I wonder how much longer Microsoft stays committed to Windows as a whole. Windows is less than 10% of the company, users are migrating to phones, tablets, and Chromebooks (all of which can run Office), and with .NET on Linux, Windows servers are making less sense. It's a shrinking market.
But Windows is where most people run Office, including all the back-end implications like Exchange and all the "Power" stuff.
It is a lot more than 10% of Microsoft revenue really (just not directly).
I agree though that they do not really care about the platform anymore. In fact, they care less and less every day about everything that is not AI on Azure.
It will be a long time before Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, and Excel are not important enough to enterprises to justify the Microsoft subscription. And Visual Studio is still a huge part of the Microsoft capture strategy.
Microsoft is working on separating all of the above from Windows without losing too much control but it is going to take a while.
Exchange should be SaaS for 99% of businesses. There's a web version of Excel that's probably OK-ish. I'm not sure what Active Directory looks like in a world without Windows.
Not every company is a startup that only needs gmail and Figma, though. The ecosystem of LoB apps and device controller software is ginormous, and not going away any time soon.
