I attended the .NET "Software Legends" thingy in my area last night (Portland, OR). Chris Sells ("I love curly braces") and David Chappell ("I love my pants") were the "legends" present (aren't legends usually dead?).

Anyway, it was an entertaining evening. I didn't realize it was simply going to be a Q&A session, and so didn't come prepared. I think this must have been the case for a number of other people as well, since there was a never-ending barrage of questions that weren't really important anywhere (in my opinion). Questions such as "I have a four billion line VB project, and the VB --> VB.NET conversion isn't going very well - Why is that?" and "I want to be able to go BEEP in C# - Right now, I can only go BEEP in VB.NET. How do I go BEEP in C#?" It was a little bit of a waste, as those questions could have been very quickly and easily answered in the docs/newsgroups/whatever.

Speaking of things being a little bit of a waste, I felt that David Chappell's talents were being wasted on the wrong crowd. He strikes me as being the evangelical type (right down to his "I was BURNED by the fires of COM, but have been CONVERTED, my friends" type comment). The reason it seemed like a waste to me is that he was already in a room of converts. There wasn't much converting to be done in there. There were the usual "I'm going to say something bad about the speaker's topic just to show how smart I am" types, but they weren't that numerous.

This all got me thinking about MS marketing. .NET is a great thing - It's being embraced by developers of every kind, even winning over bits of the OSS crowd, which is probably a lot harder than it sounds (I've never had to do it, so wouldn't know). Why, then, is it not winning over management the way it should? The CIO of my main client's company, who is perfectly intelligent and insightful, doesn't like .NET. He doesn't like it because he doesn't know what it is. He doesn't know what it is because there isn't a focused and easy way to find out.

It would be so easy. Why isn't there an extremely accessible section on one of the microsoft.com sites devoted to educating the decision makers on .NET? You might tell me that there already is one - If this is so, then why aren't the decision makers finding it? It isn't currently easy, and before you tell me that it is, let me remind you of something: "Easy" for a developer and "easy" for a manager are often completely different things. I can't even recall the number of times I've seen messages like this in various developer newsgroups: "Well, I couldn't find a printer cable, so I hooked an old vacuum hose up to the printer, attached the other end to my PC's exhaust fan, and whipped up some code that allows me to control the speed of the fan, thereby making it possible to send PS commands to the printer via fluctuations in air pressure. It was really pretty easy..." If you're a nerd, then you've seen (or written) these, too, so don't talk to me about easy. Information on .NET for the managerial types needs to be on a three-story neon billboard. That would be easy to see.

This formed the basis of the only question I asked last night. To make a long story short (ha! I have no intention of doing that - it's just another way to start a sentence), I pointed out that companies like Oscar Meyer have long known the benefit of getting out there and making people feel that their product is safe: that it's safe to eat Oscar Meyer hot dogs. When you're looking at that Oscar Meyer wiener truck, you're not thinking "20% rat fur." You're thinking "Oscar Meyer wieners are some pretty good wieners!" The actual question, then, was this: "Where is the .NET wiener truck?" Not for the developers, but for the higher-ups.

As I've already mentioned, the developers are excited. We're going to user group meetings, showing up for these Software Legends things, and so on. We don't need to be convinced - we've seen the .NET wiener truck for developers, and it was a beautiful thing. Who does need to be convinced are the people who can make .NET jobs appear.

I know - There'll be the usual argument of "Just give it time - they aren't moving to .NET because it's a version 1.x product, and transitioning isn't free." This attitude is all fine and well, but when we're talking about new development, it's a horrible way to think. What's to stop company X from simply doing their next project in Java? They're sick of VB (and worried about its becoming and antique), it takes too long to do anything with C++, and they want to move on to a next-generation platform. Their two real choices right now are .NET and Java. One of them has quite a bit more momentum than the other. The stance of sitting around and waiting for "product maturity" to help a company decide between the two is just too passive (to get it out of the way: I like Java, but I love .NET - that's why this is important to me).

I don't see what's wrong with taking a more active approach and educating the decision-makers in a more effective manner. In fact, I think it's nearly, but not quite, shameful that it hasn't happened. MS is a company with so many resources that there just isn't any excuse for the .NET marketing disaster. The CIO of company X should know by now what it is. If there were a nice little informational portal out there, then it would make a difference. If it were easy to get to, then it could make a difference. If all the crap jargon could be tossed aside, then it would be effective. .NET isn't a complicated thing - MS marketing just makes it so.

Basically, I wish that MS would put out information on their products that is as good as the products themselves. I'm company/platform agnostic: The best software wins. And .NET, for the moment, as far as I'm concerned, is it. If a few more higher-ups could be convinced of this, then we might actually begin seeing .NET jobs appear, which is what this spiel is really about.

Convince the big guys that it's OK to move to .NET so that we can all get the bloody-stinking jobs we want.