I would most definitely like to also know why? There are many developers that work using Microsoft technology, everyone organisation does not build their services or products on open source.
I shouldn't feed a troll but, look at job descriptions from banks/insurance companies/science/education/betting/automative/health based companies. Do you see a simple word being related to rails?
ps: I know of some that do, most don't, and they pay a LOT more than all the 'cool' companies.
> ps: I know of some that do, most don't, and they pay a LOT more than all the 'cool' companies.
That's fine if you are working for the money. Personally, I prefer the "cool" companies, even if they pay less. For some people, wearing a tie and spending 40 years working for a big bank or large insurance company and then retiring is an option and I respect them. It's not for everyone, however.
What is so 'cool' about those companies though? Not trolling.
Google -> Adsense are their main profit and from where the real top dogs go, the rest work in projects that most of the time go to the crapper. A lot of their big name projects are based on C++.
Facebook -> No idea, but they were using PHP and C++ right? (sorry, I don't follow much of FB engineering)
While I don't want to piss on Rails or Django or whatever, I've hardly seen a lot of companies that do use them to be working on really cool projects (and not another CRUD app for social horse riders to exchange organic cucumbers (hyperbole)). A lot of the 'cool' stuff that is happening in our world seems to be coming from more fringe languages (R, Julia, Haskell, Scala, F#) or old mainstream (C, C++, C#, Java) than the Ruby/NodeJS camp. If we go mobile, then we are even talking have to acknowledge both mainstream languages to develop are Java and a superset dialect of C - Objective C.
So honestly, if you take the beer and ping pong tables out of the equation, what are the advantages of these self-entitled cool companies over the others? (Btw, most big companies have pool tables, table tennis, gyms, beer, wine, XBoxes etc as much or more than the startups, they just don't post pictures of them on their blogs).
I agree they tend to be hidden behind the scenes companies. But those companies can be nice companies to work for(Sane work hours, good benefits, not expected to work overtime etc).
That's no longer completely true. While the core continues to run on Windows, SQL Server and .NET, pretty much everything around it is Linux-based and without that additions, the system would be unable to maintain its current performance.
Microsoft is still the one leading .NET, defining what .NET is and what technologies it includes (and which it doesn't). While Mono is a nice subset that runs on non-Microsoft OSs, .NET is pretty much a Microsoft-centric technology.
You don't need to go further than the recent announcements and the excitement they generated among .NET users to see how dependent on Microsoft they are. It's Microsoft's show to run.
Technically, Windows is no longer a windows technology, since Wine exists, but still it's mostly windows. Can you even run Visual Studio on another platform?
Visual Studio is still pretty dependent on Win32 / x86 under the hood - a lot of the UI was ported to WPF and more of the tooling, including the compiler, is being ported to C#.
So no, I think VS for Mac / Linux is still a ways off. They're moving in that direction though - wouldn't be surprised if they bought Xamarin in order to make it happen.