Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, a Free Cross-Platform Code Editor

On my machine with no files open it's at ~80-85MB RAM, VS2012 is at 500MB with nothing open. Not sure why 200MB is of any consequence unless you're in a third world country. 8GB of RAM is ~$50.

Add Clojure and Clojurescript to that list.

If I'm not mistaken those guys appeared on the scene back in 2006/2007. They showed off Pixelmator at WWDC and it went down pretty well but that's still their only product, apart from an iOS version.

I guess another way to look at it is this: If you had an idea for a desktop app today, would you decide to write for Mac first using a proprietary language Swift and proprietary SDKs like CoreData or would you pick C# and .NET so the bulk of your code could be re-used on both desktop and mobile, and you could bind to native toolkits for the UI?

It's an "arbitrary" number in the sense that it is the revers of the previous industry standard in the mobile space which was 70/30 in favor of the Carrier. Often times developers would get less than %30 of the revenue for their products. And they had many more hoops to jump thru to get to the market, could only even get a meeting to try and get on mobile devices if they were already a large company, and had to work with terrible SDKs, etc.

Apple democratized and revolutionized that entire industry, providing a level playing field where I can compete with Omni, and we both have the same hoops to jump thru and get the same deal. We both get a much better deal than before.

The $99 fee covers the cost of administering the developer program. This program is hugely popular, and is already overrun with people who just want to get access to early versions of iOS before they are released publicly. Even with the $99 fee. It's a very low fee so that anyone serious can afford it, but high enough to keep out the problematic people who would abuse the service and overwhelm Apple's developer support resources.

Seriously, I find it kinda curious that you're complaining about $99 as if it's some big barrier.

The idea that an "Apple centric skill-set is not transferrable to other platforms" is pretty darn silly. I mean, sure, if you learn to program using Cocoa you will be frustrated and annoyed at how terrible certain other platforms are to develop for.

But these days only HR people seem to think that programmers can only learn one langage and that experienced in one language is not useful in other languages or using other frameworks. Are you an HR person? Because that perspective is not one I would expect from any software developer.

It is now just a month shy of 20 years since that letter was written.

And what did Microsoft do? They bought a browser and gave it away for free, cutting off Netscape at the knees, til the company folded and become the Mozilla Foundation.

They poured billions and billions of dollars into online initiatives from the Microsoft Network to Bing, including buying dozens and dozens of companies.

None of those were big successes. None of those have been a "tidal wave" of innovation, or success, or money. At least that I can see. Internet Explorer became dominant, but mainly due to bundling and that has gone away. IIS was a popular web server for a long time and people have written web sites using microsoft technology, but .net which is just a renamed MFC, isn't really much more used outside the same types of shops that used it before 1995. Yes, the mono project brought it to linux and made C# a more viable language, but that wasn't Microsoft's doing.

Maybe I'm missing something. Xbox and Xbox online are huge money sinks that I don't know if MSFT is ever going to recover the money from. The stock has been flat during that period while google, amazon and apple have been going like gangbusters. (And given the level of monetary inflation over the past 15 years flat means down.) Yes, it did boom during the bubble but that was %100 windows and office from the boom in companies putting computers on everyone's desk. And yes, it's grown the past couple of years after being flat from 2001-2011. But that's not a result of the 1995 "initiative".

Microsoft, like Apple, unfortunately for both, doesn't quite get the internet. It doesn't get mobile (unlike Apple).

The new CEO might change this, I don't know.

But the "internet tidal wave" happened pretty much completely without microsoft.

For the record, I worked for the company near the time of this letter, lived in Seattle during most of the intervening years and have been watching Microsoft closely for about 25 years.