Microsoft started focusing on the agnostic mobile approach since Satya Nadella was appointed as CEO. The company created strong versions of Office for mobile OS — Android, iOS and Windows 10 Mobile.
Microsoft takes off its mobile journey from Nokia and recently landed at Xamarin. On 25th Feb 2016, Microsoft announced its ownership over a trending startup – ‘Xamarin’. The ability to build a cross-platform mobile application has now been acquired by Microsoft at a secret price.
As Microsoft’s Corporate VP Scott Guthrie notes:
With today’s acquisition announcement, we will be taking this work much further to make our world-class developer tools and services even better with deeper integration and seamless mobile app dev experiences. The combination of Xamarin, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, and Azure provides a complete mobile app dev solution that provides everything you need to develop, test, deliver and instrument mobile apps for every device.
Xamarin Insights
Xamarin holds 15,000 customers and among these few of them are big giants like Coca-Cola and JetBlue. The feature which has allowed Xamarin to rise is – writing code in a single programming language and running it on multiple OS. This agnostic app development scheme has attracted Microsoft towards Xamarin. It also offers new avenues for developers to test those apps with the help of thousands of cloud-hosted devices. The main product of Xamarin depends upon Microsoft’s Visual Studio software, so this acquisition is a natural pairing.
Beneficial outcomes
Gates are open for Microsoft’s developer community to give a shot for Xamarin development. The expenses on Xamarin subscription would be trimmed down which will open the doors for small or independent developers.
Another beneficial outcome would be, the UWP can be used for iOS, Android and Windows. Microsoft has to think of some solution as Xamarin’s implementation of XAML and UWP is incompatible.
Threats and Risks
Everything is channeled perfectly as per plan. What’s going to be wrong with this step? Just like the founders of Xamarin have sustained the open and collaborative culture which can be doubted when in hands of Microsoft. It may not turn to be an easy fit with Microsoft’s corporate culture.
