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Comment by BoysenberryPi | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad to see more Microsoft dev tools on other platforms but don't lose sight of why this is happening. Microsoft is shifting their business to the cloud. They make their money off Azure and other services. In other words, they are making their money mainly off of developers now and its in their best interest to get on the good side of devs which is why they suddenly have a vested interest in open sourcing tools and helping Mac/Linux. Given the love and lavish praise I see heaped on Microsoft in every thread they do something it's clearly working. I'm not saying don't praise them when they do something good but don't be deceived into thinking they are doing it out of good faith.

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> don't lose sight of why this is happening. Microsoft is shifting their business to the cloud.

Why is this a bad thing? Microsoft is a company, they exist to make money. A huge new market for them is 'Cloud' and they're doing everything they can to make that as appealing as possible.

If you want to be the tallest tree in the forest, you can take in the most water and sunlight to be taller than everyone else, or you can chop down all the other trees so you're the only one standing.

Back when they made money from selling operating systems, they were definitely doing some tree chopping with some of their practices.

Did they say it was bad?

No business operates out of "good faith". For a long time, people treated Google like it was a nonprofit with all of the talk about making the world a better place, rather than recognizing it as, first and foremost, an ad company. As you point out, making people like your company is just good business, and successful businesses do that.

What's the long-term business goal for Azure lock-in? If .Net runs as well on Linux as it does on Windows, then there really is no reason to use Azure over any other cloud provider like AWS where generic CentOS or Ubuntu boxes are no different than their Azure counterparts.

Back when .Net was Windows only, they gave it away because the goal was the developers would pay a lot of money for MSDN, GUI apps on Windows, SQL Server, Office, and Sharepoint integration, etc. But .Net core is mostly server side, so I'm having trouble figuring why they'd bother giving away VS to Mac users without being forced to run on Azure in production.

Because AWS treats the cloud as infrastructure. Microsoft treats the cloud as infrastructure + software & services and they have superior software. Using their tools means exposure to their software which means that a lot of people will chose paying for other software.

> so I'm having trouble figuring why they'd bother giving away VS to Mac users without being forced to run on Azure in production.

It's the trickle up theory of modern development. Get folks using your languages and tools, and if you make it easy to integrate with your cloud services in those tools, that's where the revenue comes in.

It's probably an interesting number how much revenue is generated by various cloud providers for folks who just forgot to shut down their VM

Literally every business does this. Apple Google

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