Comments on: How to get free (and cheap) stuff from Microsoft! http://www.utsmsp.com/2008/05/how-to-get-free-and-cheap-stuff-from-microsoft/ Microsoft Student Partners at the University of Technology, Sydney Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:51:55 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc By: Thomas http://www.utsmsp.com/2008/05/how-to-get-free-and-cheap-stuff-from-microsoft/#comment-8 Thomas Thu, 29 May 2008 09:39:33 +0000 http://www.utsmsp.com/?p=19#comment-8 DreamSpark is an interesting concept. I sat up and paid some attention when .NET was coming out -- it's a powerful library and C# is not a bad language. Most importantly, all the usual tools were available in express format for free; Visual C# Express, Visual VB.NET, etc. It's a good way to get people on board. It's an often-used strategy to market software to university students so that they want to continue to use it in their professional career. All the technical software like Mathematica, AutoCAD, etc. has generous academic licences for this reason. So it makes perfect business sense for Microsoft to distribute their development stuff for free. It worked well for Apple -- XCode, a beautiful and full-featured development system, has been free and available with Mac OS X since the beginning. And university students are poor. Vendor lock-in is a big deal for operating system developers. Apple's doing it with Cocoa, and Microsoft is doing much the same with .NET (except for oddities like the Mono project). If Microsoft is going to keep up with increasing market pressure, it needs killer software infrastructure. A killer app can be written for any platform and anybody can port a killer app, so it's the tools and libraries at the developer's disposal which count. Visual studio and .NET are Microsoft's basis for modern development, so they need to push it. Here are the results, and developers like you guys win. I'm not at UTS, so I'm not going to be able to see the talk, but hopefully it's an interesting presentation and some good software will come out of it in the long run. Enjoy. DreamSpark is an interesting concept. I sat up and paid some attention when .NET was coming out — it’s a powerful library and C# is not a bad language. Most importantly, all the usual tools were available in express format for free; Visual C# Express, Visual VB.NET, etc. It’s a good way to get people on board.

It’s an often-used strategy to market software to university students so that they want to continue to use it in their professional career. All the technical software like Mathematica, AutoCAD, etc. has generous academic licences for this reason. So it makes perfect business sense for Microsoft to distribute their development stuff for free. It worked well for Apple — XCode, a beautiful and full-featured development system, has been free and available with Mac OS X since the beginning. And university students are poor.

Vendor lock-in is a big deal for operating system developers. Apple’s doing it with Cocoa, and Microsoft is doing much the same with .NET (except for oddities like the Mono project). If Microsoft is going to keep up with increasing market pressure, it needs killer software infrastructure. A killer app can be written for any platform and anybody can port a killer app, so it’s the tools and libraries at the developer’s disposal which count. Visual studio and .NET are Microsoft’s basis for modern development, so they need to push it. Here are the results, and developers like you guys win.

I’m not at UTS, so I’m not going to be able to see the talk, but hopefully it’s an interesting presentation and some good software will come out of it in the long run. Enjoy.

]]> By: Chris http://www.utsmsp.com/2008/05/how-to-get-free-and-cheap-stuff-from-microsoft/#comment-7 Chris Mon, 26 May 2008 12:31:45 +0000 http://www.utsmsp.com/?p=19#comment-7 woohoo! keep those responses coming guys! thanks to everyone who's already registered their interest. Look forward to seeing you next Tuesday! woohoo! keep those responses coming guys! thanks to everyone who’s already registered their interest.

Look forward to seeing you next Tuesday!

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