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Comment by tylerjwilk00 | Hacker News Reader

And we know what happens after that. [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...

Except in this case it's a 800 lbs gorilla trying to extinguish another 800 lbs gorilla. Where Microsoft had a giant weight advantage on a lot of the other guys, here it'll end up in an awkward prolonged hug.

Whilst gorillas may and do battle one another, they do not do so for the benefit of ants.

Even, or especially, if they say otherwise.

Lighten up. Are you all missing the irony?

The OP is about MS. The title is about embracing. The parent comment mentioned extending it. I must be old and just couldn't pass up the historical hacker pop culture references. My apologies.

Don't sprain your wrists while shaking your pitch forks.

This is not Slashdot circa 2004, posting “OMG, EEE!” is not a substantive reply and for years hasn’t reflected how contemporary Microsoft does business. It’s just a cheap grab for upvotes with no thinking behind it. Please explain how Microsoft is going to EEE Android, which is run by an equally large and influential company and runs on way more devices than Windows does, or consider removing this comment if you can’t.

Ah, the good old “b-but VS code” argument.

I think what MS has done with open sourcing .NET is more indicative of the new MS.

Contemporary MS are trying to lock you into their hardware, software, development and deployment platforms.

They are doing this while making the tools to do so Open Source.

You are not free to control your computing in this ecosystem, but hey that's a small price to pay.

And people are eating this up. Precisely because they aren't worried about history.

As for how embracing Android fits into this, it's not clear how it doesn't.

To be fair, aren't Apple, Google, Amazon, etc. all pretty much doing the same thing these days?

Everyone wants to own the ecosystem. Everyone is patient enough to integrate with others', but with experiences that are just a little worse than going all-native.

MS gets the worst hate because of history, when it was the only juggernaut. But now we have many juggernauts, and they all behave more or less similarly.

You can cut google some slack though. They walk a fine line. You can use AOSP without any google play services. It works great. Sure, they won't make it easy, but something has to pay the bills. So things are in a very fine balance right now wrt AOSP. They also earn a bit of goodwill because, as I discovered recently, you can still use carddav, caldav, and xmpp for accessing google contacts, calendar and hangouts although google has officially deprecated all the open protocols. So they haven't gone full evil just yet.

AOSP also send telemetry to Google, also like Chromium does, and use hardcoded Google DNS and internet-checking services.

> you can still use carddav, caldav, and xmpp

Xmpp is gone, *dav only via 3rd party apps. Also Google doesn't delete Chinese and other apps which stole user data like Apple does.

xmpp works as of today. Not sure about which chinese apps. AOSP doesn't come with any. Neither do the phones sold by google in their stock configuration.

Google are an incredibly sinister privately run surveillance system, and are pushing AMP to EEE the web, but you know, MS are still the bad guys, because we’re stuck in 2003.

> because we’re stuck in 2003

It's called learning a lesson (repeatedly). Don't trust Google. And don't trust Microsoft, now or in 2003. Don't trust companies, period. Always have an exit plan and try not to get locked inside their boxes if possible. These companies exist to make money, so power and control is what they want. That doesn't mean we can't appreciate good products or initiatives, just keep in mind that the boot and the giving hand belong to the same entity.

Do you have some reason to believe that Microsoft wouldn’t tie into or conduct the same level of surveillance if they were in google’s current market position?

Microsoft introduced privacy-disrespecting "features" into their products long after they were established on the market and their users couldn't switch.

Google did that with a newly introduced products, which you could simply not start using.

So yes, Microsoft are still the bad guys.

Microsoft sell an incredibly sinister surveillance system. But it's impressive how they manage to market it as a Good Thing to companies. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/configure-w...

This, the fact that their technology spreads like a cancer through an organisation (through dependencies), and the extent to which corporations are completely at the mercy of their byzantine licensing system has often made me wonder why Redmond hasn't been bombed by some military yet.

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