Item — HN Reader

What happens to all the people who spent years learning how to use it?

It's kind of scary to think you spend learning something in and out only to find out that it's later going to be deprecated entirely. Like Silverlight. Oh well, at least with Silverlight you got something applicable out of it: XAML which works on Windows Phone 8, WPF, etc.

3 comments

This is a lesson that repeats itself over and over again in the technology industry and especially with Microsoft's tools. Learn the root technologies themselves, not the tools. Learn HTML and Javascript, not Dreamweaver or Expression. Prefer open source tools over closed. While it often seems that everyone wants a specialist, learn to apply general concepts to specific technologies. Sure, you'll need to know some specifics and be proficient in specific tools but that will come quickly when you know the underlying technologies.

You are describing what Microsoft has done, and is known for doing, for more than a decade. I saw one developer create a list of MS technologies he would ignore because he felt they would disappear. A will-not-learn list.

A lot of people I know put SharePoint on that list many years ago... A lot of people I know also got a decent wage out of it...

SharePoint is a fat cash cow. It's not going anywhere.

I can vouch for this. I work for a large corporation who has tied all of their development to Sharepoint. The CTO has told everybody several times, in no uncertain terms, there will be no changing from Sharepoint or Microsoft and to just deal with it.

The only glimmer of hope is in the 2013 release I've been told we can build a decent CMS layer on top of Sharepoint.

My will-not-learn-unless-desparate list: Microsoft (star)

The killing of Silverlight is a particularly accurate example, in that while Silverlight's end point adoption was never really there, the adaptive streaming was so much better than Adobe's that it should have been a home run. But that's definitely not the case; Adobe now owns the market (except Netflix) and anyone trying to work with Microsoft's has to figure things out without anyone at the company who knows how it works.