

Good point. I am now curious as to how the FOSS ecosystem looks when seen from within a Microsoft-heavy environment. Does it look "slow"? Can it be safely ignored?

I see a steady flow of news of new Ubuntu releases, new PostgreSQL functionality, and miscellaneous HPC/Big Data technologies, but that's because I pay attention to that. I wonder if it would be different if I spent my day writing code in Windows, for a Microsoft stack.

I've served in an operations capacity for exclusively *-nix, mixed-stack and primarily MS environments, and I will say that from my perspective the OSS community has more news, but I find that there's less that I actually care about.

I've actually been finding MS products more easy to work with lately, while Ubuntu has been getting more frustrating. Some of that is due to familiarity, but there's also a lot of decisions I've not agreed with. In general, I like that I can write something that works for a few years in Windows - I don't have to worry if the latest package updates are going to break everything. I've lost weeks fixing dependency bugs, and I don't seem to have the same issues on Windows.

It's not different. Half of Microsoft developments these days are them implementing some open source tech (like not-Windows in Azure, Node becoming close to first-class on IIS..)

Certainly there is more than a small difference between it being rational for you to ignore a company and to call the company itself dormant and stale.