Let's hope the awesomeness they are showing on the developer relations side finally leaks into the Windows side and they stop their shenanigans with W10 and Android and VFAT patent threats. It's so disappointing to see this kind of split-brained behavior.
Developers are pretty much the only demographic that might realistically switch operating systems, so they only really need to cater to them. The rest, they can pretty much treat however they want, and they won't lose them as customers.
Exactly. The developers they can get to work for them are "useful idiots", whose work they then use to further screw over their main customers, who aren't going to abandon them no matter what, and also bring in more developers to their platform and away from the competition. As long as these developers are easily and naively wooed by a bunch of BS talk about "the new Microsoft", they get to help MS with their evil shenanigans.
Sigh. I don't even know how to start with this one. I'm a "useful idiot" because I'm interested in making PowerShell work as a proper Debian package, or because I might look into what's required to get it into FreeBSD?
Seriously?
MS is not a monolith, it's made up of lots of different people with different ideologies and different goals.
I think the parent comment's point, with which you are likely to disagree but haven't fully addressed, is that even the best intentions of developers can only serve the ends of the less noble segments of Microsoft.
Between this, VSCode and .NET Core it really is an impressive effort.