Microsoft appears to be transitioning to a cloud services company, but they have lots of legacy products that still have too much value to abandon. My guess is

Microsoft appears to be transitioning to a cloud services company, but they have lots of legacy products that still have too much value to abandon. My guess is that the all-stars in the company are working on cloud products while the lesser skilled are relegated to legacy products. This is probably some ambitious product manager trying hard to push a cloud revenue advertising product into Windows so they can leverage it to get moved into the growing cloud services side of the company and out of the decaying legacy side. There's probably also a good bit of internal pressure on the managers of these legacy products to find ways to make them fund themselves. When looking at what Microsoft has been doing with dotnet over the past half a decade, helping to support legacy Window's place in the world doesn't appear to be one of their goals. Everything is going cross-platform with a distinct push towards cloud deployment, which supports the cloud services goals.