Comment by Jenk

It started long before that. Cloud meant they were under drastic threat of being abandoned, because the cloud was (and still is) dominated by linux compute.

DotNet were shook, and shook bad. They went all out to make their runtime "cross-platform" because they faced an existential thread from lamdba+node.

The rise of the MBP also saw their dotnet ecosystem under thread from the other end of the stick - the developer end. Visual Studio cannot run on macos, so competitor IDEs that can were rising in their numbers. Hence the push for VSCode to try and claw back some IDE market.