[abraxas]

Microsoft feels very schizophrenic at this point. On the one hand I think there exists a faction that wants to move more into the open ecosystem. On the other though there appears to be an entrenched faction that's hell bent on retaining as much proprietary status quo as they feel they can get away with. Thus the command line is still incompatible with any Unix shell, the SQL syntax subtly different to make it a pain for those coming from other databases, proprietary sockets, threads API's and so on. It's possible to make a Windows ecosystem interact with the rest of the world, it's just a big pain in the butt caused by an endless stream of small pains.

[genr8]

MS is so large, one hand doesn't know what any other division is doing, and their community interaction is horrible because they make more money when people are ill informed and just go with the flow. So even if 10% of the company is "new blood" and was pushing open source out the back door for the past 5 years, the upper management is just now catching on that "hey maybe they were right".

[munchbunny]

That really depends on what you consider "rest of the world".

A lot of companies, big ones, have their IT setups primarily on Windows. These are customers who make up a huge chunk of Microsoft's revenue. Linux is a small concern at best for them and is not the rest of the world.

What you call "schizophrenic" to me is the reality that Windows has massive user segments of consumers, developers, servers, and enterprise IT, and they all want different things, so Microsoft ends up making something for each group. Linux doesn't have that problem because, for better or worse, it doesn't have much of a footprint for consumers and enterprise IT.

[pwdisswordfish2]

From what I know of the company's history some of those pains were intentional to thwart interoperability, created at the direction of Gates himself.

[pie_flavor]

You take for granted that it should be Windows conforming to Linux. Why shouldn't Linux implement Winsock and COM and have Linux-specific PowerShell cmdlets and so forth? Windows dominates the desktop market more than Linux dominates the server market, and one of those wants 'cross-platform software' more than the other.

[zaphar]

Expecting a company as large and with as deep a history as Microsoft to change without looking schizophrenic while doing so is unrealistic. Microsoft is a supertanker. When it tries to do a 180 it makes really big circle and takes a really long time to do it.