What situations is this not the case?
If you downsize or move to a place with lower housing costs or somehow fundamentally change your living arrangement to lower the cost.
If you die, houses can be a good inheritance, but people usually want their investments to provide something during their lifetimes.
If you find a house that is undervalued and can be improved and sold for much more. However, this exists in any investment decision and is not unique to housing. Most houses won’t fall into this category or they would have already been bought and sold.
If you can fully pay off the mortgage, you’ll immediately get more monthly income and this income can be applied towards actual investments that make you money. (But you could have done this instead of paying off the mortgage too, so it’s economy dependent)
Whether it's a seller's market, buyer's market or balanced market, as both a seller and buyer _in the same market_ you will experience things from both sides, I don't think the market situation really matters in that case.
But what does matter, especially in market of constantly increasing prices, is that already owning a house means your stake in the house is already following the general market pricing so you only need to pay some extra "if you move up" in the market or you cash in some money "if you downsize". This is vastly better than just being a first time buyer, in that type of market.
> If you can fully pay off the mortgage, you’ll immediately get more monthly income and this income can be applied towards actual investments that make you money. (But you could have done this instead of paying off the mortgage too, so it’s economy dependent)
Really depends on the mortgage interest rate, term (years that the interest is applied over) and the expected returns from those said investments. In other words, I find it hard to find enough motivation to pay off a 2% interest rate 10 years long mortgage loan. 2% is same as inflation, that mortgage is almost free.
Ballmer went head to head with open source and thought he could crush the threat. That didn't work, and things weren't looking great for MS before he was ousted.
Nadella's strategy is far more subtle: not quite Embrace/Extend/Eliminate, more Embrace/Neutralise/Replace.
Linux is a threat to server-side windows? Fine. Let them deploy on linux, so long as those linux boxes are in Azure. But that means devs get familiar with linux at the expense of windows, which means (a) they'll want linux on their desktop and (b) things are more readily transferable to AWS/GCP/whatever.
So: give them linux _in_ windows. Make appealing tools like vscode available free to create good will and positive sentiment towards Microsoft. Re-build the advocacy that hemorrhaged in the latter days of Ballmer's tenure.
And they're nailing it. By comparison to Google/Facebook/Amazon, there's very little negative press for Microsoft. And lots of positivity, even just in this thread.
It's hard not to be impressed by how successful they're being. And I say that as someone who still bears the scars from the 90s/00s hegemony. Microsoft was positively reviled by swathes of people in those days. Their attitude and market abuses rightly got them into hot water with the DOJ.
So, whilst I respect the turnaround, I'm wary. Microsoft is cruising inexorably back to dominance. History says that wouldn't be a good outcome.
[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
I think it's smart because this will capture all those Linux people who aren't super comfortable administrating their own distro and even for those that are it's now giving them another option if they ever need to run things both in Windows and Linux at the same time or just run into some Linux issues and don't want to spend the time on them they can switch to Windows 10 WSL.
At this point the only thing that I still think it doesn't make much sense is Microsoft running/developing their own kernel. It's entirely possible for them to start running Linux and run all the WIN32 support, drivers, DirectX, etc as a separate sandbox (similar to the type of sandbox WSL runs). The performance overhead from doing that should be negligible on modern hardware.
EDIT: note that I only mean switching to Linux kernel for their desktop OS, there are plenty of usecases of Microsoft kernels where every bit of performance matters but I suspect those will continue to use their own kernel as part of Windows Server releases.