The most successful programming language startup (Microsoft) ultimately had to pivot to operating systems to go public and then pivot again to office suites and cloud computing to stay relevant.
More recently they wanted to monetize C#, but found it best to make the language itself free and open source while monetizing through complementary products.
I'm sure they still make good money from MSDN subscriptions but the value of that is deeply tied in with Microsoft's own platform (Windows, SQL Server, Azure, etc).
What are complementary products for c#?
Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange, MS office, Dynamics, anything else in the enterprise suite where C# is a good integrator.
When did they ever want to monetize C#? That is pure FUD. It's been an ecma standard from the start with multiple compiler implementations including Mono since very early 2000s.
Yeah but Mono wasn't really close to the official implementation in terms of performance or completeness.
>More recently they wanted to monetize C#,
what? src?
Where is the evidence to support this? Utter fabrication.
Someone gets it. There is no true computer science company. Google works on search and retrieval which is one of the fundamental problems in CS. But they sell ads. Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS are in a way programming language startups in their own right but we don’t see them as such.