Software giant Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has been looking outside Windows again, having agreed to buy cross-platform software tools maker Xamarin.
Xamarin's stock-in-trade is selling tools to help software developers who are versed in using Microsoft programming languages, such as C#, devise applications that run on Android and iOS, the dominant operating systems in the mobile world.
Xamarin was already an accredited partner of Microsoft, and its software compilers have been incorporated in Microsoft's Visual Studio 2015 product.
The Seattle-based software behemoth has made a huge pile of money from its decades old Windows operating system (OS), but the OS has not caught on in the world of mobile devices.
Since former chief executive Steve Ballmer moved on, to be succeeded by Satya Nadella, Microsoft has switched to a much more cross-platform mobile approach after its expensive blunder in purchasing fading Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia in an attempt to buy market share for Windows in the mobile device world.
The latest acquisition is a development of this strategy, as acknowledged by corporate vice president Scott Guthrie.
“The combination of Xamarin, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, and Azure provides a complete mobile app dev solution that provides everything you need to develop, test, deliver and instrument mobile apps for every device,” Guthrie said.
The price paid by Microsoft for privately-owned Xamarin was not released, but industry speculation suggested it was somewhere between $400mln and $500mln.
“Xamarin has more than 15,000 customers in 120 countries, including more than one hundred Fortune 500 companies – and more than 1.3 million unique developers have taken advantage of their offering,” said Guthrie in a blog post.
“Through Xamarin Test Cloud, all types of mobile developers—C#, Objective-C, Java and hybrid app builders —can also test and improve the quality of apps using thousands of cloud-hosted phones and devices,” he added.