How Microsoft dragged its development practices into the 21st century
For the longest time, Microsoft had something of a poor reputation as a software developer. The issue wasn't so much the quality of the company's software but the way it was developed and delivered.
Context & Ripple Effects
The reputation problem this article describes has a documented history in the corpus: Jeff Atwood's 2007 Giving Up on Microsoft captured the developer-side frustration with how Microsoft built and shipped software, and a 2011 Fortune report on insiders believing top management had lost its way showed the malaise ran through Redmond itself, not just its critics.
By August 2014 the behavior is changing in visible ways: alongside the process overhaul Ars documents, Microsoft is shipping a Snipp3t celebrity-tracking app for the iPhone and put its OneDrive client into the Amazon Appstore for Android devices — first-party software living happily on platforms Windows once treated as threats.
First-order effects
- Microsoft's own teams now deliver products on iOS and Android (Snipp3t, OneDrive in the Amazon Appstore), meaning the company's engineering output no longer terminates at the Windows boundary.
- Windows Phone Store crossing 300,000 apps gives the modernized pipeline a measurable outlet, with Microsoft betting the count grows further once universal Windows apps arrive.
Second-order effects
- The platform-lock-in grievance that drove developers away in the 2007 era loses force when Microsoft competes for those same developers' attention on their preferred platforms, raising the bar for rivals who still gate their services.
- Universal Windows apps make one codebase serve phone, tablet, and desktop, which pressures independent Windows developers to restructure their own delivery around Microsoft's new tooling or lose update velocity.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Microsoft's identity shifts from owner of a gated platform to operator of services distributed across every major OS — a structural change in how a legacy software giant earns developer goodwill.
- Delivery practice itself becomes competitive currency: release cadence and cross-platform reach, not just product quality, determine whether an institution sheds a two-decade-old reputational discount.
The trend: Microsoft's arc from the 2007 developer exodus to 2014's cross-platform releases marks a larger transition in which legacy platform owners rebuild trust by decoupling their software from their own operating systems.