Garth, I read that link before I posted that comment. Unless I am missing something, it does not do a good job of explaining the difference. More important, Brad obviously have very specific ideas about what these terms mean, and I'd love to hear his views.

Brad, you might want to add a few sentences about what you consider a UX and UI developer to be and the differences between the two.

Actually, VBA is included in almost all Microsoft Office applications: Word, Access, PowerPoint as well as Excel. (I think other Office apps such as Project also have VBA.) Outlook also has VBA but the VBA recorder does not work as well as the other Office applications. Excel is likely to have more heavy duty users who push Excel to the limits than Word, so VBA is used a lot more in Excel than in Word.

In general, the macro recorder is a great way to learn. Just turn the recorder on, do a bunch of things, stop it, and look a the code. A lot of times I will record a bunch of actions, then tweak the code to make it more general, and then wrap loops around the code. In 30 minutes you can do a days worth of programming.

The first language I learned was GE Timesharing Basic, the original Basic designed by Kemeny and Kurtz. It had some terrible features:

Line numbers

Gotos were required for almost anything

No If then else

Variable names are only one character long

Over time, all of these deficiencies were eliminated in subsequent dialects of Basic.

Basic eventually evolved into a professional programming language. The problem is that a lot of those advanced features are hard to understand for a beginner. It would be a very unusual 14 year old who would be using recursion and OOPS.

What we need is a language with training wheels. I think the best approach would be five levels. Set the level (1, 2, 3, 4 or 5). Each is a superset of the previous level. Start at level 1 and 95 percent of the complexity of programming is hidden from you. Get good at level 1 and then change the level to level 2, etc. Those who are good and motivated can move up to level 5, which has all of the complexities and power that one finds in a professional programming language.

The first question to ask is, "How do I display 'Hello World'?" If you have to create a class, or declare a variable to do so, something is wrong. It should be one line -- e.g., Print "Hello World!".

Once you got to level 3, I think there would be quite a lot of power available.

Microsoft Visual Basic 6 was fairly straight forward. (With VB.Net, the .Net stuff adds far too much complexity for a beginner.) Visual Basic for Applications is basically a subset of VB 6. Get rid of some of its power and one would have a great language for beginners. At the same time, it is important that a teaching language not develop bad habits (e.g., Gotos).

James Mitchell

<a href="http://www.jmitchell.me" target="_blank">www.jmitchell.me

Brad, on the Foundry Group website, why not have a tab at the top that says "Startup Jobs." Have the same tab on each of the partner's blogs, all of which go to the same page. Let each of the companies backed by Foundry Group post their job listings there.

James Mitchell www.jmitchell.me

As a die hard Windows user/fan/fanboy, I cannot tell you how much I enjoy reading these comments.
I will add two things I do not like about the Mac. Both are Microsoft’s fault, rather than Apple’s. First, Microsoft Access does not run on the Mac. Second, we use Microsoft DirectAccess (which is vastly superior to a virtual private network) and it only works with Windows Seven.
There are many good things to say about Apple; I will mention only three. Apple has the best designers in the world. The Apple store in Boston is incredible, the best sales reps I have ever encountered. And I love my iPhone.
James Mitchell
<a href="http://www.jmitchell.me" target="_blank">www.jmitchell.me

Regina, I trust you understand that the anger is directed solely at those who passed this law. Given that the law exists, it's wonderful that someone as skilled as you are is willing to write a treatise on it.

Almost all cloud applications are simple, unsophisticated apps that will need several years to come close to the functionality offered by client apps. (Salesforce.com being the most obvious exception.) Gmail is probably the best cloud e-mail offering but using Outlook is a lot easier than Gmail, and I can use Outlook even when I do not have connection to the Internet.

Are you using Skype for phone calls? I would never do that for U.S. calls, since long distance is essentially free in the U.S. Skype is fine for international calls.

It's apparent you spend your day differently than I do. I supervise about eight developers. For internal apps, we use Access. It would take about 5 to 10 times longer to develop in any other tool. I have a smart assistant who can write her own queries and reports and even forms without having to interrupt the developers. So tell me, what tool comes close to Access for queries, reports, forms, for slicing and data quickly and easily?

There is nothing like DirectAccess. All of us work remotely, we can simply open a file (Word, Excel), make changes to it, and everyone else has access to the file minutes later, without any need to worry about synchronization. It is a lot easier to simply go to our file system, find the right folder, click the file to open it, work on it and close it than to deal with an UI like SharePoint (which totally sucks in my opinion). I have tried about a dozen groupware offerings and it's like having sex with a condom, it's just not the same thing as just opening a file on my file system. I can find a file and open it in about five seconds.

When you have reasonably sophisticated information systems, you are going to be someone's slave. I am a slave to Microsoft and for our WordPress sites, to WP and LAMP. People bitch about Microsoft but I think their prices are reasonable given the functionality they offer. (And with Bizspark, I don't pay anything at all.) These are stacks that are durable and I feel pretty certain they will be around 30 years from now, so I don't mind investing a lot of time and energy learning them and maintaining them. With cloud, I will be a slave to API, UI and protocols that I have no idea if they will be around 2 years from now. With Microsoft and LAMP, there are hundreds of good technical books, basically unlimited technical resources.

I have a ActionPak subscription that allows me UNLIMITED technical support calls from Microsoft. Yes, I could spend five hours researching an issue through Google, and maybe I will find an answer, but it's a lot easier just to call. The Premiere support people are usually quite good, none of this "I am from India and I am going to read from a script" nonsense.

Cloud makes sense:

1. If you need to edit a file at the same time, a totally cool feature with Google Docs

2. If you want the infrastructure taken care of for you, because you don't have the resources to do it yourself

3. If you can live with simple apps that are equivalent to version 1.0 apps introduced in the DOS world in the early to mid 1990s. (With some exceptions, obviously.) Why do I want to go back to the Stone Age? Some cloud offerings will evolve over time to match the power and sophistication currently offered by Windows apps, but in the meantime one would have to put up with a lot of pain and most of these companies will not evolve, and many will go out of business. Why do I want to take the technological risk if I have a safe choice that has all of the power I need?

I think you are obsessed with new for new sake, which is probably what a VC should be. I am not a VC, I am just someone who wants to get a lot of work done while taking little technological risk and I really don't want to learn new software packages unless there is a compelling reason to do so. I have seen few cloud apps that draw me in. (No doubt you learn software apps much faster than I do, it takes me a few years to really know a package.) Even the better ones (such as Gmail) just short when compared with Windows apps. I hope this will change in the future; Microsoft does best when it has serious competition.

Yep, connectivity is my goal. I always want to work on teams rather than alone, so I can focus on what I am good at and others can do the other tasks. Brad is obviously working on teams and that is why I am surprised he made the move, it just seems so childish in so many ways.

"Multiple times harder" -- Would you be willing to put money behind that statement? How much money? How about half of your net worth? Design can be emperically tested. Take two guys of equal intelligence, one knows Windows really well and one knows OS X really well. (I will volunteer to be the Windows guy.) For a week, give each of them dozens of different tasks to do. I would be very surprised if there was any difference at all between the two, if for no other reason than Microsoft has done a good job of copying the Mac interface. When I showed a Mac friend of mine Windows Seven, his first comment was, "This is such a ripoff of OS X!" As Picasso, said, good artists copy, great artists steal.

I expect for the next fifty years I will be dealing with relational DBMS and I would sell my grandmother into slavery before I gave up Microsoft Access.

If you are an individual user who does not work in teams, and does not need Access, and can live with the vastly more limited choices of software for the Mac, then sure, Mac could make a lot of sense.

I did get an iPhone a few months ago and it clearly blows every other phone out of the market. AT&T totally sucks so I am thinking of switching to a Droid so I can go back to Verizon Wireless. But the iPhone is amazing. (I bought a Micro Cell and spent a day on the phone with AT&T trying to get it work. If it did, at least I could use my iPhone in my apartment. So far AT&T has been useless.)

Apps matter a lot. That's one reason why the iPhone is such a great phone, it has far more apps than the other phones.

If you are a member of a tightly-coupled team, switching to a Mac is simply silly. The server matters as much as the client. Microsoft has a comprehensive set of server software that works reasonably well with the Windows client. On the server side, Apple has essentially nothing.

Microsoft DirectAccess, for example, is the next generation VPN. It simply works, even when you are not connected with the Internet. It is hugely valuable having people around the work being able to access the same file folder structure without all of the overhead of groupware programs such as SharePoint.

And there is nothing like Microsoft Access as a front end to a RDBMS. No other program comes close, and Access is not available for the Mac.

James Mitchell www.jmitchell.me