Microsoft expended a huge amount of effort trying to get windows cross platform, with MIPS, Alpha and other versions of Windows NT. They also created .NET and

Microsoft expended a huge amount of effort trying to get windows cross platform, with MIPS, Alpha and other versions of Windows NT. They also created .NET and essentially forced it on all new development efforts. It turns out that x86 stuck around way longer than anyone expected, AMD really helped when they came up with a good 64 but instruction set that extended things to the present. It's sad that so much effort went into .NET, and it really wasn't necessary, in the end. We'll likely end up using WASM instead for safe cross platform general purpose computing.