Windows is more or less over and MS has been gradually coming to terms with it, helped along by inflection points that made it painstakingly clear that the Windows way was beyond outmoded, like containers and cloud. I don't think MS is even pretending otherwise anymore.

I wouldn't be surprised at all to see MS give up on WSL, acquire CodeWeavers, and reimplement "Windows" as a proprietary desktop environment for a nix-ish OS with a super-souped-up WINE doing much of the legwork. At this point such a contraption would be less painful than some of Apple's recent transitions (e.g. from PPC to x86).

Selling software, as a general business model, is on the ropes and this is a great indication of that. The victory of open-source here is both blatant and decisive.

Had it not been for every major software company deciding they can subsist on a combination of a) rental fees and b) advertising/demographic data, we'd probably have another RIAA v. The Internet-style showdown to confront over the next decade. In this respect, I suppose we should be grateful for the opportunity to pay 6x more to be in "the cloud".

As an observer, it's a weird situation to see, and still trying to orient my feelings and understand what to make of it.