Hacker News Reader

Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

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

Microsoft is taking over the world. They now own Github, NPM, Citus data, LinkedIn and a ton of other companies. Not to mention they have a trojan horse on almost every new developers machine thanks to TS and VSCode, and all of the data and services that companies are trusting to them on Azure. They are poised to become a data king.

TBH... if I had a bunch of liquid cash to fuck around with I would be buying a ton of MSFT becuase my gut is telling me they are going to really take a huge slice of the open source development pie here in the next few years.

They know that is the market they need to capitalize on which is why all these acquisitions and investments are happening.

View on HN

There are a lot of young developers that just have no context for what Microsoft did in the past. If you bring up their past, they say "that was so long ago" or "but they've changed!"

But public companies are not people.

Of course they change -- tactics -- and try to gain control again. Everything they do will in the end have to be justified to their shareholders and how it will either gain them profit either now or in the long run, and as soon as the fickle-minded shareholders change their tune, out goes Nadella, and we'll get another Balmer or worse.

I’m on the fence. I resonate with your take on things, but I also have a bit of hope in me as well. At least outwardly their optics are looking much better and brighter, but I’m not sure what the real culture is like at present day.

Your optimism is inherently misplaced. Power is corruptive. Even if the people in power now aren't corrupted, there is no fail-safe in place to pull the plug if they ever hand off that power to someone who can't control it. It will happen, it always does.

There is historically no such thing as a trustworthy super-power unless it subsists overwhelmingly on the support of discerning people.

You may hop off the fence if they do something like, oh, I don't know, buy Canonical to counter IBM buying RedHat. I'm surprised they didn't do it immediately after that.

And this is the saddest part of it all: the industry slowly started to drag itself out of the mire that is Microsoft monoculture, as servers were moving to Linux even in evil-corp style organizations; cloud services offering competition to Office hegemony (especially in education); IE6 dead and its descendants soon-to-be-forgotten; .NET being forced to improve itself and to become only 5 years behind the curve instead of 10 years (but some places still seek developers for the Lovecraftian horror that is Web Forms).

And now all this, all over again? Goddamn this industry.

What are public companies if not people?

It seems to me what you're complaining about is less about Microsoft and more about capitalism and greed in general.

People in groups behave differently from people alone; people considering billions of dollars in profits behave differently from people considering tens of dollars in profits.

I can say that not every new developer loves MS. I use vim, avoid JS, run Linux etc. As things currently stand, I'm considering migrating to BSD due to MS's new... love... for Linux.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com