You could say that it's a problem with the universities, but I also believe that the companies that employ those people are to blame. Very interesting topic IMO. Maybe I'll write a blogpost on the subject..

We have much higher corporate taxes in Norway than in the US, and the grants were tax grants, so we got back a certain percentage of the tax we paid for the time we spent on research and development the previous year. So it's more like we are able to compete on equal terms with US companies.

I think you misread the article. The pilot project using the first basic version of the rewritten CMS started in October 2006, and was completed in march 2007. The rewrite of the CMS started in february/march 2005.Since first implementation project finished in 2007, we've been busy improving and adding features to the system. It's only recently that we've felt that the system has all the features needed to compete successfully in the international market, and that's why we have delayed the international launch of the new system to this year.

You're correct, we were reasonably successful before the rewrite started, but we started to see limitations in the original architecture that would become much bigger problems in the future. So yes, we traded growth for a while, in order to get a solid foundation. We still think we made the right decision, as we feel our future prospects are so much better now, than if we had continued with the old system. Time will tell.

The consulting part of the company used the new version since 2007, but it's a totally different ballgame to sell licenses to partners around the world, than implementing projects within a relatively small group of developers. If you're selling to 3rd party developers, you need a stable and well documented system, with all features found in competing solutions.

The rewrite was mostly based on problems with the underlying design, not the platform switch. When we had decided to rewrite it from scratch, .Net was chosen as the new platform.

If you think the effort needed to make a new web content management system that can compete successfully with established players like SiteCore, EPiServer, Alterian, Ektron and Kentico (basically the mid-range platforms and products as defined by CMS Watch ) is a matter of changing to PHP and replacing functions, you're insane.

Thanks for noticing..

The blog module uses templated controls. When you bind data to a templated control, all that data get's stuffed into the viewstate as default. To fetch the comment content, the template for a comment has this snippet:

<%# Container.CommentContent %>

As default in .Net, a literal control is created for that data. Strangely Microsoft decided to make EnableViewState enabled by default for automatically created controls. The reason the viewstate is so big on that page is because I forgot to put the above snippet in a Literal control with viewstate enabled:
<asp:Literal runat="server" ID="litBlogCommentContent" EnableViewState="false" Text=""></asp:Literal>

I usually check the size of the viewstate, but none of the blogposts I checked had any comments, so I didn't catch it when we created the site. I'll update it as soon as traffic slows down a bit.

Hi!

I'm the author of the blog post. The Joel article is 10 years old, but not the one I wrote(the the second link).

Vidar Langberget