As sidenote I should mention after reading your comment (which I agree completely) I felt sad for Microsoft, they are really in bad position, they lost mobile war and their most important income (PC sector) shrinking.They are late, and they are losing already.(I know MSFT is strong in enterprise sector)
Yeah I think you're losing perspective that outside of startup hipster tech bubbles, Windows is still the most popular desktop computing platform.
Mobile/tablet devices have struggled heavily at overcoming the one thing that's preventing their full adoption: making them great for content creation, not just content consumption.
A lot of big tech companies aren't building their products on .NET, for a variety of reasons that mostly boil down to it not being the right tool for the job. Recently the .NET web dev situation has improved. (Whether it has improved relative to the alternatives is arguable.) But when those companies were getting started the original iteration of ASP.NET was the only game in town, and it was very much not something you'd want to use for what any of those companies do. Nor was it intended to be.
.NET's always been more of a player on the in-house enterprise dev front, and probably always will be. (That might change with .NET Core, but it also might not.) Which means that you're not going to see much about .NET on TechCrunch. Inventory & financial management for Fortune 500 companies might be the silent majority for software development work, but it's rarely newsworthy.
Their consumer product escapades are very visibly, famously star-crossed, but their revenues have always shown consistent growth, and over the past few years they've had some realizations and made some re-alignments that put them in a good strategic position for supporting all their other operations.
That is a Silicon Valley view of Starbucks full with Macs and iPhones.
Here in Europe Microsoft is doing just fine across the continent companies, not only enterprise. Including selling Windows licenses for computers used in Android development.
Anectdote, but all Android developers (and WP devs forcwhat it's worth) are uding Macbooks Pro as their work machines. That's in Europe, and not even in Western.
I wonder how many of those devs "pivoted" from being web devs.
Best i can tell, Mac got a inroad in the web development world thanks to:
A. Being unix based and thus similar to the then prevalent LAMP stack.
B. Apple having a entrenched position in media production, and web development, via newspapers and broadcasters going online, becoming a part of that economy.
A) was important: Windows was going through some painful transitions and still required paid compiler licenses, which meant porting open source apps was painful, and while Linux was many things, a comfortable desktop OS was not one of them, especially if battery life or not crashing mattered to you (usually video driver or power management bugs rather than the kernel but people with jobs to do don't make that distinction).
A Mac was the one OS where it was easy to run PHP and Photoshop, and the small size + long battery life era starting with the Titanium PowerBook didn't hurt at all. I knew it was going to be interesting when all of the developers and Unix admins I knew started buying Mac laptops for daily use. If only I'd bought more AAPL at $17…
Well, I am yet to work in any client that uses Mac for any kind of development besides iOS, and even when they do, they timeshare an iMac across teams.
That is one thing to ponder. For MS the home/consumer desktop has been pretty much a means to an end.
This in that they can point to the consumer sales and say that those are people already familiar with MS products, and thus require less training when hired by a company.
That is, if said company base their computing environment on MS products.
MS going cloud is basically saying to said companies that MS can handle all the day to day support issues, for a fee. Thus the companies can reduce the size of their IT department.
