Perhaps a better example of the Microsoft strategy would be Windows itself. For many years and several major versions, they went to extraordinary lengths to ensure backward compatibility and stability, so software that ran on Windows from the mid-1990s would still have a reasonable chance of running acceptably on Windows in the late-2000s.

We had almost reached the point where, notwithstanding any commercial licensing barriers, you could either still run application software natively, or it was so old that you could host a virtual machine containing the old OS within the new one. That's a great situation to be in if you rely on the software, and it's also a very nice situation if you write software, because it basically means that once you've got software that works it works forever. A firm foundation keeps everyone safe.

It's regrettable that under Ballmer and now Nadella they seem to have been pushing hard in IMHO the wrong direction with increasingly rapid updates and more reliance on inherently unstable on-line services, instead of playing to those traditional strengths. This makes Windows just as unlikely a prospect for long term stability as anything from Apple or the Linux world these days.

Personally, all I want is a system that I can buy today to do useful work and reasonably expect to still be doing useful work more than a year or two later. It's disturbingly difficult to find software that meets that apparently simple requirement any more.