Damn, that whole comment section is an amazing time capsule of sentiment regarding Microsoft and other tech companies! Well worth a read.
"Microsoft recently came to my graduate school to recruit for user experience design and user experience research positions. 10 folks out of my program (about 25% of us) scored and interview. Every single one of us had no intention of working for Microsoft and joked about it intensely. Microsoft had be relegated to the realm of other boring places to do our type of work but that you interview at for practice (and, you know, just in case that job at google doesn't pan out).
In my interview, the topic of digg.com came up and neither interviewer had heard of them. I said they were like a type of slahsdot, or maybe magnolia. Never heard of those either I quipped "oh, maybe you're not involve much in the web / web development world".
"Actually, I'm one of the project managers for Internet Explorer."
The interview went downhill, from Microsoft, from that point forward. My heart wasn't even in it "just in case" anymore."
Hard to believe Microsoft was so utterly reviled by competent people in 2007. Nowadays I look at some of the things they're doing (mostly Surface line) and I would love to be involved with that. I feel like, even though they're not always hitting the bullseye, Microsoft is really aiming for the target with Surface devices. I know the Surface Duo got a lot of hate, and I really wanted to get one, but I feel like it just isn't "there" yet. Microsoft has been on that sort of track record for the past 5 years or so... the first version of a new product is a little questionable, the second is decent enough, but the third iteration, they're really nailing it.
My Surface Book 3 is the best laptop I have ever owned, and I've had many.
As someone who was there, I have no problem believing it.
If you were doing _anything_ that touched anything unixy in the 90s until the mid aughts MS wasn't just "uncool", they were actively "the enemy" directly competing against everything you did. After a while that adversarial relationship turned into joking with your peers about every mis-step they made. It didn't help that they seemed to make a lot of mis-steps and put a lot of effort into things that turned into dead ends.
They had to put a _lot_ of work into re-establishing their reputation this past decade.
Combine "my way or the highway" stance of Google when it comes to tech and standards, Oracle's utter corporate ruthlessness, turn it up to eleven, and consider they had a lock-in in the entire IT market similar to how Apple now controls the iOS market, and you'll start to get sense why.
You know which ones still have them, because on Zoom calls, they'll occasionally have their audio sound like a demon trying to murder them very loudly.
Even the best phones and laptops won't match a DSLR, so I don't try to.