Guys, after giving it a lot of consideration and talking it through with several people, I’ve decided to give up on Microsoft platform and focus my efforts on more perspective platform with better future prospects - Java platform. This wasn’t easy as I’ve invested all my time in past several years on deepening my skills and building my experience with .NET world, but I believe that going further that way doesn’t make any sense:
- Microsoft admitted their client-side technologies were a step in the incorrect direction (giving up on WPF & Silverlight)
- WinRT will be strongly focused on tablets (as it’s the main target of Win8) - noone really believes Microsoft will get a big chunk of the market where iOS and Android are already strongly present
- Microsoft lost its power to actually sell their products widely even if they are good - whatever they do with Windows Phone 7.5, its market share is almost non-existent
- Microsoft is wasting a lot of its effort on obvious fail-products like Kinect
That’s why I’ve decided to move towards Java and Open Source Software (OSS):
- OSS solutions are more dynamic, have shorter TTM and present more brilliant ideas nowadays - you don’t need a corporation to come up with something “breakthrough-ish”
- Large-scale cloud solutions adapt EC2, S3, Hadoop, Cassandra - Azure’s offer is no match
- Just look at the projects hosted under Apache - how can anyone resist?
I hope you understand my motivations, hopefully I didn’t disappoint anyone personally. Feel free to share your point of view on that in comments.
P.S. Checking post’s date may help you understand my motives…
P.S.S. I’ve got my PRINCE2 Practicioner exam’s results finally: 82/108, passed (and this has nothing in common with post’s date :)) - I still think it was very hard, but I’m obviously happy with the result.