That kind of trust is hard to win back.
It may be childish but I've been enjoying Microsoft's fade into irrelevance the last decade.
[1] Amongst other OSes.
Various versions of Windows are used on probably 90% or more of desktops and laptops, in both home and business settings. It still sees widespread server use.
Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook are widely used.
SQL Server is quite common within many enterprises.
Azure is a major player, and is seeing more and more adoption.
The porting of .NET to Linux and OS X is making Microsoft's development technologies available to a wider audience.
The Xbox brand of consoles is quite popular.
Microsoft has numerous offerings, across a range of sectors, that have huge uptake and are quite successful. I don't think that "irrelevance" is the way to describe Microsoft or their products.
"Irrelevance" was perhaps hyperbole but if you compare it to their past, well...
I'd say the only product they have left where one doesn't have much of a choice (in business mostly) but to use it is the Office line and even that is debatable nowadays.
So while many businesses would trade with Microsoft's position in a blink, they are not the unavoidable powerhouse they used to be.
For the current generation, perhaps. There was a time Microsoft reigned pretty much alone, where there were no other viable options. During that time, Microsoft defined what a PC was and dictated what everything around one looked like.
That's not the case anymore, and it hasn't been for quite some time. Where you find Microsoft is much like where you expected IBM mainframes to be in the 90's - in high-inertia systems. It's too difficult (and, frankly, not that cost-effective) to convert your documents to other formats or to cloud-based office apps. What you gain from it is not enough. It's too difficult to move your AD users. It's too difficult to port your apps to use other databases after you fell for writing stored procedures in TSQL for everything.
Mainframes are not dead yet and will stay around for a while. Microsoft will stay around for some time too, but it will never again dictate what a computer is.
After all, if you look at a chicken really close, you'll realize dinosaurs are still around too.
You will argue with concrete-objective facts and they will reply with generalities and feelings.
Its a pattern -> learn to recognise it.
That might be because the "antagonists" are motivated by something more complex than whatever bulletpoint you're focused on... like the concept of free software. Try to think of an elevator pitch for it, now imagine how that would hold up in an adversarial debate where your interlocutor likens you to a "conspiracy theorist" or "the religious".
> Its a pattern -> learn to recognise it.
Yes, you've perfectly demonstrated the association fallacy, learn to recognize it.
You will rarely be able to dimmish that persons passion and feeling for that team or convince them that the other team isn't as bad as they feel it is.
:)
\2 Also this thread is not about FreeBSD preference, neither is the topic > the topic is about Microsoft supporting FreeBSD in the cloud.
I think you have below average reading comprehension. Adjacent sentences aren't necessarily conflated concepts.
> \2
Not football?
And don't get me wrong: I understand the struggle. I share the point of view.
But let's just not live in the past :)
Thanks
Come on now...
The only "evil" that I've experience with Linux is that Microsoft has price parity between Windows & SUSE Linux on Azure, which is competitive for Windows but a premium price for SUSE Linux (and an extra premium price for RedHat Enterprise).
Linux without a support contract should always be cheaper than Windows because that's the reality with the license costs. Microsoft's competitors are far cheaper for Linux VMs, but if you're willing to pay the premium it runs fine on Azure, and performs better than Windows on the same hardware (although the gap is smaller if you run Windows headless, using Windows Core).
Every time our IT Director talks about Azure I want to cringe, our infrastructure is relatively static and only grows - so it's straight up MORE expensive to put anything there (and this factors in power and cooling to the datacenter).
I wouldn't trust an operating system company that runs a "server farm" where they have their own OS and competitors. Why would Microsoft run their competition on their own hardware & data centers? If Azure breaks off from MS and becomes an independent company, OS agnostic, then maybe they can win my trust back.
I like Azure & would only use it for MS based OS, DB etc. I would never run, nor would I recommend any other OS running on Azure, ever. There are other "server farm" vendors that I can choose from for non MS based cloud computing.
Agreed on other points made on this thread regarding pricing, though.
Perhaps that's because they spent the 90's and the first half of the 2000's earning a bad reputation for everything they did
It's not always like that, and it certainly doesn't have to be. Making more money than the company consumes is, of course, a good idea, but money is only a tool.
The computer science field has always been "ruled" by ideas and philosophies, but in the end a company is a company, and the ultimate goal of a company is to make money.
It isn't weird or evil that Microsoft is trying to make money using whatever mean it can use.
By the way, it's crystal clear that a considerable Microsoft is pivoting to become a cloud provider and in that sense the most obvious thing to do is to provide developers with all of the tools they might need.
Kudos to Microsoft for being able to perform such a direction change.
Plus consider that competition usually means lower prices for customers.. We should be happy that new players are diving into the cloud business.