[bananas]

Perhaps I'm paranoid but I'm seeing a lot of tentacles extending around a few ecosystems from Microsoft. I see lots of praise but some rational analysis and caution might be worth considering.

For ref, I deal with Microsoft a lot and wrote a ton of c# over the least decade (more than anything else probably) so I'm not biased against necessarily but all-encompassing announcements like the ones over the last couple of weeks make me suspicious.

Edit: to extend my thoughts on this some more:

I don't think we're seeing embrace and extend. I think we're seeing "go on - use our tooling". Once you're in a tool ecosystem it's hard to get out of. I mean really hard. Same goes with cloud ecosystems which neatly integrate with their tooling. Their offering is to host all of your stuff (Azure) and mediate between you and what you're working on (Office/VS/Xamarin potentially).

A fully heterogenous system with a sole vendor mediating your access becomes an interesting situation when for political, financial or legal reasons you want or need to leave.

[GravityWell]

I'm hardly an MS fanboy, and I'm not sure what announcements you're referring to, but it's hard for me to see a downside to this.

[iamthepieman]

This is as insightful comment and the points you raise may be important for a startup, SAAS or software product company to consider. A lot of organizations use and develop software but aren't software companies.

"A fully heterogenous system with a sole vendor mediating your access" is a good thing for these companies.

I do a lot of contract work for state and local governments. They are already fully invested in SQL Server, IIS and Active Directory. For both these organizations and myself as a contractor to them I see the increased openness of Microsoft as only a good thing.

[JeremyMorgan]

It's a simple game of catch up. These ecosystems popped up and flourished very fast and if anything Microsoft was slow to adapt. They've learned enough hard lessons in their history ignoring emerging technologies and clearly they're not ready to make the same mistake again.

Just like the ASP stack and it's rapid advancements. They know if they don't start innovating fast they'll be finished.

[rch]

I don't believe we'll see 'embrace and extend' being applied to Node and Python, which are the two ecosystems I'd be concerned about.

I'll just welcome the added support, and hope that it leads to better acceptance of my prefered tools in more conservative environments.