>But where does this leave .NET, visual studio etc? Those are no longer the tools with >which megacorps make their intranets, or where Photoshop and Call Of Duty is made
.NET was never the tool where Photoshop and Call of Duty was made, but a significant amount of mobile apps and games nowadays are made using Xamarin and Unity, tools that run on top of Mono, a cross-platform implementation of .NET. If anything the Microsoft announcement brings Mono and .NET closer together. And I think you will find that a significant (if not majority) proportion of megacorps do run their intranets on SharePoint. SharePoint is and has been customisable using .NET libraries and tools.
VS will of course still be used by megacorps to make those huge apps, and ms will still charge them for it.
The free VS + open .NET just means single devs and startups have fewer reasons left to pick e.g node, jvm or Python as their platform. unlike before, these small players are very interesting since one of them is making the next minecraft and will host it on Azure.
So they are being very aggressive in the cloud and mobile area which is understandable. But where does this leave .NET, visual studio etc? Those are no longer the tools with which megacorps make their intranets, or where Photoshop and Call Of Duty is made. Cloud and mobile is about scale. They want thousands of cloud apps and mobile apps to be made. They can give their tools away and make money on tablets and azure. Azure runs Linux!
So making the tools free is a natural step in becoming a service company. Making them cross platform is natural since Microsoft now sells cross platform services.
No one thinks Microsoft isn't only concerned with their bottom line. It's not a charity. But that's not to say this is some kind of greedy trap. It's probably a good move for both devs and microsoft.