lalalala i can't hear you lalalala

I came across a pretty bizarre bit of information on some opencl forums yesterday and the more I think about it the more it explains quite a few things about how just strangely m$ evangelists and fanbois behave. It's not a new thought, but a timely reminder and it got me thinking further about it.

It was a question regarding some building options when using one of their developer products: presumably by someone who has a paid-for or otherwise valid license for this product. Yet this is what their response was:

BTW, I originally posted this under Microsoft‘s Visual Studio forum and had it modded off-topic and (re)moved: “Moved by DanielMoth Microsoft Employee 1 hour 38 minutes ago We do not support OpenCL questions in the Microsoft forums. (From:Parallel Computing in C++ and Native Code)“

Presumably this is only because OpenCL is not a m$ endorsed platform, but I think there is a bit more to it than just that. I think m$ are shit-scared that anyone in their protected information sphere might be made aware that there are practical alternatives to the products they push. Or worse - that anyone might actually be using them. One always notices that they don't seem to be aware that there is a whole world of developers who don't need their snot to get real work done - and might be more productive without it. Obviously this is intentional. Pretty much on-par with how the main-stream-media continually pushes a message controlled by the monied classes to ensure people behave as they want.

In my recent work with Android I had a co-worker join me on the project, but unfortunately he is a big-time m$ fanboi. He even has a m$ phone 7, uses bing as his only search engine - on IE (I mean, ... "really"?), has never rarely used anything but microsoft IDEs - since circa 1990, etc. The thing is, he was totally lost outside of that environment, and any failings of the android sdk or documentation (of which there are plenty) prompted comments on how wonderful c-hash and whatever-wpf-is-called-this-month is. Forgetting that all toolkits pretty much suck and are a huge pain to work out when starting from scratch. I spent ~3 years on c-hash bullshit because of this guy, so i know he's so full of shit when he claims otherwise - and call him out on it.

But what most surprised me is that he didn't get a google account to access the shop, nor did he download a SINGLE android tablet application to find out how they work, and what sort of user-interface features work well vs which ones don't. I don't think he even looked at the bundled ones when I wasn't driving the machine.

Why would one intentionally handi-cap your ability to do a good job? Strange ... and I don't think it was to intentionally make the result look bad - it was just too much of a culture shock for him to be outside of his protective bubble. This is why we wasted a few weeks on an aborted web front-end in the first place as well.

Anyway, I think this childish insular attitude helps to explain much of the weirdness with m$ phone and nokia's scandalous fall from the market driven by a CEO of this mould. I've been reading a lot of Tomi Ahonen's blog of late, and some of the information about m$ phone shows they are being so insular in their rejection of all possible alternatives that it is causing them to make many mistakes and create a shit product that nobody wants.

BTW the fact that Tomi had high PR reps from Nokia trying to disparage him on twatter and even on his blog shows they have totally lost the plot. Totally insane.