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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

I was also kinda liked The New Microsoft and prepared to put my anger towards them to the side (I remember the ACPI memo days). Also, as a grown-up computer user, I got appropriate number of licenses (for every Microsoft application we use) for my family and personal computers.

However, the latest GitHub Copilot stuff, their agreement with OpenAI, return of their embrace, extend, extinguish tactics with GitHub, VSCode and other stuff undone everything.

It's their DNA now. All Microsoft Empire is built with crushing monopoly as their core value and driving force. Changing this requires more than changing a mere CEO and posting a "We Love Linux" banner.

The only really good thing they do is hardware.

Posted from my Debian 11 box using Microsoft Keyboard.

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The existence of company DNA is a marketing fib.

Every company aspires to be big enough to integrate the entire stack and kick out all their competition. Only a few manage to do it.

There was never a new Microsoft. There was only Microsoft when they admitted they didn't have a stranglehold monopoly on PCs anymore.

It's as basic a strategy as anything you'd find in Art of War: When you're #2, cooperate with #3 to take down #1. When you're #1, pull up the ladder so #2 and #3 can't use it.

> The existence of company DNA is a marketing fib.

It isn't - company DNA doesn't always represent positive attributes.

Company culture, incentive structure, priorities and skill-sets are all part of what's given the shorthand "company DNA" (and all are self-reinforcing/self-replicating. Google's DNA makes it exceptional at developing and scaling complex web services, but terrible at product longevity (except for the break-out hits), and terrible at consumer electronics. Apple is mostly the opposite. In spite of all their efforts, both companies struggle to be half as good as the other one in the areas outside of their core competency, because of their respective company DNA.

I recently left Apple and my new company gave me a choice of windows or macOS as my device and I chose windows. I’m not really sure why. But I do have to say after not using windows for 10+ years it’s come a long way. Wsl simply is amazing. Vscode works perfectly with it. The office apps are leaps and bounds better than there macOS counterparts. I certainly have never been a MS lover but I think they are much better now than their 90s reputation.

They are also, very much, embracing Linux. More and more of Azure has Linux underpinnings and we'll see more integration of Linux in Windows, starting with WSLg.

I mean a lot of the Azure stuff is realising that they could either: continue offering Windows Server only and likely miss out on a lot of potential customers but gain some sales of Windows Server, or start offering Linux in their cloud offering. Ultimately they decided to do the latter, and I'd bet that it's the more profitable option.

I think the writing has been on the wall for a while now - Windows (server or otherwise) is no longer considered the money maker - now it's Office and Azure.

Nadella was literally the top Cloud Computing executive at the company before he was picked for CEO.

Replacing Balmer - who was very pro-windows.

Yes, but likely they will then "extend" Linux so if an dev is using WSL to develop a linux project you will need to install MS things on your production enviroment, likely in the NET Core world... I am sure this will happen with the full support the Linux Foundation whom they paid off. It will also come by default in Azure I am sure

After they "extend" with MS open source then start to require just a few closed binaries, that is not a big deal right, for the functionality... see VSCode as an example of this in modern times. This likely will be a paid feature unless you use Azure where it will be free...

and before long we enter the Extinguish phase

I don't really see that as much of a concern. If Microsoft announced plans for world domination tomorrow, all I'd need to change in my workflow is which fork of VS Code I'm using.

No one announces plans for world domination, it is far more benign and slow than that.

it is like quicksand, by they time you know you are in deep it is too late for you to do anything

What kind of EEE do they currently do? Outside of GH, I don’t even see them having any kind of position dominant enough to extinguish anything and GH doesn’t seem to have shifted in any way since MS bought them, they were "value add on top of git" before and are still now.

WSL is clearly EEE.

Why? I mean it's clearly Embrace. But Embrace and Extend are the goals of OSS. MS is a for profit company true. But OSS has never been anti-profit. The last E is problematic of course and MS has a history of going for Extinguish in the past. However I haven't seen any sign of that behavior in the current leadership and they've been doing their thing for a while now. You may not believe MS can change and you may not trust them. But that's a faith statement right now not a fact statement.

I've understood the second E to mean "...with our proprietary stuff". Building OSS on top of other OSS is still just Embrace.

An example of Extend would be building features for WSL that only work in WSL, not Linux proper. So now people become dependent on the MS ecosystem, and lock-in begins; the lock-in is what enables the Extinguish phase.

They've done a little bit of that with DirectX for WSL2.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx-heart-linux/

>An example of Extend would be building features for WSL that only work in WSL, not Linux proper.

That thing already exists, DirectX is available only under WSL: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/wp-content/uploads/si...

Extinguish phase is not clear though. (at least for now)

Hard to say. I think to some extent there would have to be something to 'extinguish'.

At this point, 3d rendering is a bit of a crapshoot; Multi-platform vendors will likely have a pluggable rendering pipeline anyway (i.e. need to use DirectX for XBox, PS4/PS5 APIs, Metal for iOs, DirectX for Windows, maybe Vulkan if they developed on Linux or just want to make it easier to port later).

If I reach in my head, perhaps some form of 'DirectAI' API could limit competition in some markets or force vendor lock-in.

Otherwise, I think Microsoft is in a space where they seem to be pretty OK with; being the #2 in a lot of spaces is still profitable, with the benefit of less oversight regarding antitrust.

The other place I -might- forsee Microsoft doing 'lock-in' is around their developer tooling. By that I mean, they have a lot of cool tech that is a PITA to deploy at scale... unless you use Azure. SignalR scaleout would be a prime example that comes to mind.

I think, Microsoft clearly understands that Linux is not going anywhere, but they can try to limit where it goes instead of trying to make it go away.

Linux has two fronts: Server and Desktop. It's clearly won in server space, in some very important categories.

But, what if Microsoft can make Windows attractive enough, so it can run Linux applications without the Linux desktop itself, and prevent developers from installing a bona fide distribution to their boxes alongside Windows? With this, they can

    - Add some proprietary extensions to WSL to keep some dev tools trapped
    - Double down on secure boot and key management, citing "We can run these applications anyway, where's the monopoly?"
    - Slow down adoption of desktop Linux installations

Hence, push Linux to server space to reclaim the "creative/young" desktop space, and prevent them from becoming irrelevant, and pushing Linux to systems rooms of cloud, so it becomes something like "The real world" in Matrix (the movie)?

Just give it a thought.

I don't exactly see how WSL fits in any "extinguish" strategy. Maybe in regards to desktop Linux? I doubt Microsoft are aiming to extinguish desktop Linux considering its currently irrelevant market share and Windows no longer being Microsoft's bread winner. WSL seems to be more for the benefit of Azure, their real money maker, and backend developers.

I'd wager it started development as an internal tool considering how much of their workforce now works on Azure and the Windows team being absorbed into the Azure department.

Of course in regards to desktop Linux, what else? It keeps developers inside the Windows ecosystem.

I imagine WSL doesn't really affect most Linux desktop users and it really only impacts those that used full-blown VMs for dev work on Windows anyway.

I doubt many people are dual-booting on work computers and WSL really only benefits developers, which are most likely developing something on Linux (i.e. server linux) for work.

Again, Windows is no longer the bread winner of Microsoft and desktop Linux is comparatively irrelevant to Microsoft considering it represents like 1% of the market. Both ChromeOS and macOS are more direct competitors to Windows.

Why would they work to extinguish a non-competitor for a product that has taken a backseat from all of their other products? It just doesn't make sense.

>Again, Windows is no longer the bread winner of Microsoft and desktop Linux is comparatively irrelevant to Microsoft considering it represents like 1% of the market.

If it's not their breadwinner then they should port over their office suite and the Windows API to Linux.

If it's not their breadwinner then they should port over their office suite and the Windows API to Linux.

How much do you think it would cost to port Office to Linux? How many extra Office licenses do you think they'd sell? Given your estimates of these two numbers, do you think Microsoft would turn a profit off of Office for Linux.

Anyway they've already 'ported' a decent subset of Office to Linux in form of Office365

This isn't helping your argument. Why would they do that? Again, Linux is comparatively irrelevant at 1% market share. It's not worth the cost, which is why most games don't have Linux ports.

> I doubt many people are dual-booting on work computers and WSL really only benefits developers, which are most likely developing something on Linux (i.e. server linux) for work.

I was dual booting Linux. I find WSL perfect for this because I can basically have different distributions with a lot of common tools stored in a windows folder. It’s perfect!

I'd argue the opposite... Although I'm changing jobs in a few weeks, WSL2 has allowed for a push towards Linux/Docker usage and a significant uptake for new development. This is in a historically mostly Windows environment... if it weren't for WSL, it would still all be windows.

The shift in open development of .Net Core/5/6 has been nice too. I absolutely love the Remoting extensions/tooling for VS Code as well. I can edit/terminal on remote systems with ease. All of these things have made actually building/deploying to Linux servers a pleasure.

I jokingly say that Windows is one of the best Linux Desktop distros at this point, and there's some merit to that claim. I have the new terminal set to my WSL environment as default, spend most of my time in VS Code using WSL and Docker. Of course, I'm also switching my personal desktop back to (only) PopOS in a few weeks, also bought an M1 Macbook.

I'm not tethered to Windows in any meaningful way, but the water is pretty nice. It's crap like in TFA that causes me to not want to stay in the Windows pool.

GitHub is still pretty independent of Microsoft. Internally it’s a different pay structure, somewhat different employee benefits, finance decisions, and different leadership.

They also own npm, which they also haven't done anything with yet, but the potential is there.

Oh no, not the "potential!" Please, I had completely forgotten that Microsoft owned npm until reading your comment. There's no more "potential" there than any other product/service from any other company, and Microsoft has done absolutely nothing to indicate that they will screw with npm.

> It's their DNA now. All Microsoft Empire is built with crushing monopoly as their core value and driving force.

it's literally the point of being a public company, how is that a surprise for anyone.

>GitHub Copilot

Github is Github

Microsoft is Microsoft

Aren't they? Github works heavily independently from MS

Microsoft acquired github in 2018

I think they recognize that, but are stating that Microsoft has taken a hands-off approach after acquiring GitHub and that GitHub mostly runs independent of Microsoft, similar to NPM.

Eh, mostly.

For CoPilot, you need a language model, where the current best one is made by OpenAI, which doesn't like to share its stuff.

This is the same OpenAI, which got $1B from Microsoft, and gave commercial licenses to Microsoft to use GPT-3.

Which is the company which also owns GitHub, and also has a platform like Azure, so it can just "lend" GPT-3 and some servers to train the said model on some code, which GitHub clearly has possession of.

So, while they're different, and it's casually owned by the other, this ownership allows them to put one's code and other's GPT-3 access into "good" use.

At the end of the day, public code is public, so license doesn't matter, eh?*

*: CoPilot is trained on all public code containing GPL, AGPL and similar licenses which doesn't allow proprietary use, so it's another ball of hair.

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