[vegabook]

I've been heavily downvoted for the view, but the facts are, there are hundreds of billions of dollars being spent in the Linux ecosystem, by corporations. Microsoft cannot afford not to be present in it. It's as simple as that. Canonical is starting to look like hitting Red Hat a bit on support contracts for corpos ets, so that's why I suggested that, but as you say, it could be another big and credible Linux distro (though Ubuntu all over the cloud must surely be tempting). Generally the idea that Microsoft wants to/must go big into Linux is uncontroversial, for me.