One of the things that frustrates me with the Microsoft/.NET communities is the willingness to pay (and charge) for things. I’m not talking Visual Studio .NET here, but rather simple little tools that may (or may not) make your life easier – Text editors1, Winzip-alikes2 or utilities that replicate built-in functionality that people are too lazy to learn/use/
Another thing that annoys me is the herd mentality of said communities. There are some very good .NET/Development blogs out there, but there are some which are thinly veiled (sometimes not even veiled!) advertisements. Now, this is understandable when you’re pimping a product you wrote, but not when you are, but you didn’t.
Take the last link – he’s basically selling MaxiVista’s product for them3.
He likes it, he’s talking about it – fair enough.
…I hear you say. Wrong – you’re missing my point. It’s not his post I object to, it’s the comments to an earlier post about using said product. This is a very tame example, but you see it time and again – a blogging ‘personality’ promotes his favorite product(s) and people flock behind them to buy said product(s). All too often this is done without checking out the competition (which is well worth checking out by the way – even just for the “wow that’s cool” factor).
I’ve done it myself with CodeRush – I heard it mentioned on .NET Rocks and thought:
They’re using it – it must be cool! I’ll use it, and I’ll be a cool developer just like them!
Time like these I wish I could be bothered to draw stick figures like Rory does
I tried it. I quite liked it actually. I let the demo expire and stopped using it. And you know what? It didn’t make any difference – I still code the same, I just have less flashy effects going on! Yes CodeRush does other things, but so do other (free) VS.NET add-ins.
Now, I understand the basics of marketing and why things work this way, but it still frustrates me especially when there are so many as-good-as (and often better) Free and/or Open Source alternatives out there. They just don’t get pimped (in the right places) as much…
1 Why would anyone not use Vim ?
2 Info-ZIP and FreeZip should fulfill your needs, but I do admit to using WinZip on my work machine because we have license agreement. I still use Info-ZIP though…
You have apparently not understood the purpose of Maxivista if you compare it to Synergy. Perhaps you should try both products before complaining?<br />
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What’s wrong if Scott promotes that he likes a product? There are sites dedicated to promote commercial products and Scott even provided a bonus for his readers. Get it or leave it. It’s that easy.<br />
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Jeff
In reply to your comment on my blog post: <br />
<br />
Synergy and MaxiVista are two very different kinds of Apps. <br />
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Synergy is a Virtual KVM switch, while MaxiVista is a virtual video card. MaxiVista gives one OS any number of additional virtual display adapters.<br />
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Synergy’s site says “Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems” while MaxiVista does the INVERSE. It’s an additional display adapter for the same OS.
The need to pay for stuff is an artifact of the culture, I think. Macs are the same. Someone writes a small useful program on Linux, they give it away (because who’s going to pay for a little thing that enhances the desktop when the whole OS was free?) Someone writes a small useful program on a Mac or on Windows, they charge twenty quid for it. So if you want a few useful apps, you have to pony up a hundred pounds. Some people say, well, it’s only right that the authors should get recompensed, and I don’t mind spending a hundred pounds. Me…well, I agree with RMS on this.