{"id":34483,"date":"2005-08-22T10:00:11","date_gmt":"2005-08-22T10:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2005\/08\/22\/how-do-you-convince-developers-to-pay-their-taxes\/"},"modified":"2005-08-22T10:00:11","modified_gmt":"2005-08-22T10:00:11","slug":"how-do-you-convince-developers-to-pay-their-taxes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20050822-11\/?p=34483","title":{"rendered":"How do you convince developers to pay their “taxes”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Tablet PC team<\/a> have a tough task ahead of them at this year’s PDC: They have to get people to care about power management<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The reason why this is tough is that power management is rarely a deal-maker. If a user is evaluating, say, personal finance software, how much weight are they going to place on which program consumes less battery power? That’s probably a third- or fourth-level tiebreaker. No amount of power management is going to overcome the fact that your program’s interface is harder to use than your competitor’s. Nobody ever said, “Oh, yeah, I switched my word processor from X to Y because X was chewing too much battery power.” When a battery doesn’t last very long, users tend to blame the battery, not the software that is draining it. <\/p>\n

Power management falls into a category some development teams call “taxes”. It’s something you do, not because it actually benefits you specifically, but because it benefits the software landscape as a whole. Other taxes include making sure your program plays friendly with roaming user profiles<\/a>, Fast User Switching<\/a>, Hierarchical Storage Management<\/a>, multiple monitors<\/a>, Remote Desktop<\/a>, and 64-bit Windows<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Of course, not all development teams in the world are so diligent as to pay all their “taxes”. I suspect most cheat on their taxes, and some of them just don’t pay any at all. <\/p>\n

So here’s my question to you: How do you convince developers to pay their “taxes”? (Should developers have to pay taxes at all?) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Tablet PC team have a tough task ahead of them at this year’s PDC: They have to get people to care about power management. The reason why this is tough is that power management is rarely a deal-maker. If a user is evaluating, say, personal finance software, how much weight are they going to place […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-34483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

The Tablet PC team have a tough task ahead of them at this year’s PDC: They have to get people to care about power management. The reason why this is tough is that power management is rarely a deal-maker. If a user is evaluating, say, personal finance software, how much weight are they going to place […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}