[BurnGpuBurn]

I disagree. MS was completely succesfull in their goals. They kept a ton of developers busy learing useless Xamarin, thus keeping them from developing products that can actually compete with Microsoft products.

Next they killed of an open source competitor (Mono) of their product, stole the usefull bits to put it in .Net, and now they dump the leftover project (that's not competing with them anymore) back into the OS world.

How is that not a smart way of doing business?

[skrebbel]

> stole the usefull bits to put it in .Net

a nitpick, they acquired Xamarin for half a billion dollars, that's not really stealing is it.

[bunderbunder]

I don't think Microsoft viewed Mono as a competitor. Even before Microsoft acquired Xamarin for hundreds of millions of dollars, they already had a history of collaboration on .NET, including sharing test cases in order to help with compatibility, and co-developing integrations into Microsoft products such as Azure and Office 365.

The "keeping [developers] from developing products that can actually compete" assertion is frankly absurd. .NET's real competitor is and has always been Java. Java, possibly the world's most-used platform that isn't JavaScript, has always had heaps more people working on it than .NET's entire ecosystem, let alone just the Mono project.

[ryukoposting]

> kept a ton of developers busy learing useless Xamarin...

What kind of moustache-twirly stupidity is this? Yeah, Microsoft maintained a shitty cross-platform SDK so that developers would make worse software, because that's somehow helping any of their main product verticals. By the way, those are (broadly speaking) cloud, client software, and games.

Do you have any evidence to suggest that there was a Xamarin-based application that would have directly competed with Office? How about Fallout? Now, do you have any evidence that Microsoft tried to make Xamarin worse at doing the thing that application was trying to do?

> Next they killed of an open source competitor (Mono) of their product

Microsoft's implementation is also open source, and has been for almost a decade: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime

> that's not competing with them anymore

Sure. Mono is only useful for legacy purposes. Microsoft's own design was always the reference implementation of .NET, regardless of whether it was open-source. Mono existed for the sole purpose of being an open, cross-platform reimplementation. Now that the reference design is itself open-source and cross-platform, Mono is mostly redundant.