5 ms·

I have an ongoing bet with a few friends on when and who will buy Xamarin. In April my bet was 18 months they would be bought by Microsoft or Amazon. I still le

I have an ongoing bet with a few friends on when and who will buy Xamarin. In April my bet was 18 months they would be bought by Microsoft or Amazon. I still lean Amazon.

LammyL 13y ago
Why would xamarin want to sell? What advantage would it bring them?
- scribu 13y ago
  Lots of money?
- ciupicri 13y ago
  > In summer of 1997, he [Miguel de Icaza] was interviewed by Microsoft for a job in the Internet Explorer Unix team (to work on a SPARC port), but lacked the university degree required to obtain a work H-1B visa. He declared in an interview that he tried to persuade his interviewers to free the IE code even before Netscape did so with their own browser. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza#Early_software_career http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza#Early_software_... So perhaps Miguel would like working for Microsoft again.
nbevans 13y ago
I hold out hope that the next Microsoft CEO won't be as blind as Ballmer was and that the first thing on his hit list will be to buy Xamarin or at least "secure" it to prevent anyone else buying it; a suitably large investment could do that. Xamarin would provide the perfect solution to getting a major foothold on mobile app developers, which is what Microsoft so desperately needs for their Windows Phone aspirations. Once you have developer mindshare, you have cracked half the problem.
- gesman 13y ago
  Why would MSFT needs Xamarin if their own tools are exceptionally good?
  - pauloortins 13y ago
    Cross-Platform mobile development ?
    - spion 13y ago
      MS still don't understand the meaning of the word "cross-platform".
      - venomsnake 13y ago
        They will support all and any platforms as long as they are windows.
        300bps 13y ago
        They will support all and any platforms as long as they are windows. Don't let reality stand in the way of your irrational bigotry. But in case you'd like to learn something new - here is the pricing for hosting Linux servers on Microsoft's Azure system: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/#service-linux http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-ma... It works very well and is price competitive with Amazon EC2.
        venomsnake 13y ago
        Except we were talking about cross platform applications - , which MS is just beginning to reluctantly pursue. But hey, lets turn paraphrased Henry Ford one liner into bigotry accusations.
        profquail 13y ago
        Microsoft is contributing patches to support Hyper-V virtualization to the FreeBSD kernel to allow FreeBSD VMs to run on Azure: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=38019 http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=38019
- Maarten88 13y ago
  Microsoft should buy Xamarin, but they'll also need to open-source all of .NET. That would improve Mono on non-Windows platforms. That would be the best thing they can do to really get a foothold in the mobile space and also win back some part of the startup community.
  - _random_ 13y ago
    That would be a super-powerful move. They should drop prices for Pro Visual Studio as well.
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    P/Invoke and stuff like that is unopensourcable. The run time is way too deeply embedded in COM and the registry for its own good. This move could have outright killed java in 2006 when the .NET 2.0 was way ahead of java in everything. Right now - I am not so sure it will be such a big thing. (Disclaimer - haven't touched serious project in 4-5 years in .NET but I loved C# and the libraries)
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - tracker1 13y ago
      Funny, but P/Invoke seems to work great on Linux with Mono... it's probably the single biggest reason I started out with it, as JNI by comparison is an ugly beast. I love a lot of what C# and .Net have to offer, even though half of my server-side dev time is in node.js for the past couple years, I still like a lot of .Net ... It will be really interesting to see where things go in the next couple of years. I think unchaining VS and Office from Windows would be the best move MS could make right now. Web Matrix (with an extension) is imho second best dev environment for node.js out there, and that they haven't integrated this into VS really surprises me. MS put a lot of effort into libuv, so not sure why they wouldn't get the runtime system that uses it up to speed better. The BCL in .Net are second to none in terms of breadth and comprehensiveness. I feel that if MS really opened up most of .Net in MS-PL or something similar, it could really gain ground outside of windows... Again, this would mean getting VS and Office away from the windows anchor.
- icefox 13y ago
  Wouldn't the opposite be better?
Maakuth 13y ago
I think that keeping Xamarin out of MS's hands is actually better for the ecosystem. It is very healthy that there are multiple independent but compatible implementations of the CLR and other tools so that everything is not tied to Microsoft.

I have an ongoing bet with a few friends on when and who will buy Xamarin. In April my bet was 18 months they would be bought by Microsoft or Amazon. I still lean Amazon.

LammyL 13y ago

Why would xamarin want to sell? What advantage would it bring them?

scribu 13y ago
Lots of money?
ciupicri 13y ago
> In summer of 1997, he [Miguel de Icaza] was interviewed by Microsoft for a job in the Internet Explorer Unix team (to work on a SPARC port), but lacked the university degree required to obtain a work H-1B visa. He declared in an interview that he tried to persuade his interviewers to free the IE code even before Netscape did so with their own browser. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza#Early_software_career http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Icaza#Early_software_... So perhaps Miguel would like working for Microsoft again.

nbevans 13y ago

I hold out hope that the next Microsoft CEO won't be as blind as Ballmer was and that the first thing on his hit list will be to buy Xamarin or at least "secure" it to prevent anyone else buying it; a suitably large investment could do that. Xamarin would provide the perfect solution to getting a major foothold on mobile app developers, which is what Microsoft so desperately needs for their Windows Phone aspirations. Once you have developer mindshare, you have cracked half the problem.

gesman 13y ago
Why would MSFT needs Xamarin if their own tools are exceptionally good?
- pauloortins 13y ago
  Cross-Platform mobile development ?
  - spion 13y ago
    MS still don't understand the meaning of the word "cross-platform".
    - venomsnake 13y ago
      They will support all and any platforms as long as they are windows.
      - 300bps 13y ago
        They will support all and any platforms as long as they are windows. Don't let reality stand in the way of your irrational bigotry. But in case you'd like to learn something new - here is the pricing for hosting Linux servers on Microsoft's Azure system: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/#service-linux http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-ma... It works very well and is price competitive with Amazon EC2.
        venomsnake 13y ago
        Except we were talking about cross platform applications - , which MS is just beginning to reluctantly pursue. But hey, lets turn paraphrased Henry Ford one liner into bigotry accusations.
      - profquail 13y ago
        Microsoft is contributing patches to support Hyper-V virtualization to the FreeBSD kernel to allow FreeBSD VMs to run on Azure: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=38019 http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=38019
Maarten88 13y ago
Microsoft should buy Xamarin, but they'll also need to open-source all of .NET. That would improve Mono on non-Windows platforms. That would be the best thing they can do to really get a foothold in the mobile space and also win back some part of the startup community.
- _random_ 13y ago
  That would be a super-powerful move. They should drop prices for Pro Visual Studio as well.
- venomsnake 13y ago
  P/Invoke and stuff like that is unopensourcable. The run time is way too deeply embedded in COM and the registry for its own good. This move could have outright killed java in 2006 when the .NET 2.0 was way ahead of java in everything. Right now - I am not so sure it will be such a big thing. (Disclaimer - haven't touched serious project in 4-5 years in .NET but I loved C# and the libraries)
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - tracker1 13y ago
    Funny, but P/Invoke seems to work great on Linux with Mono... it's probably the single biggest reason I started out with it, as JNI by comparison is an ugly beast. I love a lot of what C# and .Net have to offer, even though half of my server-side dev time is in node.js for the past couple years, I still like a lot of .Net ... It will be really interesting to see where things go in the next couple of years. I think unchaining VS and Office from Windows would be the best move MS could make right now. Web Matrix (with an extension) is imho second best dev environment for node.js out there, and that they haven't integrated this into VS really surprises me. MS put a lot of effort into libuv, so not sure why they wouldn't get the runtime system that uses it up to speed better. The BCL in .Net are second to none in terms of breadth and comprehensiveness. I feel that if MS really opened up most of .Net in MS-PL or something similar, it could really gain ground outside of windows... Again, this would mean getting VS and Office away from the windows anchor.
icefox 13y ago
Wouldn't the opposite be better?

Maakuth 13y ago

I think that keeping Xamarin out of MS's hands is actually better for the ecosystem. It is very healthy that there are multiple independent but compatible implementations of the CLR and other tools so that everything is not tied to Microsoft.