Tides change. Whether or not Microsoft is benevolent today, they may not be in 5+ years.
Any company large enough to screw me over without feeling the loss of my (and people like me's) business in their pocketbook, is not a company I want in a position of power over me. Adapted to this conversation: we should not tolerate "extend" from any company that could successfully pull off "extinguish".
It feels tiring that any time Microsoft does something good, EEE comes up, but times where Amazon or Google are doing massive damage to our industry or standards for their own benefits it's crickets.
- How great it feels to make dire predictions about the future. Only I can see how terrible M$'s latest move is going to be. The other sheeple can't. When I'm right I'll tell everyone I told them so.
- How satisfying it is to educate these younguns with their JS frameworks. They don't have my wisdom and experience so I'm doing my duty to society and HN by sharing with them. I will paste links to wikipedia wherever necessary. Like so -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
- how smart I'll look by talking cynically. Every action that someone takes will be followed by a cynical analysis which assumes the worst intentions. Wide eyed optimists will look naive to any person lacking context.
You know, simple predictions are often correct. But ignore it (especially if your salary depends on it).
This is the only way to make a difference.
Are you suggesting people change companies every time they uncover their existing employer did something unethical/immoral?
I say this as someone whose employer in the past turned into a patent troll - as a new parent and during a downturn it was difficult to switch jobs for quite some time.
I'm not sure if I would have had a harder time believing that, or a harder time believing that Donald Trump of The Apprentice would become president of the United States in 2016.
But we can keep seeing things in what has been seen, and never debate the merits in a circular semantics game.
Do you see? I see what you did, but I guess you saw what someone else did, and boom we achieved faux transparency.
And here is wiki article because I totally see what you did with that wiki thing, like so:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight
That’s the kind of stuff Microsoft tried to lock people into before.
And we remember a world where the stranglehold by IE had to be ruthlessly shredded with open web standards just to get back to sanity.
I don't doubt that MS would take advantage of market dominance again if it was achieved somehow, and I am sure they are making these plays with increasing their ecosystem in mind.
One interesting acquisition to look at is LinkedIn which they have really tightened the screws on to the point where everyone looking for employees or trying to find a job is made to pay. This is especially vile for the unemployed IMHO.
On the other hand, the eager monopolist of the day is really Amazon, and MS taking them on is a good thing for the ecosystem.
If there is competition MS seems to be playing a fair game. I hope it stays that way.
The structure of US corporations is such that they are fundamentally misaligned with playing a fair game. Corporations have two types of cycles: growth, and profit taking.
Regardless of who is in charge of Microsoft today, when Microsoft reaches a position of dominance, the leadership will be shifted by the board and shareholders to focus on exploiting that dominance, rather than continuing to play fair. We are only seeing fair play because Microsoft's position in the open source world is not yet entrenched.
And hopefully there's room for smaller titans to provide specialized alternatives, e.g. Spotify, Dropbox, Gitlab, Zoom
Is it impossible that a company, with a new CEO and leadership team, would reanimate a strategy from 25 years ago (more like 50 years ago by non-tech industry timescales)? Especially one that the company itself used, and the new CEO witnessed first-hand being used, to great effect to acquire market dominance?
> What evidence is there that Nadella is a Manchurian candidate for Ballmer forces?
What evidence is there that Nadella is not trying to use the same tactics as Ballmer?
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262103/microsoft-open-s...
They could certainly change their minds again if it suits them
Microsoft still does quite a few detrimental things towards open source movement and community in general.
Microsoft is now a wolf in sheep’s clothing
If the answer is nothing, then logically they should disregard you and carry on.
The web in particular is still traumatized from years of IE use/development. You needed a virtual machine to test IE on linux/Mac, think about that for a second. It’s great that they realize ‘woah we didn’t give a flying fuck about developers before, huh?’
We’re still being super nice to Microsoft that we don’t give them a pure cold shoulder and accept and evaluate their contributions.
Need time, can’t just go running back to the ex because they bought you something expensive.
Nadella IT cells...
Note that my issue with EXX being brought up is that it is superficial, to the point of being deceptive to the kind of threats Microsoft+Github are most likely to pose if Nadella et al do have their own malicious plans. But I think Microsoft's support for a healthy OSS ecosystem, via Github and things like VS Code, is genuine. Not necessarily out of altruism, but because it's one of the few ways they can have an edge into the future and not fall into stagnation like IBM.