I also think their current strategy could be the one you describe. We're at the Embrace phase. It's not sure that Extend will follow but I wonder what it could look like. Maybe it will be something convenient you can do in Linux only if you're running it inside WSL. Given how Linux is used it should be something server side, Internet facing (no Active Directory, Exchange, SQL Server, those are Windows markets anyway). A bonus would be some compatibility tool to do that on native Linux too. If enough software is written to run for Linux+WSL and it gets deployed in production, then the Estinguish phase will be ready to kick in: deprecate the compatibility tool and hijack all the Linux market to Windows. The timescale for playing out these strategies is at least 10 years, so let's talk about it when approaching 2030.
If Microsoft is really thinking along those lines, a way it could fail is if Linux expands to other markets. That would make it hard to Extend to most of the use cases.
However what WSL is doing it to make those MacOS users that deploy to Linux consider moving back to Windows because there is a Linux subsystem there too. Actually, a real Linux instead of a look alike.
By the way: why did they named it Windows Subsystem for Linux instead of Linux Subsystem for Windows? It's Linux running inside Windows, not the other way around.
It's named like this because it is a subsytem of the NT kernel (hence the Windows subsystem part) that implements Linux system calls to run Linux applications (hence the for Linux part).
Naming it the other way around ie Linux for Windows would imply that the Linux kernel is involved which is actually not the case at all.
Also, they previously had a Subsystem for Unix (SFU/SUA), so they're being consistent with their naming. That was the old POSIX layer that included, IIRC, a shell script to wrap cl.exe to take gcc-like arguments, and you can get third-party compiled binaries of things like bash.
I'm not saying that those money are peanuts but it doesn't compare to what they were doing (are?) with software licenses. Maybe they plan to cannibalize the desktop with subscription services and Azure.
I see things they could do with a WSL+Azure integration but I don't want to give them the idea :-) Anyway, they are collectively smarter than me (and more focused on their businesses) so they'll already thought about that for sure. That's why I'm somewhat worried.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...
I also think their current strategy could be the one you describe. We're at the Embrace phase. It's not sure that Extend will follow but I wonder what it could look like. Maybe it will be something convenient you can do in Linux only if you're running it inside WSL. Given how Linux is used it should be something server side, Internet facing (no Active Directory, Exchange, SQL Server, those are Windows markets anyway). A bonus would be some compatibility tool to do that on native Linux too. If enough software is written to run for Linux+WSL and it gets deployed in production, then the Estinguish phase will be ready to kick in: deprecate the compatibility tool and hijack all the Linux market to Windows. The timescale for playing out these strategies is at least 10 years, so let's talk about it when approaching 2030.
If Microsoft is really thinking along those lines, a way it could fail is if Linux expands to other markets. That would make it hard to Extend to most of the use cases.
However what WSL is doing it to make those MacOS users that deploy to Linux consider moving back to Windows because there is a Linux subsystem there too. Actually, a real Linux instead of a look alike.
By the way: why did they named it Windows Subsystem for Linux instead of Linux Subsystem for Windows? It's Linux running inside Windows, not the other way around.