Folks tend to forget about Scott Guthrie (and Scott Hanselman, Rob Conery, Scott Galloway and a few other unsung heros) and the change he seeded within MS's DevDiv about moving to a more open culture back around 2005/6.

Don't know about that; I worked for DevDiv in 2008-2009 and it was the most spectacularly dysfunctional island of not-invented-here inefficiency I have ever seen at any point in my career. They imagined the tech world to consist of Microsoft at the center, where all the smart people were, surrounded by an ecosystem of ISVs, all of whom wished they could work for Microsoft instead if only they were a little bit smarter, and then, out on the fringes, the barbarian wastelands of pain and misery, where incompetent nobodies struggled with trivial legacy projects involving esolangs like COBOL or Python or Ruby. A more self-absorbed computing culture I have never seen, utterly incapable of recognizing, much less learning from, any "innovation" generated outside its own walls.

Perhaps they've improved since I left, but the number of dev-hours I saw being squandered on a daily basis just fighting with utterly stupid limitations which only existed inside DevDiv's idiosyncratic tooling would have funded a good hundred startups full-time if they could have been put to some practical use.

Oh listen I recognise your pain. I've known a few good folk who headed off to Redmond back in the early to mid 2000's only to return shortly thereafter completely disillusioned. I think Guthrie was well aware of this problem and began to slowly turn things around bit by bit.

Just to tack on a convenient anecdote...apparently the original ASP.NET MVC code was written by Guthrie....on a flight, this is the earliest evidence I can find of this:

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottGuMVCPresentationAndScot...

I also forgot to include Phil Haack who back then was also part of that gang that began steering the DevDiv ship to brighter shores.

I cannot agree more. Scott Guthrie was the key decision maker regards the Apache license for asp.net MVC and the whole open sourcing of .NET Core. He runs Azure and is therefore interested in the GitHub community.

> People should get to know who Microsoft Cloud + AI Group Executive Vice President [Scott Guthrie] is. GitHub will be under his watch and all these years he has done nothing but wonders for the developers and the brand.

People should get to know who Corporate VP + Chief IP Counsel [Erich Andersen] is. GitHub will be under his watch and all these years he has done nothing but wonders for the developers and the brand. "During this time when customers are rapidly adopting #AI solutions across industries to solve important problems, Microsoft is helping to protect those investments by offering #AI patents as part of #AzureIPAdvantage" [1]

#AI #AzureIPAdvantage! Isn't it wonderful that Microsoft is protecting developers from the patent troll ecosystem? From the likes of Intellectual Ventures and Conversant/MOSAID, Myhrvold and Gates? Why look at what Microsoft has done over decades past? We should look at what Microsoft is doing now. People should get to know just how reformed-from-evil Microsoft is.

[1] https://twitter.com/erichandIPG/status/961651306459901952