Microsoft Out of Favor With Young, Hip Developers

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's failures with the KIN phone (only two months on the market, less than 10,000 phones sold) are well-known to this community. Now the NY Times goes farther, quoting Tim O'Reilly: 'Microsoft is totally off the radar of the cool, hip, cutting-edge software developers.' Microsoft has acknowledged that they have lost young developers to the lures of free software. 'We did not get access to kids as they were going through college,' acknowledged Bob Muglia, the president of Microsoft's business software group, in an interview last year. 'And then, when people, particularly younger people, wanted to build a start-up, and they were generally under-capitalized, the idea of buying Microsoft software was a really problematic idea for them.' Microsoft's program to seed start-ups with its software for free requires the fledgling companies to meet certain guidelines and jump through hoops to receive software mdash; while its free competitors simply allow anyone to download products off a website with the click of a button." Update: 07/07 13:21 GMT by T : Tim O'Reilly says that while he "[doesn't] disagree with all of his conclusions," he's not happy with it Ashlee Vance's piece, writing "I was not the source for the various comments that were attributed to me," including the bit about "totally off the radar." (Thanks to reader gbll.)pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.slashdot.org% 2Fstory%2F10%2F07%2F06%2F2140253%2FMicrosoft-Out-of-Favor-With-Young-Hip-Developers" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Microsoft+Out+of+Favor+With+Young%2C+H ip+Developers%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F9ih9oA" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/07/06/2140253/Microsoft-Out-of-Favor-With-Young-Hip-Developers?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./ppa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2YGxkBROsWuU4rlOzH4JSv0AWVY/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2YGxkBROsWuU4rlOzH4JSv0AWVY/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2YGxkBROsWuU4rlOzH4JSv0AWVY/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/2YGxkBROsWuU4rlOzH4JSv0AWVY/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/lunXz127mhI" height="1" width="1"/

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