Re:Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks
by shmerl on Friday June 01, 2018 @06:33PM
(#17211044)
It's different, but not very different. They still have a lot of lock-in like Outlook (ActiveSync), DirectX, exFAT and so on and so forth. They show no sign of dropping lock-in, except in markets where they are way weaker than competition.
Re:Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks
by tomnipotent on Friday June 01, 2018 @07:11PM
(#17211314)
How is DirectX a lock-in? Vulcan/OpenGL are available. Using Outlook/ActiveSync is no more a lock-in than depending on GSuite (or ANY business productivity suite), and I fail to remotely even understand how exFAT is a problem. Weak arguments.
Re:Microsoft and GitHub have held acquisition talks
by shmerl on Sunday June 03, 2018 @12:01AM
(#17217845)
> How is DirectX a lock-in?
It's MS only. It's more obvious in cases like Xbox, where MS don't support anything except DirectX. I.e. developers are forced to use it if they want to release for Xbox.
exFAT is an issue since it's a patented filesystem that MS pushed as a standard for SD cards. You can't freely use it (unless you just ignore those patents on your own risk).
ActiveSync doesn't have commonly available FOSS clients, so you can't use it on Linux easily. It's highly irritating (since it's widely entrenched in corporate environments). And etc. and etc.
Satya Nadella has completely re-organized MS inside-and-out since taking the helm in 2014. It is a VERY different company than it was even 5 years ago. In March [1], Microsoft even went so far as to officially disband the Windows department and merge it into something called "Experiences & Devices".
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17176220/microsoft-window...