I have been an MSDN subscriber for more than a decade and you can count me as someone who is more than a bit annoyed.

One of the perks of being a sub is the fact we get bits within days of RTM, the purpose being lead time for code updates and new releases, but the majority of subscribers are geeks who just want the new thing now.

The irony of the Ballmer retirement happening recently brought back youtube clips of the 'Developers, Developers, Devlopers' chant. It is easy to forget that working with developers in a first class way, was one of the many ways that Microsoft won such incredible share over time.

I used to explain it to friends and colleagues this way, when they would see the enormous binder of MSDN DVDs at my office. I would tell them that Microsoft would rather give me copies of everything for free than sell 100 copies at Staples. Not because I am special, but because they know if they win my allegiance then I will build software that requires windows. The cycle continues and by simply being nice to developers, they generate huge numbers of corporate IT customers.

For the longest time I felt this was true...but then it changed.

I cannot put my finger on an exact date, but it was after .NET came out. There were quite a few VB people upset by .NET but by and large it was broadly accepted as good and the community grew. It was probably around the WPF/Silverlight days that things started going sideways. The market was starting to fracture as mobile was gaining traction, ASP.NET was stagnating and something was not right.

Over the next several years there were so many platform misfires and misadventures it was hard to know where to spend your time. The dev evangelism team did not make the macro transition to a more web centric community as well as they should (people used the web 13 years ago but so much dev learning still happened in user groups and at small conferences) and when there was competition for mindshare from Apple and Google in the mobile space – Microsoft was on the sideline. Two huge companies waving promissory notes of riches if we would just come build apps with them and Redmond still could not figure out if we should be using Silverlight or HTML5.

Which brings us back to today, there are still so many mixed signals. Windows Phone has some great hardware but their iteration pace is lacking and while I love my Lumia 1020, my love is really for the camera, not the OS which still seems to be missing too many things (and no, I am not talking about apps). Windows Azure has vastly improved but they still don’t compete with Amazon on price, SQL Server has gotten better and better over time and no one doubts it to be VLDB capable but while they focused on BI and esoteric elements of the engine – the NoSQL world sprouted up with the only response from Redmond being effectively– ‘those document databases are not all that great.’

So is not giving us access to the Win 8.1 RTM really that big of a deal? No, but taker in the greater context it is just one more in a series of insults to what was once, your most valuable customers.

You don’t win the enterprise and then force your will upon developers, you win developers and let them force their will on the enterprise.

They forgot that.