by Al Porotesano

I apologize if I’m late in the game, but I blame adulting and microsoft for not getting into pokemon go since the inception.

I mean i’ve played Pokemon Red with my game boy color in my sophmore year in college just to get my mind off the lectures and college stuff. I’d level up in pokemon to reach the SS Anne when i’m not laboriously number crunching quantitative analytics for my Economics courses. If I wasn’t playing Pokemon Red, I’d be drawing doodles as an aspiring artist.

I just started playing Pokemon Go at the San Diego Comic Con with my friends and it was the best time to start playing the game. I was told two things: Start off with Pikachu and head to San Diego.

Before PokemonGo, I was a dedicated Windows Phone user ignoring all android and iPhones at my peril. I was microsoft’s mobile tool for almost a decade. I loved the idea of having MS office on my phone from Windows mobile 5 to Windows Phone 8. It was the killer app for Microsoft’s Windows Phone and at one point, a lure, maybe a way to force android and iphone users to switch to Windows Phones. I even bought a Windows Surface to complete the ecosystem and 2012 was the year Microsoft would strike back at Apple and Google.

Sadly, The market forces was too powerful to force that idea to the masses and Microsoft caved in releasing MS Office to the iPhone and Android in 2014.

But the worst happened to me at the Redondo Beach Pier. Days after Pokemon Go’s launch some little kid laughed at me for using a windows phone. I could give him the stink eye and scream “you little shit!”, but that was overshadowed with my epiphany about windows phones - It’s a dying product.

I stuck with my Nokia Lumia 920 & 520 for a long time, I’d be left out of all the things people do. I asked my friend if she knew of anyone who sold android phones for cheap. She lent me her Motorola android. I felt free. It was glorious. Who knew there was so many apps to play with? Leaving the Windows Phone world was like escaping a North Korean prison camp and waking up under the loud airplanes on a rocky beach at Incheon, South Korea. I had no intention of coming back as I welcome the deafening jet planes to my open arms.

There was no point in testing and developing my friend’s dating app on a Windows Phone at this point. If most of my desktops are run on linux flavors and my new phone is an android, what’s the motivation to go back to a windows environment. Most web app developers I meet are running all kinds of javascript flavors with machine learning gimmicks and all kinds of web buzzwords to swoon a Venture Capitalist. Windows Market Share be damned, these kids want flashy candy and not that buggy adobe kind. Those are the users who will make or break the trends.

The days of running anything on a .net platform is on life support. The only companies I know using .net are financial and health care companies. They don’t have much of a choice to leave the .net platform if they have to rely on legacy ASP and ASP.net applications because their old enterprise apps were based on compliance laws. If it wasn’t for the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the .net platform would be cut off life support and left for dead. Maybe the core .NET platform will rise from the dead by going Open Source or maybe it’s fading away to the abyss as a shell of it’s former self. It’s not really exciting to go back to cold fusion and c# if javascript and python are winning creative millenials with their fancy visualized demos at every meetup per week.

It’s been fun Microsoft. I owe a great part of my career to you working with several microsoft shops and startups for 15 years. I’ve served the thousands of Financial Advisors and Accountants with all kinds of templates, apps, and archived products. Whether it be used for marketing or retaining documents in an Audit, it was fun. It was fun showing off my windows phone 4 years ago before you killed it with boredom.

Will I come back to the .net platform? Only if it makes sense.

So long and thanks for all the green valley backgrounds.

  • Al Porotesano