> start accepting community developed features into their platform
Guthrie has done a great job of making developers on the Windows platform feel included and involved. While Microsoft's product offerings slip, Guthrie continues to grow the community of developers, maybe not in quantity but most certainly in quality. Before Guthrie, an offering like today's announcement never would have seen the light of day.
I'm not too familiar with what Guthrie has done for the .NET community, but Hanselman is a famous proponent of open source and making .NET as fun to code in as ruby and python. His coming to MS has changed the way I look at the .NET stack.
And let's not forget Phil Haack (http://haacked.com), who is now working at GitHub. He used to be the program manager at Microsoft for ASP.NET MVC, the first part of the ASP.NET framework to be released under an open source license.
Yeah ScottH has done a great job. ScottG hired him, plus a bunch of other community advocates over the past few years. Some have since moved on, but MS really did a great job of listening to devs who build on MS platforms.
Microsoft product offerings slip how? What I see is outstanding products being delivered such as Windows Azure, Windows Server 8, SQL Server 2012, System Center 2012.
Guthrie has done a great job of making developers on the Windows platform feel included and involved. While Microsoft's product offerings slip, Guthrie continues to grow the community of developers, maybe not in quantity but most certainly in quality. Before Guthrie, an offering like today's announcement never would have seen the light of day.