Always remember to lift the goalposts with your knees, not your back.

Yep, except in this case is just one goalpost and everyone wins. Now we can enjoy using software as MS Office and userland from Linux distros in the same machine seamlessly.

This is the "embrace" phase. It also kind of encompasses "extend" by adding hardware support via Windows drivers. This alone is not enough to get to "extinguish" though, so allow me to make a prediction.

The next step is fully locked down hardware that requires a signed OS. Linux will not run on it, but MS will pretend to support you by allowing linux apps to run on their kernel. Then, once no hardware will allow you to run linux natively they will depreciate it and get people to migrate to better supported APIs of their own.

People are just walking right into this as if none of Microsofts history ever happened.

The only OK scenario is that MS becomes a larger version of Redhat and migrates users the other direction. Is that happening? No. It's all about bringing your toys to their house.

Problem with this line of thinking is that operating system kernel matters. It does not anymore. What matters now is: if people are buying their cloud solution. No one cares about desktop users, no one cares about selling server OS. Real money is in big/medium companies buying their cloud stuff with nice monthly subscription. Good luck making people pay you every month for an OS, they don't want to upgrade and pay for new one even in 10 years so running Win XP.

In that line of thinking you also want costs of running your own cloud solution as low as possible, so it kind of even makes sense to phase out Windows because all competitors are running their cloud on Linux based systems, where they get all upsides of collaboration on Linux. Where MS trying to run all their stuff on Win pour money into something they could have for free or just also investing a lot less into Linux than what they spend maintaining Win.

> No one cares about desktop users, no one cares about selling server OS.

I don't see this in reality though. Any kind of corporate office IT is still firmly in the hands of Microsoft and Windows and I don't see any change for that on the horizon. Quite the contrary as IT departments have to double down on applying the Microsoft way with Windows 10 Enterprise and its changed licensing scheme. Where you've been able to dodge having a machine dedicated to license management (Windows Server, of course), you now are forced into a different licensing setup with Windows 10 Enterprise. Why Windows 10? Because Microsoft forbids you to use anything older on new hardware. Why Enterprise? Because you can't reliably make Windows 10 Pro stop phoning home about the documents you are opening. The only offer here is Windows 10 Enterprise.

All this futzing around with open source and Linux subsystems is just for the developer facing part of Windows. All the other areas, those that developers rarely encounter unless they talk to IT, are still shaped by the same Microsoft of 10 or 15 years ago.

Microsoft has seen that there was a huge brain drain towards apps running on Linux servers, developed on Macs (webdev, containers, deep learning, ...).

The new strategy is to get developers back on Windows via Linux. Once it's the new norm to run your apps in Linux containers that run inside Windows Server 2022, developed on Windows 10 machines, they are going to edge Linux out of the equation again. You won't be able to switch your containers away from Windows after that.

Believing that it doesn't matter how your end user devices fit into corporate IT or ignoring what steps Microsoft has taken to make Windows Server the default in the cloud is really dangerous.

That kind of locked down hardware already exists, and microsoft never needed to make any kind of argument about how you can technically run linux in a VM.

In other words, I'm not worried about WSL as a vector.

Exactly this. I still remember M$ playing rough in the browser game. Bad actors never change. You can purge "bad apples" again and again, change masks, pretend to be fluffy and lovable, but you're still same old evil co. We remember. We see you snooping. We see you seething with hate for FOSS underneath your let's opensource .net core mask.

And I, personally, will never forgive M$ for Elopcalypse, burning platform and death of nokia.

MS is actually walking back from lockdown. New Qualcomm ARM laptops allow you to disable secure boot exactly like on old x86 ones.

They don't need to do this anymore, pushing Windows is not their priority, they want to get people on Azure, Office 365 and Xbox live. Everything is about services these days.