| I think the shift towards cloud services is key here - just like today's OneNote announcement. But more than extending their tooling to competitor's platforms, I think this is a sneaky way to actually make their platform more viable. Microsoft has tried to pay individual developers to get them to develop for WP, but this is short-sighted and ultimately doesn't address the opportunity cost involved. There are a number of cross-platform mobile tools out there (PhoneGap/Cordova, Telerik Icenium, Xamarin, etc). For a small team, it's damn near impossible to maintain both Android and iOS, let alone Windows Phone. The fact that Xamarin is compiled to native code and built around Mono makes it a particularly interesting play, since it's probably better suited for games as compared to the HTML 5-based solutions. I evaluated, and liked, Xamarin a lot. As a .NET developer and part of a very small team, it made a ton of sense for me. The main issue was price - it's very expensive which kind of becomes cost prohibitive for the small team that it is a great fit for. If Microsoft buys Xamarin and builds it into Visual Studio (or gives it away as part of MSDN/BizSpark), all of a sudden you have a lot of people building mobile apps in C#/.NET - and targeting Windows Phone becomes much, much easier. Microsoft can't compete straight up with Android or iOS because it doesn't have the same audience that either of those platforms have. But providing tooling that makes our lives easier doing cross platform development is an ingenious trojan horse to getting people to be able to target Windows Phone as well.... or even Windows 8 for that matter since it's just the CLR at the end of the day. [1] http://tmarman.com/Blog/Post/ba9a711f-dcdb-40b5-bca9-ad6eb5b... |