Separate, Support, Serve
I want to do two things in this blog post: convince you that Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is a grossly invalid understanding of Microsoft’s strategy; and convince you that an alternative strategy of Separate, Support, Serve provides a much better lens to view the modern Microsoft.
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First, Microsoft has to enable me to even use Microsoft technology in the first place. If Microsoft keeps tying all Microsoft technology to Windows, then they lose. If I have to use Windows to use SQL Server, then I’ll go with PostgreSQL. If I have to use Windows to have a sane .NET server environment, then I’ll pick Java. To fix that, Microsoft needs to let me make those decisions separately.
That’s indeed the first phase of their strategy: separating Windows from the rest of their technologies. SQL Server is available on Linux not to encourage lock-in, but because they need you to be able to chose SQL Server even though you’ve got a Docker-based deployment infrastructure running on RedHat. .NET is getting great runtimes and development environments (Visual Studio Code) for Unix so that I can more reasonably look at Azure’s .NET offerings without also forcing my entire dev team to work on Windows. This strategy dramatically increases the chance of me paying Microsoft money, even though it won’t increase the chance I’ll use Windows.
