It's important to know that it's not Microsoft as a whole that hates Linux, the company is really split into three ideological factions: (1) The Gates Worshiper

It's important to know that it's not Microsoft as a whole that hates Linux, the company is really split into three ideological factions: (1) The Gates Worshipers, (2) The Open Source Geeks and (3) The iWorlders Those in (1) are the old guard, and opinions are hard to change. They tend to be near the top and want to return to the Bill Gates way of the iron fist. Those in (2) are most of the programmers/devtools folks at Microsoft. They grew up and went to school (and maybe even came from academia) using Open Source and still love it. They are why you see things like F# being open sourced. Then there are those in (3) which tend to be more on the XBox/Windows Phone side. Just like Apple, they don't really care about Linux. What they want is to offer another walled garden so they can take your money with little effort.