I don't think it's settled which of Azure or AWS captures the most market share in the next decade. AWS has a lot going for it but MS is coming in hard and fast on the OSS to cloud integration front. Probably would have made sense for Amazon to pickup Red Hat from IBM.
It already doesn’t matter for a lot of people. Java? PHP? JS? C#? If you’re using in interpreted language then as long is the interpreter is updated you don’t need to care.
Outside of that costs rule the day. If the arm servers are noticeably cheaper then people will be incentivized to make their software run on it.
Tons of open source software runs on Windows. Why isn’t windows more common on Azure and AWS? It costs more per hour. So those who could moved.
> If the arm servers are noticeably cheaper then people will be incentivized to make their software run on it.
Yeah, I don't think the incentive is as large as you perceive it to be. Few, if any, customers are going to hire back the people they got rid of five years ago to port their old code over to a platform that is 50% cheaper to run, let alone smaller to no existent savings.
But that's kind of missing the simpler problem though: there's a reason beyond form factor that the ARM version of Windows has limited features/offerings...
> Why isn’t windows more common on Azure and AWS? It costs more per hour.
Actually, with three year reserved instances, the pricing is largely the same in Azure.
Plenty of compiled language users wouldn't need to care either.
Until we get something more practical than RDP mouse slinger GUI for remote admin, I doubt serious people want to use Windows, even if it cost the same.