The return of multi-platform, part two

Building software to run on one platform is hard. Building software to run on multiple platforms is harder. So why would one? The short answer is: Because you have to.

When Microsoft dominated IT, one could live entirely within the Microsoft world. Microsoft provided the operating system (Windows), the programming languages (Visual Basic, Visual C++, C#, and others), the programming tools (Visual Studio), the database (SQL Server), the web server (IIS), the authentication server (ActiveDirectory), the office suite (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook), the search engine (Bing), cloud services (Azure), ... everything you needed. For any question you could pose (in IT), Microsoft had an answer.

But the world is a large place, larger than any one vendor and any one vendor's offerings. Ask enough questions, try to do enough things, and you eventually find a question for which the vendor has no answer (or no suitable answer).

Microsoft's world ends at mobile devices. The Surface tablets and Windows phones have seen dismal acceptance. Instead, people (and companies) have adopted devices from Apple and Google. If you want a solution in the mobile space, you have to work with those two. (Well, you can limit your offerings to the Microsoft platforms, at the cost of a large portion of the market. You may be unwilling to make that trade-off.)

Microsoft has decided to expand to multiple platforms. They offer Word and Excel on Android and iOS devices, which means that Microsoft is *not* willing to limit themselves to Windows mobile devices. They are not willing to make the trade-off.

Beyond office applications, Microsoft has started to open its .NET framework and CLR runtime for other platforms (notably Linux).

With Microsoft embracing the notion of multi-platform, other vendors may soon follow. I suspect Apple will remain a "closed, everything Apple" company -- but they focus on consumers, not enterprises. Vendors of enterprise software (IBM, Oracle, SAS, etc.) will look to operate on multiple platforms. IBM has supported Linux for quite some time.

Microsoft's support of multiple platforms gives legitimacy to the notion. It's now "okay" to support multiple platforms.