I'm starting to see a strategy here. I've been wondering how Microsoft can make money from all.this open source activity. Their platform is becoming obsolete, but is being replaced by OSX, iOS, and android. That makes developers unhappy because of the multiple OSes they need to support. But MS can step in and bring their own platform as an abstraction over these others and make developers happy. Build once, target everything. I'm betting key pieces will not become open source, they want to have control over the new platform. That is the midterm goal - regain control (even a little bit) of a dominant platform.
Windows is not becoming obsolete. Quite the opposite. In the enterprise Windows will stay for a long time. I'm working at company > 500000 employees and our IT will be very happy when they can replace the iOS devices with Windows equivalents. And certainly the Desktops aren't going to be replaced by OSX. Even more with Windows 10 around.
MS strategy is much more straight forward. Simply offer reasons and make it easier for customers to use their products. Mainly the cloud and mobile services. They're just smart enough to understand where Google and Facebook make their money with - not by selling OS.
I agree. We've been using OpenLDAP for 3 years now, and it has been a very scary, black magic experience, just trying to get basic stuff like DNS, NFS, mac, windows clients, working. Hoping to move to Windows AD as soon as possible.
I disagree because bringing Objective-C, Java/Android, and CLang compilation to Visual Studio doesn't provide any sort of abstraction.
The support for Objective-C, Clang, etc is, in my opinion, merely about bringing iOS and Android software to Windows (especially for phones and tablets). Microsoft knows they need current high quality apps on their platform to get users. Users which will buy their devices and operating systems. They don't really want developers to run iOS software unmodified on Windows but they do want to make it really easy for them to attempt a port.
Given the amount of application code that has been written for Win32 over the years and that is still in use, I do not see any viable alternative to Windows on corporate desktops.
Sure, you might have VDI and access a Windows VM remotely from your iPad or whatever, but Windows is not going away for a long time.
(And don't get me wrong, I would love replacing every single Windows desktop at our company with Debian or CentOS or even OSX, but unless a lot of companies decide to port their applications to one of these systems, it is not going to happen.)
