> What changed? Very briefly: Satya Nadella running Microsoft since 2014. Microsoft's cloud offering, Azure, is now a core part of the Microsoft's business. Th

> What changed? Very briefly: Satya Nadella running Microsoft since 2014. Microsoft's cloud offering, Azure, is now a core part of the Microsoft's business. There's a lot of competition in the cloud business. Azure runs a lot of .NET code so they're incentivized to make it performant. Bing runs on .NET 6 for instance. On a language level, there's been quite a bit of competition in the past decade with players like Node, Go, Elixir, etc, and even Java bringing for instance low latency GC such as ZGC/Shenandoah to the game. On a technical level, Microsoft more or less rewrote NET to work for multi-platform/Linux with NET Core. NET Framework is tied to Windows and cannot move fast as a result for fear of breaking changes. They can make changes much faster with .NET Core 2/3 and .NET 5/6. Last, you can't overlook that .NET is also a marketing tool. Having it on the top of benchmarks, getting people talking about it etc., will draw more eyes to Microsoft and Azure.