Dare Obasanjo has a well thought out post today entitled "The 3 Laws of Platform Adoption: Why Developers Choose Platforms and What it Means to You"  It in he says...

When a developer adopts a platform, there is a value exchange between the developer and the software vendor. The more value that is provided to developers by the platform vendor, the more developers are attracted to the platform. Although this seems self evident, where providers of platforms go astray is that they often don't understand the value developers actually want out of software platforms and instead operate from an if we build it they will come mentality.

He then goes on to lay out some very rational reasons why developers would choose one platform over the other.  Issues like speed of development, total cost of implementation, and ease of distribution are addressed.  Every developer should use this kind of criteria to chose their platform.

But they simply don't...

At this point I'm going to admit that this post is more of a rant than anything else.  But I think it is an important rant so I'm going to put it out there.  I'm a .Net developer and I'm also the person who chose to use .Net and C# as the default environments for the agency I work for. 

Since doing so I've received nothing but grief from most of my "techie" friends.

Just this last weekend I had an argument with a friend of mine who does a similar job over why I'm not seriously looking at moving to Ruby (and in particular Ruby on Rails).  I'm sitting there trying to explain to him that the hoops I'd have to jump through just to interact with Active Directory were ridiculous in comparison to the few lines of code it takes in C# but he just wouldn't listen. 

He swore by Ruby's ability to rapidly develop applications but after sitting there with him for hours I didn't see one thing that impressive.  At least, no more impressive than what C# can do with an assist from Subsonic. 

The saddest part of all is that his arguments are a lot saner than a few years ago when he was trying to get me onto Php. 

Again, this is more "rant" than I am comfortable with but I post it because it's a serious issue.  Environment has become the new holy war and no one seems to be acting all that rational about it.   It's the "Religion of Open" and no one seems to care what works well anymore. 

It's all very frustrating and I only hope that maybe a small number of developers might read Mr. Obasanjo's post and actually consider using the criteria he lays out.  They'd almost certainly be better off if they did.

While vacationing I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine.  Basically he praised me for "turning around" on Robert Scoble and "realizing he's an idiot."  I didn't know I'd "turned around" on anyone so I asked him what he meant.  He then pointed me to a few critical things I'd written about Scoble in the last few weeks.

So for the record, I don't "hate" Scoble.  In fact, I still admire a lot of what he has done.  I think he can be an idiot...a huge idiot...a great deal of the time.  But that's just who he is.  If the entire blogosphere were like me it wouldn't be very interesting.

Which brings me to the controversy of the weekend where Scoble has been receiving a lot of hate for saying the startups presenting at the Demo conference have web sites that "suck" in his opinion.  An opinion that has garnered him several attacks.

To those attackers I'd point out that Scoble represents how a lot of people think.  You can think all those people are idiots but that doesn't change the fact that they're out there and that they have an opinion. 

So when Scoble says these sites "suck" he's representing what a lot of people are going to think about them.  Knowing that is valuable.  Regardless of whether you agree with him.

Bottom Line: You can berate people into shutting up but that isn't going to change the way they think and knowing what they are thinking is of some value. 

I have to ask all those attacking him, what exactly do you think you're accomplishing?  He's not going to say he's wrong because its personal opinion.  It isn't like there's a conclusive way to prove that a site doesn't suck and knowing what he thinks allows the startups to take that criticism into account.

As far as the Startups themselves are concerned, I feel for them.  It hurts to be told your hard work "sucked" in someone's eyes.  But I consider the value of hearing that person's opinion and knowing people like that are thinking it far out weighs the pain of hearing it. 

The most important rule a startup needs to learn is to take criticism and use it.