It sure does, but Microsoft doesn't build technology to sell that technology/tools/programming ecosystem.
They build it so that users can buy their OS on which those apps can run. The more people build using their tools more OS licenses they can sell.In other words the technology is a bait through which users can be fished to buy their OS. This is a totally different thing when compared to Python/Perl other open source tools which have dedicated teams whose primary job is to build and share them to serve mutual interests.
When you find companies dropping a particular technology for something else, its just that they figure out a better bait to catch more fish.
That used to be true, but it's not any more. If the division that makes VS, .Net, et al were spunoff into its own company it would a: have billion dollar revenues and b: be profitable in its own right.
> If the division that makes VS, .Net, et al were spunoff into its own company it would a: have billion dollar revenues and b: be profitable in its own right.
And they would probably have a full development stack running on Macs and other Unixes (even Linux).
If the development tools division had not the burden of making products that sell Windows and Office licenses, they would be free to do whatever makes sense. Now they aren't
Well that's what its all about, Those programming tools aren't what MS's core business its all about. Their core business is all about Windows OS and Office software.
The reason they are feeling the heat now is the computing paradigm has changed very quickly for them to adopt. More and more computing is going to happen on the mobile devices and users will be looking at those devices to access network by some means and do rest of the stuff on the servers. Like search, games other apps.
Microsoft's core revenue comes from selling an operating system. They are not very comfortable with the idea that Software can be given away for free or a lesser prices just to sell hardware or pull traffic to your servers to sell ads.
Whereas the momentum is very rapidly shifting to later paradigm. That is why bing is so crucial, even if they have to run it under loss currently. They want some search backend, to be available when their mobile OS comes to full force in the market. Because then, they will fight a tough price war selling their OS, they will have to depend on the Google model.
Microsoft is no more a technology tools company (because of SQL server,C# etc) than google is because of BigTable, Go! etc.
Although they can sell them as their primary buisiness, but that's not what they are meant for.
Maybe in the past but not now. You seriously think that adopting cross-platform tech will make more people buy their OS? No way. It does benefit them though -- if they can optimize their OS experience for HTML5 apps, it's easier to build it, and gives them a wide range of applications premade.
Sure, I'm not saying they purely do it for that reason alone. There is always going to be a gap which they can't and will never acquire. Its not like IBM from the 80's where a computer and every thing related to it was synonymous with IBM.
But they selling SQL Server and C# et al and other programming tools has nothing to do with competing with Oracle or MySQL. Those are to ensure enough developers are trained to use them so that they can sell more OS licenses later.
It sure does, but Microsoft doesn't build technology to sell that technology/tools/programming ecosystem.
They build it so that users can buy their OS on which those apps can run. The more people build using their tools more OS licenses they can sell.In other words the technology is a bait through which users can be fished to buy their OS. This is a totally different thing when compared to Python/Perl other open source tools which have dedicated teams whose primary job is to build and share them to serve mutual interests.
When you find companies dropping a particular technology for something else, its just that they figure out a better bait to catch more fish.