Interesting, but this is just a huge advertisement for a book. Also; it says nothing about what Microsoft is doing with Minecraft in the last year. There is no new news here in this blurb as far as I can tell. Move along.
"Also; it says nothing about what Microsoft is doing with Minecraft in the last year."
That is accurate. Nothing so far. At least in public.
When the news of the purchase went out there was a lot of theory about how they will get rid of all console ports but the msphone/xbox ports, get rid of the osx and linux port, somehow find a way to make it un-runnable on anything but windows 8 which I'm sure with effort is technically possible, or monetize the heck out of it like buy diamonds for real world cash or whatever.
I'm not sure if they're wisely waiting for things to quiet and calm, or if they're actually making no progress.
The modding community is busy enough. I don't think its possible for one human to keep up with absolutely everything in the FTB DW20 pack, for example. It would just take more wall clock time to gain expertise than there is wall clock time between new releases and new mods.
There was a lot of hoopla from the community right when it happened. The head of forge quite, leaving the guy under him to make the next forge version. The one guy in bukkit sunk the whole project due to it also.
I would like to know what if anything Microsoft has done to help Forge to keep the community strong. My guess: nothing as you say. If they have done something that would be news.
There is speculation that nearly all Minecraft mods right now are illegal due to reverse engineering of the obfuscated core.
