MS is heavily investing on AI because they missed the opportunity of being #1 on the web and on mobile.
However if you go back some decades you will see that Microsoft did have smartphones, before the iPhone, just they weren't as appealing as a product.
This time around I predict it will be the same. When you look at the product (e.g: Visual Studio tools for AI) it looks very featured but not very organized... Microsoft needs to understand that more and more features doesn't mean more perceived value.
Note that the integration is in VS Code, the lightweight Editor++ which is cross-platform. In general most of the AI/ML related work has been & will likely be cross-plat.
Many people doing AI/ML right now are not using Windows. By asking them to move to Visual Studio you are implicitly asking them to move to Windows. Only by doing that you are making it extremely difficult to adopt such technology.
However if you go back some decades you will see that Microsoft did have smartphones, before the iPhone, just they weren't as appealing as a product.
This time around I predict it will be the same. When you look at the product (e.g: Visual Studio tools for AI) it looks very featured but not very organized... Microsoft needs to understand that more and more features doesn't mean more perceived value.