Joel Spolsky on CFUNITED

 
Jul 30, 2005
by Michael and Judith Dinowitz

As some of you may have seen on the CF-Community thread Joel on Software on CFUNITED or on Jared Rypka-Hauer's blog, Joel Spolsky made a comment about his participation at CFUNITED. He actually made a couple of comments, but the one that got people's attention was this one:

"For some reason, a long long time ago, I had agreed to give the keynote speech for CFUNITED, a conference about ColdFusion.

'I never used ColdFusion!' I protested.

'Don't worry. Nobody has. The biggest sponsor of this conference is Microsoft, who have a huge presence trying to get the ColdFusion developers to switch to VB.NET,' the organizers told me." (Joel on Software, Aardvark Midterm Report)

In order to be sure this is what actually happened, we contacted Joel and got a response from him. He said that no one from CFUNITED had told him that nobody really uses ColdFusion, as was implied in his quote, and that he was joking. On the other hand, he did have some pointed comments about the conference and Microsoft's presence there:

"The comment I made on Joel on Software, like so much else that you find there, was of course intended in jest. Certainly nobody from Teratech actually said anything of the sort. But, like all jokes, there is a seed of truth to it: the heavy Microsoft sponsorship and the extensive free VB.Net training materials included in the handouts made it feel like the CFUnited organizers were more than happy to take money from Microsoft to get people to switch away from ColdFusion, something which certainly doesn't seem to serve the long-term health of the ColdFusion community. Microsoft's entire attitude towards the conference was intended to promote the idea that ColdFusion is a legacy technology, something like ADA or COBOL, and their presence at the conference felt like nothing more than a remedial job-training program so that unemployed ColdFusion programmers could 'update' their skills, learning exciting new ways to make a living like flipping burgers or Visual Basic.NET. (The other subtle message: C#.Net was too hard for the unemployed former CF programmers!)"

This mirrors much of what we had said in the conference wrap-up, located here. The fallout from this will, of course, be rather interesting, as it involves Microsoft, Macromedia, New Atlanta, TeraTech, the ColdFusion community, and God knows whoever else.

Michael Smith of TeraTech responded to Joel's analysis of the Microsoft sponsorhip:

"I respect your opinion of the Microsoft presence but do disagree.

"Our intent in inviting Microsoft to sponsor was to engage Microsoft and the community in conversation rather than the long distance insult hurling that has sometimes gone on in the past from both sides, and to get a major company in the sponsorship list so that potential attendees would realize that CFUNITED was now a more professional conference compared to its predecesor CFUN. Additionally, most ColdFusion programmers use many Microsoft technologies such as Windows, IIS and SQL Server, and we had many talks on these topics from Microsoft people as well as the .Net ones.

"On the books, I was supprised when a tractor trailer turned up with 1,000 books -- but as we hadn't specified what exactly sponsors could put in the bag, we figured it was best to give out the books. We will change that policy next year so that we see what sponsors are providing ahead of time."

Aardvark Midterm Report (Joel on Software, July 7, 2005)

Spolsky on CFUNITED (CFObjective, August 3, 2005)

Joel on Software on CFUNITED (CF-Community List on House of Fusion, August 4, 2005)

Privacy | FAQ | Site Map | About | Guidelines | Contact | Advertising | What is ColdFusion?
House of Fusion | ColdFusion Jobs | Blog of Fusion | AHP Hosting