Hacker News Reader

Comment by sn_master | Hacker News Reader

Does it? I hardly see any news about Microsoft in 'tech' press anymore.

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced a big military contract for Hololens. Before that, they announced a Discord acquisition, before that finalized Bethesda acquisition, etc. You're right that it might be my bias (I work in games, game engine and XR, not web), but all of those were reported by tech media like The Verge and mainstream publications tech reporting, not gaming or niche VR sites.

Yup, I especially like the HoloLens and the Pentagon contracts. Those are things that Google would have easily taken with Google Lens (which they are already selling to the industrial applications) and GCP, but can't due to the internal political pressure groups from employees preventing them from doing government contracts.

Some days - not saying it's true, but if it was - the idea of the rabid social dissent and conflict we see in the US being the product of Chinese/Russian cultural campaigns seems like pure genius. Disallowing the US military to leverage Google IP in the field? Check. Many other convenient benefits to those countries by egging on disunity.

You don't hear as much about them, but Microsoft has very similar pressure groups that have been involved in complaints about Azure and GitHub usage by the military and ICE. A lot of very similar stories are in HN if you search.

It may not be that Google's pressure groups are more successful, but that the government actually has more interests in Microsoft's products and support agreements.

(HoloLens is on v2 and is expected to have long term support. Google Glass has been cancelled twice, and you claim it is rebranded now, but my search just now turns up Google Lens as just a phone app with no hardware initiative. Even if there is a hardware initiative with that brand name, that's still two cancellations and a confusing brand name change too many for most government contracts to trust. There are similar complaints about GCP versus Azure out there, though I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.)

These days if a company isn't growing faster than the population its garbage. It isn't enough to have a consistent value proposition that some X% of the population will spend on. This isn't a sustainable viewpoint so we pop the bubble periodically and start again. MS' os is better than it ever was, but its competitors more than caught up. They still define the data formats of business to some extent with office. And their IDE group is the best for the languages they support. Perhaps with the exception of clion. But that is kind of a stable boring story.

> its competitors more than caught up

Not in the PC market that's for sure. I tried Mac and Linux few times for work and I always found Windows to be far better, at least as a desktop/laptop OS.

It depends so much on which native tools you use. Which is good and bad. Good that all three OS are good enough not to be the deciding issue, and bad that we haven't really solved portable native software well.

I find the PC hardware to be better too. Even dirt cheap PC laptops have touch screens with high quality pens included and are very easy to upgrade their RAM to 32/64 GB from Amazon.

I'll give you that for sure. Any specific model you recommend?

I have the Samsung Notebook 9 Pro, wonderful machine, and the included pen experience was great, specially with the flipped tablet mode. It's a bit outdated now but there should be a new model.

Really? All the Windows laptops with good quality screens are priced similarly to their base model Mac equivalents. There are certainly no shortage of sub-$500 laptops, but they're priced that way for a reason. Poor battery life, low-resolution screen, HDD instead of SSD, etc.

> sub-$500 laptops..Poor battery life, low-resolution screen, HDD instead of SSD, etc.

Things have changed since 2005.

This is a Walmart one for 360$, and Costco has similar ones. You can get even better specs and price if you're willing to roll the dice with Alibaba/Aliexpress vendors.

14" FHD (1080p), AMD Ryzen 3 with Radeon Vega 3 Graphics, THX Spatial Audio, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD, HDMI, Front 720P HD IR Camera.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=0hMdQAjy43A

I’ve yet to try any PC laptop that matches the Mac battery life and trackpad, or has a good fit-and-finish without copying the MacBook look anyway.

Samsung Notebook 9 or Razer Blade?

I jumped the Windows ship 10 years ago and every time I check back in on it I’m still glad I left.

Their stock has doubled in the last two years.

Also, VS Code went from zero to > 50% market share, and Azure, Teams, etc are growing fast. GitHub is adding MS ecosystem integrations at a rapid pace.

I don’t think that adds up to a very bearish story.

You're right it doesn't. My point was only that our industry is overly hype driven and "gets the job done reliably" doesnt land you headlines or search order and that hurts investment too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com