Rahul Mehta Gandhinagar LsCandidate
45 lakh vb6 software engineers could not do what 500 microsoft employees and apex-management did , but later decided NOT to do - make visual basic !!!
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400 msft employees under guidance of apex msft management and personal guidance of Bill Gates make Visual Basic 1 in 1991 and vb6 in 1998. It became highest used programming language. In 1998, vb6 had more developers than all other languages combined. Despite the fact that mineral owners , land owners , bank owners monopolybownets were funding C++ , perl , tktcl etc.
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But in year 1999 , it was clear though not official, that microsoft apex management has decided to end vb6 and there will be no vb7. And vbdotbet was not easy to use for vb6 programmers as it didnt have edit and continue, and vbdotnet ide was too clumsy, and compilation time was much longer
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Vb6 team inside msft including shared teams was less than 500 employees, guided by apex management including Bill Gates himself.
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Worldwide , there were over 45 lakh vb6 programmers
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All of these 45 lakh vb6 developers including myself, felt sad when they heard that vb7 will never come. And many many of them were highly skilled and highly intelligent and quite rich and capable of inter-networking. And all wanted vb7 vb8 etc to come. All wanted vb6 to become more and more functional , as functional as c++.
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If they were to spare even 1% of their incomes, then that would be sufficient to hire 4000 highly skilled programmers who could make vb7 as capable as C++ or C# , and as easy as vb6 and with EnC. They could have made vb7 for Linux and vb7 for Android and vb7 for apple, along with vb7 for windows.
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But they could not make it happen
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So even highly educated , highly trainned , and quite rich programmers proved to be incapable compared to what 400 msft programmers.
Even In a field, which needs near zero capital except salaries and no govt barriers, the collective was far far less capable than small cohesive guided group.
So imo inability to form collective and take collective action is quite serious peoblem.