02/01/2010 01:14:01 PM EST

With the flood of new technologies and CTP's pouring out of Microsoft, it's not just the tool vendors that are struggling to keep up, it's the developers as well. The biggest problem I've noticed is the sheer confusion of developers as to which technology they should use. Their confusion is then passed on to component vendors as feature requests. Once you cut through the background noise of the bleeding edge developers though, things quiet down considerably. Funny that the bleeding edge developers are the smallest segment of the market, and yet make the most amount of noise - they're the vocal bloggers, and have the potential to directly affect a company's image. And by the way - "A new emphasis on productivity" should just be called - "hedging your bets". Competition in the component market just keeps heating up, and everyone is looking for an additional revenue stream. Just think of how much money was poured into Silverlight, where the components really only have a shelf life of about 6 months at a time before Microsoft releases the next major version.. making your code obsolete. I'm glad to see Silverlight evolving so quickly, but the pace of change has a direct and negative impact on profits for component vendors. I'm personally surprised that we didn't see more component vendors go under during the past year, though we did see some reaching out for VC funding, and saw many others scaling back operations. The days of just being a "component vendor" are over in my opinion. If the company doesn't have a bigger picture plan, they're simply not going to survive in this new market.

United StatesTony