Love or hate, Microsoft certainly did a lot to empower hobbyist and professional developers in the PC/wintel era. Certainly in the 80s SDKs were notoriouly expensive. OS/2 dev kit was $3000. I remember the SGI Irix Developer Option (IDO) was $3500. you could get a C compiler from MS for about $500.
MSDN later become something pricey but wasnt strictly needed to sit down and build code for a PC and ship it
These are the only tools I've really used for the last 30 years of professional development. Before that I was mostly on the Borland C and Turbo Assembler train. Before that it was Spectrum Basic lol
All of these companies wanted to make a profit off developer tools, which is why they charged that much -- there were so few developers compared to end-users. But viable platforms need applications! The only way to get them is to get developers on board, so you want to publish the tools as cheaply as you possibly can.
I think SGI's hardware was exclusive enough to limit their audience anyway, but everyone else, including Apple, really screwed themselves with this.
This is something Steve Jobs fixed at Apple in 1997 by eliminating per-division tracking of profit/loss. When the VPs are freed from profit motive for their direct divisional output, they become responsible for the profit of the entire company. It's worked pretty well.
I think SGI's hardware was exclusive enough to limit their audience anyway, but everyone else, including Apple, really screwed themselves with this.
This is something Steve Jobs fixed at Apple in 1997 by eliminating per-division tracking of profit/loss. When the VPs are freed from profit motive for their direct divisional output, they become responsible for the profit of the entire company. It's worked pretty well.