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Comment by c7DJTLrn | Hacker News Reader

The difference here is that the developer of RefTerm is an experienced, professional developer passionate about his craft and building good software. Microsoft is a faceless entity composed of people who mostly don't care about what they do during the day and are just getting by so they can get paid. There's no shame in that. But there is shame in patronising someone when they demonstrate something to be false and locking the thread on GitHub such that no further discussion is possible...

Microsoft is sluggish and delivers products that do the job and nothing more. Sadly, that's the modus operandi of most software companies. That's why nimble little startups are still managing to steal pieces of various markets.

I use Windows Terminal quite often and have definitely noticed its terrible performance. So this is definitely something visible in the real world and not just nitpicking.

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> Microsoft is a faceless entity composed of people who mostly don't care about what they do during the day and are just getting by so they can get paid.

Regardless of what you think about Microsoft the company, please remember that the individual workers and managers are people who can be hurt by our tendency to form self-righteous mobs. And according to another commenter [1], one of the people working on Windows Terminal was hurt to the point that they quit.

Full disclosure: I'm inclined to defend the Microsoft team here because I was at Microsoft (on the Windows accessibility team) for a while. I don't think that I or my former teammates fit the stereotype you described. And while I never met any of the developers on the Windows Terminal team (at least not knowingly), I could very easily have crossed paths with one of them; I believe my team used to be in the same building as theirs. So I'm inclined to be charitable.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28746624

This might get me some shit but running away like that isn't a good trait to have. Not for Microsoft, but also not for themselves. This will probably be in the back of their mind for a chunk of their career since they have no closure.

I would expect somebody working on a greenfield project at one of the biggest software companies in the world to tackle issues head on with grace.

Those individual workers hurt the project and the community around it by setting the precedent that you need to create your own competing product to verify that bugs can be fixed without PhD research.

Nobody should be harassed over their open source project, but that doesn't mean actions don't trigger reactions.

Nor does it mean that a simple mistake could not be remedied, as it was.

And we should be forgiving.

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