> Microsoft clearly doesn't care about "developers, developers, developers" anymore, because I have never lost this much productivity to an operating system in my life.
Azure's APIs are really nice! Microsoft cares about people developing against Azure. Those developers make them money.
And they've invested a lot of effort into allowing you to develop against those APIs on macOS or Linux.
What Microsoft doesn't care about, is people trying to use Windows to do development (outside of an enterprise use-case, where everyone is using the LTS version of Windows anyway.)
I feel like, increasingly, Microsoft sees Windows the way Apple sees iOS: something you develop for (to target the consumers that use it), not something you develop on.
Imagine a Microsoft that didn't have a Windows product, just their cloud products (Azure, Office 365, Xbox Live, etc.) Would that Microsoft build an OS? Or would they just tell you to use macOS/Linux to interact with their software ecosystem?
I feel like the answer to that question tells you a lot about Microsoft's priorities.
What I don't understand is, what led Microsoft down this path to begin with? Don't they have 90% penetration in desktop OSes and are fighting with established and trusted players like AWS, GCP in the data center and PlayStation and Nintendo in the living room? Why make it harder on yourself by shooting yourself in the foot?
The problem with Windows was never that it didn't have enough features, it was that it wasn't reliable enough. So instead of making it more reliable, they've doubled down on the features.
The trend for a while now has been diminishing user time spent on desktops and more time spent on mobile/web. Presumably Microsoft wanted to stake out a territory in those spaces.
Azure's APIs are really nice! Microsoft cares about people developing against Azure. Those developers make them money.
And they've invested a lot of effort into allowing you to develop against those APIs on macOS or Linux.
What Microsoft doesn't care about, is people trying to use Windows to do development (outside of an enterprise use-case, where everyone is using the LTS version of Windows anyway.)
I feel like, increasingly, Microsoft sees Windows the way Apple sees iOS: something you develop for (to target the consumers that use it), not something you develop on.
Imagine a Microsoft that didn't have a Windows product, just their cloud products (Azure, Office 365, Xbox Live, etc.) Would that Microsoft build an OS? Or would they just tell you to use macOS/Linux to interact with their software ecosystem?
I feel like the answer to that question tells you a lot about Microsoft's priorities.