They're free, it'd be a bit difficult to accuse MS of taking over a market
when one doesn't exist. They don't seem to give a damn about, say,
integrating Office 2003 style toolbars, and there are plenty of those out in
the marketplace, free and otherwise. Anyway I was thinking more about MS
working with those projects to help them interoperate better, and then
shipping those projects with VS. I don't think you can be accused of
undermining a product when you ship it with your flagship tool.

Ummm, yeah, but, the Build Tools market is already hit by MSBuild, the
Source Control by SourceSafe, leaving only Testing, Profiling and
RAD/Modelling/Management. All I was asking for was to include Testing and
Profiling tools. Oh yeah, and to give us a decent SourceControl tool to
replace that dog that is VSS.

But this is entirely my point! I don't WANT all that extra stuff. All I
wanted is what's been on the top of every developers wish list since the
days of VB4, a decent source control with a bit of integration to a decent
issue tracker and maybe some assistance on the testing and profiling front.
The fact that there are so many free products out there that do these things
indicates that the market for these tools has become commoditised. The
reason? They're what *every* developer *needs*, not wants. Since they are
commodities.

As for VSTS, it is indeed available at a lower price than its competitors.
Such a situation does not make it cheap. The Enterprise SDLC market has been
overheating for years now, with insane pricing for little comparative
benefit. MS is just adding another (slightly cheaper) product to that pile.
Considering their reputation for not getting products polished until v3, I
think that they'll have a tough sell.

Yes, but they don't work together nicely.

Actually it does. The vast majority of developers out there do not work for
large enterprises, but they do write hundreds of applications and tools that
are part of what makes Windows appealing to the public at large. However,
said public is getting fed up with perceived Microsoft application
unreliability and lack of security. A fair portion of this perception comes
from buggy, badly designed, and poorly tested applications supplied by the
hordes of developers out there. Microsoft has always recognised the
developer market as a strategic one for the rest of the company, and
accepted therefore that it's developer tools areas can be loss leaders.
Until now. You can read my post
http://codingsanity.blogspot.com/2005/03/is-microsoft-losing-plot.html on
this very topic.

And this is exactly the high-handed attitude I was talking about. "If a
developer has need for less features than VSTS". What makes a developer
require less features? Well, the fact that they're not an Enterprise
developer. Nothing to do with their skill, or their role in development, or
with the difficulty of projects they're working on, merely with the size of
the customer.

Why not? Biztalk is, and it costs WAY more than VSTS. Admittedly, it is only
available for development and VSTS is a development tool, but as I've
pointed out in this and previous posts, providing *some* portions of VSTS to
everyone will assist developers in creating higher-quality products for
strategic Microsoft products like Biztalk, Windows, SQL Server, and Office.
Alternatively, providing a cheap (possibly scaled down) VSTS server and 5
CALs for small development teams *that would never have been able to buy
VSTS anyway*, and simply making the additional CALs expensive would not only
assist the smaller teams and allow them to compete head-on with Enterprises,
but would also keep VSTS as a major revenue stream. Imagine that in 2 years
I'm hired to head up a large Enterprise team. Well, I certainly wouldn't
recommend VSTS for such a scenario, since I've never used it, instead I'd
put in place the OSS SDLC tools that I've been using up till that point. If
said team had a large amount of time to evaluate products like VSTS, well
then I might push it, but how often does that happen in practise?

Now consider that if you're not using VSTS, Universal subscription adds no
new development tools. Add to that the fact that if you have Professional
you no longer have access to the server systems other than SQL Developer.
Once again, if I don't use Biztalk or Sharepoint I'm going to have
difficulty in pushing them as solutions. Basically, VSTS has hijacked MS's
entire long-term strategic vision for a dubious short-term commercial gain.
Not the kind of forward thinking I expect from MS.

So, what they've done is ensure that the people who actually adore MS
products enough to buy their own subscriptions to MSDN do not have access to
a product that such people would invariable push at their customers. As I
said in my previous post, the poor way this whole saga has been communicated
has led to a poisoning of attitudes towards MS from consultants and small
ISVs, and for what? To ensure that MS don't lose out on a VSTS revenue
stream they would never have anyway.

For me, I don't really care about VSTS. I work (fairly) happily with the
tools that already exist, and I haven't seen anything so compelling in VSTS
that I'm completely distraught at not having access to it. I am concerned
about a couple of things though:
- Microsoft have finally listened to what their dev community has been
screaming for for almost a decade now, and provided it only to their larger
customers.
- Microsoft have decided to put the server development licenses out of
normal developers and small ISV's reach.
- They've decided to completely skew the playing field in favour of the
Enterprise customers.
- They've decided to put short-term profits before long-term strategy.
- They've communicated this is an arrogant and dismissive way.

Those are what I'm worried about, not this whole VSTS brouhaha, that's small
fry. I'm worried that the above might become a trend.