Success Quote by Jim Allchin

Allchin’s genial phrasing - “touch a lot of customers” - is corporate diplomacy doing heavy lifting. It’s a soft, almost tactile metaphor for what is really a hard strategic claim: distribution is destiny, and Microsoft intends to be the choke point through which that distribution flows. Developers aren’t being courted for their artistry; they’re being recruited as a labor force that manufactures Windows’s relevance, app by app.

The intent is straightforward: justify making Windows attractive to developers because developers, in turn, make Windows indispensable to everyone else. But the subtext is more interesting. “Make their jobs easier” sounds like benevolence; it’s also a control strategy. Tooling, APIs, documentation, and support aren’t just helpful features - they’re the rails that guide where innovation lands. When the rails are smooth, you don’t wander. “More likely to stay” is the tell: the goal isn’t merely adoption, it’s retention, the quiet corporate euphemism for lock-in.

Contextually, this is classic platform-era Microsoft thinking, forged in the late 90s/early 2000s when operating systems were less a product than an ecosystem in a trench war. Windows needed developers not only to build software but to foreclose rival platforms by making the cost of leaving feel irrational. Allchin’s quote captures the loop at the heart of platform power: make it easy to build here, make it expensive to leave, and let “popularity” do the coercion for you.