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EyeRelief

What is the motivation behind doing this? To my wary eye, I think this is another way to depress wages.

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If Microsoft open sources anything, their motivation is to depress wages and destroy other people's jobs. Obviously.

Cheaper servers = companies buy more servers = more Windows Server / MSSQL / sharepoint licenses.

Joel Spolsky wrote a good article on this approach:

"Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

[NB Yes it's from 2002 but the basic rules of the game stay pretty constant]

Yes. Software company works to commoditize hardware, news at 11. (This has been MS's strategy since MS DOS days, as outlined in Spolsky's piece.)

Actually, it can be traced back to the Microsoft SoftCard. They made compilers and interpreters for CP/M, but they'd have to port them to run on Apple II's, which would be an enormous undertaking. Instead, they sold a Z-80 coprocessor for Apple II computers that allowed Apple IIs to run CP/M and, therefore, to run Microsoft software.

They tried that too with MSX, which made the front-page a couple days back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367544

How would this depress wages?

By making it appear to be easy, where in reality adding more complexity.

Commoditizing servers gets rid of the extra profits Dell/HP/IBM used to make off server sales. They're basically just killing off the server industry for companies at the scale of Microsoft/Facebook.

It's already dead. I'm not sure it was ever alive. Companies like Google started building their own servers long before present scales were ever reached.

It's most likely due to the new CEO.

This news post is from January. Nadella was appointed in February. Although he's been leading that department for years, so I guess you could say that, but it's not due to him becoming CEO.

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