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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

>They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core.

This is a joke, right? We never, ever, needed anything other than the Win32 GUI at the core of windows, and it still works to this day. You can write Windows programs without the new stuff, in Lazarus, for example.

C# and .NET were a huge step backwards. VB6 was something easy enough for domain experts to get working, without having to hire a programmer. Delphi for Windows make it very easy for even beginner programmers to ship a clean professional Windows GUI by just building the UI and hooking events to it, with almost zero boilerplate. C/C++/C# reverse that trend and lost us all a decade or more of productivity.

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How so? Because they sort of open source the tech and made it possible to build for other platforms? C# is a great language taking over the advances of Java and C/++ making things a bit better, but intentions didn't make it any better: owning the devs.

VScode? A rebuild of Atom, "free" with un-disable-able telemetry with the same intention: owning the devs

Buy out of github, owning the devs

Rebuild of ms office for the web: owning users given gsuite was seriously taking over office use

OpenAI: since bing kept being a failure, they invested elsewhere and may have a chance, here again: own the general users and to a degree professionals.

Anything MS did and continues to do is lateral moves to own markets. The pretence of openness or innovation makes it even worse than the corp from its flamboyant 90s days, at least back then nobody was taken for a fool.

> Rebuild of ms office for the web: owning users given gsuite was seriously taking over office use

And Google let them win by coasting on GSuite. I use it for my business, my partner uses Office 365 for hers. In 2023 Office 365 is by far the better choice.

> And Google let them win by coasting on GSuite. I use it for my business, my partner uses Office 365 for hers. In 2023 Office 365 is by far the better choice.

If you don't mind me asking: what is better about o365? I know that Excel is the jewel in the Office crown, but if you aren't leaning on that heavily, what's the big difference to you?

Can't speak for GP, but the o365 Word is better than Google Docs as well. And while you can view Visio in o365, would be nice if you could edit the diagrams. Odd, but Visio is still imo much better than alternatives in that space.

Visio documents can be edited on ODfB and SPO within the browser.

https://support.microsoft.com/office/overview-of-visio-for-t...

Sweet... hadn't actually touched it for about a year and a half.

365 web apps are still shockingly terrible in 2023.

Just to add more examples of markets they are trying to take over by not being better, but by buying up the competition:

- Video games: Activision/Blizzard, ZeniMax, Double Fine Productions, Obsidian Entertainment, inXile Entertainment, Playground Games, Compulsion Games, Undead Labs, Ninja Theory, Mojang

- Developer ecosystems: npm, Dependabot, GitHub, Playfab, Deis, Xamarin, Havok, HockeyApp

This is standard business affairs for pretty much every big company. Apple, Google, Amazon, and many other fortune 500 companies, have all bought up dozens of businesses and their products and rebranded them as their own. Not sure why we're solely picking on Microsoft here...

Indeed, Microsoft didn't invent capitalism. They just have a strong position and understand the rules very well.

Because Microsoft is the subject of this thread. We could pick on other corporation, MS isn't the only one, but whataboutism isn't an argument.

And MS practices are not standard business, they certainly understand the rules well, but have have been making illegal moves, it is a fallacy to word it as if illegal moves were part of the capitalism game: Monopolies are to be prevented, that's why anti trust laws were put in place, which MS was already caught breakig.

I spend all my time writing services and HALs and even when I do need a UI, it's in the browser, that I forget there are people who still code actual GUIs for Windows.

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