Microsoft Is Winning the Techlash

First of all, I've never seen an ad in my start menu. You can disable live tiles.

Second, anonymous telemetry is not spyware.

I mean every company has problems... Microsoft just seems to be generally headed in a better direction vs worse which seems way more common.

Maybe but it's not their main source of revenue like with Google and Facebook. So they don't have to go crazy doing unethical stuff in that area (privacy) which is what people tend to care most about these days.

I consider Windows 10 to be a privacy nightmare, and I don't use it outside of work (where it's necessary because it's one of our target platforms).

However, and this is big to me, Microsoft doesn't pretend that Windows 10 isn't doing what it's doing. That means, even though I don't consider Windows suitable for my own use, that doesn't reduce the amount of trust I have in them as a company.

The answer is to use Microsoft apps on an Apple machine (or Linux if you're that kind of person)

Ironically I recall a minority pointing out Apple would be even worse than Microsoft if they were in Microsoft's place given their controllingness - Microsoft was fine with third party manufacturers as opposed to suing to stop "Hackintoshes". There never was an equivalent for Microsoft.

> How times have changed.

Including people at the top running things. Interesting (to me) how the sales guy CEO's having been changed led the companies in different directions afterwards.

> Microsoft has many business models and one of them is based on advertisements, example : LinkedIn.

LinkedIn make bank from selling Sales Navigator. Ads are a tiny proportion of their revenue.

Yes, it is always a reality check from the feel good vscode/wsl/Nadella lovefest when they foist some unwanted telemetry or ads in various parts of Windows, that they are a beast with many heads.

Sure, but Microsoft is not exactly looking to brag about the fact that it owns LinkedIn. There's zero mention of Microsoft on the LinkedIn website.

My hunch is that LinkedIn derives a substantial (perhaps the majority) of revenue from premium memberships sold to recruiters.

Bing is their major ad business, not Linkedin which makes its money mostly from subscriptions and jobs.

Windows 10 business model for consumers is also based on ads and tracking/surveillance.

I don't know if that is true anymore. One of my friends who is very much non-technical but has been an iPhone user since 2009 and Mac user for almost as long just asked me for a recommendation on an android phone a few weeks ago. He specifically cited the battery issues, and after having keyboard problems had done some googling for alternatives. Repairability was specifically mentioned, since he has had to have screens replaced on phones.

There has been a fair amount of negative press, this is filtering to 'normal' people, not just Lewis rossman's viewers

Another reason Apple gets a bad rep is the often obnoxious behaviour of a group of people who defend the brand's every step and misstep with an almost religious fervour.

> Your rebuttal would be just as unfounded as the theory you are dismissing.

True enough, but that doesn't validate the higher-profile original either. Seems a bit "well actually" TBH.

large scale human access to (and accessed) ring (after it's acquired by Amazon) video footage doesn't count?

If there's one uncomfortable thing Google has made painfully clear to all of us, it's that the vast majority of consumers just aren't interested in paying for things like email or search.

It isn't due to a lack of offerings. There are plenty of provides that will happily do so. Anyone who wants to can buy email from Google today! Yet in the face of this the vast majority of users choose not to pay for email.

My current operating hypothesis is that the vast majority of ordinary users value their privacy right up to the point where they have to put a price on it. At which point a handful of nerds (like us!) are willing to pay, but most people happily trade their privacy for services instead of involving money.

As opposed to Windows 10's ads in the start button and lock screen, and data tracking in every part of the OS? At least Google only puts up (mostly) relevant ads when you search for something.

Exactly. They're hooked on their Ad Words income stream.

> How could Google, come distant 3rd in the cloud infrastructure race.

Because MS utilized their vendor-locked(office, MS SQL Server, Windows, .NET, etc) user-base, which Google didn't have.

Google was built from the ground up writing software for itself to run. Microsoft made systems and development tools for customers to run. Google has to make a much larger cultural change to turn their monolithic infrastructure inside out into products, whereas Microsoft had to make a change in the reverse direction to try to compete in Internet/cloud services.

Don’t discount the gentrification issue. In places like Austin, San Fran, and West LA the “techlash” started when small businesses and non-tech workers could no longer afford to pay rent in their city, and their culture was pretty much replaced.

I disagree. The average FB user is opinionated about all sorts of things. I bet you if you polled random people on the street, they have an opinion on FB... and I bet it has gotten worse in the last few years.

I dunno if the new MS has much appetite for the consumer space TBH. Their strength and main source of revenue is business solutions

I think there is a still a possibility that Microsoft expects the phone and PC markets to merge and hopes to be there with welcoming arms when it does, but I'm getting the impression they won't build new hardware to do it if they can't convince other manufacturers to join in.

I think they are going to wait for the Progressive Web App (PWA) revolution to reenter the market.

I've had a profoundly awful experience with Azure in particular. Most of Microsoft's offerings are pretty good (I quite like Office 365 in both a browser and on an iPad) but Azure is hot garbage. Their APIs are inconsistent (the Ruby ADAL connector has been broken for a year, and it's an easy monkey-patch fix so that's doubly awful), Azure AD insists on being king-shit-of-all-it-surveys and does not want to federate with a (better) directory option (what Okta does to get even halfway-decent integration is kinda heroic, and also terrible), and even once you get past all that the technical offerings are, in my experience, significantly less reliable and comprehensive than AWS or GCP, to the point where I would regularly see stuff like "the audit log doesn't show the restart you requested on that server". And all this (because, again, the APIs are bad) has you swimming through the tar pit that is their web console. It's tremendously bad in ways I didn't think web applications could be. The horizontal-scrolling blade nonsense is unintuitive and doesn't correctly handle browser history (so on refreshes you get lost, sometimes, but not all the time) and it looks ugly and action buttons are in stupid places.

Then, when you have to ask for help, you get thrown into a tilt-a-whirl of awful, near-nonsensical customer support and it takes an act of Congress and God to get escalated to somebody who 1) speaks English clearly and with enough care as to be understood, and 2) understands the problem at hand. (And, not or.)

Granted, I'm probably not their target market. I don't want a more expensive datacenter in The Cloud(tm) so I'm not grateful for incremental improvements over racking servers. But it's a really unpleasant experience compared to either Amazon or Google and I'm mystified as to how it can be so cumulatively bad.

My experience falls in line with yours.

I had an MVP in azure web services. I had 20 users in my "beta" phase that were using the product and giving me feedback.

One day, I got a message that I need to update my billing method. Strange, I was using mostly free tier with one paid component and the card on file was good til 2022, but ok. I put in another card because maybe there's something wrong with the system.

The next day I get a call that the site isn't working from one of my beta users. I log in and all of my azure resources are gone.

I immediately try to reach out to azure support via various mechanisms (their support chat, email, twitter, etc). Funny enough, twitter is always the fastest way to get support. Just write that something bad happened and tag their product, and you get someone who can communicate. However, they just redirected me to their support channel.

Two days go by and I get a template email response. I have an email chain going back and forth over the week to try and get the resources restored.

In the end, they tell me that not only will they be unable to restore my resources (a production database. the backups were all "gone" because the resource didn't exist anymore), but that I had to create a new azure account to use any services because of how screwed up my account got.

I tried escalating, but received the same response.

Now I just go with AWS. I'd even go with google as long as they don't delete my production database.

I've previous experience as a Devops engineer for a Large company which at the time was one of the larger customers of Azure (as in they'd put our company on the marketing materials). Support was obviously better when we could get a turn around time of <1 day to talk to an engineer that worked on a piece of infrastructure. Still wasn't a pleasant experience.

It's really unfortunate, all of this. I know that there are so many teams that are putting out great products, but their cloud approach is awful. _Some_ of the offerings are actually pretty nice, but combined with UI churn, the worst support (I'd rather take googles non-existent support as long as my data doesn't get deleted) of all cloud providers (IME) and empty apologies on the internet (you can say you're sorry, but I don't believe you unless you act on the mistake), I don't see myself going back anytime soon.

All just personal opinions, but Microsoft products and services are generally good, from my experience. Windows 10 works great (and I seem to be the only person who actually appreciates their update policy). Office works well. OneDrive used to work well, now it's just "okay", but still fine. My Surface Go is a champ and feels great, despite being silly cheap. My Microsoft Ergonomics keyboard + mouse are still going strong, and is still my all-time favourite Ergo keyboard. Xbox One X is a nice piece of kit. Azure can be kind of overwhelming, but it works well enough and is far less overwhelming than AWS, despite offering mostly similar services.

Microsoft still has legacy weirdness all over the place. It's 2019 and it still feels like nobody from Windows talks to anyone in Office, and no one in software talks to anyone doing hardware. And Microsoft botches acquisitions (Skype is still a tire fire, similar for LinkedIn). But generally, the quality of Microsoft products is good, despite their failings.

Microsoft consumer support is pretty poor. But I basically never need to use it, and some of competition is so much worse, that Microsoft look good in comparison. (Have a problem with anything Google, for example, and Microsoft Support suddenly looks like mana from heaven).

Adding my own anedocte, I tried to read some of their training material, the processes of creating an account was incredibly annoying and un-intuitive. Something that even "Web 1.0" companies back in 1997 had already figured out.

Then I tried following the examples of the training, start a small, free VM and do some stuff, but it won't let me, because the web interface was completely broken, no matter which browser I used. I even tried using that damn Edge on a W10 VM.

Yeah, MS might not have been the target of a lot of backlash recently, but their products are still as awful as ever.

>Do others have similar experience?

As a habitual Microsoft hater who spent most of the 90s and early 2000s being constitutionally incapable of writing the company name without a $, yes I have.

They still suffer from an appalling lack of taste and poor design sensibilities, but their enterprise level products and services are top notch. And I'm developing a new appreciation for a business model that involves transparently charging me a known price in exchange for a known service. They could still get better at that though. They still have too many enterprise clients over a barrel.

I had a small app that pulled my agenda (calendar events) from an Exchange server. But my company switched to office 365. I spent a few days trying to figure out where I need to register and what API to use, etc so I can rewrite my app to work with Office 365. Now I don't have an app showing my agenda.

What is Microsoft? It's not a singular person born in the 80s and is now 40 years old. It's individual people who have come and gone over decades. The same people who were ultimately responsible fpr "personally burning you over and over again" are either retired or happily leading at other companies that you support. And new people with fresh ideas and fresh ideals may have replaced them.

I think many people working on development tools outside MS either don't understand value of debuggers, or don't have enough resources to implement them well.

I've been programming for living for 20 years now, did/doing various stuff including mobile, embedded, videogames incl. console, desktop, servers, a bit of web. In my experience, debuggers only work well on microsoft platforms.

Integration is simple on surface, press F5 and it will launch with debugger. Implementation of that can be very complex, launching may involve complicated deployment (over network, USB or worse), starting virtual machines, connecting multiple TCP streams using weird protocol each, and so on.

It works consistently for MS platforms, even very old ones like WinCE. It's broken consistently for the rest of them, even Android or iOS which have larger install base than Windows.

I've had similar experiences on HN, and funnily enough the last time was for a comment that was fairly supportive of Microsoft. I got absolutely roasted in the comments, but received a ton of upvotes from the silent majority.

There are three areas I'd disagree with you though.

The first is Microsoft's Surface line of tablets and laptops. I literally cannot find a kind word to say about the (very expensive) Surface Book devices we bought en masse about 18 months ago. They are awful[1] and we are already starting to phase them out as a result. It makes no sense because Microsoft can clearly do hardware well: for example, I have no complaints about my Xbox One X - it's all round great.

The second may substantially be connected to the first, and that's Windows 10. I increasingly hate using it because I find it slow, finicky, and unresponsive/a serious resource hog. So much of the time my laptop is running hot and draining its battery because Windows is doing something or other not related to what I'm working on.

The third is Microsoft Teams. The functionality it offers is good and, for VOIP and video calls, it's probably second only to Zoom so does get a thumbs up from me there. However, it's painfully slow to switch views, doesn't support multiple windows (so you can't sensibly look at chat and wiki at the same time), takes an age to start up, and behaves like an absolute moron when it comes to switching networks or losing and regaining network connectivity (usually requires a restart of the app).

[1] Underpowered, overpriced, poor battery life, run very hot, ropey WiFi, poor speakers that are insufficiently loud, crappy trackpad, only a single display port built in, poorly designed/laid out ports, unreliable (and often weirdly slow) charging, drains battery within 12 - 18 hours whilst asleep, I could go on (and on). In short: DO NOT BUY UNLESS YOU HATE YOURSELF!

I consider Microsoft more trustworthy than the other big tech companies because they behave in a more trustworthy fashion by (generally) being forthright about what they do and what their intentions are.

That said, I avoid Microsoft products because I don't like what they do and what their intentions are.

The difference between my attitude toward Microsoft and (for example) Facebook is that I make my decisions about Microsoft based on their products and services. I make my decisions about Facebook, etc., based on the fact that I don't trust them even a little.

This means that Microsoft has the advantage -- if they cared whether or not I am on board with them (and they have no reason to), they could change my mind very quickly by altering their products.

Facebook, etc., could not affect my attitude in the same way, as my main problem with them is that they are entirely untrustworthy.

People with less than 500 karma can't downvote though, so it's possible to end up with 40 upvotes even if the majority of people dislike Microsoft.

Let's say 200 people wanted to vote on your post. 100 people with > 500 karma vote 45% up 55% down ending up with -10 karma total. 100 people with < 500 karma vote 45% up but the other 55% can't downvote = 35 total upvotes.

Well, its certainly much easier to upvote than to write a comment - you don't have to actually justify your upvote nor will the words be scrutinized. If you feel happy with MSFT products, you can just upvote, but if you don't like them you can't just say "Well, I don't agree!".

And the lack of downvotes can be explained by another phenomenon - there is no incentive for some to downvote a comment like yours at this point, because nearly all replies are negative! If a comment thread surfaces some bad things about someone you don't like, and it becomes popular, you actually want it to become more popular isn't it?

One of my colleagues in a previous job had this super boring but very critical task - making sure the financial numbers entered in the system are correct. One mistake could cause serious problems for the company.

My boss (CTO) once remarked - "we never hear from or about Patrice, she must be doing a fantastic job!"

Point being, when things work, it is rare that people talk about it (like my boss), they just take it for granted. When things don't work though, that is a different story.

I suppose it is just human nature.

I think that your comment turned into a "topic" of "opinions on azure". Perhaps it's that topic, rather than the content of your single starting comment, that is being upvoted.

I thought that the subcomments listing out experiences was valuable to me. I would be conflicted on downvoting your comment though, because it would hide the subcomments that I do feel are valuable to have visible.

To clarify, I don't think you wrote anything off topic or bad for discussion (which is why I would downvote something). Even though we have different perspectives, I feel both are valuable to have a comprehensive view.

I have mixed feelings... I think Azure in general, and o365 specifically are pretty nice. I do think Azure is a bit overpriced, but they do offer a lot of discounts in a lot of ways, which offsets it for some. They've been a bit better than most at adapting to changes in tech, and if you put Windows aside for a moment, are overall moving in a very nice direction.

Windows' changes have been pretty bad in terms of invasiveness since Windows 8/10. I just really don't like several bits of it. I think LSW is pretty nice, but iirc SystemD support is probably over a year off still, and docker/podman still a ways off. Windows vs Linux containers and Docker has seriously muddied the waters so to speak.

MS, like most corporations isn't a single entity... there's various child entities with some areas of cooperation between them. I'm glad that Windows no longer steers the ship and appreciate a lot of the efforts I've seen. Open tooling and platforms in particular. I love VS Code, the Azure Data Studio (or whatever it's called) is nice and progressing for cross-platform. I do think its' weird that Teams is the odd man out as an electron app from MS without a proper Linux release. Moving Edge to blink/chromium is a good move overall.

I'm anywhere from luke warm to positive on MS in general. That said, it isn't generally my first choice for a lot of things (outside o365). I'm often frustrated with working in Windows at work after about 6 years working outside windows. I use bash (from git) with windows, and there's quirks, but less than with LSW.

I really want them to succeed as I think with the current leadership and direction a better MS means better options and tools for all. I wish they'd redouble their efforts on linux support for everything around Office and Teams though. I'd also like to be able to build/deploy a damned SQL project without windows too.

In 2 years, by my own estimation, it will be a very different world running Windows as a developer and at that point it may become my favorite environment for building Linux apps of all things. MS/Windows progresses while Mac stagnates and alienates its creative/development/pro users more and more.