democratize ?

Posted Tue, Feb 5 2008 11:21 by bill

In what seems to be the latest buzz word at Microsoft, seems everything is being democratised.  I first noticed the term when Eric Meijer talked about "democratizing  the cloud". Then yesterday I was reading Mary Jo Folley's article on Microsoft's eight long term growth bets. Mary quotes Ballmer as saying they will “democratize virtualization”.  And today I was reading on eweek, Paul Vick talking about bringing sexy back to Visual Basic. Paul said "democratize it further" in relation to VB.

So is all the democatize something we the people get to vote on ?  Or perhaps they mean equal rights ? Or perhaps they mean making it available to the common people ?   Hmmmm... so when Paul said "democratize it further", did he mean give VB equal rights further... doesn't sound right.  Maybe he meant make it available to the more common common people ?  Or maybe he just meant at present it's treated like a 2nd class citizen ? ;)  With all this democracy, it's hard to choose which one to vote for :|

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Comments

# re: democratize ?

Tuesday, February 05, 2008 11:59 AM by Bill Booth

How about giving VB the Yield statement and Anonymous Methods, stop treating it like a "2 class citizen", give it a role in Enterprise application blocks and samples? It seems like MS has no clear vision for VB. They are taking a premier product and trashing it.

# re: democratize ?

Tuesday, February 05, 2008 10:50 PM by bill

Hey Bill,

I was only having a light hearted joke about the way that term is being used a lot lately, but yes you are absolutely right.

# re: democratize ?

Wednesday, February 06, 2008 2:43 PM by Tom

Bringing sexy back to VB?  VB has never been sexy.  At best, VB was the red-haired, freckled girl that was cute when you were kids, but got stone-cold ugly as she got older.  Then VB.NET came along and rejuvinated her.

The sooner people get off the VB6 band-wagon, and onto the .NET band-wagon, the better.  Nostalgia has no place in business.

# re: democratize ?

Wednesday, February 06, 2008 6:37 PM by Bill Booth

Sorry Bill but that eweek article tripped my trigger. I know one thing that is subject to "democratizing", the price of a MSDN subscription. It doesn’t make much difference if you use C# or VB the price is the same.

OK, end of rant. have a good one.