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Comment by dirkg | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft buying Github was the best thing that could've happened to Github/open source in general.

Screw the people who still spread MS FUD. I cannot think of any other company, certainly not FB/Goog (Amzn has nothing in this space and no interest outside paid AWS services) that would've done anything close to what MS have done.

Everything is better, tons of things are now free, integration has improved, there's full transparency. It helps that MS's own tools like VSCode, VS online etc are best in class by some margin and used by everyone.

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It’s not FUD if Microsoft has a history of EEE.

I’m rolling my eyes hard at your claim of VS Code as best in class. If the category is JS-powered code editors then I’ll surely give them that title. However BS Code has many flaws compared to other IDEs. One being that it’s restricted in performance by the language it’s written in. I don’t use those products so I must not be apart of everyone?

Have you used Atom, Sublime etc? VS Code is far better than them, and its an actual IDE. I don't know how much you work in JS but VSC is the defacto choice for everyone and has a million extensions while still being fast. If you don't work in that area then its understandable but you really shouldn't comment on it in that case. Its not competing with VS for instance.

So you say that VS Code is best in class IDE, without specifying any scope.

Then when someone calls that out, they shouldn't comment if they don't work with Javascript?

Which one is it, best in class JS editor (which yepthatsreality actually agreed to), or best in class IDE (but only people who work on JS can comment on that...)?

I have used Atom, VS Code, Vim, Nano, SublimeText, Notepad++, Jetbrains IDEs, etc. I currently use SublimeText and Javascript is the primary language at my employer (beating out Perl, PHP, Ruby, Python, Groovy, Java, and Typescript). SublimeText has plenty of supported plugins and is even faster and can handle larger files than VS Code. I'm not here to dick measure though.

Better than other? No. Best in some cases? Maybe.

There is never "Just Best". Its always very much subjective. And speed is not always everything, as long as it is fast enough. And for example.. For me, my use case, emacs is best. It can do anything. It is best as Swiss Army knife, because it can do anything. JS IDE? Sure here. Clojure? Here you go boss. Haskell? Hell yeah. Especially, since introduction of LSP stuff (Emacs LSP and Eglot). Simultaneously it can do IRC, note taking, literate programming, statistics, and much more, like remote editing with TRAMP. So in that case, it is best.

But is it best as just Java IDE? Absolutely not.

> It’s not FUD if Microsoft has a history of EEE.

When is the last time Microsoft "EEE"-ed anything? The most recent examples are 20 years old.

And look, you should never trust $bigcorp blindly, that would be naïve, but people have these 20-year old grievances that have little bearing on the situation today.

skype, lync, skype for business, teams...

Microsoft acquired Skype more than 10 years ago...

Surely they screwed up the massive lead in the space that Skype had, but I can't say they "EEE"'d it. It was just badly run.

Poor management/neglect is part of the extinguish step.

So, purposely?

If it happens consistently, does it matter?

How do you prove intent in a historical context without admission?

Skype was never anywhere near "open" and always fully proprietary. It was just a change of management, and nowhere near "EEE".

Teams is just a run-of-the-mill chat thingy, no? Was is ever open in any way or built on standards? What did they "embrace" or "extend"?

EEE doesn't have to involve "open" anything. You're moving the goal post.

"[Strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors. "

So pray tell me, how does one either "embrace" or "extend" a product that has always been proprietary, has never used open protocols or standards, and never had any interoperability with anything else?

You purchase the rights.

EEE is about making standards and protocols incompatible with competitors. This literally cannot apply to Skype as it was never compatible with anything. I don't know what part of that is so hard to grasp. You seem intent on using your own definition of "every bad decision Microsoft ever made" or some such.

I never indicated that the definition couldn't include open implementations, just that the definition wasn't limited to ONLY openness. There are plenty of examples of this behavior not even exclusive to Microsoft. Proprietary products can build on an open protocol and attempt to change it, sometimes for the worse.

I didn't bring Skype into this, so I'm not going to comment on it as an example.

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