Redmond’s Age of Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish
Nadella could say that and kinda, sorta mean it. He was made CEO because of his success leading Microsoft’s cloud efforts, which led to Azure becoming the place where most of Microsoft’s money is made. And because enterprise users of Azure are mostly firing up lots of instances of Linux and hardly any instances of Windows, Microsoft is now in the ironic position of making a lot more money selling Linux than it makes selling Windows.
Microsoft continues to have plenty of reasons to discourage desktop use, however. Desktop Linux competes directly with Windows, and although Microsoft’s operating system is no longer the company’s biggest cash cow, it continues to put a lot of a lot of dollars into Redmond’s bank accounts. This puts Microsoft in the position of “loving” Linux the server operating system that runs in data centers and which it sells by the minute in Azure, while desktop Linux remains a threat.