More ranting! Why on earth must you pay for a copy of Visual Studio? Microsoft should be giving it away free with all copies of Windows. Or at least making it free to download.
"Through their Empower ISV program you can get five complete sets of MSDN Universal (otherwise known as "basically every Microsoft product except Flight Simulator") for about $375. Command line compilers for the .NET languages are included with the free .NET runtime... also free. The C++ compiler is now free. Anything to encourage developers to build for the .NET platform, and holding just short of wiping out companies like Borland."
Just trying to figure out how to get onto the Empower ISV program (plus the $875 per year for us in Australia!) is just proving my point about how hard it is to start developing for MS compared to Google now: https://partner.microsoft.com/
Get a Microsoft Live ID, sign up for the partner program, then what do you do? (Not supported in Firefox either)
How is this going to compete with the ease and speed of Google's offering or even Ubuntu+Lamp/ROR etc. and el cheapo shared hosting?
Joel's point was that they have to put at least some hurdle, otherwise, they would crush Borland and co, which would be a bad thing, since they provide devs useful tools.
I don't really know whether that's true or not, but it makes some sense.
Plus, MS has 99% control over the desktop, so it doesn't really make sense for them to give the tools away. Or else what, Linux will steal market share from them?
You honestly don't need the full version to make great stuff. Yeah, there are some features, but I don't use most of them.
..You do live in a capitalistic society you know ;) People make things to sell them. Sometimes there's a specific business advantage to giving something away for free, but I can't imagine that the returns from doing that would be more than the returns from people buying Visual Studio.
Sorry for the harsh(ish) words, but this is America, and you don't get much for free. The ad-driven revenue model is beautiful, amazing, capitalistic communism, but not applicable to everything.
But in the world of information goods (I'm not going to link to the book, you know where you can get it:-), the externalities created by giving something away for free might be worth more in the long run than the foregone revenue from said product. Or, in the immortal words of Steve Ballmer, "DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!".
