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Comment by ckozlowski | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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> > 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.

> 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.

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