Have you seen the Visual Studio Express SKU? Or pricing on Lightswitch?


>Nice summation.
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>Accidentally, I just wrote this today. Which proves to be a part of the same trend: Microsoft (and Apple and a few others) think that tools like Fox, where you invest a few hundred bucks and you can do anything you want, should not exist. Want to be a programmer? Either work for a corporation, which will buy developer tools in the same order of $ magnitude as the developers' salaries combined, or fork out a few thousand and hope that it's not all obsolete by the time you got a distributable product. They don't really care whether you sell anything, unless you sell a lot. Then they'll try to buy you, steal from you, or just develop a piece of crap that looks nicer and does more or less the same thing as yours (actually, far less) and you sue them if you feel like.
>
>The small players are to be consumers of tools, not real players.