3 ms·

Tbh, I think they should just charge for the chips and keep the software free.

Joker_vD 5mo ago
Yep. Strategy Letter V by Joel Spolsky (2002): "Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements". Also, from the 2004's "How Microsoft Lost the API War": The logical conclusion of this is that if you’re trying to sell operating systems, the most important thing to do is make software developers want to develop software for your operating system. That’s why Steve Ballmer was jumping around the stage shouting “Developers, developers, developers, developers.” It’s so important for Microsoft that the only reason they don’t outright give away development tools for Windows is because they don’t want to inadvertently cut off the oxygen to competitive development tools vendors (well, those that are left) because having a variety of development tools available for their platform makes it that much more attractive to developers. But they really want to give away the development tools. Through their Empower ISV program you can get five complete sets of MSDN Universal (otherwise known as “basically every Microsoft product except Flight Simulator“) for about $375. Command line compilers for the .NET languages are included with the free .NET runtime... also free. The C++ compiler is now free. Anything to encourage developers to build for the .NET platform, and holding just short of wiping out companies like Borland. Similar logic applies to selling FPGAs.
- manwe150 5mo ago
  Although it also means Windows could rely on Intel so long for compiler tools, that when I was trying to build for ARM customers, I realized a lot of the expected developer tools are just barely functional or don’t exist (ifort, MKL, gdb, mingw, etc)
imglorp 5mo ago
Similarly, AMD wonders why they can't have a bigger piece of that sweet GPU market. Maybe Nvidia is worth 5 trillion because they have a deep ecosystem (CUDA) and community and there's certainly not charging or impeding developers from using it, charging only for the hardware.

Yep. Strategy Letter V by Joel Spolsky (2002): "Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements". Also, from the 2004's "How Microsoft Lost the API War": The logical conclusion of this is that if you’re trying to sell operating systems, the most important thing to do is make software developers want to develop software for your operating system. That’s why Steve Ballmer was jumping around the stage shouting “Developers, developers, developers, developers.” It’s so important for Microsoft that the only reason they don’t outright give away development tools for Windows is because they don’t want to inadvertently cut off the oxygen to competitive development tools vendors (well, those that are left) because having a variety of development tools available for their platform makes it that much more attractive to developers. But they really want to give away the development tools. Through their Empower ISV program you can get five complete sets of MSDN Universal (otherwise known as “basically every Microsoft product except Flight Simulator“) for about $375. Command line compilers for the .NET languages are included with the free .NET runtime... also free. The C++ compiler is now free. Anything to encourage developers to build for the .NET platform, and holding just short of wiping out companies like Borland. Similar logic applies to selling FPGAs.

manwe150 5mo ago
Although it also means Windows could rely on Intel so long for compiler tools, that when I was trying to build for ARM customers, I realized a lot of the expected developer tools are just barely functional or don’t exist (ifort, MKL, gdb, mingw, etc)

imglorp 5mo ago

Similarly, AMD wonders why they can't have a bigger piece of that sweet GPU market. Maybe Nvidia is worth 5 trillion because they have a deep ecosystem (CUDA) and community and there's certainly not charging or impeding developers from using it, charging only for the hardware.