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Comment by jackfoxy | Hacker News Reader

Sure would like to know where Visual Studio falls in this. I would think giving away all versions of VS would only benefit Windows and Server sales by encouraging more developers.

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Visual Studio is part of that Server and Tools division's $4.8 billion in revenue.

I suspected as much, but how much of that $4.8?

I don't think they ever directly publish that, but they did publish in 2010, producers of Visual Studio extensions brought in over $400 million in revenue. Considering the people buying those extensions have a full version of Visual Studio, and the cost of VS and MSDN subscriptions, I would not be surprised if those two things account for most of that $5 billion.

Wow. In that case, it seems like it ought to be tempting to double the cost of Visual Studio and give non-business copies of Windows away.

You'd think. But that would reduce the number of Windows developers, so doing that would be eating the seed corn.

Definitely not true. I am a former employee who worked on Visual Studio.

Visual Studio is close to a $1 billion business. The lion's share of the Server and Tools Division is licenses for Windows Server and SQL Server.

considering windows server and mssql server are also in that division i highly doubt that!

VS Express is a free, fully featured IDE. What Pro/Ultimate features would really attract a new set of Windows developers? By the time you need Ultimate features, you can probably afford Ultimate.

It's not 'fully featured' if there's more features it doesn't have which another version does.

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