this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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I think it’s more embrace. They have to compete against so many more entities now.
This is my thought, they've all but lost the battle for cloud servers and they'd rather the developers computers were Windows. WSL allows that.
Azure is their primary revenue source now, they didn't lose anything
Yeah but imagine if they could collect licence fees after every AWS server as well.
The world is not enough for these companies.
My client is spending waaaaaaay more money on Microsoft Online than it ever used to on software licenses. Every single user in the business is costing 🇦🇺$30 per month alone just for their Office suite. That's before you get to the Azure stuff. Some hosted apps cost over 🇦🇺$1k/month to host in Azure.
Before you go too strongly after Microsoft for charging so much, this is cheaper than what we used to pay for running our own SharePoint, Exchange etc farms as well as the infrastructure required to host websites/database etc. All that has been outsourced to Microsoft Online and saves significant money.
Microsoft is doing very well out of its own cloud fees and can cope with AWS, Google and all the smaller private cloud operations getting some of that action.
I know they are doing very well, trust me, I've seen the inside of the beast. It's not Microsoft either, any megacorp will talk to you in terms of how much they lost by not fully monopolising a market segment.
And that is my point, not that they don't make insane amounts of money, but that it will never be enough.
Poorly. WSL is awesome but it's I/O performance is not at a level which will make developers on bigger projects happy.
Azure is enormous, what are you talking about?
I meant running windows on them, its enormous and its all linux servers. I know you can run windows but it'll be a tiny fraction.
Microsoft don’t care what you run on azure, just that you’re using azure. In fact running Linux on azure instead of Windows benefits them because it’s more lightweight so their hardware stretches further.
I think you’re probably right. Microsoft seems less invested in winning an operating system battle at this point. They’re positioning services and abstractions that care less about the end device’s operating system, more so that they’re at least on that device.
I wouldn’t be surprised we see Microsoft “embrace” Proton and Wine in the next 5 to 10 years as it’s far easier to let “the community” predominantly handle supporting legacy Windows versions that have to handle it themselves.
They can’t suddenly lose that entire OS revenue machine however and would need to transition. But I doubt that Redmond are naive to the disruption Wine and Proton are having and how technical users are starting to jump ship.
Xbox is transitioning to "release on everything", so their upcoming games will all work on proton (apart from COD etc that have anti-cheat, although wouldn't surprise me if they make that linux compatible eventually). Microsoft would rather you subscribe to game pass to play their games on Linux than not subscribe to game pass and not give them any money. It wouldn't surprise me if they eventually released a Linux Xbox app.