Microsoft’s renewed embrace of developers, developers, developers, developers

Microsoft's love for developers is well-known and has been enthusiastically expressed over the years. Windows' strength as a development platform-the abundance of custom, line-of-business applications, games, Office integrations-has given the company an entrenched position in the corporate world, ubiquity in Western homes, and extensive reach into the server room.

In the past, Microsoft's focus on developers had a certain myopic quality. One manifestation of this that was close to my heart was the development of the company's C and C++ compiler-or perhaps I should say, non-development. Microsoft's compiler did not support the C99 standard (and still does not today, though it's better than it used to be), and for a dark period through the 2000s, it made only half-hearted attempts to support the full C++98 and C++03 standards. The failure to support these standards meant that many open source software libraries were becoming difficult or impossible to compile with Microsoft's own compiler, making Windows at best a second-class citizen.

I asked Microsoft about this many times, wondering why the company didn't appear to care that it was making Windows irrelevant to these groups. The response was always unsatisfactory: the existing body of Windows developers wasn't demanding these features, and hence they were unimportant. Never mind that there was a wider community of developers out there that Microsoft was making unwelcome on its platform.

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