Microsoft is doing absolutely great under Satya Nadella.
There's just a feeeew things. Yeah, we're gonna tell you when to restart, we'll update it for you. We'll tell you what you can and can't run on your own machine. We'll "protect you" by trying to keep you inside the Microsoft Store, so you can adjust to buying all of your software instead of getting anything for free. Freedom is bad!
What can Microsoft do for a programmer who self-hosts and doesn't trust proprietary software? They co-opted GitHub but that really just reduced trust in GitHub more than anything. And GitHub itself is proprietary software built on top of Git. VS Code is a laggy mess. Azure has nothing to hook me. LLMs are toys or another privacy invasion vector to "analyze". I don't trust them to store my e-mail.
Everything MS touches dies a slow death. Look at Skype.
Ignore them and market themselves to the remaining 99% of programmers.
Many people use proprietary software because they're forced to for work or social circumstances (i.e. banking and messaging apps), not by choice. In other words, they're socially engineered into it. Why trust software you can't inspect? Because it has a big brand behind it? Because no software company has ever betrayed the trust of its customers? Companies never do deals with shady partners that end up betraying them, and in turn their customers too? Transparency fixes this, and it can mitigate a company going rogue on its own product and customers.
Libre software can certainly suck in some areas of the stack, but at least I can do more than send an e-mail to an unmonitored inbox at a corporation where my ass doesn't matter as soon as they have my money. I'll get a form letter containing a response to what some random bot thinks I'm talking about, and my concern will not be addressed, even as a paying customer. In a world of software that I can inspect the code of, I might be able to research my way out of a tech issue. The contention is that even as a customer, I can't count on Microsoft addressing any problems I encounter. If you're already coming at me with "get ignored, go away" then what's the incentive to engage at all?
You're right that some sectors are ignored, probably because they believe they should be paid for providing certain things. Fair to have that opinion, but it's also fair for me to disagree with it, criticize it, and share that criticism.
I still give Microsoft software a shot from time to time, to make sure my understanding of it is at least semi-recent. But by and large, I don't enjoy my interactions with their ecosystem. Setting up Minecraft Realms and mitigating differences between Java and Bedrock was a PITA. The migration from Mojang was a pain. I did enjoy getting Bedrock for free with my transfer. That was a solid move that showed they understood it was a pain and were willing to part with a little revenue in the short term in the hopes I'd buy content in the long term. (I did, for the record.)
But that's video games. I don't mind them being proprietary because I'm there to have fun. As long as it's not chatting over the network or doing analytics and other shit, I'm fine with a game not coming with source code. But I also love that gzDoom, darkplaces, TADS, LÖVE2D, TIC-80, and other open engines exist where people can bring their own creations to life in a non-profit environment. Microsoft itself started in a bougie garage, they ought to appreciate the spirit of DIY.
I've paid for things so it's not like I won't buy anything. My experience and view is not any less deserving of expression simply because it's less popular, though. There are plenty of people out there similar to me in distrusting Microsoft and other big tech companies' software. Minecraft isn't perfect, it has analytics and a forced word filter, and no way to self-host a Bedrock server. None of those were a thing when I bought it back in 2011 or so. They want me to pay for a Realm for that. And I did, for a little while, due to family members wanting to play, but I realized I could host it for cheaper. Eventually we stopped playing anyway, so I didn't have to worry about it.
Most people simply don't care about software freedom, and chide and ridicule those who do. Unsurprising, but still no less disappointing when encountering it among those who like to develop an air of distinction and taste but come up lacking in conversation. If they care so little, why be shitty to those who do?
Because for nearly everyone, that’s all software.
It's not a conscious, calculated decision being made. It's social engineering in action. Most people don't read the Terms and Conditions. Most people don't understand how to inspect their computers for malware or misbehaving processes. They aren't qualified to determine the trustworthiness of their software. So we're supposed to pretend people chose to have details of how to fix their shit hidden from them? No, it was actions from industry to socially manipulate and normalize practices. Average people are being taken advantage of by industry, and the people who say something about it get blown off because "it just doesn't matter".
Yeah, sure, until it does. And they'll be too fucked to do anything about it, because human nature can never overcome this delusional positivity that life is fine and nobody is bad and businesses never mislead people. People with this outlook are poor at evaluating risk.
"Fewer people care about X therefore X doesn't matter."
"Lots of people make money in spite of X so X doesn't matter."
You're not even interested in a real discussion or addressing anything. Why are you on the Internet at all?
In the context of who the market caters to, whether you and people like you ignore Microsoft is meaningless
The AI revolution is still underway, we don't know who missed what yet. In term of research output. Most of the ground breaking work did "not" come from msft. They just bough they way in. Valid strategy, but definitely not novel.
You have a point with the cloud computing. I’d hesitate to call it a revolution though. I’d never willingly use a microsoft cloud product if I wasn’t forced to by my employer.
Imo they barely kept pace largely by leveraging existing software and repurposing it for cloud. They still seem to be playing catch-up with multiple solutions to the same problem--some deprecated, some preview.
Take for instance Postgres. Azure had Single Server built on Windows containers. They acqui-hired Citus to build out distributed and they released Flexible Postgres as a Linux-based replacement for SS. Flexible still doesn't have feature parity with Single Server and doesn't have feature parity with other cloud vendors (pg_wait_sampling roll-up is missing last time I checked a few months back).
To make matters worse, their data migration tools are sorely lacking as well.
https://www.knowledgehut.com/blog/cloud-computing/top-cloud-...
The failure of Windows Mobile, and later Windows phone, had little to do with being "slow."
Remember the whole antitrust thing? Microsoft was under a consent decree that expired between 2007-2009 (different provisions expired at different times).
That decree, combined with the material threat of additional action during that time window, limited their ability to compete (because that's, well, the entire point of a consent decree motivated by an antitrust settlement).
There's a reason that you see a notable difference in Microsoft's market position and strategy from 2012-present compared to the previous decade (2001-2012). The timing of the Ballmer-to-Nadella transition is not coincidental; it's indicative of the larger shift the company made as they repositioned themselves to aggressively expand again.
It was simply a failure of execution. Can you point to one thing in the consent decree that stopped them from competing better in mobile?
The issue is they went and rewrote a chunk of it, breaking APIs and fucked all the developers off, then abandoned it.
The only thing they are is fucking stupid morons.