My guess is that this time they really wanted to pull the developer demographic over into the M$ sphere of influence. MSYS, MingW, and Git Shell already fill the same niche as WSL, so it wasn’t destined to succeed. Thing is, they probably didn’t expect it to succeed either. Microsoft’s strategy has always been to throw a hundred dicks at the wall and hope that one of them sticks (think Zune, Windows Phone, etc). This time, Azure kind of stuck. WSL didn’t. When you’re as big as Microsoft, the occasional win more than covers the cost of a hundred fails.
My guess is that this time they really wanted to pull the developer demographic over into the M$ sphere of influence. MSYS, MingW, and Git Shell already fill the same niche as WSL, so it wasn’t destined to succeed. Thing is, they probably didn’t expect it to succeed either. Microsoft’s strategy has always been to throw a hundred dicks at the wall and hope that one of them sticks (think Zune, Windows Phone, etc). This time, Azure kind of stuck. WSL didn’t. When you’re as big as Microsoft, the occasional win more than covers the cost of a hundred fails.
Given that Docker/Podman heavily rely on WSL to work on windows, I would argue that it definitely has succeeded
The Google graveyard is a monument of this practice.