"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.
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 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.