[ffgjgf1]

Did MS ever make any significant amounts of money from selling VS/MSDN compared to how much the availability f 3rd part software benefited Windows sales/increasing market share?

Also you didn’t actually necessarily need it to publish software on Windows.

While if you want to develop for iOS (and even macOS these days) you still need to pay the $100/300 yearly fee (which is there entirely for gatekeeping and not an actual income stream).

[dagmx]

To your question, that’s exactly my point. Without access to a companies books, you don’t know how they fund things. Take this as my response to your other reply as well.

You don’t know if Microsoft chose to fund certain parts of their development with the profits from VS enterprise or not. None of us do.

Even, for arguments sake, if we say that they could make it all free and still afford it, it would still affect priorities of what gets developed.

Again, I’m not saying one is right or wrong. I’m just arguing that it’s a lot more nuanced than any of the comments here suggest. Nobody has enough facts outside the companies bookkeeping and leadership to make these hardline claims.

[ffgjgf1]

> Without access to a companies books, you don’t know how they fund things

I’m highly certain about that. Regardless also I don’t think most companies work like that. More or less all revenue at least from the in specific divisions like Windows or Azure is going to the same pot.

> Nobody has enough facts outside the companies

Well.. same argument applies to > 90% of all stuff people say on online forums like HN and makes most online discussions entirely meaningless.

Regardless we can still reason about a lot of things with a fairly high degree of confidence without complete certainty.

> we say that they could make it all free and still afford it, it would still affect priorities of what gets developed.

Yet it’s the direction MS has been taking over the last 10-15+ years. They have invested massive amounts of money into products which are either effectively free for most users or don’t really generate enough direct revenue to fund them like GitHub.