[jpalomaki]

I don't think this strategy would work anymore on these fields. Microsoft does not have dominant market share in cloud, server operating systems, development platforms or databases and it does not look like they could gain it. The dominating position is key for the embrace, extended, extinguish because that's the way to push your own stuff to market.

I believe Microsoft is doing these moves, because they have decided that the old business model where all products are required to support the sales of each other is too risky. It served them well, but now there are too many good alternatives on many areas. If Azure does not support Linux, customers are not going to migrate to Windows because of that, they just pick another cloud. The old way was risky, because it meant that if customers moved away from Windows, they also had to move away from .NET and SQL Server.