It's a smart move. It's the "strategy tax" which is dumb. It is extraordinarily rare for it to be a smart business choice to not have all of your products be as promiscuous as possible.
Imagine where .net/visual studio/et al would be today if they'd been shipping official VMs (CLRs) targeting linux/unix ages ago.
At this point it's questionable whether or not office is really going to be the breaking point that keeps people from fleeing the MS ship. More so, there's a strong risk that it could work the other way, that people "building a life" (or a business) outside of the Windows walls could find that it's not so hard to live without office, which would hurt MS even more. Also, ensuring that office remains the de facto business standard for the foreseeable future means that MS will always have that opening to entice people back to the Windows platform, the same way mp3 players enticed people to switch to macs, iphones, and ipads.
How much money would .NET make them if it wasn't attached to Windows OS sales? If they detached .NET & Visual Studio, where will they make the money from it? For Sun, Java at least ran high end server product sales.
It's complicated. The runtime, the libraries, and the web server are all free. But Visual Studio makes money, and the team foundation system makes a lot of money. If you take all of that together then on its own it would be a company with ten figure annual revenue.
In a hypothetical alternate Universe where .net 1.0 launched on linux/unix as well and they were able to gain a lot more traction in those communities then one would expect VS and perhaps TFS sales to increase concomitantly. Also, such an independent company would probably have a wider range of products for sale if they weren't tied to the Windows/Office ATM, though of course that's more speculative.
Imagine where .net/visual studio/et al would be today if they'd been shipping official VMs (CLRs) targeting linux/unix ages ago.
At this point it's questionable whether or not office is really going to be the breaking point that keeps people from fleeing the MS ship. More so, there's a strong risk that it could work the other way, that people "building a life" (or a business) outside of the Windows walls could find that it's not so hard to live without office, which would hurt MS even more. Also, ensuring that office remains the de facto business standard for the foreseeable future means that MS will always have that opening to entice people back to the Windows platform, the same way mp3 players enticed people to switch to macs, iphones, and ipads.