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Comment by williamaadams | Hacker News Reader

I've worked for MS for 20 years. I sat in one of those Steve Ballmer meetings where he decried OpenSource. But, more soberingly at the time was that he said "we won't sell on Linux because we simply don't know now", in answer to the question "when will SQL Server be available on Linux"?

Times have changed. I mean look, we bought GitHub. That's not a move of someone that's trying to destroy from the inside. If it were, we would have immediately just slow rolled it, but we're actually making improvements.

I don't think we're collectively smart enough (nor are most orgs) to pull off grand conspiracies. Just a bunch of humans trying to do what's right for the company and customers.

So, I agree with your assessment. Lots of good, still bad actors, modern times have changed.

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Yes, times change. Now MS is not the top dog anymore, Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook are all eating his lunch. There is competition. So they can't get away with acting like the old MS. The marketing people figured that out, and are just adjusting. Business as usual.

I've never seen a deeply flawed self-enclosed cultured turned into a sane one. I've seen ones change because they were so much injected with outside influenced. I've seen ones change because the core was alright, and it recognized the problem. But never have I seen a team of bullies sticking together and turn into good people.

However, I have seen plenty of them putting up a smile, getting some green paint on and buying a stairway to heaven.

It's a shame people keep falling for it though. That's why politicians can be crooked. That's why abusive relationships last. That's why you can pollute, use children workers and lie to customers: by the time you pay the price, it's a slap on the wrist compared to what you did, and earned from it.

Then you just say you changed, and people forget or forgive, let you keep the loot, and the right to carry on with your business.

> Now MS is not the top dog anymore, Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook are all eating his lunch.

MS is one of the most valuable companies in the world, and regularly surpasses Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook as the most valuable company in the world.

> I've never seen a deeply flawed self-enclosed cultured turned into a sane one.

I doubt that your definition of sanity is at all useful here. You're obviously not familiar with the core teams that comprise MS and you're not disseminating any information here that is even remotely useful.

I guess you're safe in the bubble here though where people think Windows is simply unusable because some of the control panel windows have a different dressing than other ones and that macOS is the best despite that it's missing the most basic window management features! Hah!!

I doubt HN crowd at large cares about control panel settings that much. What's importan though is that for many years MS led a very violent campaign against their competition, including Linux and Open Source. It wasn't a one-time thing. It was year after year, with a strategy and tactics, some of it leaked in the Halloween Documents. These clearly showed that Microsoft is an equivalent of self-absorbed bully who doesn't really care about the benefit of their customers but just net profit. It's really hard to forget. So I'm sorry if some of us don't believe Nadella's smile.

I don't need to disseminate any information, microsoft lying, insulting, cheating and corrupting for 20 years has been largely documented by the medias in the nineties.

If you were capable of reading at all at that time, it was one scandal every year.

> I mean look, we bought GitHub. That's not a move of someone that's trying to destroy from the inside.

lol

ok, so it is exactly the move of someone trying to kill it all from the inside...

But really, it's something easily judged over time. Everyone will be able to judge how our open source attitude is in coming years.

And hay, look, there's more absorption of Linux into Windows... Is that embrace extend, or recognize reality? Or hold on for dear life? From my perspective, it's evolution, and nothing but good.

Once you as a company have a certain track record, I'd say it's not unreasonable for an outsider to shift from "just wait and see if it'll be terrible!" to a more proactive stance. In cases like this, past actions do model future behaviour.

I don't know, personally I remain faithful to the classics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeo_Danaos_et_dona_ferentes

and cautious about these kind of corporate mentality changes, it seems to have been proved a valid approach for the last 2 thousand years or so.

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