Everything before CoPilot was pretty standard CEO stuff. The real change was internally. Satya is well-known for eradicating the "Art of War" environment and bringing workers together. He also fully embraced open-source (Balmer hated OSS) and R&D has continued to innovate. (Still boggles the mind that F# exists and is awesome)

Prior to CoPilot, my only beef was that Azure needs a ground up re-architecture. They bolted products onto Active Directory which is ancient LDAP tech. It's a massive flaw in how Azure works and why it's 10x more complicated than AWS or GCP.

  It's a massive flaw in how Azure works and why it's 10x more complicated than AWS or GCP.

Wait until you try OCI.

That's never going to happen. I'm more or less locked into AWS at this point, though for my personal stuff I'm using my linode server a lot.

I thought Oracle Cloud was designed by AWS alum and was supposed to be solid?

Given the option, I always favour Azure over AWS or GCP.

AWS is a complexity maze, whereas GCP seems Google only does the minimum and one can only talk to bots.

You can pay for professional services.

In Sweden the only one I ever got support with was Google, so it’s not a universal experience (I didn’t pay for professional services).

I believe you and I have had this discussion before.

Yes, and I told you those professional services were nowhere to be found, while in AWS and Azure we actually got people on the phone, so do you want to have this discussion again?

yeah. Because I have the opposite experience.

So I think when either of us talk about it as if it’s universal we are both wrong.

So every time you make a claim, I’ll be there.

Your experience with Google, it’s mine with AWS.

See you next time, until my GCP experience improves.

It should be noted that while Satya opened the floodgates, it was already making inroads by then, just with a lot more paperwork. Some early examples of F/OSS predating Satya were ASP.NET MVC and PTVS.

At the same time, the insistence from up top that all divisions have to be profitable on their own means that in practice there has been a steady ongoing scale-back from F/OSS for several years now. Just look at the situation in VSCode: sure, the base platform is still open, but increasingly many first-party extensions have their pieces replaced by closed source functionality - Python language server, C# debugger etc. Related to this are the attempts to block VSCode forks by using prohibitive licensing terms and even inserting runtime checks for the same.

It always feels that whatever good .NET team manages, it gets killed by upper management decisions, like VSCode should not eat into VS sales, thus plenty of tools will never have a VSCode version.

Example, you cannot do graphical debugging of parallel code, use visualizers, or do profiling analysis in VSCode.

> They bolted products onto Active Directory which is ancient LDAP tech. It's a massive flaw in how Azure works and why it's 10x more complicated than AWS or GCP.

I really don't see the problem with LDAP. If they make an overlay for it and it's needlessly complicated, that's just par for the course. Have you experienced SharePoint?

> Everything before CoPilot was pretty standard CEO stuff.

Sure it was. Just as OP wrote:

> From a user's perspective, everything has gotten steadily worse under his reign.

Ancient LDAP is probably the best they still offer. A far superior way for internal auth and vastly superior for companies that need on premise infrastructure. Nobody wants internal apps that auth through AWS or GCP.

I hate registering a shitty app and use their modern auth flow. No security gain for additional maintenance.

For that matter, this is a main reason why Windows is so established. The logistic problem of distributing user accounts on several machines.

And no, a virtual and slow cloud Windows is not an alternative for anyone that wants to be productive.

Satya was definitely an improvement, a breath of fresh air. But the last few years, they've started dropping the ball. Everything is half-assed (new outlook), or releases too soon burning goodwill (new teams), or a miss being pushed on people (copilot integration).

(strangely, perhaps my perception, this is roughly when the Mac M1 came out).

> He also fully embraced open-source

Embraced as in this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

I wish we still had ancient LDAP tech at work...

Solitaire is no longer free?

They said Microsoft not windows. Modern dotnet is a good example of something Microsoft has been doing right. Windows on the other hand...

> Solitaire is now a subscription service

That is a joke, right? Right??

Nope. Minesweeper, too.

Well, the games are still free, the subscription is to remove the ads.

But you have to subscribe for each game separately, and it's a per-device subscription.

Yes, Microsoft really is that petty when it comes to nickel-and-diming users these days.

Can't believe anyone is subjecting themselves to this on their own free will.

This is so fucking insane that I don't even know where to start. I'm hoping that even this is a joke.

Well, you can have a subscription for switching a relay in your car, so that current flows from the battery to some wire, so that your seat heats up.

It's a sign of the times...

That should be criminal.

> I long for the halcyon days of Windows 8.

That's a phrase I would never have thought I'd see. I remember Windows 8 as being generally despised when it first came out.

There's no bottom. It can always get worse.

On the UI side of things the trouble with 8 was the push towards touch as the latest shiny object to chase, coming a few years into the boom of smartphones/tablets. The start menu was full screen with no option and many OS applications were either full screen only or by default until you clicked a new title bar button. The 8.1 release pulled back from a lot of that.