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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

I lived through the 90s, so I disagree. Anyone who feels perfectly comfortable with Microsoft's embracing of things they like is ignoring history.

Maybe it's different this time, maybe it isn't.

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I lived through the nineties as well, that doesn't mean I think everything that was amazing back then still is amazing today nor that everything that sucked back then still sucks today...

I think the Microsoft of today is very different from the Microsoft of the nineties.

Personally I'm not so much worried about Microsoft going back to Microsoft'95 but more about the fact that they, like most (all?) other big tech companies, collect more and more data and integrate more and more tightly into our lives. Still I feel that currently Facebook, Google and Amazon are all scarier in that respect.

> I think the Microsoft of today is very different from the Microsoft of the nineties.

If they've managed to change that much, then nothing prevents them to make the opposite turn and return to the monopolistic Microsoft as soon as a new CEO steps in.

That's why I prefer Microsoft to stay away from the products and projects everybody loves. Furthermore, I don't think Microsoft has anything to contribute to GitHub.

> I don't think Microsoft has anything to contribute to GitHub.

Microsoft has experience handling online code repositories and team services. Azure integration has the potential to improve deployment pipelines for many users. Microsoft has lots of experience doing things at scale, and can potentially find cost reduction maneuvers for Github. Visual Studio integration can bring more users to Github. Cooperate users are more likely to upgrade their existing agreement with Microsoft than they are to enter a finical relationship with a new company. Microsoft has just as much or more to offer Github as any other top 5 tech company.

Let's not forget that they developed GVFS to support large monorepos.

Let's also not forget this only runs on Windows.

They've stated that they want to bring this to other platforms as well.

https://github.com/Microsoft/GVFS/issues/4

Yes they want... yet it has been Windows only for a year and a half, so far. That's the problem with Microsoft buying big things like Github. It turns people not using their flagship OS into second class citizens.

Re: Skype

Their MacOS implementation that they linked to is pretty cool and understandable even for a filesystem lay-person.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2018/03/15/gvfs-for-...

GVFS is a contribution Microsoft has given git, not a contribution Microsoft can bring to Github. That is why I left it out.

Azure, VS... Yes, I know Microsoft has tons of things to offer to their customers. But not everybody in Github is into Microsoft tech. In fact, most are not. So that's what worries me: trying to tie Github to their products and strategies.

It might happen, but I suspect they will continue to play nice with other tech stacks. Their recent strategy is to provide good tech that can integrate with other tech, to compete on superior products instead of locking in users. They haven't recently extended or extinguished, just embraced, and embracing has done great things for their stock price.

> then nothing prevents them to make the opposite turn and return to the monopolistic Microsoft

Well, the world has changed and there is no longer any opportunity for a 90s Microsoft. So I'm pretty sure that unless the world changes back to the 90s, Microsoft wouldn't survive such a turn.

That's like saying IBM could come back as a monopoly. It won't happen even if they want it to.

How is Microsoft different exactly?

Do they not engage in patents racketeering?

Do they not spy on users of Windows 10?

> like most (all?) other big tech companies

"The other children are doing it" and then you're mother would say "that doesn't make it right". It's a child's defense no doubt.

But anyway, it's also factually not true.

I reviewed the data that Microsoft has on me and there is nothing in there that makes me feel uncomfortable. Facebook on the other hand.. not only is the data wrong but if it gets public I can see it damaging me

I just want to point out, aside from the discussion, that Microsoft owns a significant stake in Facebook.

I'd say that Microsoft is worse than most other companies because it caters to governments, not consumers. Skype and MSN mysteriously worked in China at a time when no other service did. What's their incentive to push back against LE backdoors when they're not an edgy consumer brand anyway?

"caters to governments"

Corporations only exist as legal constructs. I'm not trying to be pedantic. I'm just saying that it is always going to be the case that a business, any business, will work within the law and with lawful government because they ultimately depend on contract and property law.

All companies have to comply with the law, but Microsoft sells lots of software to governments. They aren't going to put up a fight over end-user privacy if they make more money from gov't contracts than from privacy-conscious consumers. The financial incentives are completely different than for e.g. Apple, and I don't see how that is ever going to change.

All companies, including Apple sell lots of products to the government because, next to Walmart, its the largest employer in the country. It has a $4T budget.

Apple doesn't give a s* about your privacy. They claim to give a s* about your privacy. Those are different things.

If you want this to change you have to get involved with legislation to change the rules/law. That's the only option. None of them "care" about you or really anything, because they aren't human. Companies respond to changes in the law which bound the approved set of behaviors. That's it.

EDIT: I got the budget wrong. Changed that.

I don't care what Apple claims to care about, just like I don't care about Microsoft's newfound love for free software (haha).

However, I highly doubt that government and enterprise purchases make up a large share of Apple's income. And consequently I'm convinced that news of a backdoor in iMessage would cause Apple way more financial damage than these things did to Microsoft: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728294, https://www.scmagazineuk.com/skype-backdoor-missed-by-micros... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...

And the more Apple doubles down on protecting its users, the bigger this financial incentive becomes. Of course that doesn't stop me from supporting better legislation (GDPR was a great start).

Maybe they should rebrand themselves then.. A new name perhaps? :)

Microsoft has been changing a lot. Embracing linux in their cloud offering, offering unix as a subsystem on Windows, open sourcing their work. Anyone who likens the current MSFT to anything resembling what it was in the 90s hasn't been paying attention to the current leadership.

That's not to say they couldn't revert to their embrace, extend, and extinguish tactics of the 90s, even under future leadership.

I feel that no big corporation should own GitHub, even if their investors feel differently.

I'm not enthused about the idea of Github being bought. But on what grounds do you suspect that the Microsoft of the 90s is just lurking, like a conscious spirit, to reveal itself after a decade?

CEO Nadella started working at Microsoft in 1992, but the executives who coined and lived the EEE phrase are all out. Is Nadella a sleeper agent? If not, what entity at Microsoft will subvert his leadership?

> what entity at Microsoft will subvert his leadership?

I agree, it seems that both Gates and Ballmer have found new callings in life, which has left Nadella with pretty much control of the company. I remember almost feeling sorry for the guy when he took over, what freedom could he possibly have between those two? A lot, it seems in retrospect.

I've mentioned this a number of times, some of Microsoft's open source tooling is under the very permissive MIT license. In the case of GitHub it just means competitors will rise up and replace GitHub. Remember when SourceForge was the GitHub of the day, and then it became bad, and finally it's acceptable with the new owner. People will outright ditch GitHub if evil is truly done to it, but Microsoft doesn't want that, they'll do everything they can to not screw up GitHub.

Whoa, hang on a second. SourceForge? Acceptable with new owners? Have you tried to download anything from the site recently? They may not be bundling crapware with downloads anymore but it's still an ad-laden slow-loading pile of trash unusable website. (I don't think I'm being hyperbolic there, to be honest!)

I usually get to a download page and it auto prompts for downloads. I mean why are you not using an ad-blocker?

Windows 10's forced updates and telemetry say otherwise.

Telemetry is bad, forced updates is not.

Playing the devil's advocate here, but some of the forced updates come as a result of problems found in telemetry data...

But I generally agree, I want my OS to ask me every time it wants to send a crashdump (or anything else).

Updates are ok when they're bug fixes and security patches. They're not when they're forced feature and UI changes and often break installations.

Forced updates are bad.

1. Updates can introduce breaking changes.

2. Windows will restart the computer to update, potentially interrupting processes.

3. Users should have freedom to use software in the way that they choose, and not have actions forced on them by the software.

I understand that many windows users are far from power users and the forced updates provide security updates. My point of view is anyone willing to give up liberty for security will receive neither.

There are literally billions of Windows users. Less than 5% understand why keeping your computer up to date is important.

Forced updates may suck for you, but understand that it is you they suck for, not the vast, vast majority.

> I understand that many windows users are far from power users and the forced updates provide security updates

I think this largely was only true of the period between the internet becoming a thing and the smartphone becoming a thing. Nowadays there's phones, tablets, and chromebooks that serve the needs of those people better and in a more convenient form factor. Desktops are for people who do work, create stuff, or are hobbiests.

I think a lot of the reasons computers suck today is because of this idea that they need to cater to some strawman drooling moron of a user.

Those devices only take you so far. They are consuming devices only, similar to a television. People still have and use normal PCs and will do so in the future. (Notebooks included of course)

That's kinda my point though. The strawman user these kinds of arguments prop up as the reason everything needs to suck is pretty much 100% consumer. There might be a few things, like typing documents and printing that aren't entirely covered by smartphones, tablets, and chromebooks, but that's a rapidly shrinking set of things.

>but that's a rapidly shrinking set of things

Doubt that. "Desktop" is defined by mouse, keyboard and display. A chromebook satisfies this. I have yet to meet a user who uses a smartphone instead of a PC to do stuff that are notably easier to do on a PC. (while having both)

I would also bet that every user would chose a keyboard over a touch interface to type text.

Maybe you have a point, but I don't feel like connecting a bluetooth keyboard and mouse to a smartphone makes it a desktop. Regardless, I don't think those OSs are good desktop OSs either. I still maintain that this is a poor excuse for having shitty tools.

Using keyboard/mouse/monitor with smartphones is very uncommon.

2. Can be delayed.

3. I agree. I don't give a shit about what users do to their machine, but when they launch a DDos to my servers, I blame them for not updateing their OS. In Windows XP history, there were many viruses/trojanes/whatever that were only possible because people didn't update.

I wouldn't mind forced updates if they were only used for critical security updates. They are not; Microsoft abuses the privilege, and therefore may not be trusted to have it at all.

Feature updates can be delayed for up to a year.

On Pro and up. Not on Home.

2. Can only be updated so many times until Daddy Microsoft knows best and will forcibly shut down your computer.

3. "Users have freedom to do what they choose unless it makes more work for me"?

> Users should have freedom to use software in the way that they choose, and not have actions forced on them by the software.

Agreed, but this had only ever actually been true with free software.

Forced updates can be bad, for example I narrowly missed having a bricked workstation when the April update was released and it borked machines using Intel 600p SSDs. I hadn't used that machine for a few weeks and it had been powered off; by the time I finally started using it again Microsoft had blocked the update for machines with that hardware.

Anyway, I can manage the limited telemetry via hosts and I can defer updates (which I will do from now on), but my biggest gripe is forced installation/reinstallation of previously removed apps and games. I run Windows 10 Pro and I end up with a few variations of Candy Crush games, Minecraft, Autodesk drawing apps, and others after initial OS installation and after every major update so far. This is while using an offline account, and even if I used my Microsoft account on this workstation I've never purchased/downloaded any of those apps in the past.

I get that "Pro" at this point means home power user, and companies should be using Enterprise, but Microsoft shouldn't be pushing any software back onto the machine once the user has uninstalled it. That's user-hostile and takes control out of the hands of the one person who should be in complete control of the system.

Once full, non-buggy support for Ryzen APUs arrives in Linux, I'm switching Windows 10 to a VM and going back to Linux on this machine as the daily driver OS.

I saw one happening on a PC in a conference room two weeks ago at the very moment a talk should begin. Nobody could do anything with the pc until the update was over. Great user experience.

Fault from the admin I would say. Updates can be delayed or scheduled. I know that this won't help in the moment.

Enterprise versions are updated based on the admin policy.

I recently had to do the forced April Windows 10 update, and not only did it take 10 hours, the UX was horrific... e.g. Random CMD prompt windows popping up etc.

If that is allowed to pass QA in Microsoft, then it kind of scares me what can happen if they were to acquire GitHub.

10 hours? You on a dinosaur computer or something???

No, forced updates are also bad. I own my computer, I built it, and I paid for Windows. Microsoft shouldn't get to decide how I run it (I can't turn off Windows Defender permanently) or when it updates (you can only delay them so long before it forces you to update). If their updates were stable it would maybe help the argument, but they routinely break my system such that I lose time that was intended to be spent on playing a game. They also conveniently reset some of my settings which always tends to favor the way Microsoft would like for me to use my computer. Or they reinstall fucking Candy Crush.

For god's sake, even Apple, the prime example of knows-better-than-you lets you never update, if that's what you really want.

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It's that kind of crap, not even the telemetry that got me to switch off of windows entirely at home.

Microsoft is a big company, that's a different team with a different set of leadership. The guy in charge of Windows stepped away. Windows 10 is the last version of Windows basically. Not sure if that means someday they may release a distro (crazy I know) but it's interesting nonetheless.

You are behind on the crazy: they already announced their first Linux distro, it's called Azure Sphere OS and intended for secure/maintained IoT.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/04/microsofts-bid-to-se...

I know about that one, but I mean one that'd be consumer driven in some way. I know the ship has sailed but I'd love to see Microsoft create an Android / iOS competitor, and maybe something open source would give them an edge in that regard. It would be best if it were somehow privacy / security focused. Microsoft has the resources to make amazing products the issue is and I've mentioned it before, the company is ever so big, with ever SO MANY PRODUCTS and projects. We know they've got quite a bit going on on the user facing front, but I can't imagine how many internal tools they've got that they rely on as well.

Automatic updates are great, I use it on most of my dev servers

I could even see that defaulting auto update to "on" is a good move too. If you know what you're doing you can turn them off.

I haven't adminned a windows machine since '98 -- can you really. Or turn off automatic windows updates?

As for any telemetry stuff, that should be opt in, and have a target server to send to, which you can point to your own box if you want to.

Microsoft today is different to Microsoft in the 90s though. In the 90s it was a software company that used embrace extend extinguish to maintain and extend its monopolies, but it wrote software and the software was the product.

Now it seems it uses the "user is the product" ala Google, Facebook etc. I'm not aware of apple doing that. Still I guess inevitable as companies penny pinch more and more.

I lived through the 90s too. It's been 20+ years since the peak of the Microsoft that gave them the reputation you're reflecting.

If "I lived through the 90s" was how I measured technology and companies, I'd sure as hell not be using Apple products - their technology was pretty terrible then, and the company was incoherent. Would any rational person say that the terrible tech and incoherence then translates to how one would accept what they produce in 2018? Some companies change, some don't (see: oracle). It seems a healthier approach is to measure the behavior and state of a company in the present.

First off were the 90s macs really terrible in comparison to the present state of the art at the time?

Second its easier for people to grow to be better at their job than to grow into being better people.

Re: macs. Yes. MacOS releases up to 1999 lacked features common in other systems, like full preemptive multitasking and memory protection. Windows NT had that in the mid 90s, and various Unix flavors had it for decades. I liked the UI on the macs vs windows95/98/NT or Linux/Solaris, but the stability of macs was a joke. Everyone was pretty happy when they cleaned up NeXTSTEP and turned it into the basis for OSX - that was a very smart move.

A lot of the tooling is released under the MIT License. It's kind of hard to say they have ulterior motives when you get the right to fork and keep.

Visual Studio was the best Java editor by far. I wish Sun hadn’t blocked them as it took almost 5 years for Jetbrains to make a decent editor.

I loved through the 90s and think that Microsoft not requiring Windows shows that the danger from the 90s isn’t the same today.

Now it’s cloud vs OS lockin.

I lived through the 90s, and Ace of Base was the best band ever.

Sort of like the ship of Theseus, if all the people working at and running microsoft are different, is it even the same company?

Culture can persist despite replacing all employees over time.

Well since companies are people, more like skin cells. They all get replaced every whatever days but you're still you!

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