See also Microsoft's struggle to maintain mindshare in the early 00's/10's, when the only way to develop on Windows was to pay thousands of dollars for VS licenses and platform documentation.
From 2004, which some might argue should count as the early 2000-2010s:
> But they really want to give away the development tools. Through their Empower ISV program you can get five complete sets of MSDN Universal (otherwise known as “basically every Microsoft product except Flight Simulator“) for about $375. Command line compilers for the .NET languages are included with the free .NET runtime… also free. The C++ compiler is now free.
