Cross-Platform Microsoft

willdavid sends us to the ZDNet blogs for a provocative opinion piece by John Carroll. He points to Microsoft's evident cross-platform strategy with Silverlight, and wonders whether the company couldn't make money — and win friends — by extending its excellent development ecosystem cross-platorm. "Microsoft, apparently, is helping the folks at Mono to port Silverlight to Linux. This is good news, as the primary fear I've heard from developers is that Silverlight will be locked to Microsoft platforms and products. Microsoft has already committed to supporting Silverlight cross-browser on Windows, and has a version that runs on Mac OS X (which is even available from the Apple web site). The last step is Linux, and Microsoft is working with Novell and Mono to make this happen."

Comments

Re:this might be good.

[PPH]

Honestly, Microsoft is putting buildings up to house newly hired 'smart people' as fast as they can in Redmond and elsewhere. You'd think that they could get a little more productivity out of them in terms of core product quality.

Microsoft is quite well known for sucking up as much talent as possible to keep them out of markets where they don't want competition. They are also quite active in bidding against their own community of third party developers with this talent pool. If you've got a spare $50 billion or so in spare cash sloshing around, you can afford to underbid your competition. You can also afford to put together a staff large enough to do the project in .NET.