Microsoft programming languages and open source help win customers – Business Insider

Ever since cofounders Bill Gates and Paul Allen launched Microsoft's first product in 1975, programming languages have been a key part of its strategy to win over customers.

Microsoft's first product was Altair BASIC, used to run the BASIC programming language on Altair computers. Since then, Microsoft has developed several other new programming languages, including Visual Basic, C#, .NET, and TypeScript.

Over the years, building these programming languages has been crucial to bringing more developers to its products, particularly now, as it races against Amazon Web Services and Google in the cloud.

"The most important thing is that as the industry moves, we want to meet developers where they are," corporate vice president of Microsoft's developer division, Julia Liuson,told Business Insider.

While Microsoft has always invested in building these languages, its strategy has changed over time, most prominently through its shift towards developing open source software, as shown in 2012 when it launched TypeScript as a more powerful alternative to JavaScript. While Microsoft previously only built proprietary products, TypeScript was totally open source from its beginning. Today, open-source development is key to growing its cloud.

"Microsoft's investment in languages is good it's steady," VP and principal analyst at Forrester, Jeffrey Hammond, told Business Insider. "They're turning over and investing in modern languages. It's had real benefit to their products. The ability to introduce modern concepts as needed but also embrace concepts from outside the organization is one reason we've seen strong growth of Azure."

Here's how emphasizing language development and changing its tune on open source has helped Microsoft win over developers:

Back when Anders Hejlsberg first joined Microsoft 24 years ago, it was a "very different company," he said. Now a technical fellow in Microsoft's developer division, Hejlsberg has helped the company build three programming languages: Delphi, C#, and TypeScript.

"Lots of people love to work on new programming language innovations, but very few people build a programming language that can attract millions," Microsoft's Liuson said. "Anders has done a hat trick: He has done it three times."

While Microsoft has changed in many ways since Hejlsberg joined for example, the development process was much slower and engineers would release products every two years, rather than on a weekly or monthly cadence like they do one major shift stands out: When Microsoft changed its opinion on open source.

Bill Gates is seen in October 2019. Nicolas Liponne/NurPhoto via Getty

At the beginning, all of Microsoft's products were closed source, and it even actively crusaded against open source software in the 1990s and early 2000s, waging war against open source projects like the operating system Linux. While it gradually began doing some open source work, launching TypeScript in 2012 was a turning point, as it was its first programming language that was open source from the very start.

"I've seen transformation that occurred in the company in the last 5-8 years," Hejlsberg said. "It is truly profound. It is truly a different company. These last eight years have seen so much fun because it is so energizing."

Now, Microsoft has made a complete turnaround. It develops its languages in the open and acquired GitHub, the bustling heart of open-source projects around the world. It even made its own legacy programming languages like C# and .NET (which is used for building Windows applications) available as open source.

GitHub CEO Nat Friedman (left) and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (right) Microsoft

With open source development, Microsoft's engineers can easily communicate with the users of the languages to learn what they want. Someone may submit a suggestion through GitHub to fix a bug, and it's possible for an engineer to fix that bug the day of. This was "unheard of in the old days," Hejlsberg says.

"C# is now 20 years old but our development process on C# is every bit active as it always has been," he said. "We're devoted to staying in it in the long term."

Open source also allows developers to build better products faster, Hejlsberg says, as people around the world can contribute to the language remotely. What's more, open source programming languages attracts developers who are sensitive to getting locked into one vendor and want a language that can easily be used on any platform.

"Writing code is the manifestation of the investment you make in your applications," Hejlsberg said. "The code is the artifact that comes out of that. If that code can somehow only function as long as you license with somebody else, that can be problematic. For that reason, there's a strong incentive for developers to view the world through an open-source lens."

Ultimately, the firm's switch to "entirely open source" has been "tremendously important for our accelerated adoption," Hejlsberg said.

Today, JavaScript is the most popular programming language according to GitHub, and it's used to build web applications. As JavaScript continued to grow in popularity, TypeScript emerged as a strong contender for building modern web applications.

"JavaScript programmers wanna write in JavaScript," Hejlsberg said. "Why is it that JavaScript isn't suitable for large scale development? What can we do to fix that but stay in the ethos of the JavaScript community?"

To fix these problems and make a language that's like JavaScript, but more powerful for running large scale applications, Microsoft came up with TypeScript. It's similar to JavaScript and compatible with it, but it also helps developers catch issues and bugs more easily so that their apps run smoothly in web browsers.

And because TypeScript is available as open source, this allowed the language to spread quickly among developers. Today, it's the second most loved programming language, according to the developer Q&A site Stack Overflow.

"I think if you have to look at the modern Microsoft, TypeScript is probably the next big successor to the history of successful Microsoft languages," Forrester's Hammond said.

Hammond only expects TypeScript to keep growing as web technology advances. He says that every time Microsoft designs a new language, it "gets a bit better."

"I think TypeScript is a reflection of that," Hammond said. "In some ways, it's almost like the three bears: Not too firm, not too soft, it's just right."

For Microsoft, it's not just about building its own programming languages. It's also about investing in its developer tools and supporting outside languages as well. For example, Microsoft's Visual Studio Code, a platform for developers to write and edit code, has become the most popular open source project on GitHub.

Read more: Here's why 8.5 million users love Visual Studio Code, the free software that's helping Microsoft win over programmers in the cloud wars with Amazon

Again, all this helps Microsoft lure more developers as customers. And recently, a Gartner report said that Microsoft has the greatest market share of application developer tools.

"Often you'll see someone talk about how wonderful this programming language is and then you discover that the tools are horrible," Hejlsberg said. "Unless you invest both in the language and in the tools, it is very very hard to get growth."

And besides Microsoft languages, the company also supports several other popular programming languages, including Python, C++, Java, Rust, and more. And even though Microsoft didn't build these languages, it still embraces them. Since they are open source, Microsoft can actively contribute to these languages to fix bugs and add new features.

Overall, building and investing in programming languages helps Microsoft bring in more customers. All this has helped accelerate Microsoft's cloud, bolstered by its strong relationships with enterprise customers as well as its investment in attracting developers.

"Azure would be nothing without the interesting applications of developers that run in there," Liuson said. "Having a great set of programming languages and tools to write applications faster and help them deploy Azure will help our cloud strategy."

Relying on open source also let it avoid missing out on any big trends.

"One of the more interesting areas where there might be a weakness from a Microsoft perspective in artificial intelligence," Hammond said. "Python has taken over as the dominant language. While it was not invented at Microsoft, they embrace it strongly."

Not all of Microsoft's languages have become a smash hit. For example, F#, which can be used for app develop, and Q#, which is used for quantum computing, have not yet gained much traction. Still, as quantum computing continues to grow, Q# could become Microsoft's next big language, Hammond says. It, too, is open source.

"Future wise, we are deeply devoted to this continuous journey of investing in open source," Hejlsberg said. "We have gotten much much better and understanding what our customers want because we have this much deeper engaged conversation through the open development process."

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Microsoft programming languages and open source help win customers - Business Insider