Microsoft Buying Xamarin?
Mary Jo Foley's reporting that Microsoft may be either buying tool-maker Xamarin outright, or making a big investment in the company. It's all speculative at this point, but this is an idea that just makes too much sense.
Xamarin makes it possible for .NET/C#-focused developers to create apps for the two most popular mobile platforms -- iOS and Android -- without leaving the comfort of their favorite language and IDE (that would be Visual Studio, of course). Xamarin has been making these products for a number of years now; they used to be called MonoTouch and Mono for Android, and have morphed into Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android. Xamarin has been churning out frequent updates, and further integrating the products with Visual Studio. I've felt for some time that Xamarin would be absorbed into Visual Studio, eventually becoming a transparent part of the IDE.
Note that these reports are only substantial rumors at this point. But the rumors have credibility, at least in part, based on the natural fit of these parts. It's not the type of head-scratcher that some other deals were. Xamarin and its founders, Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman, are serious software developers, and make a serious product that many developers think is the best way to write cross-platform code for the mobile platform (you may have noticed that we think it's serious enough to have a column dedicated to the topic).
It would also be a forward-looking move for Microsoft. It needs to get iOS and Android developers to use both Visual Studio and Windows Azure, and integrating Xamarin into its core IDE would do that. It would also encourage more development in C# among the non-C# crowd, who may like what the language offers, but are wary of any Microsoft-branded stuff.
It's hard to think of any downsides for developers of such a deal. One fear could be that the pace of innovation that Xamarin now shows could be slowed, once it's absorbed in the Redmond behemoth. But, at least in the dev area, Microsoft has truly adopted a speedy release cycle of upgrades and fixes. After all, Visual Studio 2013 came just a year after the previous major version, and is now approaching Update 2. It's hard to imagine that Xamarin wouldn't be similarly upgraded, especially since it'll be baked in.
Worth noting, too, is that new CEO Satya Nadella is a techie, so the potential acquisition might appeal to his geeky nature. He understands development in a way ex-CEO Steve Ballmer couldn't hope to, and may be quicker to understand the benefits involved.
This is all speculation, of course, but it's something I think should happen. What do you think?
Posted by Keith Ward on 03/18/2014