Perfect example of a strong technology that has really been hurt by strategic errors. Whatever success .NET did have, it was still largely pigeonholed as just

Perfect example of a strong technology that has really been hurt by strategic errors. Whatever success .NET did have, it was still largely pigeonholed as just something for Microsoft stack devotees. There was no technical reason the essence of the new core version couldn't have been a priority 20 years ago. Not only cross platform and open source, but acting earlier and more aggressively to dispel patent trap mistrust. It cost precious momentum. No doubt hindsight makes it easy to say all this now, but there was still an issue of entrenched thinking about the way things had always been before, combined with a circle the wagons mentality. One part of it I think was easy to see, was that free high quality development tools should have been widely available day one. How does it make any sense for a company to try and make $5000 off of a copy of visual studio, at the expense of platform momentum that is driving $200 billion a year in revenue?