| > I don't think you have to be a dumb optimist to buy into this. Personally I think Microsoft's change mostly came from realizing that being a government contractor is much more profitable than serving consumers directly and playing nice with open source is really important for attracting talent. Most likely, it came from them realizing they had lost their platform monopoly due to floundering so badly with consumer mobile. Apple invested tons of resources to accelerate their initial iPhone OS efforts, and had a polished experience you couldn't get from third party integrators. Google capitalized on the technology gap for most non-smartphone third parties in releasing a quasi-open-source mobile platform, seizing the market that Microsoft would normally sell their platform into. Their emphasis on backwards compatibility (and general developer distrust of Microsoft's long-term support of new API) wound up making it very difficult to get support for newer platforms, especially on new architectures like ARM. My opinion however this wound up being overall healthy for them, because they have always mostly sold to companies and strived for more recurring revenue via support contracts and the like. The explosion of new platforms and of mobile devices meant it was easier for them to sell SaaS products like Office 365, and to treat Azure as their new platform play. Microsoft's Open Source policy reflects that they now need to attract new customers in a diverse technical landscape, vs try to lock in existing customers to a Microsoft-created ecosystem. It also reflects the difference in their revenue being services vs software. |