Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

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Between this and the ChakraCore news item on the front page I've been wondering whether Microsoft really has been changed its behavior since the 90s, or whether this is just how they play the game when they're not in a position of strength as they are with node.js and cloud services.

It's pretty telling from the ChakraCore thread not entirely being "They're obviously trying to embrace, extend, extinguish node.js like they did Java" that people have either forgotten their modus operandi, or that I'm too much of a cynic and they've genuinely changed.

Sometimes I think I'm being too cynical and they're now just as "nice" as some other companies which have a mostly healthy relationship with open source & open architectures.

But then again all the news where they're being more open these days have to do with areas where they don't have established lock-in, including projects like .Net & ChakraCore which formed the basis of some of the major projects where they lost the lock-in wars.

Are they just trying to lure users they've lost back into their sphere of influence so they can tighten the noose again, or are they genuinely doing business differently now?

I don't know, but it's hard to place any trust in them when you've been burned so many times, and even though they have a new CEO middle management & their business model has a lot of inertia.

Posts like this remind me of the quote in N.N.Taleb's Antifragile book, The mind fights yesterday's war, but the body fights tomorrow's war (in the context of biological systems under stress).

Some minds here are fighting a decade old war and no good deed goes unpunished in HN comments.

IMO you don't get to shed decades worth of reputation because you made a few good moves in the open source world.

For me at least, such a company would have to spend as much or more time pushing this new open idea than they did pushing the Embrace Extend Extinguish model.

Some people are more forgiving than me but I agree with the parents skepticism about how the openness seems to largely be in areas where they already lost the lockin wars.

Thats possible.

But tales like Aesop's fable of The Scorpion and the Frog have reverberated with humanity since prehistoric times for a reason, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog

Look they released their Javascript engine with no JIT compiler for Linux. It's the same Microsoft because they are in it for money and dominance. A leopard can't change its spots. Microsoft will always be the same, no matter what they say. They are simply changing themselves to be more like Google because they know their old strategy does not work in the new world.

If anything it's Microsoft which is fighting yesterday's war with today's strategy.

To be fair we don't know that they won't port the JIT over eventually. I can't imagine it's a high priority.

And that's all you have to do, just keep saying we're working on it, and turn to the next question. All ways of getting people to use your operating system and your eco-system while keeping the rhetoric of we're open now. And they can't be it's not in their nature. They have a whole lot of business interests which will keep them the same old, same old.

> Sometimes I think I'm being too cynical

Not at all. My very first thought was "this is just good old Microsoft, giving free stuff to schools to catch users early".

Every gift comes with a debt. This is why sometimes we don't accept gifts.

> "They're obviously trying to embrace, extend, extinguish node.js like they did Java"

But they haven't extinguished Java yet. Unfortunately. And it seems it's going to be around for a long time.

There's nothing new -- MS has been giving away free (or nearly so) Windows and Office suites to students as long as I remember. Only the product has changed, now it's cloud services. Basically, it's like a drug dealer giving you the first dose for free.

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