Does Microsoft, as a big corporate company, live in a vacuum where they think their products can exist and keep on being profitable without noticing how other competitive products work? Take PHP as an example. Microsoft have made sure that PHP can run on their web servers (IIS), and not just Apache, which makes you think that they have realised the importance and relevance of PHP in today’s web development environment. I mean its so easy to make obvious associations that say ASP sites can ONLY run on IIS or PHP site can only run on Apache, but these simplistic associations do not apply to business where a hybrid model often contributes to a business not because it runs better on one or other platform, but because it makes business sense.
Another immediate example I can think of is Twitter, which is used by Microsoft themselves, and not because its a Microsoft product or not but because of Twitter’s reach, and this translates into business sense. Microsoft can make more people aware by using something like Twitter.
