It is the eternal quest for hearts and minds. Developers. Developers. Developers. Microsoft have always been aggressive about getting their stack in schools here. Hook them young. To be fair other companies try and do the same. It is good to see Microsoft on the Pi. Diversity is important. It is better that they get behind the Pi than them going off and promoting a more closed alternative that would only boot a signed Microsoft image.
As more and more things become connected and automated, why would they not want to extend their platform to those devices?
The architecture of the Pi is common enough that is probably serves as a proof-of-concept for commercial vendors who want to build programmable products that would be well-supported by operating systems and device drivers (by piggy-backing on the work done for the Pi).
There's actually a very good reason. Windows XP has been officially unsupported by Microsoft for about two years now unless you are willing to pay them a quarter million dollars a year. Often the computers spec'd for those systems have pitiful amounts of CPU power and memory (i.e. much less than necessary to run Windows 10), and the cost of a re-spec for PCs in certain critical systems is basically the cost of developing a new platform (not to mention that some of them can't fit a microATX-sized PC or have low power requirements) makes it potentially cost-effective to use SBCs, especially a popular one which someone like Newark/Element14 can customize for you and potentially support.
Cousin: "Ugggggg my laptop is garbage since I put on Windows 10 and it's so slooooooow, can you fix it? I can't even play Minecraft!!!!"
Me: "Umm, I haven't actually used Windows in about 5 or 6 years and have no idea what's wrong - I also don't feel like spending my limited time visiting family messing around with your laptop. Here's a USB drive with Ubuntu, give it a shot"
Cousin (next day): "DUDE that's amazing it's so fast! I had to figure out UEFI stuff but I installed Ubuntu and Minecraft is faster than it's ever been before! I have a great dual boot setup going!"
Anyway, I don't feel too bad about it.
Incidentally, UEFI is one of the many reasons MS puts me off.
Not only this. Raspberry pi serves as a good jump in point for embedded development, and there are a good billion more cores to be sold in that area in the next few years.
