Eclipse Ecosystem

A blog devoted to promoting the Eclipse ecosystem

Thursday, October 19, 2006

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

2 Comments:

  • At 1:20 PM, Blogger 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, Blogger Diego Parrilla said…

    redsolo, that's exactly how I feel about both IDEs.

     

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