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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

There's been lots of positive announcements from Microsoft recently, but I think I'll save the applause for when they can do those cool things and actually make money from it, not from extorting cash for patents, office document lock-in, and all their other "bad microsoft" stuff.

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I'm on your boat with this. I haven't seen any change that truly 'matters'. I have noticed them trying to increase their presence on technical and social media but the content really isn't anything of substance which leads me to feel that they're purely marketing moves.

Not sure I follow. In what sense are things like Surface Pro, Hololens, Surface book laptop, open source .NET etc. purely marketing moves?

They haven't been hits, yet.

They can only innovate, and have no control over what "hits". The above are good products.

My interpretation of the grand parent's comments were that it's nice and all that "Microsoft is changing" but if it doesn't result in a turnaround in their fortunes with consumers and developers it's all for naught. So far I don't see any turnaround happening.

They don't change anything software wise. Windows 10 is still being forced as a benchmark of how popular the OS is (and hilariously we heard this first on the MS event), while they didn't have the balls to address the privacy questions regarding data collection upfront and what will they do about it.

I guess people and media forget fast.

extorting cash for patents

Standard practice among all the big players

office document lock-in

Standard practice among the players lucky enough to be able to do it (we now call it 'walled garden')

... My thesis is that all big tech firms now act as MS once did (or would if they could). But we're just used to it now.

On first read, I was going to ask to get a link to that thesis, thinking it was some Masters or PhD work. Every 10 years you're going to have the 'big-evil'. I'm with you 100% about it being standard practices in big companies, and 110% about users being complacent about accepting the walled garden.

Also re: patents- IBM has a huge patent portfolio. Very little of it is used to patent troll. Those boxed-office Texas shell LLP law-firms setup are nothing like what IBM is doing today (second only behind Red Hat in terms of core Linux kernel commits, IIRC[caveat: source was from a talk I attended in 2013 by one of the 3 upstream-controllers, including Linus]). "Evil 80s IBM" is now actually too stagnant to really exploit the consumer and barely breathing off of old banks and gov't systems that run System/36,360,38,390 on z/OS.

"Evil 90s MS" is now opening up basically everything for the consumer, minus the cash-cows (enterprises). MS Research funds tons of Haskell research, language development that gradually goes from PhD/post-doc work -> "obscure" languages like Haskell/F# -> C# (LINQ is effectively a monad). Python 3.5's new async/await is largely influenced by work Microsoft did (both in semantics and syntax). The CoreCLR is on Github. Inspect, modify, alter, run your F# code on a RS/6000 or 8 dollar ARM if you want to. Visual Studio Community Edition is free, a la the IntelliJ model. I argue they're now a net positive on the community. Just like IBM, they've realized the enterprise is where their money is, so charge for SQL Server licenses (which are really reasonably priced compared to Oracle), Sharepoint, Server, and Dynamics/Biztalk type stuff.

In the 80s it was IBM. In the 90s it was MS. Today, Apple performing so much walled-gardened anti-competitive practices (I can't install my legally purchased copy of OS X on my Intel machine? Really?) that it makes the MS DOJ trial look completely insignificant.

> (I can't install my legally purchased copy of OS X on my Intel machine? Really?)

I thought the only way to legally purchase OS X was to buy it preinstalled on a mac.

It's for sale directly from Apple - http://www.apple.com/au/shop/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-s...

That's an upgrade.

That's a quite old version of OSX (2009), and is meant for people needing to upgrade from OSX 10.5, as v10.5 wasn't upgradable over a network connection.

> (I can't install my legally purchased copy of OS X on my Intel machine? Really?)

I can't install Android on my iPhone as well, even if they have similar hardware

Unless it was advertised as capable of doing that, then you can't (of course you can with some hacking, but the idea is the same)

Does Apple have the same market share on phones as MS on the computing market of the 90s? So there you have it

Can't you? A quick web search found android install instructions for several iPhone models.

Not officially, as mentioned (which is the same situation with Mac OSX and notebooks from other brands)

Just because the "big players" all do it, doesn't make it right.

> But we're just used to it now.

It's time for complacency to end, yes?

I didn't say it was right. Just interesting that MS are still the pantomime villain while everyone else copies the script.

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