Microsoft Took Less Traveled Road to Enterprise Tools
Darryl Taft has a new article up on eWeek, Microsoft Took Less Traveled Road to Enterprise Tools, which examines the path Microsoft took to building enterprise tools, which provided us with one of our greatest differentiators – strong integration.
Rick LaPlante, general manager of VSTS (Visual Studio Team System), said Microsoft "meandered down this path" to the ALM (application lifecycle management) space.
"We said let's do some modeling tools. Then we said let's go buy a big company that shall be nameless. Well, that turned out to be a bad idea. Then we said let's go do our own thing because our value proposition is integration."
There’s a quote in the article from Marcel de Vries that makes a decent argument for Team System over a patchwork collection of tools to accomplish the same tasks, which require extra care & feeding to work. In addition, these stiched together “Franken-systems” can vary considerably within the same organization, and often rely upon unique tribal knowledge to maintain.
"This enabled us to be more innovative in the configuration, setup and tuning of our software factory and not needing to worry about commodity tools that help us build and execute unit tests or run a daily build."
842