Monthly Archives: February 2017

The Future of Visual Basic

I have been critical of Microsoft’s strategy with Visual Basic for awhile now – it has been treated as a second class .net language, slowly falling behind C# as far as new features and functionality.  The official word was it would be separate but equal, but reading between the lines I felt it was on its way out.

Recently, Microsoft came out with a blog post clarifying the future of Visual Basic.

It appears Microsoft is going to position Visual Basic as a simpler, more straight forward .net language with the focus on new developers.  I think this is a great move.  C# is a great language, but with all the different features and constructs, it can be overwhelming for even seasoned developers.  We definitely need a language that is the gateway to c#, and  I agree that it makes sense to keep the feature set limited so new developers can understand the basics of .Net.  The world doesnt need two languages that do the same thing (which is how VB and C# have been competing).

An interesting quote from the article:

An interesting trend we see in Visual Studio is that VB has twice the share of new developers as it does of all developers. This suggests that VB continues to play a role as a good, approachable entry language for people new to the platform and even to development.

I have always enjoyed VB, and I also enjoy C#.  Because I jump back and forth between legacy apps (VB) and new development (C#), I don’t have a problem switching between the two.  So new developers that start in VB, once they understand .net and want more power, can start to switch to C#.  But if the developers are just running simple programs, or building forms over data, they will do fine in VB and can stay in VB.  Any C# developer that says they can’t code in VB is lying.. (and I have heard a few developers claim this..)  And its not terribly difficult to migrate VB.Net to C# if an application grows.

So kudos to Microsoft for defining this strategy.  I hope it works out for Microsoft, and they once again are able to capture the hearts and minds of developers.

Click on the link below to read the full blog post.

The .NET Language Strategy


The Twitter Conundrum

I am a fan of Twitter the product – I think it provides a unique niche for news and events in a time where more people are getting engaged in social networks.  However, this week I finally threw in the towel and closed out my position just barely breaking even.

Why? I am reminded of a quote I heard from Jordan Ritter on Triangulation.  To paraphrase, ‘the most important thing for an organization is a good team. A great team can be successful with an average product, but a bad  team will screw up the next Facebook every time’.

That’s how I feel about Twitter – great product, but the current team is not making the moves to make it work.   I had hoped when wunderkind Jack Dorsey returned as CEO, he would provide the leadership necessary to make the team move the product forward.  After a year and a half, I am seeing few signs of improvements.  And if you looked at the stock based compensation numbers for its employees, it looks closer like a pre-bubble bust company of the early 2000’s.  Factor in that earlier in the year several companies looked into buying Twitter, and all walked away after due diligence.

Hopefully someone will buy out the company and build a great product and make product enhancements to better monetize the platform and make it easier for new users to get engaged with.  I still think this platform has potential to be great, but I am on the sidelines until I see signs of a great team in place.

Small business technology thoughts for the coming year

As we start a new year, I felt it was time to hold a mythical business meeting with the mythical marketing department here at Vertical Financial Systems (VFS).  A lot has changed in technology since VFS was founded, and I got to thinking about what the future holds for small business technology.

So I asked myself the marketing department – where will the small business spending on technology services go in the next few years?  Here are some thoughts that came out of that ‘meeting’:

Spending on business websites may be almost nothing going forward.  For a few dollars a month, anybody can spin up a website in WordPress at GoDaddy or SquareSpace or any number of providers, using pre-defined templates and designs.  No hiring designers, coders, system admins, nothing.  Just hire an English major (or better yet an intern) to write up your pages and you are in business.  In the 2000’s this was a pretty decent business for a large number of people, but I can’t see why most businesses would spend a lot of money on that anymore.

The rise of smartphones has made that platform the application platform of choice.  Unfortunately, it is still painfully expensive (as compared to web development) to build out an application.  Plus, you have to write it essentially twice – once for Android, once for IOS (though few people are writing for Microsoft anymore).  Software is slowly coming out to make this development easier, but I think we are still a few years away from getting the costs significantly down.  The pain isn’t only in your client’s pocketbook – trying to be an expert on both platforms is no fun either.

But I do think the phone is the future application development platform.  Websites may evolve to be just brochure sites – provide info about your company and service, but not heavy functionality for existing customers.  Stuff like checking order status and billing may still live on the web for light customer service, but the heavy application development should be on the mobile device where native access to GPS, email, camera, etc  is available.  Interestingly, in a previous post I mentioned I got a Wink Hub, and the only way to control that is via a smartphone app – there is no website application or login where it can be managed.  Perhaps the future is just starting to arrive.

Content creation should still be a big market – but not static website content, custom, relevant content pushed to your customer.   Information pertinent to your customer should be selectively pushed to their inbox or smartphone – special offers, account notifications and the like.  So getting content created uniquely for each customer, based on what you know about the customer, seems like the big technology winner.  In order to engage customers, the fusion of marketing and technology will need to be stronger than ever before.  Thinking about this reminds me of the launch of Internet Explorer 4 (circa 1997) – where the big talking point was push technology where you could have web pages pushed to your PC.  The vision was fatally flawed, as web pages were just beginning to be dynamic, and frankly nobody really wanted all that content stored on their PC.  Content deliver has to be smart and targeted.

So to summarize, Web applications are not the big growth industry moving forward, and smartphone application development is still too expensive for many small businesses.  So while we are in this technological transition, it probably is a good time to build up on push technologies, and work to make your existing applications smarter about what your customer or lead is interested in, and  push relevant content to your customers.  This investment will payoff regardless of what platforms emerge in the future.

Lots to think about in the coming year.   Regardless of what new technologies or trends emerge, as always there will be a lot of new things to learn and decisions to be made.