Re:Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish
by whalesalad on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @12:33PM
(#23248855)
I’m on the fence. I resonate with your take on things, but I also have a bit of hope in me as well. At least outwardly their optics are looking much better and brighter, but I’m not sure what the real culture is like at present day.
Your optimism is inherently misplaced. Power is corruptive. Even if the people in power now aren't corrupted, there is no fail-safe in place to pull the plug if they ever hand off that power to someone who can't control it. It will happen, it always does.
There is historically no such thing as a trustworthy super-power unless it subsists overwhelmingly on the support of discerning people.
You may hop off the fence if they do something like, oh, I don't know, buy Canonical to counter IBM buying RedHat. I'm surprised they didn't do it immediately after that.
And this is the saddest part of it all: the industry slowly started to drag itself out of the mire that is Microsoft monoculture, as servers were moving to Linux even in evil-corp style organizations; cloud services offering competition to Office hegemony (especially in education); IE6 dead and its descendants soon-to-be-forgotten; .NET being forced to improve itself and to become only 5 years behind the curve instead of 10 years (but some places still seek developers for the Lovecraftian horror that is Web Forms).
And now all this, all over again? Goddamn this industry.
What are public companies if not people?
It seems to me what you're complaining about is less about Microsoft and more about capitalism and greed in general.
But public companies are not people.
Of course they change -- tactics -- and try to gain control again. Everything they do will in the end have to be justified to their shareholders and how it will either gain them profit either now or in the long run, and as soon as the fickle-minded shareholders change their tune, out goes Nadella, and we'll get another Balmer or worse.