Comment by AnonymousPlanet
4 years ago
Microsoft saw that Macs were eating their lunch regarding developers and researchers when e.g. nearly everyone doing AI was on a MacBook or Ubuntu. You had a hard time getting Tensorflow to run on Windows because no one in the community really cared.
Also everyone developing applications in the cloud was eventually targeting Linux as the production OS, which is a pain if your development OS is pretty much hostile do anything command line.
MS then put a lot of money into getting a Linux like command line and support into Windows with WSL.
They also got a bunch of influencers and devs do their thing with improving that kind of developer's experience.
Apple, however, has been sitting on their hands in this regard. They are moving exactly the opposite direction with this crowd.
I have no idea what rationale is behind that. Did they come to a different conclusion than Microsoft or are they just failing to execute on the strategy?
MS sells cloud services. They don't really care what machine you use, as long as you live on Azure as much as possible. That's why they give you more and more tools that improve the "remote development" experience.
Apple sells silicon. They don't really care about developers; as long as they can pull enough users through the iPhone->iPad->Mac funnel, they have done their job of selling as much hardware as they can. In their view, developers bitch and moan but in the end will have to go where users go - at which point, Apple can tax them for access to the walled garden.
It’s going to be hard to beat Msft on developer ergonomics when Msft has GitHub, Azure, VSC, and TS.