True, although they do have the advantage of being somewhat more niche in that they aren't developing an entire platform from the ground up with all the costs that entails.
For example if MS loses enough ground with Windows in the consumer / small business space and begin to cede the enterprise desktop too does it make sense for them to continue development of Windows as a pure server platform?
Or will we start to see ports of stuff like Exchange,Active Directory,VS,SQL Server to other platforms?
I think they will focus on higher level (and therefore value) enterprise applications - SharePoint, Dynamics ERPs (particularly AX) and Dynamics CRM.
It also wouldn't surprise me if they decided to take all product consulting in-house and become much more of a consulting company with products as a useful sideline - a bit like IBM.
>Or will we start to see ports of stuff like Exchange,Active Directory,VS,SQL Server to other platforms?
Maybe. Some of that stuff doesn't make sense to port. For example, the value proposition of Visual Studio to Microsoft is not that it makes them particularly a lot of money, it's that it encourages its users to produce software that only runs on Microsoft's platforms. Obviously nobody is going to run Visual Studio on Linux if it can't produce Linux binaries, but it doesn't make any sense from Microsoft's perspective to allow that, so likely Visual Studio will never run on any other platforms.
And really the rest of it kind of suffers the same issues. Is Active Directory still worth it when the client devices are non-Windows? Probably not, unless they make enough integration modifications to the client OS that it would amount to producing their own Linux distribution. (That'll be the day.)
I guess I could see the case for selling Exchange Server for RHEL if they produced a Gnome, KDE or Android version of Outlook to go along with it. Even that seems like an ecosystem thing though: People install Exchange because they already have Windows and Outlook and Active Directory and Exchange relies heavily on all of them. If the starting point is Android or iOS and gmail, does that still happen?
