To be honest, they already pigeon holed themselves when they axed the mobile division. Had they not, there would be a rich ecosystem for the DUO to tap into via UWP. Which would have paved the way to Azure driven web connected apps and containers...
But that's ancient history now.
They killed mobile because it was a complete failure and an embarrassment. They had 0.2% market share and dropping when they killed it.
They thought they could design one "platform" (UWP) that could run great on phones, tablets, desktops, servers, xBox, Hololens, etc.
There are now a billion devices that can run UWP apps, why don't developers write for that? I'll tell you why, UWP sucks! LOL. I say this as decades long Windows user and developer.
The problem is they designed UWP to run on the lowest common denominator (phones). It was optimized to run well on the touch oriented input, small screen, limited power of phones. It is a terrible "platform" to write complex desktop applications.
Microsoft has had a progression of frameworks / platforms starting after Win32/ C API that developers by and large have eagerly adopted because the latest one was so much better than the previous one.
C++/MFC - huge improvement, object oriented development
C# / .NET / WinForms - huge improvement, C# is nice, .NET is a modern, powerful and consistent API
C# / .NET / WPF - huge improvement, even more C# and .NET features, WPF is a very powerful UI platform
Then things changed...
Windows 8 "Metro" platform (precursor to UWP) - WTF! this is GARBAGE!
Windows 10 UWP - WTF! this is GARBAGE! LOL
WPF is that last framework from Microsoft that is suitable for writing complex desktop applications on Windows. Unfortunately, Microsoft basically abandoned it after about 2012. It is in maintenance mode with no real improvements for 8 years. Instead Microsoft has focused all its attention and encouraged developers to use "Metro", and now UWP. Visual Studio is written in WPF, why doesn't Microsoft use UWP for that? I'll tell you why - UWP Sucks! My company develops custom complex Windows desktop apps for clients. None of our clients have ever mentioned UWP.
I spend my available free time learning iOS / Mac OS and Linux these days instead of bothering with anything new coming from Microsoft.
This is all self-inflicted by Microsoft. They thought the could leverage their desktop dominance to drive their mobile efforts, by forcing the crappy "Metro" UI on users of Windows 8 (and later Windows 10) hoping it would lead to people then buying Windows phones / tablets. The whole gamble backfired spectacularly. Instead of propelling them into dominance in phones / tablets, they have completely failed in phones / tablets and in the process completely ruined desktop development in the process.