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Comment by aruggirello | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why, following their new "openness" motto, Microsoft is still not:

1) porting Visual Studio to Linux.

2) porting Office to Linux, or

3) contributing to Wine, with the goal of solving long-standing issues with their (above) software - but hey they could contribute in other areas too, since Wine is far from complete (a USB driver/stack is much needed IMHO).

I won't believe in Microsoft "openness" until I see one of the three above.

Edit: the fact they're using this event mainly to promote Azure services rather than talking about differences/upgrading issues from debian 7 to 8 speaks of itself.

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MS is only open in so far that it aligns with their business plans. They have a long term plan for Azure and need more .Net developers for it. Hence making .Net more attractive by opening it up. Does not mean they will open up other things.

This seems to be their strategy but it could backfire. Once Windows developers and enterprises start using Linux and other clouds instead of Windows Server and Azure, we might see the old MS again.

Azure is twice the price of Google for compute (VM). Azure was really a PaaS and it still shows. They really hope you bring you in on using their software, not just the VM aspect. I'm not overly convinced, but it is probably a decent strategy. Some folks will say "hey I need a message queue" and use Azure's instead of hosting in a VM. Lock in. Azure is even doing this for stuff like Redis, I suppose to get more people on the idea of using hosted software vs machines. In fact their infrastructure offerings are pretty weak (like SSD, or networking).

For 1 and 2, probably because there's very little money in it and it would require an immense amount of effort.

Indeed. And why would a somebody who makes their own operating system and has great tools for it be worried about tooling on other systems? The whole point of them having their own OS is to make money from it or to have the ecosystem they want. This helps with neither of those.

It would probably be easier to make a stripped-down, open-source version of Windows. Then they probably wouldn't have to port anything.

Probably because MS (like many others) are excited about and use Linux on the server side but don't take it seriously / want it to be taken seriously as an end-user desktop OS.

I dont think either of those are out of the question, but they can't be trivial to port. This stuff takes time.

WOW. They just did it. These guys rock!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9459364

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