Microsoft: Look, We Play Well With Others!

Apple! Twitter! Box! The software giant is visibly ditching its standoffish approach.

"And now, we're going to demonstrate adding Windows Azure cloud services to an iOS app, on a Mac."

A Microsoft employee uttered those words. Really.

In a keynote at Microsoft's Build conference for developers Thursday morning, the software giant pushed hard to show a different side. While Wednesday, the first day of the conference, was all about Windows—the operating system that has long been at Microsoft's heart, Microsoft made an appeal for a very different set of digital creators—people who craft code for the Web or mobile apps, for whom Windows is an irrelevancy.

Plays Well With Others

In demo after demo, Microsofties attempted to show they spoke these cloud-born developers' language. Here's Twitter's Bootstrap framework for responsive websites that run well on smartphones and tablets! Here's an app for iPhones, running behind the scenes on Microsoft's Azure cloud! Here's support for Git code repositories in Visual Studio! [...]