Just use Linux and be done with it!
I think that Microsoft know exactly why the clever people are using Linux, and I do not see any reason to try and make Windows more line Linux.
However, Microsoft could release their own Linux distribution and this would be (almost) comparable to Apple utilising similar technology in their O/S.
They would still have a business model because their distro would be made to work with the rest of their software and the community would benefit because it would be open source so everyone else not using the MS distro could still use the same technology.
This would (hopefully) mean that they could not use their old method of taking a standard and making it proprietary.
IT administrators would most likely not bother extracting the relevant parts from the Microsoft distro because Microsoft would most likely give their fully integrated distro away for free (you would continue to buy Exchange/Office365 and MSSQL etc..)
I am sure that Microsoft would love to see the top500 list of supercomputers listed as running a Microsoft distribution because at the moment they embarrassingly really only have a very small number of rather limited super computers running their Operating systems - mainly because what they make is non performant and just does not scale and is closed source and lacks security and is not modular non portable etc - oh damn it, I have just given away some of the reasons why people use Linux :)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
