Re: Exactly true
The problem MSFT face is that if enough developers start using Linux they'll realize that there's absolutely no reason to have Windows -- most of the Office stuff is just playthings for Marketing, for example -- and if that dam breaks they're screwed.
They would be screwed if Windows is the be-all and end-all of Microsoft as it once was.
Is it, though? It doesn't even get its own department anymore. When I saw how shabbily Microsoft was treating its own users after the introduction of Windows 10, I wondered, "What company treats its customers like this and expects to keep them as customers?"
The only possible answer I could see at that point was that Microsoft has no expectation of keeping its Windows customers. To me, it looks like MS seeks to squeeze them for all the short-term profits it can, but to have them leave in the end. It seems to me that MS would rather cut itself loose from the baggage and be that cloud company it really wants to be under Nadella. All of this fear about MS sabotaging Linux, while completely justified based on the company's past actions, assumes that MS wants to be in the desktop OS market bad enough to try to knock competitors off their horses. I don't see any evidence that that's the case. Everything to me suggests the opposite.
It's not that MS is now too "nice" to E.E.E. Linux... far from it! The "new" Microsoft, like the old Microsoft, will stop at nothing to reach its corporate goals, as they showed when they were willing to trick people into installing Windows 10 when they were trying not to. It's just that now their corporate goals seem to include being rid of software products that, despite Microsoft's pronouncements to the contrary, can never really be "cloud services." An OS starts with a kernel, and a kernel is too low-level to ever be part of the cloud. Cloud services run on OSes, but they are not themselves OSes. And the "new" Microsoft has little interest in anything that isn't a cloud service.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
