I think it is different now though. Microsoft was trying to leverage their near-monopoly on the desktop into a monopoly in new markets. Now, although Microsoft retains the bulk of desktop/laptop market share, desktops and laptops are not as significant as they once were. Microsoft's attempts at the tablet and phone markets were largely unsuccessful. A lot of apps that used to be desktop-based are now web-based. For desktop apps, cross-platform development solutions (e.g. Electron) are a lot more popular than they used to be. The alternatives to Windows on desktop/laptop (macOS, Linux, ChromeOS) are arguably more compelling and more practical than they used to be. Linux, not Windows, dominates in the server space. In cloud, Microsoft is stuck in second place position. The generation coming up through the school system right now is more familiar with Google Docs than Microsoft Office. Microsoft's language platform (.NET, C#, etc) has decent marketshare but competitors such as Java and Python are ahead.
So even if some people at Microsoft want to repeat Microsoft's EEE strategy from the 1990s, Microsoft doesn't really have the same foundation that it had in the 90s to make such a strategy successful. And that 90s strategy, even if it worked in the short to medium term, doesn't appear to have been a long-term success – Internet Explorer may have killed Netscape, but arguably Chrome has killed Edge. Microsoft's attempts to EEE Java likewise failed – Visual J++ and J# are history, and Java is still more popular than .Net/C#.
JVM yea, but Java itself as a lang + frameworks/libs like Spring? I don't think so.
I may be biased, but also I've seen a lot of arguing about Java vs C# (as a langs) feature-wise
Which one is ahead in features is debatable. Certainly C# has some goodies which Java lacks, but more recently Java has been catching up.
Which one is ahead in marketshare/mindshare/ecosystem – I think Java is the clear winner here. In part because, despite Oracle's overall ownership, Java gets a lot of attention from other big vendors such as IBM and SAP and Google (putting to one side all the regrettable Oracle-Google legal issues), and a lot of focus from the open source community. By contrast, .Net is basically just Microsoft plus a boatload of small-to-medium vendors, and the .Net open source community has always been smaller than the Java open source community.
(Obligatory disclaimer: I used to work for Oracle, although not directly on Java.)
They simply moved from selling windows and office licenses to selling office365 and Azure, and using open source helps them do this.
Ex. PyMSSQL is now officially supported by MS. This implies, their costs of maintaining an ODBC driver for Python-MSSQL will be largely reduced thanks to the OSS model.
Same deal with Linux-Azure tooling (there have been many tools that came out), or be it .Net-Core.
They are looking at "extinguishing" Linux not by doing better than competition, but rather by absorbing the competition and getting them to work for MS in the long run. Great business move, not sure for the larger ecosystem.
But then, OSS will always be there. If not Linux, something else.
Microsoft is in the IBM position of 1985. IBM made a bunch of crucial missteps because they saw the PC as part of a larger mainframe and minicomputer strategy and was unwilling to cater to the microcomputer customer as just a microcomputer customer.
So they were blinded and dropped the ball a bunch.
Microsoft, like IBM in the 80s doesn't have full stack monopoly anymore. But unlike IBM, they have admitted this and most importantly that they can't claw it back. IBM ran off to fairytale land trying to claw things back with OS/2, the MCA bus, and their line of PS/2 workstations.
Microsoft knows this well, they built the first versions of OS/2 for IBM.
Like a good general who studies the battles of the past, they're trying to do the early Apple/early Google strategy: make good products and get developers to be enthusiastic about them.
Their will be new marketing opportunities opening in the future and their job is to position themselves to capture it.
They won't get there by pretending like it's still 1998.
Then again it is different people with a seemingly different playbook. I’m still slightly uncomfortable with it.
I am also slightly uncomfortable with that, but they are not the player they once were back in the 90ies, they definitly don't have an OS monopoly these days, and that is a good thing. Everyone who wants to use other distributions is free to do so.
In the meantime the world has changed, and Microsoft has changed. And still people keep referring to eee as if this is still the same Microsoft.
All the big tech companies are now making money with services.
Microsoft made a lot open to Linux. Why? Because they like you to be on Azure.
I really think they are not going to extinct Linux. They are going to hook you on their services and make a lot of money out of it.
The question is to what extent and in which areas Microsoft's interests and strategies align with ours. The answer to that question has changed in recent years, especially if we consider the alternatives.
The “third e” is extinguish.
This seems more like a product of love from one developer. Doesn't seem like a cunning move in some grand scheme. Companies don't have personality and even company culture is very hard to maintain across many offices spread out over the globe.