It seems like the risk of not collecting $500 from a bunch of developers is peanuts compared to the real threat MSFT now faces of people choosing to develop non Windows-specific apps which happen to still work on Windows. How many "apps" have you installed lately which are really just local servers with web front-ends? Qt-based stuff? Java SWT/Swing? What else? While many of these apps likely are built upon 3rd party components developed using Visual Studio (perhaps a free version), the makers of these apps almost always provide a Mac and Linux version. Microsoft has passed a dangerous tipping point where it is now like Apple in the early 90's -- fighting to attract developers who will provide killer, platform-specific apps. We all laughed as Ballmer screamed, "Developers, developers, developers!" However, he's all too well aware of the danger Microsoft faces of losing its dominance as a platform provider. I'd say "lost" as I believe they're already running on fumes, but they still control a huge portion of the desktop market. They should be worrying that developers won't develop anything at all which relies on their APIs and forgo the overly ambitious goal of buying developers' use of Metro. In a storm, any 'ol port will do.
Off topic: the "headlinese" title of this article results in syntactic ambiguity.<p>I read it as: The coder who built Microsoft Answers (<a href="http://answers.microsoft.com/" rel="nofollow">http://answers.microsoft.com/</a>) cried because of a new development kit.<p>Related:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_blossom#In_headlines" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_blossom#In_headlines</a>
In before the hate train starts rolling full steam ahead right over Microsoft. This is a fantastic decision, they obviously really had no choice otherwise a lot of people would have abandoned Windows 8 development and Microsoft would have looked bad launching an OS that didn't have many supported applications.<p>As for Windows XP support, why would Microsoft add in support for an OS they don't really support any more? It has been 11 years, well almost 12 since XP came out and the fact people want to support the outdated OS is like asking Google to start supporting Internet Explorer 6 again.
Are they going to include 64bit support? The earlier versions of Visual Studio Express didn't which was a right royal pain for me. I produce a Python library and since Windows users don't have compilers have binary downloads available. To get 64 bit command line compiles I had to do an unholy wedging of VSE and the platform dev kit. (I'd much rather the Python developers used free software instead of forcing this stuff onto the rest of us.)<p>If anyone is curious you can see the downloads and popularity at <a href="http://code.google.com/p/apsw/downloads/list" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/apsw/downloads/list</a>
Funny ... I haven't heard anyone crying.<p>Oh yeah, they're all developing HTML5 applications that will run on Chrome and Firefox and maybe Internet Explorer. Why worry about the OS' look and feel?