4 ms·

Ask HN: Is Microsoft loves Linux a big “Embrace, extend and extinguish?

4 points by punnerud 10y ago

1123581321 10y ago
I do not think so, only because it's simply not possible anymore due to Microsoft's minority server and mobile market share. Microsoft can make plenty of money in the "embrace" phase. Extend may happen at some point down the road, but seems no more of a concern than what Google, Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Sony and Facebook are attempting to do with their various devices and platforms. Edit: my justification for Microsoft making "enough" embracing Linux/open source is that the computing/software market is larger than it used to be. There is room for many large companies to grow nearly as fast as they'd like -- and I expect that trend to continue.
peller 10y ago
Say what you will about Balmer, but I think he was right when he chanted "Developers, Developers, Developers." To me, the Windows Subsystem for Linux is their attempt at keeping web developers using Windows desktop systems. (And by extension, their admittance that the era of M$ desktops reigning supreme has begun its steady decline.) Perhaps I'm biased (quite likely) but I see a company scrambling defensively more than the monopolistic "my way or the highway" we got in decades past - Apple and Google now enjoy that position, not so much Microsoft.
- samfisher83 10y ago
  They still have nearly 90% market share of the desktop market.It hasn't really been declining that much. Most people who work still use windows at work. People still use excel and word. I think you underestimate how important they still are.
  - peller 10y ago
    Yes, fair enough. I didn't make myself clear enough, because I was referring to the share of developers, where my hunch is that a lot of devs have migrated to OSX, but you're probably still right.
sharemywin 10y ago
Too big a market to not compete. By The Cloud Market's latest analysis of operating systems on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Ubuntu has approximately 135,000 instances. In second place, a long, long way back, you'll find Amazon's own Amazon Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI), with 54,000. Lagging even farther behind, there's Windows with 17,600 instances. In fourth and fifth place, you'll find CentOS, 8,500, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), 5,600.

4 points by punnerud 10y ago

I do not think so, only because it's simply not possible anymore due to Microsoft's minority server and mobile market share. Microsoft can make plenty of money in the "embrace" phase. Extend may happen at some point down the road, but seems no more of a concern than what Google, Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Sony and Facebook are attempting to do with their various devices and platforms. Edit: my justification for Microsoft making "enough" embracing Linux/open source is that the computing/software market is larger than it used to be. There is room for many large companies to grow nearly as fast as they'd like -- and I expect that trend to continue.

peller 10y ago

Say what you will about Balmer, but I think he was right when he chanted "Developers, Developers, Developers." To me, the Windows Subsystem for Linux is their attempt at keeping web developers using Windows desktop systems. (And by extension, their admittance that the era of M$ desktops reigning supreme has begun its steady decline.) Perhaps I'm biased (quite likely) but I see a company scrambling defensively more than the monopolistic "my way or the highway" we got in decades past - Apple and Google now enjoy that position, not so much Microsoft.

samfisher83 10y ago
They still have nearly 90% market share of the desktop market.It hasn't really been declining that much. Most people who work still use windows at work. People still use excel and word. I think you underestimate how important they still are.
- peller 10y ago
  Yes, fair enough. I didn't make myself clear enough, because I was referring to the share of developers, where my hunch is that a lot of devs have migrated to OSX, but you're probably still right.

sharemywin 10y ago

Too big a market to not compete. By The Cloud Market's latest analysis of operating systems on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Ubuntu has approximately 135,000 instances. In second place, a long, long way back, you'll find Amazon's own Amazon Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI), with 54,000. Lagging even farther behind, there's Windows with 17,600 instances. In fourth and fifth place, you'll find CentOS, 8,500, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), 5,600.