My pet theory is that this is because the dev
tools department at Microsoft is not a pure cost
centre with the sole task of improving the platform,
they have Visual Studio licenses to sell.
This is the single most baffling thing about Windows to me, and it always has been. Why insist on trying to sell Visual Studio licenses, instead of maximizing the amount of software written for your platform(s)?
It doesn't even seem like they're acting in rational self-interest by doing that.
I suppose their rationale is that they give a lot of development tools away for free, and you only really have to pay for the really enterprise-y editions. I guess? Still dumb to me.
MS DOS used to come with a Basic interpreter, if that's what you mean ;)
Later, when the PC platform became what we know today, there wasn't really a channel for free (small f) software except shareware magazines and Microsoft surely would not be seen with that crowd! In those days, Microsoft wasn't concerned with losing the heads and minds to another platform but with losing the revenue to Borland. Since then, more and more has been made available (I still fondly remember laying my hands on the first Windows SDK day came with a free command line version of the MSVC compiler), but it is a culture shift that won't be rushed as long as there are no really pressing reasons.
> Why insist on trying to sell Visual Studio licenses, instead of maximizing the amount of software written for your platform(s)?
For a while now they haven't been doing that. Community editions are just as good as paid ones and before that Express versions were still comparable if not better than open source IDEs.
It doesn't even seem like they're acting in rational self-interest by doing that.
I suppose their rationale is that they give a lot of development tools away for free, and you only really have to pay for the really enterprise-y editions. I guess? Still dumb to me.