Tech politics aside, kudos to you Microsoft.
Tech politics aside, kudos to you Microsoft.
As far as other tech companies with large R&D budgets, look at Google. However, Google's R&D investment areas are different than MSFT's (apparently they don't do OS research): http://money.cnn.com/2013/11/20/technology/mobile/apple-rd-s...
I know that Google also does a lot of R&D but from what I can tell, it's usually directly related to what they are doing.
And these are only the subjects I personally care about.
.NET compilation to native code via MDIL (Windows 8) and .NET Native, F#, Windows containers are some examples of work that started at Microsoft Research.
I think this is a great example of Microsoft's new-found desire to promote learning and openness, rather than fight against it as they did in the past. My opinion of them over the past few years has slowly been swinging towards positive, and even though I'll likely never give up on Slackware and OpenBSD on the desktop and the server, I'm happy to see this new vision bearing fruit.
We all know the only reason this exists is because Microsoft has little traction in the smartphone market and app developers won't target their hardware. If Microsoft phones were the market leader they would not give two fucks about portability.
Sounds like a serious effort to allow you to develop native iOS apps in VS instead of xcode. You're right the motivation is heavily to minimize the cost of porting/releasing iOS apps to WP/Windows.
I mean it's not everything, give them a little time though.