Re:Rust/WinRT Public Preview
by _bxg1 on Thursday April 30, 2020 @07:47PM
(#23037604)
Right now they seem to have an enormous theme of winning over developers, of all kinds, for all platforms. I would say it's to sell them tools, but most of the recently-headlining MS tools have been free. Maybe it's just to garner general goodwill. Maybe it's to draw people to Azure. I can't quite see the strategy, but it's a very clear theme behind many of their recent (publicly-facing) efforts.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
MS has a huge legacy market, they don't want to end up as the next oracle where every dev relentlessly argues to move to a different platform.
Making tools/functionality free such that existing devs don't want to jump, and new devs consider azure is a reasonable business strategy.
Except two of the biggest platforms they've been focusing on are the web and Android, and they've publicly stated that they don't necessarily see the future as a Windows-world. Azure is the only platform that I see these efforts helping, and maybe that's enough, but I still have to wonder if there's something I'm missing.