Science Quote by Miguel de Icaza

“It’s strategic for us” is the tell: de Icaza isn’t pitching .NET as a philosophical ideal or a prettier way to write code. He’s framing it as leverage. The point isn’t the elegance of Microsoft’s stack; it’s the gravity well it creates. If “lots of people” build in .NET, the ecosystem becomes the product, and everyone else has to decide whether to orbit it, translate it, or resist it.

The subtext is a cold-eyed realism about developer behavior. Programmers follow jobs, tooling, libraries, and community momentum. Standards win less by being “open” in the abstract than by being sufficiently convenient, sufficiently staffed, and sufficiently inevitable. De Icaza, coming out of the open-source world, is often read as an evangelist for ideals; here he sounds more like a strategist acknowledging that ideals don’t pay salaries, ecosystems do.

Context matters because .NET was, for years, both a technical platform and a political signal. For free-software advocates, Microsoft’s frameworks carried anxiety about lock-in, patents, and control. For pragmatists, .NET represented modern tooling and a massive installed base. De Icaza’s intent threads that needle: if the world is going to write .NET applications anyway, then building bridges (via compatibility layers, cross-platform runtimes, or tooling) isn’t capitulation; it’s relevance.

The line works because it refuses romanticism. It’s a statement about power in software: whoever owns the developer default owns the future, and strategy is just the adult word for admitting it.