Today at Build, Microsoft unveiled its first version of Visual Studio for Mac and Linux.
The new tool, called Visual Studio Code, makes it easy to develop .NET code along with many other programming languages on Linux based systems.
It’s monumental for Microsoft as it marks the first time the company has ever made Visual Studio cross-platform, truly embracing those that it’s previously feuded with.
The Verge reports that Microsoft is killing its Internet Explorer brand. Don’t confuse it with the browser though.
Internet Explorer will still exist in some versions of Windows 10 mainly for enterprise compatibility, but the new Project Spartan will be named separately and will be the primary way for Windows 10 users to access the web.
There is no realistic way for Microsoft to kill the MSIE browser. Even if they will completely remove it from all the new installations, there is still a gadzillion computers with it already installed. It doesn’t matter if they “end of life” it or even actively push people to upgrade. It’ll just be dragged around for a few more years.
And what does Microsoft do to help? They introduce yet another browser – Spartan – into the mix. Like we don’t have enough good browsers already. So now web developers will be suffering the pain of not one, but two Microsoft web browsers. And the fun part will be supporting all the old ones, and figuring out all the quirks of the new one.
Thank you very much, dear Microsoft. You’re fun as always.
P.S.: A better solution would be of course to drop their own web browser completely and use one of the existing applications – Firefox, Chromium, Google Chrome, Opera, or anything else. All these options are free, well tested, solid, fast, and secure. Most even have huge communities with extension developers, theme designers, and support forums.
Wired.com is running a good piece on the price of the operating systems. It covers a bit of history and shows how things are now and how it all came a full circle – from free operating systems of the past, all through highly profitable years of Microsoft and Apple, and back to free operating systems of today’s mobile world.
In a way, operating systems are returning to their roots as a kind of loss leader. Before the personal computer revolution of the late 1970s, operating systems were just one piece in a vertically integrated stack of technology, a stack that also included hardware and support services. Operating systems like Unix and VMS were used to sell minicomputers and workstations, and companies made their profits on hardware and support contracts. OSes such as BSD UNIX were completely free, and programmers would pass them around at will. Under the same philosophy, Apple gave away new versions of its Macintosh operating system until the crisis years of the late 1990s, when hardware sales slowed dramatically.
In the rapidly developing smartphone and tablet markets, tightly-coupled stacks are once again dominant, so OS makers can subsidize their operating systems with profit from the products integrated into them. Google, for example, subsidizes its mobile OS by selling online ads, and, in theory at least, by selling Motorola-branded hardware. Apple’s iPhone profits come from hardware and service sales, not the OS.
The article also shows how problematic is this new situation for Microsoft.
Microsoft’s OS sales once generated 47 percent of its revenue, but they contributed just 25 percentlast year on decelerating Windows licensing (and even that figure is inflated by ad revenue from Windows Live). In response, Microsoft is restructuring as a “devices and services” business — meaning a company that sells hardware like the Xbox and web services like Azure. In other words, it’s becoming more like Apple. Apple isn’t really a software company. It makes software and services that run on its own hardware devices.
However …
Yes, even Microsoft is moving towards the vertical stack. It recently acquired phone maker Nokia and sells its own tablets. But this game of cross-subsidizing the operating system will be tougher for Microsoft, since the company is no Apple when it comes to hardware — and no Google when it comes to online services. The company rose to prominence in the horizontal PC era, when Microsoft could play one hardware vendor against another, dictate prices, and keep a computer’s hefty OS markup hidden from consumers. Those were the days.
And more specifically:
So to the average consumer, the 21st Century sea change in OS pricing might not be particularly apparent. But to Microsoft shareholders, it will look very real and very scary. The company must make up that 25 percent somewhere else.
It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.