Eclipse ahead of Visual Studio?
Sorry for the use of a question mark in a title, I took a page from Jon Stewart's marketing handbook.
But the question is a fair one. Microsoft claims to have three million Visual Studio developers. IDC says there are over two-and-a-quarter million Eclispe developers. That's not a big gap, especially when we're tracking over half a million downloads a month of the Eclipse SDK production releases.
Tim O'Reilly comments on Preston Gralla's question - "Why has Microsoft Abaondoned the Power User?" (apparently the O'Reilly guys also watch Jon Stewart) -- and we're hearing the same sort of sentiments coming from developers -- as tools become "slick" they risk loosing extensibility.
Eclipse projects are often labeled as not having a great "out of box experience" and as not being "slick" -- but are constantly lauded for customizability and appeal to power user features. We have not abandoned the power user and "Design for Extensibility" as a priority keeps Eclipse on that track.
- Don
But the question is a fair one. Microsoft claims to have three million Visual Studio developers. IDC says there are over two-and-a-quarter million Eclispe developers. That's not a big gap, especially when we're tracking over half a million downloads a month of the Eclipse SDK production releases.
Tim O'Reilly comments on Preston Gralla's question - "Why has Microsoft Abaondoned the Power User?" (apparently the O'Reilly guys also watch Jon Stewart) -- and we're hearing the same sort of sentiments coming from developers -- as tools become "slick" they risk loosing extensibility.
Eclipse projects are often labeled as not having a great "out of box experience" and as not being "slick" -- but are constantly lauded for customizability and appeal to power user features. We have not abandoned the power user and "Design for Extensibility" as a priority keeps Eclipse on that track.
- Don
posted by Donald Smith @ 11:48 AM
2 Comments:
At 1:20 PM,
redsolo said…
I've both used Visual Studio 2005 and Eclipse for C# and Java, and I have to say that Eclipse is an IDE for a developer where VS is an IDE for a prototyper. It is some what simpler to do prototypes in VS, but then when you go beyond DnD controls onto a form, I would say that Eclipse wins heads down.
It feels like Eclipse is made for developers by developers, and I love it. Keep up the good work :)
At 3:04 PM,
Diego Parrilla said…
redsolo, that's exactly how I feel about both IDEs.
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