The problem with that is, I feel like by adopting .NET I am the one being fired at by Microsoft

Realistically, you are. There's a bit of lock-in that occurs here: you've spent X% of your career learning the ____ stack, and there's a huge opportunity cost to switching stacks... so ____'s incentives are aligned to make sure that that X% stays X% over time, that you're learning new ____ stuff, rather than their tech stagnating and you being able to use your now-free learning time to learn a competitor's stack.

I don't mean to be cynical - ____ legitimately want to improve their APIs and the experience of working with their software. But that's what makes the "build an ecosystem" business model so amazing if you can swing it: the crazier your innovations, the more you capture mindshare as people try to keep up, and so you're able to make a great profit while attracting the craziest talent.

Insert Microsoft in the ____'s.

Now, for all the Angular 2 programmers out there, insert Google.

Uh, .NET Standard adheres to the APIs in the .NET Framework. It's the same APIs you have been using for many years and that is the entire point of it all. .NET Core initially used a subset that was too painful to port to by a lot of developers so now they are expanding that subset closer to the .NET Framework.

I know I'm going to be reiterating/rephrasing what you've said, but it's true for any closed stack. Especially Java. At least with C# (maybe not .Net as a whole), at least the language is an ECMA spec (ok, not all versions of C#, but several of them): http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...

I appreciate that MS is working to find a common set of libraries. Eventually this refactoring hopefully leads us to the point where we can all use an open-source common set of libraries and then just add on the Windows, Linux, Android or OSX specific parts.

I like the direction MS is heading, in general, with Windows 10, even if there are certain things I don't like. I like that I can run python under WSL because it has a better CLI experience (in my opinion) than the native windows Python build. I also like they are open-sourcing key technologies.

I just wish they would do better about naming so to reduce confusion. I'm confused just looking at the tables of which versions support which versions of the Standard. In the one chart, in .NET Framework 4.6.1 supports standard 1.4. 4.6.2 supports 1.5, vNext supports 1.6. Then also 4.6.1 supports standard 2.0. So, .NET Framework 4.6.1 supports Standard 1.4 and 2.0, but 1.5 and 1.6 support different (presumably incompatible) standards? The way the table reads it's 2 steps forward, 1 step back.

Google didn't intentionally change the world in Angular 2 to make sure that developers were learning new Angular 2 stuff vs. something else. If they wanted to do that, they were too late, because a lot of people had moved to React already.

Angular 2 is so different because they were trying to fix all of the problems with Angular 1. In fact, Angular 2 didn't even settle on how to do that after starting early releases of Angular 2. But, that wasn't some secret conspiracy to get people to use it. If anything, a lot of people that were sold on Angular 1 are slower to migrate, but that's what they get for trying to do things right.

We can also give Android APIs as an example instead of Angular, or the whole IDE and NDK reboot.

That only applies if your ecosystem is the hype-du-jour.

.NET is massive, it is entrenched, but I doubt it is growing.

So "fire and motion" doesn't apply here.