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 :)