And that, in my opinion, is the way it's supposed to work. Vendor's products gettin' ya down? Not being responsive to your needs and lacking in quality? Move elsewhere! Money talks.
A good kick in the ass can be a humbling experience, and a good opportunity for the open-minded. It was a long time in coming, but I'm glad to see MS is starting to take some of these lessons to heart. If they keep it up with actions such as these, there's a good chance they'll stand to be rewarded for it.
> And that, in my opinion, is the way it's supposed to work. Vendor's products gettin' ya down? Not being responsive to your needs and lacking in quality? Move elsewhere! Money talks.
Exactly. That's what got Apple where they are today as well. Pre-Rhapsody, MacOS was largely a joke in the developer community, but that changed drastically when they ditched the archaic MacOS for the Nextstep derived OSX. When that happened, suddenly there was a reasonable alternative to Windows or the various Unices out there. It seems entirely natural that, like the shift that pushed people towards Apple, we would see similar shifts in other OS's that would entice people to think more broadly than seeing Apple as the dominant desirable dev platform. That seems like a healthy thing with respect to avoiding a stagnant monoculture.
And -quickly enough- they'll go back to being the old MSFT we all knew and loathed from top to bottom, and these olive branches will vanish quicker than a pile of shaved ice on a summer day. For many of us, this isn't our first rodeo. :)
I'm not nearly as confident as you seem to be.
People with purchasing power can still be swayed by FUD. Less-technical bosses are not-infrequently swayed by marketing copy from glossy mags and giveaways from salesman rather than sound technical advice from technical staff. It's abundantly clear that shadowy back-room deals and front-room exclusionary deals based on tremendous price cuts on widgets that have a near-zero unit cost are still tremendously effective.
I expect that within five or ten years, after this new crop of programmers have happily been making Microsoft software a critical part of their workflow, Microsoft will return to its traditional MO.
As I said earlier, for many of us this isn't our first rodeo, and isn't the first time Microsoft has played the nice guy for a little while. :)
Three things:
1) That describes a corporate goal, not a set of behaviors used to achieve it. There are many companies out there who also have the goal of "Keep everyone using our software.". Not many of them have utilized such destructive techniques as Microsoft has in pursuit of that goal.
2) Your second sentence would be more correctly spelt "Microsoft's game plan is to keep everyone using Microsoft software, wherever possible.". When you spell it that way, it becomes clear that the big picture actually hasn't changed. Windows was (and remains) a big part of that game plan, but for the past decade or two, it would be hard for an honest observer to make the claim that Microsoft was only interested in keeping folks on Windows.
3) Many of us have seen Microsoft play nice with the wider community. They never play nice for very long. The more cynical old-timers would say that this "play nice" phase is -itself- a part of the EEE strategy.
People that think this way have a ridiculous amount of brand loyalty which really means nothing. The people change behind the brand all the time. It's clear that MSFT is changing. It's clear from the people that I've talked to that work there. It's clear from the messaging by senior management.
I never said that things can't change. I've seen many companies change over the years. However, Microsoft's anti-competitive and underhanded practices have been extremely profitable for them and have -all things considered- resulted in very few negative consequences.
> It's clear [that MSFT is changing] from the people that I've talked to that work there. It's clear from the messaging by senior management.
Both Plus and Hangouts were supposed to be bold new directions for Google. At the time, it was abundantly clear from talking to most people who worked there and senior management that everyone was totally stoked about these new platforms and that this was the direction that the company was going to go for the foreseeable future.
But here we are -four years later- and Hangouts is -all things considered- a steaming pile and everyone in the company knows it, Google is slowly but steadily disentangling itself from Plus (and Plus from its services), and Vivek Gundotra -the former head of Plus- quietly "left the company" several years past.
As you say, companies change.
> It's clear that MSFT is changing.
This isn't the first time that it has been "clear" that Microsoft was changing. In the past it turned out to be a temporary change in order to gain reputation, or new users for their platforms or... Like I said before, "Playing the nice guy" has -historically- been just a small -and fleeting- phase of Microsoft's dirty market domination strategies.
Given the enormous amount of harm Microsoft has done to the industry over the past several decades, (and given Microsoft's historical propensity for lock-in and intentionally high switching costs) I'm going to wait for a very long time before seriously entertaining the claims that Microsoft has actually changed.
It's abundantly clear that their slimeball strategies worked very well for them for at least twenty years. In the computing industry, twenty years is a very long time. :)
While it is next to impossible to truly consider a topic in a vacuum, it is very common practice to focus on a particular single topic or set of topics when engaging in discussion. This practice tends to promote productive discussion by allowing the conversants to momentarily disregard issues that are largely or completely unrelated to the topic at hand.
Because -as the US DoJ inquiry showed us- Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior has been a strategy that was pursued because of directives from C-level employees.
Historically, it hasn't been low-to-mid-level minions spontaneously deciding to do great violence to the computer industry, it has been directives (either express or implied) from the top that caused them to behave in this way.
It's particularly interesting that you start with 1995, since that's the year of Bill Gates's "Tidal Wave" memo. A large chunk of MS suddenly devoted itself to getting Really Good At The Internet, and within a few months produced the best web browser on the market (IE 3, the first mainstream browser to implement CSS) and the best JVM (far faster than Sun's own at the time). IE continued to be the best browser until Firefox came out. (Yes, you can argue for Seamonkey, but it took years for it to be usably stable.) Every version of IE up to and including 6.0 was more standards-compliant than the equivalent Netscape release.
I was doing all kinds of web development on both Linux and Windows NT back then. I never got used to Windows for web hosting, but I far preferred developing against MS SQL Server than any other DB, due to its features and documentation.
The main problem with IE, regardless of how good it is, is that it is windows only. This was true of all of Microsoft's stuff (particularly crappy mac versions don't count) (I also wasn't a fan of Mac OS 9 ... but there was bsd and linux for a number of years by then...) They used their own formats, which were not publicly documented or even really designed. If you had to use any single Microsoft thing, you practically had to use it all. Samba and later OpenOffice changed the situation but were really a lot of reverse-engineering and bug-for-bug-compatibility work, and of course Microsoft kept moving the goalposts with new versions and new bugs.
The resentment comes from the lock-in. You had to pay a lot of money and deal with licenses (or pirate and deal with cracks) just to experiment. You had to deal with the surprisingly flaky file sharing and dhcp client etc. You had to deal with the fact that there wasn't a good terminal or shell, that the compiler was not trivial to download and install and invoke from a script, etc. If you have the freedom to choose the "convenience" of the Microsoft user-oriented products or not, it's not such a big deal that Microsoft everything sucked for networking related development. But if the lock-in gets you somehow, you really resent it.
EDIT: and I almost forgot! microsoft calling linux a "cancer", funding lawsuits over linux kernel code, trying to make it harder for linux to support ACPI based systems - more underhanded lock-in to their crap
Maybe you predate me but when I jumped on the Mozilla bandwagon at Gecko 0.7.1 the internal name for the suite was Seamonkey. It was only after Firefox that the group maintaining the suite started using the internal name as the public branding.
This is not true, there was IE for several UNIX operating systems.
Some of the brightest people I have ever had the pleasure of working with came from MS.
Incompetence was far from the problem. Priorities out of order would be one diagnosis.
A lot of the credit for that goes to Apple's crazy climb in popularity. But at least some of it also goes to technologists involved in networking, the internet, and the web, many of whom decided never to deal with any Microsoft stuff ever again. If you knew the frustration of Microsoft's combination of lock-in and incompetence, back in 1995 - 2006 (my entire computing life at the time!) you wouldn't blame them.