Microsoft to become next IBM?

After reading this article by one Mr Bright who I respect. It seems he forgot where is he coming from. The software development.

DevOps Space

The most interesting comment for me, is this one:

IronTek Ars Scholae Palatinae

IMO, Microsoft needs to double-down on their Xamarin investment and get .NET up-and-running as a first-class citizen on Linux, OS X, iOS, Android, and Windows.

Port Visual Studio (the real Visual Studio) over to Linux and OS X as well.

I think , Microsoft should do exactly the opposite  in order to become relevant on GitHub.

Microsoft future? What matters a lot is relevance in the so called DevOps Space.

Most prominent project are on the Node.JS platform. Which means Linux or Apple desktops for a lot of developers too,

What I think is rather  important is to understand: Microsoft has no real interest in the future of Xamarin or .NET.  This is why 90% of it was shunned onto the GitHub. You will never see Office open sourced on the GitHub.

Focus is on the (not so) new Windows API : Windows Run Time (Win RT). And that is modern C++.

Windows and Standard C++ and the fashion it was adopted, is more relevant than UWP. That is a real seismic far reaching  Microsoft move.

But, none of this interests the huge DevOps population happily developing and delivering on the Node.JS, NPM and a such. All platform agnostic.

I think the big problem is that DevOps space finds MSFT tools and technologies too easy to ignore.

It is indeed very feasible and logical, to use JavaScript/NodeJS to first develop software and have it running on all the relevant OS-es and their relevant desktops. Updated regularly to ever better releases. As the curious and good MSFT product  VS Code editor shows too. Very fine example to help you understand what am I talking about.

It is also very feasible and logical, to develop and deliver mobile apps using Node.JS. With the help ofAngular, jQuery mobile, and a such.

For both desktop and mobile  teams,  the skill set required is narrow and well defined. If NODE.JS is in the foundations that is.  Cloud IDE’s do proliferate, after mass jumping, on this same bandwagon. Cloud side vendors also offer a lot of free support and space successfully amassing huge  NODE.JS focused DevOps following. Azure included too.

Think GitHub.

No Windows tool or technology in view. Hundreds of thousands of open source projects.  Google, Apple, Facebook, AWS, and the rest. Thousands of relevant software vendors happily keep their code over there too. All happily open. Left to brew to success, nested in the ever helpful DevOps open and young community.

Xamarin is a small proportion. WIN32 is tiny on the GitHub. And that is the problem for the future of Microsoft.