It's a risky move to embrace your competitor's platform. Once this tech matures will people prefer SSH to RDS/WinRM? Will people write software for IIS or will they use WSL to deploy their Apache/Nginx config? When enterprisey software starts shipping with a WSL requirement will admins decide to move to Linux where their software is a 1st class citizen?

Why would you choose to be Windows native when its much easier to go cross platform starting with Linux?

I think the idea is that right now, MS doesn't have much of a choice. Like it or not (and I doubt MS likes it), the server world runs on UNIX/Linux, and out of the four "mainstream" OSs (Windows/Mac /GNU+Linux/Chromebooks+Linux), it's the only one without a UNIXlike back, so while MS is fine on the desktop, they'll have long term problems if developers move to Mac or Linux and the community will see alternatives to Windows.

But in the end, it's not as if Windows is Open Source, and there's no guarantee that WSL will exist in it's current shape forever.

This is actually the whole EEE strategy. You embrace it, as a monopoly you can push your copy over any other, then you "extend" and improve it (so there'll be code which will only work on WSL) and then ... You won.

My company is windows based. The IT department run a bunch of VM's running Linux. But it is always treated as a black box appliance. The admin expertise is still heavily based on the windows stack. I think this tech will make it easier to deploy those sort of appliances on Windows, without needing much Linux admin ability. Windows will compete at a higher level with deployment systems rather than the OS itself.

> one could even argue they are somewhere between the embrace and extend phase.

I see it more as grasping at straws to stay relevant. The Ballmer-era FUD campaign was mostly a failure (and bad PR). "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em".

With Pichai they're steering more towards a service-oriented company. Linux clearly has a place in their vision. You can see this also in their offerings on Azure.

Microsoft is a large company. In recent years, many *NIX developers joined them. Although I don't have statistics.

Gone are the days where its funny or righteous to bash Microsoft on /. heck gone is /.

Its also not only Microsoft; its Wintel at a whole. Desktop market lost a lot of its relative relevance. Intel is also having trouble with ARM platform [1]. That's not only desktop market. ARM's onto the server market as well.

I'm not really backing the above up with sources and numbers though so take it with a grain of salt.

[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/12/02/intel-corp...

the service oriented One Microsoft vision was Ballmer's last major contribution before walking out the door.

https://genius.com/Steve-ballmer-one-microsoft-annotated

Nadella (Pichai is google) is executing the roadmap Ballmer laid.

Ouch, I'm sorry I mixed them up and thanks for the reference on Ballmer's last minute change of course

Agreed. At this point it's like trying to "extinguish" the world's deserts or oceans :)