Dan’l Lewin, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President for Strategic and
Emerging Business Development (SEBT) was in Cambridge today to have breakfast with some local entrepreneurs While Microsoft has always competed vigorously in the application business, it has also actively courted developers, even those of competing products. As desktop applications got networked together and client-server became the dominant paradigm, developers naturally gravitated towards the server platform that paralleled the client. With the rise of the Web, however, developers had the choice of Linux or WIndows, and as it turns out Linux was just the beginning of a collection of open source tools such as Ruby on Rails and Drupl.
Dan'l was here in Cambridge to listen, and to learn how to build closer ties to the Boston-area ecosystem of developers, academics, and venture capitalists. He also described what Microsoft was doing to win over the next generation of developers, including a program called
BizSpark that provides startups with everything Microsoft makes, for free, for three years. Microsoft is doing some innovative stuff, including the
Azure cloud computing platform. Programs like BizSpark and a concerted effort to contribute to the developer community should serve them well, if they can win the hearts and minds of each new generation of developers.
After the meeting, I got a tour of Microsoft's Cambridge facility from Reed Sturtevant and Katie Rae. (Photos
here.) With the help of
SkB Architects of Seattle they've transformed an otherwise well-placed but undistiguished office building at 1 Memorial Drive into a space that makes you feel creative as soon as you walk into it. Now if it was only available to people who didn't work at Microsoft.
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