It is only a matter of time before the end of Windows only for those apps - the new Microsoft under Nadella is operating system agnostic. Losing out in the mobi

It is only a matter of time before the end of Windows only for those apps - the new Microsoft under Nadella is operating system agnostic. Losing out in the mobile space forced the abandonment of "devices and services" and vertical integration to a horizontal "platform first" strategy, but it was always going to happen (and many pundits wanted Microsoft to anticipate it rather than react to it). The kernel doesn't matter - developers can and will target runtimes not operating systems. Today we're in a situation that would have been infeasible a few years ago: Microsoft producing apps for iOS. The strategy here is all about blocking competitive software from establishing itself against Office (the real cash-cow) and thus Microsoft services (a potential cash-cow) while the runtime is developed and rolled out across all systems. What used to be vNext is now .NET Core and it is brilliant. It is largely open source[0], builds on open source tools and the runtime is small, fast and portable. VS Code is an example of this new strategy: if Microsoft can make VS[1] and their developer toolchain (which has always been the best environment, imo) cross-platform then any app can be made cross-platform (this is working, at least in my case - I was never a .NET developer until .NET Core). The advantage Windows will hold is DirectX and WPF - but for everyone else there is xwt[2] and coincidently (or not) Microsoft just bought Xamarin who wrote their cross-platform Studio product in xwt. In the interim developers can use the existing cross-platform GUI toolkit: html. Bind to a local port and open the browser and point it to http://localhost:random_port http://localhost:random_port (I just happen to install Sonarr[3] this morning which does this, it means you can distribute cross-platform binaries) or write a thin platform-specific frontend. [0] https://dotnet.github.io/ https://dotnet.github.io/ [1] https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/code-vs.aspx https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/code-vs.aspx [2] https://github.com/mono/xwt https://github.com/mono/xwt [3] https://sonarr.tv/ https://sonarr.tv/