
From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user's conversion to Mac OS X—Part III - nickb
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from-apple-III.ars
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justindz
"It used to be the case that the development tools division at Microsoft ran
at a loss, but that's not the case today. They make money out of us. It just
seems a bit short-sighted. If I am developing in Visual Studio, I'm almost
certainly developing Windows programs for Windows users to run on Windows."

That's a good insight, if not horribly original. The talk of development
ecosystems, open APIs and other things highlights a long term problem here:
app developers should get awesome tools for free whenever possible because
they make _your_ offering more valuable at basically zero marginal cost.

As a thought experiment, imagine that little Johnny was going to write the
next killer app for Windows. He looked at the tool offerings, decided he
didn't want to use a "lite" version tool and needed some of the bells and
whistles in the full version. So, he decided against Visual Studio and instead
built a [insert alternative here] app which turned out to be multi-platform.
As a result, the killer app does not provide any lock-in value and is not a
win for Windows.

Not that I'm in favor of lock-in, of course. I've heard of developers going
Mac for TextMate, though, so I suppose freely facilitating the development of
platform specific apps that are really usable on their target platform is
probably a good principle if you're not preventing them from going the other
route in any way.

~~~
tx
Funny how things change. In mid 90s people were praising Microsoft for being
so incredibly nice to developers: MSDN and Visual C++ were bargains compared
to ridiculous amounts of license fees IBM wanted to for OS/2 development tools
and (!) documentation. In the end, many cited IBM's ignorance towards
developers as a key factor behind the ultimate demise of OS/2.

I asked someone at Microsoft once why they even charge for Visual Studio and
he replied that otherwise they'll get happy Borland lawyers going Netscape
route after them.

That's understandable.

