I sometimes like to imagine a world in which .NET was cross-platform and open source from the start such that when F# was introduced it took over everywhere Python was popping up. It's a fantastic world to imagine but a depressing reoccurring dream.
The anti-Microsoft bias at the time was pretty strong in most of the open source community given the various dirty tricks that had been employed against Linux around 2000. Within the corporate world there was a big strategic split between folks who were all-in on microsoft and .NET vs people who wanted open source and Java (I worked at a big bank at the time and this was a very sharp point of division with careers made and broken on the back of tech choices, fear or otherwise of vendor lock-in etc).
As for MS's strategy, my recollection is at the time MS was all-in on C# and trying to replace C++ and Java rather than pushing F#, which was somewhat of a side-gig for them. Visual Studio was very dominant in terms of IDE then both for C++ and C#, with only Java guys and unix nerds like me using anything else.
How so? Link? Many people have never seen an F# program.