I think you may be confusing marketing with advertising. And note that I'm no Apple or Google fan either. Microsoft has always built excellent developer tools.

I think you may be confusing marketing with advertising. And note that I'm no Apple or Google fan either. Microsoft has always built excellent developer tools. Even before VS Code, Visual Studio for Windows has been one of the best, if not the best, IDE. And it wasn't open source, but nowadays, it's tough to compete in a world in which even IntelliJ IDEA has a FOSS "community edition". The open-sourcing of .NET happened because they've lost the mobile, and .NET was dying due to Java's and JavaScript's dominance. But even today, the development of .NET Core has plenty of shenanigans behind closed doors; the difference in how Oracle (of all companies) treats the Java community as a partner in developing new stuff is appalling (see Project Loom). So we've got VS Code, .NET Core, some inevitable Linux contributions due to Azure, and the acquisition of GitHub, which is now used for open-source laundering via Copilot, copyright licences be damned. What else? The only thing that changed for Microsoft is their shift to Azure. They are still the same boring old corporation that wants to crush their competition by any means necessary, monopoly power included.