Someone like Valve, who has a massive investment in Windows software in areas that Microsoft has specifically targeted for "embracing."

What Microsoft doesn't seem to understand is that when they screw with Windows and deprioritize the needs of its users, they're also screwing with the rest of us who live, work, and play in their ecosystem. Gabe Newell, being an old-school 'softie himself, understands that very well... and he's one of the few interested parties with the funding to do something about it.

That is the part that baffles me. Visual Studio Code is a fantastic advert for the Microsoft brand: every day it shows every developer who uses it that MS can produce genuinely great software. It makes Azure more credible, as well as providing on-ramps to services. If people have a bad experience with Windows, why would they be inclined to get other services from MS?

Ironically, we decided not to try out VS Code specifically because of privacy/security concerns about Microsoft that have been heightened since Windows 10. We checked Microsoft's written policies to see what sort of telemetry data was being uploaded. We were unable to find any detailed information about it, and the general wording appeared to allow for uploading more-or-less anything, up to and including our own code.

"telemetry.enableCrashReporter": false, "telemetry.enableTelemetry": false,

into vscode settings and you are fine wrt telemetry.

What concerns me more is that the .rpm build is consistently later than other builds. Usually it means, that the user is staring 2 out of 4 weeks every month on update notification, that cannot be used, because the build is not ready yet.

It brings back the memories of MSIE and WMP that used to be available for Solaris and HP-UX, always slightly later... until they weren't and the users were left in the dark.

... for the moment, as far as you know.

The problem is the trust thing, not the telemetry thing.

Yes, exactly, and trust is hard to earn but easily lost. Given the corporate philosophy of Nadella's Microsoft, and the fact that Nadella was made CEO in the first place when it was pretty clear what style of leader he was going to be, I don't see Microsoft ever regaining the kind of trust we used to place in it without fundamental changes that start at the highest levels. And sadly, as long as investors continue to buy into that vision, those changes are highly unlikely.

It's not often I feel so strongly about a business, but Microsoft's actions in recent years almost feel like a personal betrayal after being being their customer for so long and trusting them as a keystone of the tech industry. In this case, I really do regard them as "the enemy" now, and I really do hope that someone else will drive a wedge through a gap created by their customer-hostile strategy with painful and expensive consequences for their management and investors.

The claimed benefits of the Cloud have always been as much hype as substance, and a lot of the "sales pitch" in the early days has now been debunked. We're not going to run short of stories about major Cloud services having significant downtime, poor support, data leaks and so on any time soon.

Likewise SaaS is a great pitch if you're a software developer, and converting capex to opex makes it attractive in some contexts as a customer as well. However, I get the feeling that patience is starting to wear a bit thin in some quarters now, with customers looking at the overall costs they're paying, how many improvements they're really seeing in return, and also how many unwanted changes are being pushed out.

Depending on where you stand on those issues, combined with the general dumbing down associated with many online apps compared to traditional desktop software, I can imagine a variety of situations where businesses might be looking at keeping more IT in-house as we go round the cycle again. For personal use, I suspect there's less of an incentive because many of these users are quite happy with just using their tech for basic communications and information retrieval, but for those who do want to do more creative things or who enjoy more demanding applications like games, again there's surely a big enough market for a serious desktop OS with an emphasis on good management of local native applications and not just being an expensive thin client for online services.

So who potentially benefits from an industry shift? I guess the simple answer is anyone who is interested in developing software for the markets I just described.