Why do you think so? I did think this too until about 6 years ago but with them basically buying all of open source and AI, I kind of can’t help but use and love the products they now own. What damage to they currently do?

His comment has merit. Microsoft controls something like 90% of desktop computer marketshare and turned them into malicious adware & spyware platforms overnight.

Ok - but don't use that platform? I mean it is not like you can't switch to a Mac and avoid that whole ecosystem anymore.

I love and hate this response. The vast majority of people don’t know or care, and I always question if the things that bother me even matter.

I just need to make windows work for video games, but it kills me that I can’t make a 1 laptop lifestyle work.

Tell that to all the IT deparments in the world. And all the people that keep sending Office files. And the friends and relatives that nag you to fix their Windows crap yet again. Apple is of course even worse in many regard.

For myself I don't need Microsoft stuff. But sadly there are all these other people around.

Could you post a few examples of what good they did to open source? Genuinely curious.

They are also one of the most major contributors of CPython, which is the default implementation of Python. Especially in London they have a dedicated team, Faster CPython team, which (unsurprisingly) concentrates on improving performance of CPython. The team contains big name like the creator of Python, Guido van Rossum.

Typescript, vscode, npm, github and more

https://opensource.microsoft.com/projects/

They also added a “Sponsor” button to Github which while I have mixed feelings about it, does help open source projects thrive.

TypeScript, NPM - doubling down on crappy language and rotten foundations. You could argue that at least they are helping to manage the damage to the industry.

VSCode - misspending money to prove JS can be used to build native apps? We did not say you "could not", we said you "should not".

GitHub - they just bought that, thanks for not ruining it I guess.

Github, NPM have all the signs of EEE. For Github they already gave the misery of PAT and TOTP. Corporate hoops planned for NPM as well. Especially sad, as NPM is/was the best package/dependency management system ever created.

TypeScript and VScode are there of course to make all programming as horrible as it's on Windows.

Not the person you were asking but they open sourced .NET and gave us the language server protocol

I don't see buying all of open source and AI a good thing. What it did to OpenAI definitely isn't a good thing. For open source my prediction is good old EEE.

And even if those were positive, I'm still forced to use Outlook and Office and OneDrive and occasionally even Windows because they have so profoundly corrupted how computers are used.