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Comment by jasonlgrimes | Hacker News Reader

Now they can afford to buy some new tech. Cheaper than innovating weak product.

I wish they'd buy:

* Xamarin and polish the debugging, VS integration and Mono in general (maybe replace a lot of it with MS' .NET implementation? I can dream)

* MvvmCross and polish it and put it into the .NET BCL

* JetBrains (or just ReSharper) and give it a once over (performance- and code analysis-wise) and ship it with VS.

* Maybe Digia for Qt to replace MFC (this one's kind of selfish since Qt is used in places Microsoft probably doesn't care for - maybe they could sponsor the Windows side).

> Cheaper than innovating weak product.

Aside from MFC I think Microsoft has fairly solid solutions to a lot of problems (Azure, Active Directory, Exchange Server, Visual Studio, Office, .NET).

Agreed. I wish they would would buy Xamarin and make it easy to build C# MVC applications and deploy on Linux/BSD. Give me that with entity framework to MySQL/Postgresql and I am sold. Will convert over to using it for everything. Add in ReSharper and it has the potential to be the most productive environment on any platform.

Can't sell windows server licenses if you let people run on Linux.

Xamarins price is way too high and I bet apple would block the apps built with it if msft bought them (and they'd likely sue for reverse engineering).

> apple would block the apps built with it

Apple went there [1] and failed [2].

[1] http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/iphone_agreement_bans_flas...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_and_Adobe_Flash_controver...

MSFT has been in the position of buying pretty much anyone for a long time. I don't see how "now" fits here.

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