Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

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I wouldn't go so far as to say they're exceptional. They're gaining good graces for developers by offering a bunch of free (for now) tools that people like. But most of their big breadwinner software is still abysmal to use.

I just tried cold starting Word and getting into a blank document on my i9 MacBook Pro and it took about 15 seconds. Windows is increasingly a dystopian user tracking and ad serving platform that happens to run the applications you need, and they still constantly break basic system functions. For a while I couldn't open jpegs in the built-in photo preview app. I gave Edge a shot for a good 6 months or so and eventually gave up because they kept breaking basic functionality that I never saw broken in Chrome (there was literally a month or two point in time where if you grabbed the scrollbar and dragged it, the bar would disappear, jutting the entire page sideways and breaking scrolling until you closed the tab and reopened it. This is on the default, built-in OS browser!) Also, my god, their SSO experience is so clunky and prone to breaking.

They’re strategically exceptional, but beyond that a lot of their products (or subsidiaries) are also dominant for good reason (vscode, GitHub).

O365 and the product integration there (teams) is why they crushed slack despite slack’s headstart. Slack sold out to languish at salesforce while Microsoft will now just own that space.

Cherry picking a Microsoft app for macOS is like looking at iTunes on windows, it’s not really representative. Even Windows itself isn’t that important (that was one of the big strategic changes after Ballmer left and Nadella took over). You’re right about edge though (which is why Microsoft abandoned it for WebKit).

Microsoft also ships (something Google can’t do very well). I think their current trajectory is probably undervalued because people have not properly updated from outdated historical sentiment.

Unfortunate about slack. It really seems to have stagnated. At least we have discord; I'm really glad they turned down Microsoft's 12 billion offer.

I think it's more about salesforce, I have a pretty negative opinion about them and everything they acquire seems to limp along or die (and the good employees leave immediately) - just seems like a boring place to be (nice sky scraper though).

Microsoft has a better track record with acquisitions.

Salesforce wastes all their effort on new acquisitions making business-driven decisions like “add Einstein to it!” or “integrate it with the Lightning Experience (TM)!” instead of doing anything remotely useful to pre-acquisition customers. Once it’s adequately diced up, they can add it as another line-item to renewals who already pay so much money to salesforce that they don’t care.

> at least we have Discord

Poe's Law?

Discord is yet another walled garden to be fair. It might be good replacement for some little, private communities.

But also large communities are moving into Discord instead of using some public, index-able and findable platforms. They used to be public in the past and people very able to read information about them without going process for creating account, acceptance or even finding whole community.

Discord is terrible for storing long term information in text form. People try to keep some pinned posts but no.. information disappears, when in comparison for forums it was there.

And let's not start with privacy.

> information disappears

Wait really? I've never seen that happen on Discord, I can still see messages from over half a decade ago. Why would they delete data they mine?

Slack on the other hand deletes everything immediately if you're not on the paid plan of course.

Not _immediately_ I think it's after 10,000 messages they start to remove some.

That 10k messages amount to less than a day in a highly active business.

> information disappears

Main point was that you can't access or view it without creating the account at first, or even being able to find the whole server. You might even need to give phone number before you can view anything. Then wait 30min to verify that you are not a bot. And all this to find a solution for a problem which you might never return to. The search in Discord is kinda terrible.

Also, if you are couple days or even hours late for the discussion, it might be too late to take part or continue it in large communities. Discord lives in the moment, it is not a place to store information.

On the other hand, on forums, it is not a problem to continue some discussion couple days later. The quality is often much much higher.

Not sure what you mean, you just need one account for all of Discord, joining a new server is just one click away. Or do you make a new account for each server? That seems unreasonably hard to keep track of. I guess the search could be better but I've never really had too many problems with it and I've seen far far worse implementations. Such as Rocket Chat which has completely broken search. Literally never returns anything.

But yes chat is chat, you can't compare it to a forum style board because they're not trying to do the same thing. You do typically need both a Discourse and a chat server for any major organization.

+1 I’m hoping urbit can provide a solution to this, but it’s still not at the quality bar I want (though I think there’s a path to get it there).

vscode is an incredible piece of software, better than all the paid options in my opinion, the amount of features they pump out month to month is outstanding, just a bit slow due to electron. I never understood why they put so much effort into a free product that I run from Linux and Mac, but I'm happily paying the copilot subscription so it all makes sense now.

You honestly had me do a double take. Copilot costs money? Maybe I get it through some other thing, but its been free for me as long as I can remember. It's wrong so often that I generally keep it on because it's entertaining. I wouldn't pay for it.

You might be thinking of IntelliCode, which was released in 2019. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/intellicode/

No, I use in PHPStorm as a plug-in.

I think copilot is free in the education pack - you might have got it from there?

Looks like I get it through my organization.

It's free and electron because they can run it in a web browser, running everything on MS Azure. With code on GitHub and CI on GitHub etc etc. The whole dev experience offered to companies as a service via a series of web applications. Companies will love this.

Just get any web browser, preferably Microsoft Edge on a Microsoft Window Pro on a Microsoft Surface laptop. Open Microsoft GitHub workspace. To dev for your Microsoft Azure hosted Linux VM. Run the CI on GitHub. Use Microsoft O365 for your design doc. And Microsoft Team for communication.

Poor little Linux in the middle.

Why poor little Linux? Those got what they wanted.

No gloomy project managers above you, just write the code you like, express yourself? Check

No telemetry to know what average Joe The Normie uses and wants? Check

No spending time on meetings and plannings, boring strategy discussions, just do a bit of here and there what your soul wants today? Check

Love to tinker and customize your setup without leaving a chance for IT department to standardize on software and settings rollouts, no MDM covering YOUR system ? You are out of enterprise - Check

Dreams came true, why poor?

Because the linux desktop is forbidden at many tech companies nowadays, for the very reasons you wrote!

At a company I worked, overtime they wanted everybody on Mac or Windows. No code locally, only ssh onto a Linux VM. When you argue you can also ssh from Linux, the response is: we cannot run the spywares on Linux.

Sure you can change job. But I have noticed the trend all over among my circle of friends.

better than PyCharm for python?

Nope, but VsCode addicts are usually too cheap to try a paid-for tool like PyCharm

There’s a free, open source, community edition, which provides most of the functionality

Nah that editor is much better if you're just using Python, but vscode imo is better for polyglots, the experience and keybinds stay the same across languages once you work out `tasks.json` and `launch.json`

Would have to differ. Best IDE would have the Borland Pascal 7/C back in the 90s, then Delphi and eventually Netbeans/Eclipse to take that position as something worthwhile between Linux, Mac and Windows.

For me Delphi Pascal was the pinacle of compilers/IDE combos. A simply fantastic combination of GUI editor, assembler support, fast compiler and truly useful documentation with pratical examples at the click of a button without needing internet.

VScode with a proper copilot seems to be a game changer. Crossing fingers.

Yep. IntelliJ's stuff is the only one that actually competes with VSCode - and the playing field is surprisingly even if you add the VSCode plugin ecosystem to it.

For C# Rider is still the gold standard in my book, but for Go I still prefer VSCode to GoLand.

> integration there (teams) is why they crushed slack despite slack’s headstart

Teams is terrible software and only beat Slack b/c it is included 'free' in every o365 sub. GSuite is much better at collaboration than o365, but because of decades of MS lock in most people still need office to deal with interop.

Slack recognized it was going to be hard to compete with a free feature from a product suite most companies are forced to have. SF could have been a good home, but they struggle at handling acquisitions.

Slack sucks, but if you compare it with Teams, it is still gold. If anyone asks me, whether I wulould rather join a voice chat on Slack or Teams, the answer is 100% of the time Slack. You never know what bugs Teams will cook up this time to ruin your call.

O365 is a child's toy for non-professional document creation. Quickly hacking a document together maybe. Any normal non-web office suite blows O365 out of the water in terms of creating maintainable non-directly formatted documents. Now that they are deprecating offline Office (I think last release 2017 or so) their office suite has gone downhill at alarming speed.

VS Codium is OKish, and has some cool features, but ultimately does not get close to what I have in Emacs in most aspects that actually matter, so that's not a convincing offer either.

Their software is OK at best and rubbish in the average. And don't even get me started on Windows itself.

A quick search turns up Office 2021[0], and I see no indication that offline Office is being discontinued.

And claiming that O365 is a toy? Literally the only other online office suite I've used or heard of is GDocs, which has a fraction of the functionality that I use from O365.

Your post doesn't sound serious at all to me.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-profe...

It was clear to me when they mentioned Emacs that their opinion on this can just be ignored. That isn't to say Emacs isn't a great thing for a certain niche, but it's just not something that matters in this kind of strategic product discussion (and thinking it's comparable is just a signal it's not worth engaging imo).

There are many reasons why VSCode is dominant and emacs isn't, similarly there are many reasons slack failed to compete (even after taking out a full page ad pretending to be apple before suing Microsoft). If you're going to pretend to be apple, you better be as good. If you're going to mock competition you better hope you're apple and not netscape [0][1].

I too think Slack is a great product, but that's not enough. Slack needed to expand into a more competitive offering and they failed to do that.

[0]: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/browser-wars/

[1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/slack-microsoft-open-letter_n...

GDocs is a toy as well. Maybe worse than O365. If you only know those two, then I can understand your opinion.

Try using offline office suites, best not MS Office, and use their writing tool. So many things are missing in these online office suites. I assure you the post is serious and I have used multiple online and offline office suites. Perhaps you should explore more and make use of styles and all that. You will quickly notice how many things are missing in the online office suites.

Desktop Office apps are still available, fully supported, and fully functional. Office 2021 is the latest buy-once release, but Microsoft 365 subscribers get all the desktop apps with their subscription (and they get continuous updates). The web apps are separate and have their limitations. Microsoft 365 subscribers get to choose between the two. Non-subscribers get only the web version with some features removed.

> lot of their products > GitHub

Yeah that one doesn't count, they've made exactly zero changes since acquisition and Actions still has downtime every few weeks.

It takes three seconds to cold start Word for me on an old (2015), underpowered (core i5, 8GB RAM, low end SSD) HP laptop.

You're complaining about 15 seconds? I can remember the Windows 3.x days when it took minutes to warm Word up.

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