Microsoft has never seen Visual Studio as a profit center. It's just there because compilers are complements of applications that run on their system, which is

Microsoft has never seen Visual Studio as a profit center. It's just there because compilers are complements of applications that run on their system, which is a profit center. The only reason they even used to charge for it was to not kill Borland's compiler business. As long as there's a C compiler for applications on their operating system, they're happy. If someone else writes it, so much the better.