Oh Geesh, now I read the response to your question/post.
Not you, but this is why I quit your ping list.
Almost every reply is a BASH (get it?) of Microsoft.
It gets old. Sure, they suck. It’s Microsoft, right? And Bill Gates left a decade ago.
But when they finally get some good leadership (Satya), no one notices or cares.
Note to people posting: Microsoft is NOT an end user company like Apple. Comparing the two is like comparing apples to oranges, sort to speak.
I love Apple devices. Great stuff! However, IT isn’t just about sitting at home using your iPad or finding a new app for the iPhone. IT is about using systems and devices to make the business more efficient and thus more profitable—as opposed to having to shut down.
Because of the rapid growth in cloud services, and now the fuller, more robust integration of cloud with on-premises servers, this push by Microsoft just makes sense. Those servers run ether Windows Server or Linux. For others (more and more) BOTH.
BTW, to people who use MACs and then run a Windows virtual machine, well, Microsoft loves you for it. You still have to have a Microsoft license to do so. They make as much money, if not more, from those licenses than a big OEM like Dell or HP.
Re: Bill Gates, thank God.
But when they finally get some good leadership (Satya), no one notices or cares.
I am a charter member of the "Microsoft Sucks Worse Than the Vacuum of Space" choir. That said, I think the recent moves by Satya are good. I also feel like they are mostly inevitable. In the enterprise, the only compelling offering is Exchange, primarily because of mountains of inertia and a general dearth of knowledge about alternatives. Microsoft is in some serious trouble because MS-Windows scales for shit.
Of course, the fact that Satya is better than Ballmer is a pretty low bar. He definitely seems to be able to consider alternatives that Ballmer was incapable of. This is good. On the other hand, the ham-handed Windows 10 forced upgrade regime was completely on Satya's watch.
I'm cautiously optimistic that having greater support for Linux is a good thing, as long as Microsoft can keep from executing their standard EEE approach, which would be difficult to execute in this case anyway.
One thing I've found to be really funny to watch over the past few years is seeing die-hard MS-Windows partisans extolling the virtues of Powershell, after making disparaging comments about command line tools like Bash for literally decades. I still shudder every time I have to deal with Microsoft software in any meaningful way, because it is always so clunky to me. The lack of virtual desktops in their default GUI shell still amazes me.