Microsoft's "Love" of Linux

[sman]

Microsoft's "Love" of Linux

"http://pedrocr.pt/text/microsofts-love-of-linux/"

Recently Microsoft has been making a lot of announcements and releases of technology that fall under a supposedly “Microsoft Loves Linux” type of strategy. This is particularly noteworthy given the history of Microsoft since the end of the 90s. Their internal policy was a full attack on Linux1. and they were convicted by a US court of anti-trust violations for acting out that strategy2. If they have indeed now fully turned around and now “love” Linux that would indeed be big news.

Two particular strategies became famous in how Microsoft treated Linux (and also other technologies and competitors):

Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD): a marketing strategy designed to discredit the technology and it’s proponents by spreading that open-source software infringes on Microsoft patents and is costlier to operate among other claims3.
Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish (EEE): a technical and market strategy of starting by becoming compatible with an upcoming technology only to extend its monopoly by creating incompatible extensions and using them to push out the original competitors4.

To finish, this is a theory, and as any good theory needs to be falsifiable. So here are the kinds of news that would require re-evaluating it because they would definitely signal some kind of “love” for Linux:

Microsoft launches Office for desktop Linux or otherwise makes the Linux Office experience go from fourth-rate6 to first-rate (e.g., by making Office a web-only product accessible from any standards-compliant browser).
DirectX, Win32 and other Windows-only APIs are dropped. New apps opt-in to a brave new world of .NET/Vulkan/etc that can be equally run on Linux and old apps run in backwards compatibility mode like DOS apps.
Active Directory and associated technologies are released as 1) a set of closed source containers or VMs to be launched in the Linux cloud of your choice and 2) a fully featured open-source client stack that plugs into standard Linux technologies allowing corporate admins to manage Windows and Linux clients with the same tools

I think all of these would be strategic blunders from the point of view of Microsoft shareholders. But they’re the kind of things you do for love.