Hacker News Reader

Comment by elliotec | Hacker News Reader

Why, and what exactly do you mean?

The parent is probably having flashbacks to a time now long gone, in which Microsoft was widely regarded in tech circles as the evil empire. They would attempt to 'embrace and extend' potentially threatening (to them) technology that they didn't control, as a means to hijack or kill it. Many people - including internally at Microsoft - often called it: embrace, extend, extinguish:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

I don't know if Microsoft's management still considers E-E-E to be a viable strategy or not.

However, even if they don't, I haven't seen any indication that they've repented of their past scummy tendencies. The Windows 10 rollout is perhaps the most obvious case in point.

I'm curious if you've seen something that makes you more optimistic than I am.

Whether or not you consider their actions evil, they were demonstrably an extremely destructive force, provenly using very untoward methods, much more so than most of their peers.

It's mind boggling to consider how many years their shenanigans have probably set back computing as a field.

As for trusting them now, I don't believe an organization like that can truly change in such a short time.

I'm not sure they can change fully in this short a time, but they've definitely demonstrated some healthy changes under Nadella, including "embracing" open source, VS code, proper handling of the Mojang acquisition, and others.

They just bought Xamarin and killed Robovm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com