Call me skeptical, but there's not a whole lot of products I willfully pay Microsoft for. Most of them I pay for with a strong feeling of resentment that I have simply no other choice, since there are no competitors to the market or the lock in is too strong.
I have met many, many people who gladly pay for Office (specifically, Excel) or Visual Studio, so much does it increase their productivity. I'm not one of them, but I'm not an accountant and the code bases I work with are small and don't require VS's incredible tooling.
There are also adherents of the cult of Visio, but I honestly can't fathom what they see in it.
Microsoft can be faulted for many things, but the reason it is so successful is that it made some really good products that still haven't been surpassed.
Visual Studio I'll slightly disagree on. I resent it. When VSCode, an electron application, can run lag/stutter/micro-freeze free and Visual Studio an IDE written in C++ cannot you know the codebase has become unmaintainable. This isn't a recent phenomenon either. This has been a nuisance in VS 2015, 17, and now 19 (16.4 Preview).
I'd love to switch to VSCode but the csprojec/C# support isn't there yet. I don't need a forms builder, server explorer, EDMX designer, test explorer, and all the other bells and whistles VS offers. I use VS strictly to write code (C# MVC/Web), run, and repeat. The refactoring tools/Intellisense/IntelliCode/QuickFixes are awesome but if I could trade them all for a lag free experience I would in a second.
I'm using a i7 (6th gen)/16 GB of RAM/SSD. I have no extensions except the built-in ones and Web Compiler/Bundler & Minifier. It doesn't help.
However, the developers I've spoken with who love it tell me that it has some insanely good tooling that is just unmatched by anything else. I'm not even in a position to know what they're talking about or why it's so important to them, but that doesn't mean they don't know what they're talking about.
I agree. Visual Studio has a tendency to make me actively angry.
For whatever reason I have the opposite experience, VScode input lag is painful at times and VSPro is minimal. As you know once you master an IDE, keyboard shortcuts and common keywords are typically being entered at 200wpm+ in bursts and its quite noticeable. Initial startup is definitely poor for both.
> I don't need a forms builder, server explorer, EDMX designer, test explorer, and all the other bells and whistles VS offers.
Same. CodeLens gets immediately disabled. Makes me wonder if there would be a way to hack up a stripped down "VS Lite".
While the Ballmer years saw the company coast along on its old crown jewels, missing nearly every opportunity, Nadella's MSFT has shaped up to be one that is building a few new kingdoms - in the cloud space, open dev tools, new consumer hardware (see the upcoming Surface lineup) - it's definitely not the Windows + Office company of old.
Instead it is usually more like "Oh shit, a new Mirosoft product, I hope I wont be forced to buy it to stay compatible".
I've been using a dedicated GPU (switchable) model of the gen 1 Surface Book for four years, and (other than that gigantic hiccup where Intel screwed up the power management on their chips) I've loved it. Plays many of the fancier video games, battery life on the scale of 5-7 hours under web browsing workloads, great screen, and with WSL2 I get most of my Linux development needs covered as well. I can detach the screen and use it while I'm flying. I can break out the stylus when I need to draw diagrams in meetings (or... when I'm dungeon-mastering for D&D).
Many of Microsoft's products are simple and boring at first glance. However, when you really want to flex it to do something powerful, the features are usually there. Their products have so many years of development in them and it shows because their products stand the test of time, particularly in the enterprise. I'm glad there are lot of other vendors entering the market though as it keeps companies like MSFT innovating.
I've used it heavily for years, and I disagree with this assessment. I avoid it whenever I have the option.
In my current job we don't have either and its utterly frustrating how bad the alternatives are.
When I first heard of the Surface, what I thought it'd be: a bad laptop and a worse tablet.
After I read and heard people raving about how great it was for years, what I thought it'd be when I finally got to use one: a great laptop and a good-enough tablet.
What it was when I finally got to use it, very much to my surprise at that point: a bad laptop and a worse tablet.
I don't get it.
I think it's a combination of astroturfing and owners trying to convince themselves they made the right decision.
I wish the battery life was better, and I think Microsoft is missing out by not having the detachable keyboard have a small battery onboard so that you could use the keyboard on the side while you're drawing. But it's my favorite mobile device, and I'm not joking, astroturfing, or anything like that.
They actually did come out with an accessory that would attach onto the keyboard and do that, but it also was discontinued a long time ago.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-quietly-discontinues...
I assume both devices didn't do well enough on their own (otherwise they'd still be made today) to justify creating one that did both.
The original Surface Pro was decent, but generally slow and bulky. The first Surface Book, on the other hand, is still a great, versatile piece of hardware several years later.
Of course, YMMV - a tablet alone doesn't cover everything for me, but for some people needing a keyboard/base for connections may not work out.