Microsoft is a gigantic organisation with very good working conditions. This leads to people with very long tenures working in highly defined and specialised roles within the company. Career development does happen, and is actively encouraged by Microsoft, but you're usually moving into a role which is just as niche as your last.
When a major acquisition occurs of a smaller organisation, it's usually done with a promise of keeping independent leadership and a degree of organisational separation. However, as middle-management staff rotate out of the smaller company naturally, the roles that they vacate are very attractive to Microsoft employees who want to have a bit more of that start-up feeling, and a slightly wider remit to make change.
So through a kind of organisational osmotic pressure, even if the leadership of the acquired company remains independent, the middle ranks of the acquired company become permeated by life-long Microsoft-ers. None of this is particularly bad - I just want to make it clear that Microsoft's definition of independence is not everyone's definition thereof.
OT, but I love that term!
Their absolute best bet is to sit on GitHub, feed it money, offer the paid features as an additional perk for MSDN subscribers through an account linking method, and call it a day. The developer goodwill they can buy being a good steward of GitHub far surpasses any other value they could extract from it.
Starting with "any existing Microsoft account is now a valid Github login". Then maybe "you can more easily use VS (or VS Code) with Github and deploy to Azure, if you use a Microsoft account with Github" and "you can merge your Github account into your Microsoft account". Then "all new accounts on Github are Microsoft accounts, you can no longer make a separate one".
Whether they go all the way to "there's no such thing as a separate Github account anymore", not soon, but probably one day - they've been trying to centralize accounts between all their services for years and years, haven't they?
After several retries to talk to them and maybe get somebody more technical on the line, I just gave up and being disappointed I simply gave up on Skype altogether – thankfully it has fallen out of favor at work too.
Skype has been a monumental fuck up and just thinking about it on a thread about GitHub being acquired makes me sad.
Did your bet stipulate a time frame? I think the odds of this go up considerably after a honeymoon period of 2-4 years.
(Although, IIRC except for WhatsApp most of these didn't make many promises.)
Also it wasn't the Microsoft Account change as much as the they had the weird MS Store or Local account sign in options. I removed the Store sign in and only used local and had no issues. Am I missing something?
Microsoft 15 minutes ago isn't the Microsoft of today is just as true a statement and one just as vacuous.
P.S. I thought the whole anti-OpenSUSE movement was also plain old stupid.
- Putting adverts directly into their OS (which people pay for by the way)
- Forcing their shitty updates, (and restarts) at the most inconvenient times
- making it impossible to permanently and easily turn off telemetry
Wow, you have low standards. I bet if you ate dog shit, you'd say it's not so bad.
> Forcing their shitty updates, (and restarts) at the most inconvenient times
Weird I have a pop up that says there is an update coming and when do I want to schedule it....
>Putting adverts directly into their OS (which people pay for by the way)
Didn't care for it and I hit the disable on 3 switches
> making it impossible to permanently and easily turn off telemetry
They did push out an update over a year ago that makes it so you don't have to use the tools that were out since 2015. Telemetry was specific for Inside program and beta but I certainly see why people were freaking out. I looked at what was being collected and it seemed fine for me.
What about them mucking up the Spectre/Meltdown patches which bricked a bunch of PCs? In my case I wasn't bricked but I had to rollback a patch.
What about re-enabling of disabled services (e.g. Firewall, Defender) after some updates?
Going back a couple years ago, what about downloading/pre-loading Windows 10 on Windows 7/8 computers, without the user asking first? Can we forgive them for that? It used up several GB of space and burned sometimes expensive bandwidth? Happened to my laptop while I was traveling, I only noticed after I started getting low disk space warnings.
If I had a real list of the all the actual problems I've ever encountered with Windows, Windows 10 is definitely approaching Windows ME levels of incompetence.
Maybe some of us are just having more issues because we have unique hardware configurations which don't play well with Microsoft's newest foray into OS experimentation. Or perhaps our expectations are too high?
I don't agree that their present is good.
I'm actually really excited about MS+GitHub, but have to agree the account situation sucks.
In the process it seems they managed to seriously undermine their new, really really nice social network by using the same name for that and now me and a few others have a nice social network all to ourselves :-\