Because of this, there is an increasing demand to learn the fundamentals of machine learning by both existing software engineers and students. However, one of the challenges many users face is the accessibility of machine learning workflows and tools – they will commonly need to use Linux software solutions, often on separate hardware from what they use for their day-to-day computing tasks.

But you folks have known that for years. Not only did you initially mock Linux from high above, with a smug sense of superiority, now you also have to make concessions for its popularity on your cloud platform, Windows Azure, where you are offering Linux images for VM role deployment. Now, you are several years late to the machine learning game. Arguably, you were behind the cloud computing trend in many ways, too, speaking of the cloud. And yet again, it was a competitor, with Amazon, and maybe a second with Google, that were investing in Linux. If one of the largest software companies in the world cannot keep up with the latest industry developments in a timely fashion, is there something wrong with its corporate culture?

Maybe one could excuse this oversight, given that, by any measure, the embrace of machine learning by the industry was sudden and rapid. Despite machine learning having been a developing field in academia for decades, there was the AI winter of the 70s and many developing technologies initially take a long time to find their way into corporate environments that can afford the investment in often complex deployment and setup processes, let alone end-users. Machine learning, however, had announced itself in such a broad variety of fashions, time and time again, that it seems nothing short of absolute corporate blindness to have yet again failed to acknowledge the enduring significance of Linux and the increasing insularity of the Windows ecosystem.

It might sound far-fetched to bring this up in the same context, but with another major product release, Microsoft Edge, now apparently having abandoned their previous core, in favor of yet more open source, Linux community derived developments, those being Chromium, V8, and Blink, after having ditched EdgeHTML.

One has to therefor ask, is Microsoft too incompetent to keep up with some of the most significant industry developments? Is this company that is employing tens of thousands of people world-wide no longer capable of developing a usable web browser on their own? Is there an equivalent of senility that infects corporations that grow too large?

Speaking of Windows, why do people still use it at this point? It is more of a pain in the rear nowadays and even the crummy setup experience you used to have with Linux is now a smooth ride. You are often browsing the Internet while your Linux distribution is still installing the system, using pre-compiled networking drivers and bootstrapping systems that are loaded into RAM disk. I think people are primarily using Windows because of the driver support and the software available. They install Windows despite Windows. It is a means to an end. The operating system more likely gets in the way and people seem relieved when they have to mess with Windows as little as possible, whereas people under Linux often love investing weeks, months or years into customizing every part of their base system. In short, I believe Microsoft is in many ways riding out the momentum they had built in decades past with the ecosystem they have built. It is not Windows that people want, it is access to the software Microsoft has brought to an increasingly inferior platform through its business connections. People install Windows for its ecosystem, not for Windows, whereas people who use Linux often times like its design philosophy and for its own sake. Long term, this cannot bode well for Windows or Microsoft and their arthritic lethargy when it comes to adjusting to new trends: they were spectacularly wrong on the Internet, they lost the browser war long ago, they were late to the cloud, and now they dropped the ball on machine learning. The only way they seem to have made it this long is by having decisively crippled the competition in the OS market, an area that is conspicuously monopolistic, especially by the standards of the fast-paced software industry.