Microsoft is under price pressure in a variety of product categories from the open source movement and others. Most folks are probably unaware that the true core of this is not Office and Windows, despite how important they are to MS’s revenues. A developer friendly culture and strong development tools are a big piece of what’s contributed to MS’s ongoing success – these lead to a healthy software base for their operating systems and indirectly to the broader use of their products. If folks are writing all the books in your language, it’s the language most folks are likely to use is a way to think of this if you’re a non-technical person. It’s actually a good bit more complex than this, but it’s a really important contributing factor to Microsoft’s dominance.

Meanwhile if you take a look around higher education these days, what you’ll discover is that more and more computer science programs are teaching Java and very few are teaching .Net or C#, Microsoft’s preferred languages. If a school’s not teaching Java it’s teaching C. (or really, more accurately, they’re teaching both, but almost none of them are teaching .Net or C#). There are a variety of reasons for this but a huge one is the free availability of great development tools for Java, especially Eclipse. Additionaly even Apple is releasing its dev tools for free these days, as are Sun and IBM, and there are a variety of free alternatives available for linux.

All of this represents a medium term risk for Microsoft as newer generations of software engineers come up using non-MS development tools. Microsoft is of course not stupid, so what’s a struggling monopolist to do? We should all know by now simply by looking to the past. Release the developer tools for free, which they’ve just announced.

Normally I wouldn’t link to stuff like this since it’s really over the head of basically all of my audience, but here’s the thing: having a windows compatible IDE and compiler available is pretty handy at times, and this deal, at least for now, is only promised for the next year or so. So take a moment and go here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/support/install/

And download your tools. Just tuck the CD images away on your hard drive somewhere until the day you need them, in total it’s less than 2 gigs of data. These are unrestricted licenses and the link is to a download location that doesn’t require registration or product keys. These are not full versions of the products, but they’re more than sufficient for any hobbyist’s need or the casual geek who just wants to compile something they’ve grabbed off of sourceforge.