[wvenable]

This swift reversal is consistent with Microsoft's past actions and attitudes? I don't feel that's the case.

These days we seem to be unprecedented access to the internal workings of companies; from exactly which execs are making decisions to the opinions of individual managers and developers. It used to be that you'd have to talk about Microsoft as a monolith because this level of information wasn't available.

But I don't think saying "this is just Microsoft being Microsoft" is a very useful or interesting comment. If anything, this is just the start of defining what Microsoft will be in the future. We haven't really seen the conclusion yet and it's definitely not assured that things are going regress to the 90s.