Linux Use On Microsoft Azure Crosses 60%, AlmaLinux Now An Endorsed Distro

[bernstein]

Microsoft has long recognized that windows server is almost exclusively used for ad, sharepoint & ms-sql, windows on smartphones is dead, windows on tablets is almost dead and windows market share on desktops, laptops & handhelds has been steadily eroding for 15 years. That's why they have been rebuilding the company around SaaS: Azure, Office 365 as PWA, C#/.NET as Multiplatform/OSS, xbox game pass, xbox cloud gaming, aquiring Activision-Blizzard & Bethesda, ...

They will continue pushing windows as long as it makes them money, but clearly the're no longer dependent on it in any way

[L_A_G]

I mean the Microsoft of the 2020s isn't the NIH syndrome basket case it was under Gates and Balmer. The one that only saw open source and standards as something to quash with tactics like embrace-extend-extinguish. The current management can be fairly pragmatic and doesn't go out of their way to reinvent the wheel the way they used to.

Not that they don't still have some vestiges of this. They quickly stopped publishing data on what percentage of Azure instances run Linux when it took off and I'm pretty sure there's some Enron style accounting to get a figure this high for Windows server. With Windows getting more and more Linux compatibility and features like its own version of sudo I get the feeling that by the 2040s Windows will essentially be a Linux distro with a very involved proprietary Windows VM.

[User29]

It's the embrace before the kill

Again???

[rhavenn]

They would love that too if you were paying for Office 365 online apps . Really they have pivoted to a services company pretty successfully (from a revenue / market perspective at least). If desktop Linux adoption were to speed up significantly, they'd just offer more of those services directly to Linux users. Windows isn't really a cash cow for them anymore. But they could make native versions of Office, a native Game Pass client that leverages Proton and has a curated game set that works well in Linux, etc. What they really want is that recurring service revenue. For better or worse, they still have an easy path to remain a trillion dollar company even if desktop Linux became dominant.

Yeap, I use Linux exclusively for work and for play. They get a E5 license out of me for work + plus addon licenses and for personal use they get a OneDrive license out of me of which I use rclone to sync to. Outside of Visio docs and some PowerPoint, both of which I don't really use more than once a year, I have yet to find a document I can't work with in the web versions via Sharepoint or Teams channels (sharepoint under-the-hood).