I am selfish enough when it comes to my business that I like Microsoft. I love Microsoft. I wish them the best of luck with everything they do. There are many people who disagree with that sentiment, and they may have good reasons – Microsoft has done a lot of evil in its past, and occasionally still does. But Microsoft has the power to create de facto standards in the market and that helps me build and sell more software. The more successful Microsoft is, the more successful I can be.
What ties me so strongly to Microsoft are the tools they provide to developers for creating applications to run on Microsoft platforms. Microsoft invests a lot into making life easy for developers – the more applications running on Microsoft platforms, the more successful that platform can ultimately be. Whether it’s a Windows-based PC, Windows-based phone, or an Enterprise Server in some data center running Exchange, SQL Server or other high priced Microsoft enterprise software, Microsoft wants more developers creating more applications for that platform. It’s an ecosystem, and the developer community is the engine that helps drive Microsoft where it wants to go.
A key element of Microsoft’s strategy of making developers productive is to provide a range of tools for different environments that all operate the same way. A developer who knows how to write an application on a desktop PC, should know how to write an application on a phone, how to develop a website, how to build a game for the XBox 360 or how to develop an application that runs “in the cloud”.
The reality of what Microsoft actually ships though isn’t quite as perfect as this scenario may sound. Different sets of tools are released from different product groups – they each have their own release schedules and each group fights a natural tendency to produce tools optimized for their platform while still keeping in lockstep with the tools being offered by other groups.
Over the long run though, this strategy works. There is a vision, and understanding the features and technologies that Microsoft hypes to developers the most, and seeing what’s new in the latest set of tools released can give developers a good view of where the other tools are eventually moving to.
I can’t invest in becoming an expert in development tools offered from multiple vendors if each of those tools works differently. It’s enough of a challenge staying an expert in Microsoft tools that I can’t spread my time learning tools from Adobe, Google, Apple, Oracle or the open source community as well.
If you buy into embracing Microsoft’s set of tools like I have, then you naturally want Microsoft to be successful in everything it does. If Microsoft is successful with a given product, then it creates opportunities to sell software that supports that product. If Microsoft fails, then the market they fail in becomes locked out to the Microsoft developer.
Clearly, Microsoft isn’t successful in everything they do. And in my next blog, we’ll discuss one of those markets – the smartphone and mobile device market, and speculate what Microsoft will be doing over the next year to change this situation.
