Microsoft's Android patent shakedown was the big thing that kept me from believing the company had really changed - I think I'm ready to consider that it really has changed now.
I'm still unconvinced, I think we'll need to see years of really good behavior for me to possibly believe they've changed. There have been decades of bad faith attacks on free/libre technology, I think I'm going to need to see at least 5 years of no fucking around from them before I consider this more than the embrace part of embrace, extend, extinguish. Up till now my biggest complaint has been the extortion racket they've been running with these patents, so this is certainly a move in the right direction, but that company is evil to the core and I don't believe for a second they're really trying to change for any reason other than marketing/public perception.
Well, I suppose now. Their last majorly problematic behavior (that I'm aware of) was the extortion racket against Android vendors with their FAT patent, which is presumably no longer going to occur.
Guys, are they obligated to throw their business outside windows, give everything for free and quit or shrink, firing more than half of people doing job @ ms?
Why do people think they should opensource everything?
It doesn't matter - just another person that jumped on the MS bash bandwagon because it's fun and it lets you score quick brownie points. Most people have crap articulations of why MS is evil or why it sucks besides "patents", and it's the same basic drivel I see repeated about any company. Never ceases to amaze me how critical thinking skills can cease so thoroughly on a subject.
I think you may be missing some historical perspective. Microsoft have quite the history of being extremely unpleasant toward free and open source software.
There's also this list of more recent issues with their software:
Technical details I cannot think of anything off the top of my head; my issues would be with his motivations. He ascribes things to malice that could be easily attributed (and rightfully should be) to incompetence or out of touch with the customer.
> He ascribes things to malice that could be easily attributed (and rightfully should be) to incompetence or out of touch with the customer.
So you're ascibing spying, tacking, inserting ads etc. all to "incompetence". Interesting. I'd definitely say it's malice. It's not "out of touch with the customer", it's making money at the expense of the customer.
It definitely wasn't malice, but feel free to believe in whatever makes you feel better. The way people like to throw around words like "malice" and "evil" without seeing the ridiculous hyperbole is beyond me.
> I am on the other hand amazed at how much Slack people are willing to give multinational corporations that don't presumably even have them on payroll.
"The only thing worse than a paid shill is an unpaid shill; sellouts at least have greed as an excuse."
It's good you're doing fine, but some of us noticed Windows tracking us and pushing ads on us, NSA spying and backdoors, Amazon deleting books and spying on conversations, Google tracking our location even when we opt out etc.
> It doesn't matter - just another person that jumped on the MS bash bandwagon because it's fun and it lets you score quick brownie points.
Please stop doing this. With the same attitude, I could call you a naive starry eyed fanboy who has been duped by some benevolent looking little tricks and who is riding on the sugary wave of MS apologism that has been going on here for a while.
The actual money for MS comes from its strong foothold within corporations. And if you look at the picture here, you will see technical interdependencies and licensing models that are carefully crafted to make MS technology spread like a cancer through your org.
None of this is in danger of being changed by any of Microsoft's oh so benevolent moves. Those are merely to get people like us developers on their good side.
Microsoft opensources .NET core. But not those parts that are important to interoperate with other MS technologies. For that you are still stuck with Windows and closed source. This doesn't even slightly endanger MS's foothold here.
Microsoft embraces Linux. But as part of Windows and not to the benefit of Linux as an independent OS. Should MS Office ever run on Linux then the boat has turned wrt. Linux. What I see here is classic embrace, extend, extinguish.
Microsoft builds VS Code, an editor for web developers. VS Code does not compete with Visual Studio but with editors like Sublime. MS is trying to pull developers working on MacBooks and Linux to their side, to their technology stack. Get people to care for (in the form of making plugins etc.) technology under their control.
The current developer world revolves around open source and communities taking care of projects they need and use. MS wants control of this (cf. the acquisition of Github).
Keep this in mind when judging any new move of Microsoft.
They started changing for the better as soon as they got rid of Ballmer in my opinion. He was toxic for the company and for the industry as a whole. It's taken a few years, but I don't think there's much of the "old" MS left anymore in terms of business practices and ethics.
Yes and no. Credit to Satya Nadella, the culture really is changing towards openness and collaboration. However, Microsoft has a lot of "lifers," and you don't just roll back two decades of the old Microsoft in a couple years.
At the high level/PR level, I think the business practices and ethics are improving, but it'll take many years and possibly a good number of retirements (because the industry is actually old enough for that now) for the mindset change to propagate throughout management.
That's a great observation and reminder, thank you.
I agree Ballmer's strategic actions were problematic for the larger technological ecosystem and only benefited Microsoft in shortsighted ways though they did establish Microsoft as the most important technology company in the world for nearly 10 years (1995 - 2005).
It's been 4 years since Ballmer left Microsoft and it's taken some time for new management to effect change. Microsoft is a much more interesting, cooperative, and innovative company as a result.
EDIT: Change "Ballmer" to "Ballmer's" and number agreement.
The part about leaders generating energy is interesting.
I wonder what he thought about Scott McNealy's attempts at generating energy by trying to make Microsoft out to be the great enemy of humanity that Sun was going to vanquish, which I though fell flat because you should never let yourself be defined simply in terms of opposition to someone else. When Sun Microsystems fell apart into several different companies, he even named one of them "SunSoft" in opposition to "Microsoft".
You've got to have something of your own to be energetic about, without needing an enemy to fight against. For so many years, Java was first and foremost simply a weapon in Sun's arsenal for their much bigger purpose, the raging war against Microsoft. They actually weaponized a programming language, and that was a higher priority than any other consideration. They wasted all that energy they generated around Java in a war overseas, instead of building infrastructure at home.
I'm not sure they've really changed, but I judge them from an enterprise viewpoint. I think their strategy has certainly changed, but I think their core ideals have remained the same, and I think they are really just honing in on their primary market.
Their tech still doesn't play well with others, only in the areas where they absolutely have to.
I think Sharepoint in the cloud is a good example. It's really great if you let it handle most things, maybe you buy a theme or maybe something bigger to put on top, but generally you let Sharepoint handle most things on your intranet. You'll include a few non-Microsoft systems through Sharepoint apps or widgets, and that still works well enough. That's the great use case. The terrible use case, is using it alongside 500 other IT systems and trying to include those, the way you'd like a modern enterprise intranet to do.
We have a system to report our driving to get it refunded. Another system to get vacation time accepted and validated, and a third system for sick leave. All with their own web-interfaces, mobile apps and open APIs. They rely on AD and ADFS for authentication, but they're their own things. Sure you can build a Sharepoint specific plugin for each of them, but a modern intranet should really support stuff like VUE stand alone widgets/apps so that you can share those widgets between systems and you really can't do that with a Sharepoint plugin.
We use Azure a lot, like I said, and it I think it's great, but it's very clear that .NET is very first class in Azure. You can argue that stuff like Node.js is up there, and maybe the few python frameworks that Microsoft support with visual studio, but JAVA, Go, Flutter or whatever you can think of certainly isn't smooth in Azure.
And just try using non-outlook, libra office or something other than one drive for business in your Microsoft enterprise setup, you can, but it's not very nice.
I'm sounding negative, but I actually really like Microsoft. I think they're great at what they do, and I think they're one of the best partners you can have in enterprise, along as you embrace their tech. But that's the catch, and that's why I think they haven't really changed their core values. I do think it's perfectly reasonable, for them to want you to use their technologies, from a business point of view, but when I look at the options for stuff like cloud, I think it's very clear that Azure wants you to also build your backbone in .NET with maybe Node.js + a JS framework on the front, where as with AWS I feel like Amazon doesn't really care what your stack is.
