> It's a different group of people steering the ship then it was 25 years ago.
Is it a different group of people than were steering when they decided to patent troll Android OEMs less than a decade ago?
Is it a different group of people than were steering when they started abusing their desktop market share to strong arm their way into the browser market last year? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29415031)
Microsoft didn't change, they're just being more careful now that their position is weaker.
open source as a for-profit business is hard. Most for-profits in the space have a closed source commercial product somewhere in the mix. They've got quite a bit open source right now. It's not bad. Compare with Adobe, Oracle, Intuit, Apple, ... not the worst.
They had been doing mobile ever since the mostly fiction pen windows (which became windows CE a few years later) in 1992 but lost that battle so hard with things like Kin and Lumia they dropped out. And let's forget about Zune.
At one point they has 95% of the browser market but lost that so much that they completely abandoned their browser engine.
Despite all the money they've thrown at projects like Surface and Bing, they have failed to come anywhere near a dominant position. Even in gaming consoles, which has been fairly successful, they're still in 3rd place behind Sony and Nintendo after over 20 years.
Their cloud azure is nowhere near AWS ... being a barbarian emperor hasn't been working for them for a long time and demanding the 1970s IBM style vertically integrated infrastructure is not a luxury they have.
It's a different group of people steering the ship then it was 25 years ago.
I know how fun it is to presume they are being exclusively evil but who knows, things can change