That’s the thing with massively wealthy people (which until recently meant billionaires and near-billionaires). They’re not interested in making the world better for others. The one thing that makes them happy is… more billions added to their wealth. Why? They don’t know… but they must have it. But the happiness is only temporary - until they become unhappy again and crave even more billions.

The bigger problem might be what it will cost to get things back where they need to be. Probably a lot more than $600k. How many of the knowledgeable developers are willing to come back to clean up the mess? Any of them? And at what salary? Possibly a lot more than they were paid before they were kicked out. If you can’t rehire the original developers then you might find others with the required technical skills - but probably not with the domain knowledge. And now costs and times increase further.

Why bother? Just to keep paying MS?

Scalability was the primary reason. An application running on physical Windows-based servers can’t quickly scale up and down, leading to higher hosting costs due to everything scaled to maximum capacity at all times. Or, more often, leading to slow performance and lost revenue due to the customer not wanting to pay for maximum hosting capacity at all times. So the customers want scalable cloud hosting. And when losing a customer often means a loss of millions of dollars in revenue for my former employer, they want to keep those customers.

A secondary goal is increasing the speed of deployment for new customers. Scripting the entire environment - including servers, network, storage - can make it very fast to spin up a new customer or testing environment. That can be done without .NET, of course, but .NET Core is the obvious next step for a large distributed enterprise product suite that is (was) already running on .NET Framework.

.NET Core isn’t a primary platform for desktop or mobile client applications. It is very common as a hosting platform; that is likely to continue.

.NET Framework specifically - yeah. That’s on life support. .NET Core is likely to be around for a long time. I spent the last few years at my former employer working on transitioning our server-side business layer components to .NET Core so they could run in Linux containers. Someone else got to deal with the Kubernetes aspect - thank goodness.

Now I usually avoid thinking about any of that. (Oops.)

I wish that were true. But most consumers buy a phone based on a few metrics - the screen (large, bright, vibrant), fast CPU/GPU (mobile gamers), cameras, storage capacity, software support longevity, battery life, general bling (colors, shiny), and pre-chosen platform/cult (Android, iOS).

Techies like us care. But we’re very much the exception, not the rule.

And if sideloading can be unlocked and available after a 24-hour wait - as Google suggests - then it’ll matter even less.

I’m a 30-year ex-Windows developer - started with C/C++ briefly, moved to Java for a few years, and then to C#/.NET for about 23 years. Good riddance to Microsoft Windows. The keyboard shortcuts may be forever ingrained into my reflexes, but I’d rather use Linux or MacOS.

No concerns about .NET however. It’s a cross-platform development framework and works well. It’s also quite fast now.

It does seem like that at times. But at least in Minnesota, the ruroids often seem to have better availability of fiber than the suburbanites and exurbanites. Possibly due to state broadband grants.

Probably. I suppose that I was lucky that I could manage these things myself. As we had only one local IT FTE, and I wouldn’t have known who to contact beyond that single resource. And might have hated life if I had needed someone else to manage this for me.