Centralized services on top of decentralized things are mostly used for visibility. Pirate Bay for torrents, Napster, GitHub for git, ... They do fix a proble

Centralized services on top of decentralized things are mostly used for visibility. Pirate Bay for torrents, Napster, GitHub for git, ... They do fix a problem. I actually think that Microsoft is the lesser evil in this case. They will add azure flows, but not enforce them. I believe they will also embrace other services ( not the embrace and extend way though. The Enterprise culture makes them support things for a very long term ( even codeplex still let's you download old archives) They reinvented themselves with the mantra: developers. Making them pissed off for using something else is not their mantra any more ( them = developers outside the dot Net/ windows ecosystem) And yes, as each business, they also want profits. But the way to do it has changed. Ps. Google code also let's you download the old repos ( just checked it) Edit 2: the only thing I can think of is that the evolution of Windows forms didn't go as planned and got changed to "more web". As a result, WPF ( I think) is in maintenance mode and considered as feature complete untill it's fully integrated in. Net core ( which was a hard change because of differences in graphic rendering cross platform). The only thing that got deprecated here was Silverlight, which was a correct and hard decision.