Microsoft continues to try to convince us that they are great with press releases and non-organic stories such as this.
I, my peers, and my co-workers just don't see it. With billions in reserve it's no surprise they are trying to buy popularity.
I, my peers, and my co-workers just don't see it. With billions in reserve it's no surprise they are trying to buy popularity.
I love my Surface Pro 4, I love the fact .net is cross platform, I love that Azure is fast and easy to use, I love that Office on my mac is current and that Microsoft's mobile strategy is 100% cross platform unlike that of Apple and Google.. I love that MS is honest these days and its disappointing the community is largely dishonest in return.. often snarky.
But yeah, I don't see either any major change in mobile MS usage around me.
(1) AFAIK, Microsoft continues to assert patents against Linux without giving the broader community enough information to resolve the supposed violations. (I'm not positive about this one.)
(2) AFAIK, Microsoft continues to apply for more software patents, without joining the Patent Commons.
(3) Microsoft seems to intentionally subvert its OS's users' attempts to disable snooping. AFAIK, Microsoft not only refuses to say what data are gathered, but also phone home to so many different IP names/numbers that it looks like they're trying to hide the activity from the OS user.
(4) Microsoft is now "embracing" Linux. Microsoft became famous for "embrace, extend, extinguish". People outside of the CEO's inner circle can't know if that's the plan here as well.
The manner in which Microsoft pushed Windows 10 may be a data point.
>what are the odds that the company's executive-level culture has changed?
So, quite relevant.
You jut made me feel old :(
I'd love one if I could put linux on it. or if I could buy an OEM pc without an OS (and yes I know there are some vendors that "allow" (just that word makes me cringe) you to do it, but it should be a right). If, by their own definition, it's "intellectual" (and not material) property, then if I dont use it I shouldn't have to pay for it.
If they want to sell Surface because it's an awesome product, why do they need to go out of their way to lock their software on it ? If it's so awesome, surely people would want to use it, right ? If the proverbial destination is so great, why do they need to lock their guests inside ?
X11 and VNC help if you want a Linux desktop, but that's admittedly a less than ideal experience.
Of course, virtualization generally precludes USB peripheral access, so my suggestions are a pure software and web development solution.
So either you want something that already exists or you want something new, and I'm very confused as to your initial post.
at least according to this [1] article, MS requires secure boot in win 10. and the criticisms about UEFI and how it makes linux much more difficult to install (which I have experienced firsthand) are documented on wikipedia [2]. I'm going to enjoy my friday evening and not try to make a solid case, but of course microsoft denies that they ever intended to use UEFI to block competition (because they've never done that before :) ).
[1] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/201722-linuxs-worst-case...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_In...
You can.
https://ramsdenj.com/2016/08/29/arch-linux-on-the-surface-pr...
"Something that sets the Surface apart from other popular tablets, is that it doesn’t artificially limit your capabilities. If you want to use it as a laptop, or install alternate operating systems on it, you are free to do so. I think the Surface is going to make a great Linux laptop, and I look forward to spending some time playing with it."
It looks like most of the linux issues are due to MS doing some weird architectural things (touch calculations on the GPU, etc), but that's just what I was able to find out with 2 minutes on the first thing google popped up.
I don't know about "without an OS", but Dell is selling a laptop right now that comes with Ubuntu Linux out of the box: http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-9360-laptop/pd?3x_n....
And, like others have pointed out, the Surface isn't "locked". Yes, it has SecureBoot and UEFI... just like literally every desktop motherboard shipped within the last 5 years. You can go into UEFI, turn off SecureBoot, wipe Windows and replace it with whatever you want. It may not work very well, but it's totally doable.
If they want to sell Surface because it's an awesome product, why do they need to go out of their way to lock their software on it?
Because the software is part of the product. Apple has shown us that customers do not consider hardware and software to be separate entities. They consider both to be an integrated whole.
You may see a "new" Microsoft, but all I see is a Microsoft which is making moves they HAVE to in order to survive. In this world of "the cloud" and the utter dominance of Linux in everything with a CPU that ISN'T a desktop computer, what else can they do but the things they're doing?
That Microsoft is executing WELL is a byproduct. If they didn't, they'd have become the IBM they defeated 20 years ago, and we wouldn't be having this discussion. (They'd offer legacy support for Windows XP, and we'd all wish we could cut them out of the budget, along with the mainframe.) I credit Nadella for this, but none of this is due to some sort of newfound egalitarianism or philanthropy. It's just business.
I find the bright and cheerful comments like yours depressing. They seem to belie a belief that the upper management of Microsoft has somehow been knighted with a sense of civic duty. I see it as the same business shrewdness they've always shown. They no longer have the power to dictate absolute terms to corporations, and must play nice with the rest of the IT world.
And I bet it chaps some of the old guards' asses.
So, how does that make the outcome any worse? RedHat isn't contributing to the Linux kernel out of a sense of charity. IBM isn't contributing to OpenStack as a philanthropic endeavor. Facebook isn't improving PHP because it's a fun hobby project. They're all doing the things that they're doing because it's good for business. Why is it any worse when Microsoft does it?
Another difference is that the other examples you've listed here are all free software. Of all the glowing coverage Microsoft has been getting of late, only .NET on Linux is comparable. But you're never going to get Windows-forms-like applications on Windows (which a surprising number of people seem to think will happen). It's only the web stack. Does ASP.NET really stack up well against Rails or Node.js as a web application stack on Linux? I don't know, but at the least, they have some catching up to do.
But, really, I think it's another example of my main point. Microsoft could have used some pre-existing open source project and built on top of that, but they chose to create another language for the future. It's even pretty good, by all accounts. It's just that, in a world of PHP, Javascript, C++, Ruby, Python, Erlang, and all the rest, what place does a closed-source language and compiler have? They had to make it open source.
Yes; have a look at the language column one this page:
https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r13&hw=...
You absolutely will be able to get Windows-forms like applications. You just won't be using WinForms or WPF. Instead, you'll use Mono and its bindings to GTK or QT. This is exactly how it should be. WPF is an OS specific GUI library. Using WPF on Linux makes about as much sense as using Cocoa on Windows.
But, really, I think it's another example of my main point. Microsoft could have used some pre-existing open source project and built on top of that, but they chose to create another language for the future.
I think you're misremembering history. C# was created because Sun specifically cut Microsoft off from using Java. Microsoft had a project to write its own Java compiler. Sun took legal action to prevent Microsoft from doing so. And this was during the early 2000s. Python, Ruby, etc. were nowhere near mature enough to serve as the primary systems programming language for something like Windows.
Moreover, Microsoft gets a lot of criticism for making C#, but Google gets no criticism for making Go? Isn't that just slightly hypocritical?
Oh, I'm quite clear. My point is that, if the stack had delivered on the premise of the idea of WinForms-level-easy GUI development, why haven't Mono-based GUI apps proliferated on Linux? Yet, after many years of including Mono in Ubuntu, they've pulled it from the default install.
> Microsoft had a project to write its own Java compiler. Sun took legal action to prevent Microsoft from doing so. And this was during the early 2000s. Python, Ruby, etc. were nowhere near mature enough to serve as the primary systems programming language for something like Windows.
Fair enough, but even all the way back in 2000, it was obvious that, if you were going to start from scratch on a language, there was no point in making it closed. There wasn't any more real money to be made in compilers by that point. GCC was being made available on everything, and $1,000 proprietary compilers were dying out.
> Isn't that just slightly hypocritical?
Sigh.
As a JVM developer the .NET Core stuff is really interesting to me and I'd love to figure out a way to start using it.
I'd pretty much written MS off several years ago as a fading giant but they're cranking out products and services I want to use now and that I just need to figure out how to get them into my life.
In this regard I would not say they are "back" but better than Microsoft has ever been. Are they the best at everything... nah but heck the fact that I am saying many of their products are compelling is a big improvement
My take on it between Amazon and Microsoft: Microsoft has less functionality but with an easier UI. Amazon is light years ahead of anyone but their UI scheme (from naming things to where they position features and options) is pretty lack luster.
I think your information is quite out of date. GCP is competitive with AWS for many use cases and certainly is better than Azure.
The days of GAE even being the primary offering are long gone.
There's a reason that if you look at DevOps tools they all support AWS, most also support GCP, but very few support Azure.
>most also support GCP, but very few support Azure.
This might be a case of different tech stacks, but nearly everything I work with supports Azure. Sorry to ask this, because it might be easier for you to provide an example or two what you specifically know doesn't work with Azure versus me providing everything that does (and of course, these should be semi-popular tools in whatever "stack").
Huh? What does "consumer focused" even mean in the cloud space?
Google has made a substantial effort to buff up their cloud offerings in the past few years and it definitely shows. (AWS is still my first choice though.)
> This might be a case of different tech stacks,
That's true. If you're working with a Microsoft stack then of course Azure will come out ahead. I'm coming from a generic Linux background.
Nothing. It's their general company culture. They don't tend to actually create good API's/tooling in my experience. It always seems like an after thought. From google maps to their cloud offerings.
>If you're working with a Microsoft stack then of course Azure will come out ahead. I'm coming from a generic Linux background.
I work with Linux and Microsoft stacks on a daily basis, but certainly that could just mean I've chosen tools that explicitly won't conflict with each other. However, I'm still interested to hear what tools don't work with Azure (with the assumption that there is some quality about Azure that prevents/disincentives that tool from doing so).
Azure has tons of stuff thrown all over it. The UI is absolutely terrible. It's some weird tablet-esque thing that flies out to the side and requires so much clicking around. It's slow. And it's overpriced. AWS's UI, while involved, at least isn't someone's let's-resurrect-Windows-8-UI project.
I know two companies that get tons of free Azure credits, yet still pay for GCP in production just to avoid dealing with Azure. If GCP slowly keeps adding features while keeping simplicity and speed, they're going to make huge strides against AWS and Azure.
GCP is generally a lot more consistent and modern, having benefited from a clean-slate design and Google's expertise in designing huge continent-spanning infrastructure solutions. Some examples:
* AWS Glacier looks pretty nifty until you realize that Google's equivalent, the coldline storage class, still gives you millisecond latencies (Glacier's is usually measured in hours), at a much lower price point.
* GCP is designed to automatically migrate VMs between physical hosts, with zero application downtime. This in turn is possible thanks to their rather amazing network stack, a completely transparent, encrypted L4 SDN. AWS, meanwhile, suffers on the awkward mess that is AWS VPC (unless one is still stuck on "legacy EC2").
* Google gets things like consolidated billing correct from the start. Other minor things like IAM management and the command-line toolchain are a breath of fresh air.
Not to say that it's all rosy, of course. GCP has its own set of issues, like any product offering, though no major ones come to mind. But it's clear that some of their services (the StackDriver tools comes to mind) are not up to their usual quality standards.
Of course, Google doesn't have counterparts to all of Amazon's offerings, but then AWS has a lot of odd products (much of it targeting enterprises with legacy infrastructure). Google's focus on Kubernetes and containerization means that some of the deployment-oriented services (CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk and so on) are less relevant, and for now Google seems to rely on the community/third parties to come up with their own solutions, which I think is a good call at the moment.
That's not only technically impressive, it's also really good customer service.
I find myself being really suspicious whenever something being used by thousands or millions of people is just waved off by other people as being terrible. To me being "terrible" usually translates as "I started with something else and it works differently than this and its what I'm used to has its own failings and workarounds but I'm at least used to them and more productive there and I don't really feel like taking the time to get used to how things work for this other system."
1. No managed option for MySQL or Postgres hosting.
2. Hard to find resources in the panel and lots of confusion on security practices.
3. Instances randomly dying at an astonishing rate.
You're right that "terrible" is hyperbole. I'm sure there are people who are happy with Azure, especially if they're using a Microsoft stack.
Your translation of "terrible" is how I feel about GCP: it's fine, but it takes me longer to do things because I'm familiar with AWS. Compared to Azure, where I would spend hours on trying to do something and still couldn't find a way to do it.
Like I said, if you're interested in the Microsoft ecosystem then Azure is probably great. I'm not. For running an open source stack, Azure is not competitive with AWS and GCP.
The quality of the machine blew me away. It's easily the best "laptop" I've used in a very long time, and it's become my downstairs computer.
I originally planned to dual-boot it with Arch Linux, but I ultimately decided against it because Windows 10 worked so well on it, especially for the form factor. Any advantages I would've had by running Linux were eliminated by installing Cygwin and KDE Applications (plus PuTTY to connect to my Linode). Since then, that's been augmented by bash for Windows, which is absolutely lovely. Thanks to b4w, it's become my main machine to use when working from home.
More recently, I've visited one of my local Microsoft Stores, and I'm really impressed by the Surface Book and the Surface Studio. Those are some really sweet pieces of hardware.
I used to be a diehard Microsoft hater for most of my life, and now I'm a convert.
Seems like the teams behind the JS/TS stuff are pretty cool. Don't know about the rest.
Maybe we can make all these things again in VIRTUAL REALITY!!!!
why grep, when you can grep over the network?
Yeah, it's hard to see any innovation compared to your granddad's laptop ;-)
* runs sandboxed apps from a web store - Android(2008), IOS(2007)
* as well as traditional Windows apps - Only Windows obviously
* built in AI assistant - Apple(2011)
* excellent pen operation - Wacom(1992)
* built in accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer - Every flagship phone since 2005
* cloud integration with OneDrive, Office programs, email etc with the ability to continue work from different devices - Google drive, Google docs, Gmail (2007)
* face-recognition or fingerprint log-on - Available on circa 2000 Fujitsu laptops
* increased security features - SELinux(1998)
I'm not impressed. Most of this stuff has been done for over a decade if the version from 8 years ago is worse that isn't saying much.
Going back to 1989, Microsoft had a stylus-operated tablet with the GRiDPad, which was running MS-DOS with Extensions for Pen Computing.
SketchPad was innovative. Otherwise, such claims generally tend to illustrate that the claimant doesn't know enough computer history...
Innovations come in small bursts. Take the Surface Hub as an example.
Otherwise, the interesting point about Windows 10 is that so much of the technology was carried across from the smartphone industry, including Cortana and notifications from Windows Phone.
I'd have thought that creating a converged mobile OS to cover IoT devices, games consoles, smartphones and all types of PCs required innovation.
On the same basis, so did "PC innovations" that included features from minis and mainframes, and smartphone innovations that had already appeared in various PCs and handhelds.
Unless you're actually a research organization, pretty much every innovation will have more to do with implementation than with pure invention.