I would argue that specific technologies changing is super relevant fact. In 90's and 00's "everything Windows" made loads of sense for a company so being hard

I would argue that specific technologies changing is super relevant fact. In 90's and 00's "everything Windows" made loads of sense for a company so being hard on any competition was the right thing. Also I don't see people saying it about MacOs you cannot do software to this day for MacOs or iOS without having actual device and operating system from Apple. What changed for MSFT was that operating system in 2010's and forward became irrelevant. Cloud is where the money is and now MSFT is "all in Azure or nothing company", entire company is designed to promote Azure and O365. To properly promote Azure they need to run Linux on that cloud and they need mind share of developers that will develop products using Azure - earlier they could force developers to use Windows because that was where software was running.