Comment by exikyut
8 years ago
> Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
Hmmm... Windows Subsystem for Linux... the 1998 Microsoft-vs-Linux report... hmmmm.
While I'm currently picturing a pacman trying to eat a dot a bit bigger than it expected, I do wonder what kind of hilarity Microsoft have planned for, presumably, 5-10 years from now (I'd presume they're in the Embrace/Extend period if my conspiracy theory is right).
[Small edit: currently at -1; interesting | Edit 2: Now at -4! Anybody care to actually comment? I'm interested in why people disagree!]
In the interest of providing data, here is at least a single reply. Though I haven't voted, by my criteria your comment leans more to downvote than upvote. My reasons:
1. It adds little to nothing to the discussion. You raise two items with no commentary but "hmmmm", then offer a metaphor and an admitted conspiracy theory - neither of which you explain in depth nor draw interesting conclusions from.
2. There is inherent ridiculousness (almost to the point of trolling) in connecting a 20-year old report (1998) to a modern initiative, particularly considering the massive industry, technical, and organizational changes between those two events. Implying that one leads to another as part of a 30-year strategy to consume/extinguish Linux assumes a level of long-term planning and, frankly, managerial competency that is almost unheard of in today's public companies.
3. Assuming I can even understand your poorly constructed point, I still disagree with it (see #1 and #2) and, more importantly, think you fundamentally misunderstand the landscape in which Microsoft now competes. In a world increasingly accessed by mobile devices, MS has no mobile presence. In an OS landscape increasingly disintermediated by the browser, MS has little significant browser presence. They have oriented their entire organization around Azure (its biggest revenue growth area) and cross-platform applications deliverable in the browser and on 3rd party mobile OSes. They reorganized and, for the first time, no longer have a Windows division. Thinking they're in the middle of some Machiavellian scheme to take back an increasingly irrelevant OS dominance position by extinguishing Linux (and failing because Linux is too big?) completely misses the point that Linux's size wasn't the cause of Microsoft's inability to extinguish it, it was these other countervailing industry forces. And to imply that they've somehow failed also ignores the fact that MSFT's market capitalization has had a nearly identical growth to GOOG and AAPL over the past two years while they've made this transition.
As they say on Food Network, for those reasons we had to chop you.
3: I hugely appreciate you taking the time to reply. This is incredibly helpful, I now see the ridiculousness of my half-thought-through point.
2: The reason I connected current activity with long-ago activity was based on sentiments I read that Microsoft were still behaving in some of the ways they used to. But a 20 year stretch is kind of pushing it, particularly in the tech industry.
1: Fair point.
Thanks for the feedback.
[Update since edit period has expired: back at -1 again - adding this because I think it's interesting, also first edit was after about 20min, 2nd edit was after an hour, this edit is after ~2h | Update 2 after ~1hr; parent is at 2, this is at 0]