[cs702]

How are they accessing these virtual machines?

Probably with Citrix-compatible thin clients. There are a ton of those out there.

...it is very difficult to find candidates who know anything but Microsoft tools.

That may be true in the US and some parts of Western Europe, such as the UK, but what about the rest of the world? The author of the blog post, John Hempton, is a hedge fund manager who works out of Australia but invests worldwide, and he often thinks and writes in terms of global trends. What is your experience trying to hire candidates outside the US?

[aggronn]

Where else is there? Development in India is more ingrained in Microsoft than anywhere else on earth. Looking for blog posts on silverlight will lead to a poorly written guide by a developer in India. ALL LARGE IT CONSULTING FIRMS have major operations in India, and the majority of them use ASP.NET or WPF. Many are now moving over to open technologies like rails, but only in small US specific shops targeting US customers. I haven't heard or interacted with many Chinese developers who aren't in the US. You mentioned western Europe specifically--from working with some Microsoft platform lately, it seems like most silverlight 'vendors' in Europe of are in eastern Europe (most notably, i think, Telerik).

Australia may be the exception to the rule, though I doubt that a quarter of Australian CS majors go on to work somewhere using python, rails, or PHP. A good number probably go to java, a compiled language, or iOS dev, but if they're going into web, i'd be hard pressed to believe that a majority aren't going into an ASP.NET operation.

Claiming that most developers under 30 don't use microsoft platforms is just pish-posh. They just don't learn it in class, and don't do it in their free time. That doesn't mean their first job isn't going to be a DB analyst on some 10 year old VB.net application.

[irahul]

> Development in India is more ingrained in Microsoft than anywhere else on earth.

Software development in India follows whatever happens to be mainstream. People need jobs, most of the jobs are in software services, the projects service providers get are mostly Java/.net, colleges and people tend to stick with Java/.net to be on the safer side.

> ALL LARGE IT CONSULTING FIRMS have major operations in India, and the majority of them use ASP.NET or WPF.

Most of the consulting firms in India don't get a choice, even for the greenfield projects. Goldman Sachs comes in saying this is what you need to do and use Java, the consultancy plays along.

That said, from what I have seen, Java overshadows .net by a big margin.

[aggronn]

I agree with all of that; I should have been more clear in referencing the web stuff. Perhaps I'm being unintentionally disingenuous about Java's role in all of this.

[huggyface]

Probably with Citrix-compatible thin clients. There are a ton of those out there.

Why would you post this reply when I specifically address that in the next two sentences?

That may be true in the US and some parts of Western Europe, such as the UK, but what about the rest of the world?

India is overwhelmingly Microsoft-centric. Eastern Europe is overwhelmingly Microsoft-centric. Much of Russia is very Microsoft-centric.

But nonetheless your oddly defensive argument (know the author?) sounds suspiciously like the "oh yeah, they're big in Germany" retort. But anyways what I am replying to is what I see as a immediately ridiculous claim that people under 30 don't know Microsoft, when the overwhelming proof says otherwise.

The author of the blog post, John Hempton, is a hedge fund manager who works out of Australia but invests worldwide, and he often thinks and writes in terms of global trends

This is one of the stranger appeals to authority that I've yet read. When I think "technology trends expert" I don't think "hedge fund manager". That someone invests money gives them zero authority on technology trends. I should add to notice that my business is hedge fund technology, so the circle is kind of complete here.

[josephcooney]

I'm from Australia, and (based on the job ads I see - I just did a quick search on job site seek.com.au - "ruby" returned nearly 300 results, "asp.net" returned > 700, and having worked here for 10 years) Microsoft is the dominant development paradigm, so I don't think the condescending notion of the parent "this is a GLOBAL thing you yanks wouldn't understand" works either.