They're very late to do this IMO, but better late than never. I am certain that VMWare has not been selling many Workstation licenses to personal users (costing ~$300 each) and making the products free gives free advertising and mindshare to VMWare. Visual Studio is a good example of this, Microsoft making Visual Studio free for personal use in 2014 provided a huge boost to a platform that a lot of people had written off as dead, irrelevant, gray corporate software.
Except that VMWare is owned by Broadcom, which is known for only being interested in Fortune 500. That doesn't at all apply to Microsoft. No sane people will buy into VMWare anymore if 500k in cash is not a rounding error of your budget.
> VMWare has not been selling many Workstation licenses to personal users (costing ~$300 each) and making the products free gives free advertising
Not really. The VMWare Workstation Player had the same engine (but less management functionality) so personal user could actually use a VMWare virtualization product. For basic usage (including snapshotting), which fits a non-commercial user, it was a fitting choice.
Therefore, it's good that they're essentially giving more functionality for free, but they did have a free offer before (for non-commercial users).
Primary IDE for Unity and Unreal. Microsoft has been extending beyond Microsoft platforms, so I imagine a decent chunk of Visual Studio use is for cross-platform development.
It's probably the best C++ IDE out there, with a great debugger. For C# a lot of people prefer Rider, but in terms of free options VS is much better than VS Code.
