| A lot of us are indeed skeptical. MS has a history of doing focused marketing. The ongoing BUILD conference is currently marketing Win8/WinRT. A past push that sticks out to me most is the "3 pillars of Longhorn (Vista)". The vast majority of "the 3 pillars (WPF/WCF/WinFS/InfoCard)" are now useless. We should all remember Vista/Longhorn as something that had an equal amount of marketing, but failed horribly. Anyone remember the Windows Vista UI Guidelines? A search box and back button in every application? The sidebar? Have a graphic designer design your application's UI in XAML (oops, they're still trying to push that one)? Maybe Windows 8's new stuff won't fail, but we can't tell at this point. This is also the same thing I say about Windows Phone, Azure and even something as heavily supported as the Entity Framework. You just never know when funding will be cut or if the product will die. For me, with all this in mind, I do the bare minimum just-in-time learning to keep up with the day job, especially as it comes to frameworks and new product pushes. Fundamentals such as OO concepts or any kind of universal, timeless concepts, I'll study. But I won't bother with buying the newest WinRT book when it comes out because hey, why bother. Even if I do study up on one of these topics, I'll do it knowing that the platform may die at any moment. I'm sure WebOS folk or niche phone developers (Symbian OS?) know the feeling. The vast majority of .NET developers effectively do the same regarding learning Microsoft frameworks, only they're more quiet or less honest about how little proactive studying they do, and usually won't own up to the truth. All .NET developers are 'behind the curve', at least as the curve is re-defined every new marketing push. |