Microsoft isn’t making Nintendo’s mistakes anymore

Microsoft announced it will support writing Android and iOS development right within visual studio. Sort Of. It’s using cross platform rather than native development. But still, this is quite different from the Microsoft of my youth, that outside of the Mac BU, simply didn’t acknowledge anything outside their own universe.

If you’ve looked into Azure, you might’ve noticed that one of your development choices is on a full LAMP stack; all 4 letters of LAMP, Linux, Apache, mysql, and php. It’s not php running through IIS on a Windows machine. The only Microsoft product involved is presumably Hyper-V at a layer outside your VM. Mac native apps Coda and Sequel Pro have no problem connecting.

Even Sharepoint 2013 “just works” on all modern browsers.

Office on iPad exists now.

Nintendo, by contrast, is still content to slowly bleed money on consoles that aren’t selling. Still content to live in the world of yesteryear where Nintendo is unquestionably vertical, rather than take advantage of the license to print money that official ports and emulators on other platforms could potentially bring them. They (sort of) seem to understand that graphics upgrades to their platinum titles every generation is what we want. They’re hit or miss on continuing those legacy titles with new games…