And I'm sure they will. . . but lately Microsoft seems to have grown up and learned to not create incompatible extensions. Perhaps they're finally starting to realize that nobody really loves them, so if they refuse to be nice to other children then they'll just get kicked out of the schoolyard. (Ballmer and upper management may not have, but they're facing the real possibility of a mutiny right now.) So it'll hopefully just end up being the kind of situation where if you switch platforms you'll lose some of the bells and whistles that were provided in a library on the old platform. Just like what would happen if you switch from one open-source platform to another.

What concerns me more is:

> the company is providing “connectors” for moving data between the two.

Microsoft loves to sink a lot of time into gee-whiz crap that lets their MVCs throw together gee-whiz crap using GUI tools without ever writing any code. They love it so much that they often waste all their effort on that stuff without bothering to get the fundamentals in order, and the end result is unusable garbage like much of ADO.NET and early versions of Entity Framework. That one sentence makes me fear more of the same old garbage: We'll get a port of Hadoop that comes with a plethora of toys in the System.DraggyDroppy namespace for impressing the suits, but is crippled by a broken set of bridge libraries for the programmers.

Which is fine. A Windows port of Hadoop isn't really necessary. We can just keep using REST or whatever to keep the Windows servers talking to the servers that do actual work, and Microsoft can keep chasing its own tail while it slides into irrelevance, and everyone can be happy.