[EvanPlaice]

I wouldn't consider Nadella as 'kinder, gentler' so much as opportunistic.

The MS licensing model doesn't scale when it comes to server-side development. Managing 100 licenses requires a lot of unnecessary overhead and cost. At Google scale (100k+ servers) it's not worth the effort.

MS is embracing OSS simply because they're doubling down on Azure. It's hard to sell desktop software under a subscription model. whereas it's much easier and potentially more profitsble to sell services under a subscription model.

Sharepoint proved to be an early success but talented devs (ie the ones needed to drive the future of the MS ecosystem) need more power and flexibility.

The only standard they're aggressively trying to push is Typescript and that's only because the vast majority of the devs in the MS ecosystem can't think outside of the OOP box or work effectively without a dedicated IDE like Visual Studio or Webstorm.

It's kind of sad seeing OOP design patterns (ex factory, singleton) being used in Javascript where they're completely unnecessary. If that's what it takes to get .NET devs to quit bitching about 'what a horrible language' JS is, so be it.