Microsoft has said that this Express line is not going to be a real moneymaker for the company. So why do it?
Traditionally, we have been focused on targeting the professional developers -- the people who are proficient in programming. If you look at the beginning programmer or the hobbyist -- people who aren't necessarily programmers by profession but want to write a program or use something to help them in whatever they are doing -- the cost of entry is too high, both in terms of the programming model and the tools that go with it.
About a year or two ago, we had this notion of making it easier to develop Web sites. And we came out with a downloadable set of tools and programs called the Web Matrix. That was really the genesis of our idea for Express, because the amount of customer response and excitement and momentum that we saw for that was just huge. That experiment blew our minds.
We realised that there is a huge developer space out there. I call them developers, but they aren't necessarily what I would call the professional developers. They are more like the hobbyists, the beginning programmers.
Would a systems administrator or business analyst possibly want to try out these Express tools?
Here is a way I think about it: The Express tools are a way to get started. They're for anybody in the world -- it could be a student, it could be a 14-year-old kid who wants to get into programming, it could be a different kind of a professional who wants to get the fundamentals of programming. We think that there is at least an 18 million developer base of what we call the enthusiast, hobbyist, academic developer for whom we want to make it super-easy to get started.
We hear about students learning to program for LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP). How much has the rise of open-source tools affected your decision to introduce Express?
I wouldn't necessarily say that was behind the thinking of Express. The thing that I personally like about open source is the feeling of transparency that we have with customers.
Historically, we haven't been very transparent with our development process. So if you look at the development life cycle of Whidbey (the code name for Visual Studio 2005) we have come out with what we call community technology previews. To me, that is a huge step forward in terms of how we want to engage with our customers and really build a feedback loop with them.
When I have an early build of the products, I want to be able to share it with my customers and really treat my community of customers as an extension to my development team through the life cycle of the product.
