4 ms·

My guess is that they want to sell two things: Azure and Windows Phone via Xamarin. Say open-sourcing .NET convinces a team or a startup to write their new app

My guess is that they want to sell two things: Azure and Windows Phone via Xamarin. Say open-sourcing .NET convinces a team or a startup to write their new app in C#. When it comes time to deploy to production, maybe they'll use Azure. VS has some Azure integrations to make it easy. Now the team needs to write a mobile app. They have the option of using C# with Xamarin. Conveniently, you write Windows Phone apps in C# too, so maybe the team decides to target all three platforms instead of just the major two since they can get so much code reuse. A phone platform is really about the amount and quality of applications. Sun was never able to monetize Java very well, but MS is in a little different circumstance since it has a cloud service and a mobile OS and hardware.

cmdkeen 11y ago
This. It also applies to the enterprise, all those in house data centres that are ripe to be migrated over to Azure. Microsoft care an awful lot less that you migrated your Oracle server to Linux if you run that server on Azure...
- tracker1 11y ago
  That I my speculation as well.. when the company I work for migrated from rented hosting to cloud for easier growth, they went Azure because the existing software is all in .Net on windows... Even though new software is targetting Linux, we're staying on Azure mainly for entropy. It's a valid strategy for keeping their corporate customers.. they have that developer mindshare, and can reduce the systems employees (SysAdmins, DBAs, etc) to boot... Too many corporate environments have dev and admin groups that are combative to eachother... "The Cloud" offers advantages in many of those environments. I'm not saying it's for everyone, but I can see the appeal on several levels. Though working with some of the azure tools via node, it's not as bright as MS makes it out to be.

cmdkeen 11y ago

This. It also applies to the enterprise, all those in house data centres that are ripe to be migrated over to Azure. Microsoft care an awful lot less that you migrated your Oracle server to Linux if you run that server on Azure...

tracker1 11y ago
That I my speculation as well.. when the company I work for migrated from rented hosting to cloud for easier growth, they went Azure because the existing software is all in .Net on windows... Even though new software is targetting Linux, we're staying on Azure mainly for entropy. It's a valid strategy for keeping their corporate customers.. they have that developer mindshare, and can reduce the systems employees (SysAdmins, DBAs, etc) to boot... Too many corporate environments have dev and admin groups that are combative to eachother... "The Cloud" offers advantages in many of those environments. I'm not saying it's for everyone, but I can see the appeal on several levels. Though working with some of the azure tools via node, it's not as bright as MS makes it out to be.