Steve Ballmer: Developers

our commitment to enabling developers to build on our platform I think a lot of developers would question whether or not you guys even have such a commitment at all. Twitter does NOT have a good history in this regard. If anything, you guys need to bend over backwards, sideways, upside down, and any other way you can think of, to treat developers well and woo them. I mean, somebody needs to go full Ballmer and start screaming "Developers, developers, developers!!!". [1] Seriously, you guys are so behind the curve in terms of developer perception that "good enough" isn't even close to good enough. You should probably be reaching out to developers, offering to fly them to Twitter HQ, and treating them to steak and lobster, etc. And that's just to get back in the good graces of the development community. Developers do not compete with Twitter, developers make the Twitter ecosystem larger and stronger and better. Twitter needs to embrace that mindset and go all in on becoming a desirable platform to develop for. As for myself, our app offers limited Twitter integration, but we're damn sure not going to spend a lot of time and energy on Twitter given the history and what-not. My advice? Kill Gnip, make it trivially easy to access the firehose, commit to adhering to open standards[2][3][4][5] across the board, and put developers front and center. If you want to charge for firehose access, fine, but kill any notion of some complicated application / approval process. Make it as simpl

There will be room for a good number of niche frameworks, some of which could be highly profitable for their creators/maintainers. I don't disagree with that :-) My point was -- and still is -- that the competition to become the dominant framework has already been won, by TensorFlow, because it has captured the hearts and minds of the most developers. Most new AI services are being built atop TensorFlow -- not DL4J, nor Torch, nor Theano, nor Caffe, nor CNTK, nor anything else. Let me finish by sharing a video of Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, in which he emphasizes the importance of attracting developers to a stadium packed with Microsoft employees: [this video]

All in the name of UI cleanliness and simplicity . Like how there's no way to manually trigger the firmware update for the AirPods. You just have to keep them plugged in next to your iPhone and ... wait ... until some magic pixie in Apple's cloud decides it's time to push the update to you. Steve Jobs used to say it over and over again when criticized by angry developers[1] that their main focus will always be users instead of developers and that the latter will just have to suck it up if they want to get a piece of the lucrative Apple user base pie. In comedic contrast, here's a sweaty Steve Balmer shouting "Developers!" for half a minute.[2] Ah, the early 2000's, with Apple and Microsoft battling it out, what a time to be alive. [1] [link] [2] [this video]

Wondering how this affects Apple employees. Back in the day, working for Apple seemed cool. (Pirate flags on building etc). Previously MSFT used to be (maybe they've turned that around?) the most hated tech company (becz of their very aggressive attitudes to competitors especially Netscape). One thing they didn't FU and is represented by the infamous sweaty Balmer video [0] of him shouting "Developers, developers, developers", is pissing of people who build on their platform. Well Apple seems to have topped that with this and other malicious compliance shenanigans in the EU. I can't every imagine developing an iOS/native app on that platform going forward. [0]: [this video]