So it's a little disingenuous to say only technology consumers should have positive feelings for Microsoft. Plus, making money & helping programmers are not mutually exclusive; Coupled with their business strategies (good and bad) this has always been MS's strategy to grow and profit from their markets.
They killed what small progress they’d made on their ecosystem 2 times, simply because they got bored and decided they didn’t like the technology stack they’d previously mandated and supported. They deserved to get buried in that space.
Meanwhile Apple have kept what is essentially the same technology stack for the past decade. Sure there’s been some pain, but almost all of it had some purpose that moved the development of apps forward.
Looking back on it, they took on an extremely difficult problem having a completely new marketplace and platform against competitors with tremendous amount of pre-existing traction.
There were clearly some pivots towards universal windows compatibility, and possibility of android compatibility as well. Nobody argues there's a ton of tactical failures and the net result was a loss, but I wouldnt conflate the mobile endeavor with something half-baked nor disregard to developers
Trust has two main dimensions in my view, compassion and competence. Microsoft was not competent enough to have a surviving platform in the face of iOS or Android... even though they had roughly a 8 year lead.
That doesn't earn my trust.
How did they treat Nokia employees?
Mhmmm.
I was one of them, and Microsoft treated me very well.
Windows Phone was an amazing platform. I’ve also developed for iOS a lot. Visual studio + expression blend was way ahead of apple’s xCode. Every single piece was much better: language, libraries, compiler, debugger, emulator, UI designer.
The platform is now discontinued so I no longer develop for WP. Meanwhile, most of the skills I’ve obtained working on WP7-8 apps apply to other XAML-based platforms, i.e. WPF, WinRT, and UWP. Fortunately for me, Windows is not going from desktops any time soon.
Just want to point out that Github was also a "for-profit" company.
I think self-hosting is a better choice for almost any organisation. Remember, 'the cloud' just means 'someone else's computer.'
Of course you don't need to host it all there. Just mirror enough that it gets you the "visibility", while keeping everything else on your own servers.
Then again, there's inertia. And inertia always wins.
Meanwhile, they basically invented the "buy your competitor and tank their business" strategy. That's probably what this person is referring to.
"Buy and trash competitor" isn't a real strategy. When an acquisition fails, it's usually poor management or vision, or just a lack of synergy in the first place, not a purposeful tanking.
How does tanking Github allow Microsoft to sell more copies of Office?
1) creating value for their customers
2) maintaining the moat that prevents other people from creating value for their customers
The former is constructive, the latter is destructive. They both contribute revenue.
I haven’t done a full scale analysis of Microsoft, but the argument I would entertain is that Microsoft primarily sells tools for companies and individuals to built moats around themselves.
Look at how much data Google has on every single one of us.
MSFT is going through a cultural change right now. It was the case for Google, to make money the had to be an advocate of open source. They didn't do that because they are good-hearted or anything else. It is just like geopolitics. Hit your opponent from the weakest point. And Microsoft weak point was open source at that time.
But the point is neither MSFT, Apple, Google or Facebook does not care about developers or customers. They want to make money. This is nature of corporations. Instead of nagging and being short-sighted we should embrace open source collaboration by MSFT and should hit them when they don't respect customers.
However, with the understanding of what the poster meant, it does make sense. We're talking about the company whose racket produces 10$ avg for each Android phone sold.
I'm talking especially about those FAT patents, which are against the spirit of patenting (independently of being in favour or against patents).
I understand that big companies are big and internally conflicting, however, I see a radical conflict of interest between their newfounded open source responsibility and their ruthless business attitude.
What about the data Microsoft has on you? Their Windows 10 OS is basically a data funnel right to their servers. They operate a tracking based search engine that also builds profiles on people. And they have data centers in China that are run by Chinese state run companies.
>And they have data centers in China that are run by Chinese state run companies.
BTW, tbh I don't trust data centers in USA any more than data centers in China.
Unlike Microsoft, however, they can't seem to make GUIs where the font metrics are right (eg. can you read the text properly or does the text overlap or end up being too big or too small for the space?) or scrollbars.
Linux is a winner for server apps but on the desktop it seems to get worse over time, not better.
No, not really. The problem is too many people (like you maybe) associate "Linux desktop" with "Gnome (3)". That's false; there's a bunch of different DEs for Linux. Just look at Xfce; it isn't getting worse. KDE seems to be getting no worse too.
Do they still do that?
At home, I use KDE, so of course they're not going to have system utilities binding to GTK. KDE is Qt-centric, so most stuff there is most likely in Qt-flavored C++. Xfce is GTK, but it's known to be fast (I use it at work and it's quick), so I seriously doubt it has system utilities in Python.
Honestly, I think all your complaints are really about Gnome3.
What a strange criticism. Of course Microsoft is a for-profit company and they're doing this to make more profit - no one is of the delusion of otherwise. They didn't spend $8b out of the goodness of their heart.
However, one way you make money is to do and make things people like. Here's hoping Microsoft will recognise the value Github can provide and they do right by it. I'm cautiously optimistic.
A federated or independent solution is the only way to go for infrastructure like this.
Their developer tools are pretty good for their own platform (but JetBrains actually makes great cross platform tools, some of them are proper free and open source, VSCode is playing catch up). Their C++ stdlib implementation was sucking balls for decades. Their (the dev tools') scriptability was horrible. PowerShell is nice, but it came too late, and it was too server focused.
C# is okay, MS has great teams and people, but they are still very much run by the bean counters.
EDIT: just noticed the article says it was also added to 2013, but my 2015 doesn't support it so idk.
I can conceive PowerShell being good as a scripting language, but as a day to day terminal? That would my hell. And the fact that they are forcing so much on it in win10 doesn't help.
They do produce some great things sometimes, I agree, it just doesn't average out as positive IMO.
You comment makes no sens, "I don't understand if you are a programmer', no offense but what rock do you live under?
This is not mutually exclusive. You need money to keep lights and servers ON
I wouldn't consider myself a fan, but their developer tools were (are?) some of the best out there.
I dislike Microsoft a lot. But Apple, just as much. People will take a dump on Microsoft while in the same breath fawn over Apple for identical behaviour.
They're all as bad as each other. Yep. Google included.
Not a Fan, but judging from their recent work, I am giving them the benefits of doubt.
I definitely agree. Anything Microsoft-related, or even Google-related, is a no from me. Just from a product standpoint, most of there products inherently aren’t that great. And you get that feeling when using their products, a feeling of “oh, this must be a Microsoft product because it feels very corporate.” Plus, there approach to design is subpar — it’s like there’s people out there that actually like Google’s Material Design?
> Like I understand if you bought an Xbox
I have an Xbox, and I just noticed advertisements on the dashboard that are non-gaming related. I also think I saw this when using a friend’s Windows-computer, they have advertisements within their operating system. It’s just bad.
I like Material Design...
Sure, Microsoft is ultimately out to make money, but they're doing a fair bit to "help programmers" and only making money from those efforts indirectly.
Like I understand if you bought an Xbox, but I dont understand if you are a programmer.
Microsoft has always been a headache. Recently its been a tiny bit better, but they still are a for-profit company that needs to continue to make a profit.
This was to make Microsoft money, nothing to 'help programmers'.