Completely agree with you , But even all node.js dev's are user of unix/vim/emacs (I am emacs user though) this does not mean Microsoft should not develop tools for its users.Microsoft try to attract developer to its own platform , which is OK , at least I think it is ok. Every Company doing same thing.

I wasn't ever trying to say this is a bad effort or anything. I think it's a relatively good thing. I just don't see azure as sustainable.

Why not? Azure is platform agnostic at this point, it isn't just a home for .NET code.

The same reason I use *nix on the desktop: I like to be able to poke around on everything.

It's really scary for someone new, but power users like environments where everything is modifiable and hate GUIs.

I like being able to configure nginx a certain way. I like being able to get into a psql shell and play around with my data. I don't want to just give someone a git repository and magically press some buttons in their UI and have it work, because when you inevitably realize you want to do something special, you're stuck.

Not to be at all rude or confrontational, but I think there's a lot of folks in the open-source communities that have no idea how drastically their numbers are DWARFED by the number of devs working in enterprise computing. And those enterprise devs often have no use at all for "poking around", for better or worse: their priorities are other, entirely.

Different strokes for different folks, but there's a lot more folks stroking the corporate way.

That approach doesn't seem to have hurt Heroku. And you know you can spin up a Linux VM in Azure, right?

MS has been pushing more and more for all of their tools to be scriptable through powershell, to give you just that. Getting stuck is harder and harder these days. Hell, powershell has features I'd love unix shells to copy, like being able to import libraries and use their classes and functions like any other shell command.

Yeah, I don't use vim, but Emacs, so that generalization is totally off.

Yeah I was being hyperbolic, but my point still stands. The LARGE majority of developers have accepted unix as their overlord, and that poses a huge problem to microsoft as they're a second thought. They're forced to try to fit new frameworks into their ecosystem, rather than on unix where developers expect it to run.

I see it ultimately as damage control. With the overwhelming majority of developers on unix, you're not going to see microsoft hang out in the server market for very long. I think they'll hang onto the office crowd, but nothing on the backend.

This, of course, is just the opinion of a 20 year old unix nerd, who became one because his father is a microsoft fanboy. I rebelled in my teenage years by infuriating my father and installing linux. I still think I raise some valid points.

What makes you think that Microsoft can't have a part of the Unix server slice, either? Have you seen e.g. this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2015/02/03/coreclr-is...

(specifically the part that says "We will be adding Linux and Mac implementations of platform-specific components over the next few months.")

Or the part where ASP.NET vNext runs on Mono as the officially supported platform?

http://graemechristie.github.io/graemechristie/blog/2014/05/...

What evidence do you have that the majority of developers are on Unix? Just web devs or all devs?

I doubt that it's true in either case. IT departments around the world employ programmers to make all sorts of business apps including internet/intranet web apps. Even some very small companies have custom apps to do business and the vast majority of businesses are using Windows.

There seems to be a common thread on HN of people assuming that trendy startups are the entirety of the software industry.

And this is a great development - it means for future enterprise projects, Node will become a more realistic choice, because it means that using Node on a project doesn't require orgs to build entirely new infrastructure to support * nix deployments or dev environments.

For the most part, npm packages work fine on both Windows and nix platforms. However, it is pretty clear that most are developed on, and have fewest problems with, nix. I believe that is due to the massive popularity of Macs with the JavaScript-focused web dev crowd.