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Only losing market share and power has made Microsoft produce software with reasonable quality, flexibility, and interoperability.

A lot of the credit for that goes to Apple's crazy climb in popularity. But at least some of it also goes to technologists involved in networking, the internet, and the web, many of whom decided never to deal with any Microsoft stuff ever again. If you knew the frustration of Microsoft's combination of lock-in and incompetence, back in 1995 - 2006 (my entire computing life at the time!) you wouldn't blame them.

>Only losing market share and power has made Microsoft produce software with reasonable quality, flexibility, and interoperability.

And that, in my opinion, is the way it's supposed to work. Vendor's products gettin' ya down? Not being responsive to your needs and lacking in quality? Move elsewhere! Money talks.

A good kick in the ass can be a humbling experience, and a good opportunity for the open-minded. It was a long time in coming, but I'm glad to see MS is starting to take some of these lessons to heart. If they keep it up with actions such as these, there's a good chance they'll stand to be rewarded for it.

> If they keep it up with actions such as these, there's a good chance they'll stand to be rewarded for it.

And -quickly enough- they'll go back to being the old MSFT we all knew and loathed from top to bottom, and these olive branches will vanish quicker than a pile of shaved ice on a summer day. For many of us, this isn't our first rodeo. :)

At least now we'll have a decent editor we can continue to run ourselves when that happens. :)

Honest question: how many people from the embrace-extend-extinguish era are still at Microsoft? Once they are all gone, and the market has shifted several times since then, you would think that era would be over for them. Or, is it just deeply engrained in their corporate culture, which lives in longer than any individual employee? I kind of doubt it but it's interesting to think about.

The computer technology world has changed a lot since then, and I expect that intelligent people at Microsoft know that the old ways won't work again.

> ...I expect that intelligent people at Microsoft know that the old ways won't work again [because] ... [t]he computer technology world has changed a lot since then ...

I'm not nearly as confident as you seem to be.

People with purchasing power can still be swayed by FUD. Less-technical bosses are not-infrequently swayed by marketing copy from glossy mags and giveaways from salesman rather than sound technical advice from technical staff. It's abundantly clear that shadowy back-room deals and front-room exclusionary deals based on tremendous price cuts on widgets that have a near-zero unit cost are still tremendously effective.

I expect that within five or ten years, after this new crop of programmers have happily been making Microsoft software a critical part of their workflow, Microsoft will return to its traditional MO.

As I said earlier, for many of us this isn't our first rodeo, and isn't the first time Microsoft has played the nice guy for a little while. :)

I disagree. Before the game plan was to keep everyone in windows. Now with iOS and android killing things it's no longer about just windows. Satya's vision is very different from Ballmer. The big money makers are now shifting to Azure. This means if open sourcing tools that didn't make money will attract more Devs to azure. That is very valuable in the long term in business sense. This also gives Microsoft a good rep and gives a broader reach.

> I disagree. Before the game plan was to keep everyone in windows.

Three things:

1) That describes a corporate goal, not a set of behaviors used to achieve it. There are many companies out there who also have the goal of "Keep everyone using our software.". Not many of them have utilized such destructive techniques as Microsoft has in pursuit of that goal.

2) Your second sentence would be more correctly spelt "Microsoft's game plan is to keep everyone using Microsoft software, wherever possible.". When you spell it that way, it becomes clear that the big picture actually hasn't changed. Windows was (and remains) a big part of that game plan, but for the past decade or two, it would be hard for an honest observer to make the claim that Microsoft was only interested in keeping folks on Windows.

3) Many of us have seen Microsoft play nice with the wider community. They never play nice for very long. The more cynical old-timers would say that this "play nice" phase is -itself- a part of the EEE strategy.

I really dislike this line of thinking. It assumes things can't change. Microsoft as a corporation is just a brand, the people have come and gone and with it much of the ideology and decision making thought.

People that think this way have a ridiculous amount of brand loyalty which really means nothing. The people change behind the brand all the time. It's clear that MSFT is changing. It's clear from the people that I've talked to that work there. It's clear from the messaging by senior management.

> I really dislike this line of thinking. It assumes things can't change.

I never said that things can't change. I've seen many companies change over the years. However, Microsoft's anti-competitive and underhanded practices have been extremely profitable for them and have -all things considered- resulted in very few negative consequences.

> It's clear [that MSFT is changing] from the people that I've talked to that work there. It's clear from the messaging by senior management.

Both Plus and Hangouts were supposed to be bold new directions for Google. At the time, it was abundantly clear from talking to most people who worked there and senior management that everyone was totally stoked about these new platforms and that this was the direction that the company was going to go for the foreseeable future.

But here we are -four years later- and Hangouts is -all things considered- a steaming pile and everyone in the company knows it, Google is slowly but steadily disentangling itself from Plus (and Plus from its services), and Vivek Gundotra -the former head of Plus- quietly "left the company" several years past.

As you say, companies change.

> It's clear that MSFT is changing.

This isn't the first time that it has been "clear" that Microsoft was changing. In the past it turned out to be a temporary change in order to gain reputation, or new users for their platforms or... Like I said before, "Playing the nice guy" has -historically- been just a small -and fleeting- phase of Microsoft's dirty market domination strategies.

Given the enormous amount of harm Microsoft has done to the industry over the past several decades, (and given Microsoft's historical propensity for lock-in and intentionally high switching costs) I'm going to wait for a very long time before seriously entertaining the claims that Microsoft has actually changed.

i would bet money most of the powerful stock holders that forced those practices are still around.

I would bet money that stockholders didn't force those practices. Those anti-competitive, industry-harming practices were (and are) used because they secure large profits for the company in exchange for relatively little effort.

Why would they go back? That strategy seemed promising in the beginning but clearly it caused massive damage to their reputation and simply doesn't work in the long term.

I think that strategy reaped them billions, and continues to do so (the Office franchise is still a money printing press).

Yep.

It's abundantly clear that their slimeball strategies worked very well for them for at least twenty years. In the computing industry, twenty years is a very long time. :)

It's interesting that you don't make assumptions about future "evil" behaviour of their competition.

Why is it interesting? The topic is Microsoft and Microsoft's past and present behavior.

While it is next to impossible to truly consider a topic in a vacuum, it is very common practice to focus on a particular single topic or set of topics when engaging in discussion. This practice tends to promote productive discussion by allowing the conversants to momentarily disregard issues that are largely or completely unrelated to the topic at hand.

So, where's the criteria how the subject is constrained? Why are we talking about Microsoft and not the particular responsible Microsoft business division?

> Why are we talking about Microsoft and not the particular responsible Microsoft business division?

Because -as the US DoJ inquiry showed us- Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior has been a strategy that was pursued because of directives from C-level employees.

Historically, it hasn't been low-to-mid-level minions spontaneously deciding to do great violence to the computer industry, it has been directives (either express or implied) from the top that caused them to behave in this way.

> > Only losing market share and power has made Microsoft produce software with reasonable quality, flexibility, and interoperability.

> And that, in my opinion, is the way it's supposed to work. Vendor's products gettin' ya down? Not being responsive to your needs and lacking in quality? Move elsewhere! Money talks.

Exactly. That's what got Apple where they are today as well. Pre-Rhapsody, MacOS was largely a joke in the developer community, but that changed drastically when they ditched the archaic MacOS for the Nextstep derived OSX. When that happened, suddenly there was a reasonable alternative to Windows or the various Unices out there. It seems entirely natural that, like the shift that pushed people towards Apple, we would see similar shifts in other OS's that would entice people to think more broadly than seeing Apple as the dominant desirable dev platform. That seems like a healthy thing with respect to avoiding a stagnant monoculture.

I remember it very differently.

It's particularly interesting that you start with 1995, since that's the year of Bill Gates's "Tidal Wave" memo. A large chunk of MS suddenly devoted itself to getting Really Good At The Internet, and within a few months produced the best web browser on the market (IE 3, the first mainstream browser to implement CSS) and the best JVM (far faster than Sun's own at the time). IE continued to be the best browser until Firefox came out. (Yes, you can argue for Seamonkey, but it took years for it to be usably stable.) Every version of IE up to and including 6.0 was more standards-compliant than the equivalent Netscape release.

I was doing all kinds of web development on both Linux and Windows NT back then. I never got used to Windows for web hosting, but I far preferred developing against MS SQL Server than any other DB, due to its features and documentation.

I'll admit I didn't really get started until 2000, and I'd also push the end-range to around 2009. And I did use the Mozilla Suite back then (pre Seamonkey naming).

The main problem with IE, regardless of how good it is, is that it is windows only. This was true of all of Microsoft's stuff (particularly crappy mac versions don't count) (I also wasn't a fan of Mac OS 9 ... but there was bsd and linux for a number of years by then...) They used their own formats, which were not publicly documented or even really designed. If you had to use any single Microsoft thing, you practically had to use it all. Samba and later OpenOffice changed the situation but were really a lot of reverse-engineering and bug-for-bug-compatibility work, and of course Microsoft kept moving the goalposts with new versions and new bugs.

The resentment comes from the lock-in. You had to pay a lot of money and deal with licenses (or pirate and deal with cracks) just to experiment. You had to deal with the surprisingly flaky file sharing and dhcp client etc. You had to deal with the fact that there wasn't a good terminal or shell, that the compiler was not trivial to download and install and invoke from a script, etc. If you have the freedom to choose the "convenience" of the Microsoft user-oriented products or not, it's not such a big deal that Microsoft everything sucked for networking related development. But if the lock-in gets you somehow, you really resent it.

EDIT: and I almost forgot! microsoft calling linux a "cancer", funding lawsuits over linux kernel code, trying to make it harder for linux to support ACPI based systems - more underhanded lock-in to their crap

Uptill IE 5, it was was there for Mac, and Linux was never mainstream till the time, for it to be evil to not support it.

> pre Seamonkey naming

Maybe you predate me but when I jumped on the Mozilla bandwagon at Gecko 0.7.1 the internal name for the suite was Seamonkey. It was only after Firefox that the group maintaining the suite started using the internal name as the public branding.

> The main problem with IE, regardless of how good it is, is that it is windows only.

This is not true, there was IE for several UNIX operating systems.

While I certainly shared your frustration, I do think that MS had some extremely talented folks there.

Some of the brightest people I have ever had the pleasure of working with came from MS.

Incompetence was far from the problem. Priorities out of order would be one diagnosis.

I'm not sure about the branding angle. For the longest time, MS was its own worst enemy brand-wise. They appear to be doing the necessary changes to win about people who like good tools, though. I'm not complaining.

Possibly after being bitten by a brand people are leery of products under that brand name?

Disclaimer: no hate for MS nor VS. I'm sure its a fine tool. I just don't need it and probably won't use it.

Incidental to your point but I wouldn't characterise Office as bloated or slow. Word, Excel, and PPT 2016 are all super snappy.

I'm pretty sure kup0 was referring to how Office has generally been in past versions. The latest version of Office are much better made and performant for the same reasons why VSC is well-made and performant: Microsoft has started taking these user experience issues a lot more seriously.

The Mac versions are still pretty terrible and are missing loads of features.

> But that says more about their own problems and unwillingness than it does about MS.

Not sure I agree. In a lot of cases they earned this reputation by leaving developers SOL when they abandoned software or APIs. Personally I don't really have a problem with MS, but they're unpopular around where I work for this reason.

Bloat and jankyness seems to be a function of project age. This is a relatively greenfield project, so it's pretty nice for now.

MS Office is ancient as far as software projects go. The only things that are older at this point is UNIX, Oracle bank/govt mainframes.

You checked the latest Office 2015? I think it improved quite a bit, at least on OSX.

Office 2016. It's absolutely awesome. As native as it gets IMO. It's clear MS is treating OS X with respect.

I used to have Office 2013 installed on a Windows VM because 2011 on Mac was garbage.

How nice the surface doesn't say anything about the internals, developer experience or the crazy shit they do for backwards compatibility.

By going to VS Code they're jettisoning themselves from the .sln (solution file), .csproj (C# project file), MS Build world. Project management and build files are being pushed into external utilities. This is kind of the way a lot of the rest the world (ruby/node/python) is going.

IDEs are fine, but when you remove the need for an integrated debugger in favor of TDD the need for an IDE diminishes.

I would hardly say that TDD removes the need for an integrated debugger. Being able to inspect the state of a system the instant a test fails sounds mighty useful to me.

Also, software builds being driven by an external tool has been common since at least make(1), so it's hardly a ruby/node/python thing.

I've been the new guy on teams that did not use the ide for debugging (insanity in the Java world, right?) and was perceived to be a super star because of my ability to trouble shoot and drill straight down to root causes. Learn and use your tools people!

But VS Code does have integrated debugging...

>Bloat and jankyness seems to be a function of project age.

Atom, that he mentioned, as well as lots of other projects, were slow and bloated from the start.

That's why I worry about atom in 10 years from now...

Ancient?? I think you don't know the history.

MS Office started in 1990.

Current technologies that are older include...

- Unix and most of its tool system (including emacs, vi, grep, awk, tar, X-windows, etc)

- Most fundamental networking technologies (tcp-ip, ftp, email, etc)

- Several game franchises including Mario, Final Fantasy, Frogger, SimCity, Wolfenstein (you'll be more likely to recognize its descendants Doom and Quake)

- Many popular relational databases. Whether you use MS SQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, those are built on code bases that have been continuously developed from before 1990. (Albeit with name changes. MS SQL started with Sybase's code, PostgreSQL was developed from Ingress.)

- Around half of the top 20 programming languages in use today, including languages such as C, C++, Python and Objective-C.

There is a LOT more history to the software you use every day than you recognize!

I'm talking more codebase wise, not protocols, languages, specifications and franchises.

For example, Wii U mario games aren't using code from the original 8bit mario games. Same with most SMTP servers today. SMTP is old, the current implementations in use most of the time are not that old. I think many unix tools in use today like grep are probably not using the original grep implementations either.

So I covered most of the list with UNIX (OSes), Oracle (DBs) and mainframes. I did miss compilers, vim & emacs but even that is being replaced by guys like LLVM.

whole heartedly agree