Microsoft's leadership and strategy has evolved under Nadella, at least enough to produce quality products like VSCode, and 'good enough' products like WSL.

I say this as someone who has historically been very anti-Microsoft, that used to do all my work in Linux. Modern Windows with VSCode, running WSL, is something the Microsoft of the IE6 era would never have produced.

It's true.

I'm using Linux and/or BSD on all my private machines, but from an outsider's perspective Microsoft appears to have undergone some significant changes since Nadella took over. From what I know, if someone had suggested making the .Net runtime open source in, say, 2008, under Ballmer, they would have been treated like a heretic.

There's still plenty to complain about, it's gotten more nuanced.

Also, it's important to keep in mind that Microsoft - and surely many other companies of that size - are like a feudal system internally, with different teams/divisions doing things their own way, not necessarily playing nice with the others if it doesn't suit their own agenda.

MS under Nadella's leadership has grown on two fronts: more friendly to the open source world, while pushing for more advertisement and spyware on their most popular product.

At least Ballmer didn't try to milk me for my data.

Well, VSCode is a bad example. It's open source so if Microsoft decides to ditch it, it can be community maintained until people move to something else. Or another foundation can take over or another company can fork it. Come on, VSCode is a "lightweight" IDE ("lightweight" in terms of features, not in terms of resource demands) and it's one of the better ones.

I remember its first version and my first impression was "WTF". Nowadays it's pretty usable. IE of its era really wasn't. You can switch to anything else if you don't want to use VSCode. IE ... you either couldn't (on a company-issued computer) or you didn't know how (at home). Nadella's Microsoft is a far cry from Ballmer's.

> It's open source so if Microsoft decides to ditch it, it can be community maintained until people move to something else.

Some would suggest that it's closer to open-core: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31605975

I think IE's monopoly is an important component that cannot be ignored when doing comparisons. If Microsoft stopped updating VSCode, 90% is Open Source, and there are multiple good competitors already on the market. So there's minimal captive-ness with VSCode, whereas IE held the browser market captive in outmoded web tech for years, with no real escape for web developers and competitive browsers struggling to make headway.

And of course, remember that the base of VSCode is Chromium. Pretty hilarious in the scheme of things.