"You should not underestimate the power of a narrative or even impressions."
I'm not. I'm saying (from Shiller, world leading economist) - that narratives are usually wrong, and the MS case is evidence.
VS Code and 'open source' Chakra are very, small, things.
They are not even canaries.
(Caveat: Azure allowing linux is important strategically though)
I personally fall victim to this myself a lot, making undue correlations between some tech move or announcement, and actual business robustness. We vastly over estimate these things because we think and care about these issues all day. Most technology customers, and most Enterprises do not. If you have a look at where MSFT derives it's revenue and how consistent it is, that gives a clearer picture.
Second, that MS may appear to be more 'open' in these areas in no way implies any kind of success or revenue growth.
Apple is considerably more 'closed' and they do just fine, for example.
Satya in no way deserves a massive P/E ratio bump from analysts, there is no real basis for it.
MSFT stock price over the last 20 years should have been ballpark commensurate with it's revenues, fluctuating here and there. The 'big lift' after Satya had nothing to do with fundamentals really.
Ballmer took an already great company and massively grew it, launched XBox, moved into the cloud, grew enterprise services substantially, it's one of the most successful and robust evolutions of a company ever.
The 'misperceptions' that lead to 'false narratives' in this case are analyst's readings of pop culture tech trends, and we HN'ers overvaluing the importance of things like VS Code.