That's a great business strategy for them.
But then again, they abandoned IronRuby, which is very frustrating. (what is the state of IronPython?).
Sounds like two hands that aren't really in sync.
Microsoft employs 90,000 people. Do you honestly expect all of them to be in sync at all times?
Besides, supporting third-party technologies on Azure and reimplementing open-source programming languages on top of the .NET framework seem tenuously related at best. That's actually one of the advantages of having a corporate agenda in my mind: things that are unlikely to gain traction with developers can be cut with impunity. It prevents fracturing and slowing down communities, all too common in the open-source world (think of the many, many variants of Lisp, or the recent explosion of LanguageX-to-javascript compilers).
Besides, supporting third-party technologies on Azure and reimplementing open-source programming languages on top of the .NET framework seem tenuously related at best. That's actually one of the advantages of having a corporate agenda in my mind: things that are unlikely to gain traction with developers can be cut with impunity. It prevents fracturing and slowing down communities, all too common in the open-source world (think of the many, many variants of Lisp, or the recent explosion of LanguageX-to-javascript compilers).