Ask HN: Is Microsoft loves Linux a big “Embrace, extend and extinguish? - punnerud
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1123581321
I do not think so, only because it's simply not possible anymore due to
Microsoft's minority server and mobile market share. Microsoft can make plenty
of money in the "embrace" phase. Extend may happen at some point down the
road, but seems no more of a concern than what Google, Apple, Amazon, Samsung,
Sony and Facebook are attempting to do with their various devices and
platforms.

Edit: my justification for Microsoft making "enough" embracing Linux/open
source is that the computing/software market is larger than it used to be.
There is room for many large companies to grow nearly as fast as they'd like
-- and I expect that trend to continue.

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peller
Say what you will about Balmer, but I think he was right when he chanted
"Developers, Developers, Developers." To me, the Windows Subsystem for Linux
is their attempt at keeping web developers using Windows desktop systems. (And
by extension, their admittance that the era of M$ desktops reigning supreme
has begun its steady decline.) Perhaps I'm biased (quite likely) but I see a
company scrambling defensively more than the monopolistic "my way or the
highway" we got in decades past - Apple and Google now enjoy that position,
not so much Microsoft.

~~~
samfisher83
They still have nearly 90% market share of the desktop market.It hasn't really
been declining that much. Most people who work still use windows at work.
People still use excel and word. I think you underestimate how important they
still are.

~~~
peller
Yes, fair enough. I didn't make myself clear enough, because I was referring
to the share of developers, where my hunch is that a lot of devs have migrated
to OSX, but you're probably still right.

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sharemywin
Too big a market to not compete.

By The Cloud Market's latest analysis of operating systems on the Amazon
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Ubuntu has approximately 135,000 instances. In
second place, a long, long way back, you'll find Amazon's own Amazon Linux
Amazon Machine Image (AMI), with 54,000. Lagging even farther behind, there's
Windows with 17,600 instances. In fourth and fifth place, you'll find CentOS,
8,500, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), 5,600.

