Microsoft is well-known for three things, their hardware (such as the Microsoft Surface series), their operating systems and their software. The problem being is that a lot of these are closely tied together, their hardware uses their operating system and normally come pre-installed with their software. You can get their operating systems or software alone, but putting their software on another operating system tends to work quite badly (or if you are using the Mac version of Windows Office, you may be missing some of the features available on Windows). This is set to change with Microsoft announcing that their SQL database software will be coming to Linux soon.
For clarification, at least, some of Microsoft’s SQL server’s core capabilities will be coming to Linux, with what parts being heavily influenced by demand and feedback. With Microsoft looking to build their own Linux distro and even opening up their .NET framework for Linux and Mac OSX users, maybe we could see a more and more open approach regarding their software.
With open source software being a big part of companies and governments, Microsoft may be looking to not only get community support in increasing their software capabilities but possibly winning back some of the markets that are going to open source solutions.
Good good.
I hope M$ dont end up shooting themselves in the foot, like they always do with these good starts.