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Comment by privacypoller | Hacker News Reader

As a developer Microsoft has treated my far better than any other corporation pushing an agenda. Amazon seems kind of apathetic towards any one developer or group, Google and Apple can be down-right hostile in their policies or support. Microsoft has by far hosted the most events that I have access to, ranging from global developer conferences to user-group meetings.Their tooling and developer support has always been forefront in their strategy as well.

So it's a little disingenuous to say only technology consumers should have positive feelings for Microsoft. Plus, making money & helping programmers are not mutually exclusive; Coupled with their business strategies (good and bad) this has always been MS's strategy to grow and profit from their markets.

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As a former windows phone user and .NET developer who is currently a mobile developer, Microsoft definitely treated mobile developers worse than any other company.

They killed what small progress they’d made on their ecosystem 2 times, simply because they got bored and decided they didn’t like the technology stack they’d previously mandated and supported. They deserved to get buried in that space.

Meanwhile Apple have kept what is essentially the same technology stack for the past decade. Sure there’s been some pain, but almost all of it had some purpose that moved the development of apps forward.

As someone who also developed on windows phone I really disagree with this portrayal. Microsoft did not change the stack on account of "getting bored" with the tech.

Looking back on it, they took on an extremely difficult problem having a completely new marketplace and platform against competitors with tremendous amount of pre-existing traction.

There were clearly some pivots towards universal windows compatibility, and possibility of android compatibility as well. Nobody argues there's a ton of tactical failures and the net result was a loss, but I wouldnt conflate the mobile endeavor with something half-baked nor disregard to developers

None of what you said actually justifies this to a developer. Microsoft may claim "developers, developers, developers" but when it came to mobile, they screwed the platform not once but twice.

Trust has two main dimensions in my view, compassion and competence. Microsoft was not competent enough to have a surviving platform in the face of iOS or Android... even though they had roughly a 8 year lead.

That doesn't earn my trust.

I appreciate that Aws is apathetic a bit. The other way to put it would be unintereste or removed or unbiased. They aren’t that helpful, fine. That’s what we get paid the big bucks for. I’ve worjed in the Msft ecosystem...never again, no thanks.

How did they treat Windows Phone developers?

How did they treat Nokia employees?

Mhmmm.

I'm pretty sure that wasn't the plan.

> How did they treat Windows Phone developers?

I was one of them, and Microsoft treated me very well.

Windows Phone was an amazing platform. I’ve also developed for iOS a lot. Visual studio + expression blend was way ahead of apple’s xCode. Every single piece was much better: language, libraries, compiler, debugger, emulator, UI designer.

The platform is now discontinued so I no longer develop for WP. Meanwhile, most of the skills I’ve obtained working on WP7-8 apps apply to other XAML-based platforms, i.e. WPF, WinRT, and UWP. Fortunately for me, Windows is not going from desktops any time soon.

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