There are two ways convince a company to switch to a new programming language. The old fashioned way is to send out salesperson. They get in touch with the CEO show them a few Power-Point slides, throw some buzzwords at them and voilà, Mr. Manager will introduce that new technology.
Well, he will try to introduce that new technology. In most of the cases it won’t work. Because usually the CEO looks at other things when deciding for a programming language than the development team. The dev-team won’t accept the new technology. This will slow down development and thus reduce productivity.
Microsoft chose a different way, to convince tilllate to switch to ASP and Silverlight. They sent out their "Evangelists". Young, cool guys in T-Shirt, probably former developer, using a Macbook (running Vista) and using developer-speak. Instead of Power Point slides they are developing. Sascha, the ASP guy built a small web shop using VS.net using quick drag-n-drop moves. Ronny did a few mouse clicks with Expression blend and Visual Studio to show how easy it is to build a gallery.
Such a presentation is definitely more entertaining than charts showing that TCO of ASP.NET is 30% lower than the LAMP stack. But still, it is a sales presentation. Targeted to the developers. They are here so convince us of their product. I don’t like being convinced. I like to gather my own informations to take decisions.
Did they convince us? A 60 minute demo is definitely not enough to make a strategic technology decision. First opinion: No ASP.net. Further evaluation of Silverlight (from a developer’s standpoint, it’s far better structured than the Adobe suite for RIA, and a steeper learning curve than Javascript).
