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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

> Today it’s obvious Microsoft can’t be trusted.

You weren't around when they were threatening linux with patents and forcing OEMs to not deliver PCs without a Microsoft operating system preinstalled then?

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I use Microsoft products for business (though I'm trying to phase them out). I don't care that much about their competitive practices (from a business perspective) and there's even the upside of a pretty uniform productivity software/ file format ecosystem that makes communication easier.

Committing corporate espionage, which is what their software does now, on the other hand, makes me not want to use them at all. I have agreements with customers about protecting their data, how can I use software that steals everything I put into it and sends it to MS? This is a much bigger deal. (Although I agree you could argue their earlier anticompetitive practices gave them the monopoly that allows them to run their current criminal spying empire unchecked)

You also cultured them into not respecting you:

Since you didn’t expect respect or decency before, their management culture doesn’t value that, and accordingly doesn’t treat you with it now.

After all, if you tolerated poor treatment before, why wouldn’t you now?

Where did he tolerated poor treatment before?

Microsoft was always bad to competition, but not really to customers. (backward compatibility till eternity)

That changed a lot. Tracking and ads build into the OS? No thank you.

See that’s on-brand with the cutthroat ruthless billG company. So not ideal, but not surprising either.

This is anti-customer and needlessly fraught with legal implications.

Of course it seems aligned with their hallucinations-enabled OpenAI investment.

How much of this is just attempts to feed GPT4?

> See that’s on-brand with the cutthroat ruthless billG company

Tangential, but this made me reflect on how "good"/"nice" Ballmer, and Ballmer-era MS, was in a very relative sense. This is slightly startling considering how my mental image of either Ballmer or MS is not great. But now looking back it does feel like relentless anti-competitiveness lessened a bit during that era, and lot of good stuff happened then. Windows 7 probably will go down in history as the pinnacle of traditional desktop Windows, MS giving up on IE gave room for Firefox and (unfortunately also) Chrome, lot of previously proprietary stuff got documented and published (SMB and Office formats comes to mind), and there were some nice product developments.

In contrast Gates era Microsoft was very much characterized by strong-arm tactics and throwing their weight around. And now Nadella era feels very aggressive again, pushing the company forwards no matter what; in some ways maybe less vindictive and direct than Gates, but still definitely not nice.

Ballmer was as bad as Gates (and seemed completely unhinged at times to boot), Nadella only looks good next to Ballmer but has done plenty of stuff that should have never ever happened.

All of them were present at MS when they pulled their 'millions of lines of code' bullshit in an attempt to kill Linux and harm FOSS.

As a long-time Linux user, the Nadella era looks far better. Back in the earlier eras, MS was my clear and present enemy: they did a lot of stuff to me, personally, to make my life hard because I didn't want to use their software, and tried to force me to be their customer with various tactics.

These days, that's all gone. I don't feel any pressure to use Windows, and I don't see MS doing various legal shenanigans to try to destroy Linux. I'm able to do what I want and not worry about MS much at all. It's very different from the earlier eras that way.

Instead, the difference these days seems to be that MS is the enemy of its own customers (or should I say "users"?). If you use Windows, MS will make your life hard with all this built-in malware and advertising. But if you're like me and you simply don't use Windows, you never see this stuff, except when people complain about it on forums like this, or if you have the misfortune of having to deal with a relative's PC.

Personally, I like this new era much better. I'm able to easily opt out of MS's shenanigans by simply installing Linux. When other people gripe and complain about that stuff, it falls on deaf ears here. ("but but but... I need to play $game on my PC!!!") I feel the same way as when sports fans complain about how much they're getting raped by the media companies so they can follow their favorite team.

That's a good point. Almost everything you need to do works on Linux now.

It is probably extend era

Lot of people like to troll Ballmer for his "Developers! Developers! Developers!" act, but then again you can't really get any better than being developer centric and by consequence enthusiast, power users, and professional centric.

By contrast, Gates was "Embrace! Extend! Extinguish!" and Nadella is "Data! Data! Data!"

I miss Ballmer.

I don't. All three of them were/are terrible. They just each have their own personality about it.

And yet under Nadella Windows is way more developer-centric than it ever was under previous leadership.

But under Nadella, Microsoft is far more contemptuous of users than it ever was before.

I see the Nadella era rather as the triumph of PM culture, adapted/stolen from the seemingly more competitive Google and Facebook. It's all about demonstrating increased "engagement" and the ubiquitous A/B testing because new product deltas get you promoted. It's never about maintaining 'old' stuff or providing real value - only gimmicks to catch the eye of your half-wit leadership.

If you're referring to Program Management and not Project Management... Microsoft actually created the "PM" role and popularized it.

"The PM role is unique to Microsoft and was actually created in response to developing software that is more usable and at the same time pushes the state of the art of technology. So when we talk about PM at Microsoft, we're talking from a perspective of creating and evolving the role over the lifetime of the PC industry."

"Program managers got started at Microsoft while developing Excel for the Macintosh. [...] a new role was created in Program Management with the explicit goal of partnering with development and working through the entire product cycle as the advocate for end-users and customers."

https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~xwangsd/courses/w23/readings/PM%...

Also, Microsoft nowadays is very much in the business of mass surveillance. This "feature" prepares the ground for a future with client-side scanning and upload filters running all your "local" data and "private" communications through [PhotoDNA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA) and other spyware.

* GETS UP FROM CHAIR * Alright back to DOS it is...

I wouldn't actually mind going back to DOS, like FreeDOS. Or even Windows 2000, with some updates for SSE, AVX, and other instructions. Operating systems have been getting in the way of the software that runs on top of them for over twenty years now and it's annoyingly become the norm.

Not only PC's. They tried to eliminate as many Android OEM's as possible by threating and launching patent litigation against them unless they paid up. The amount they demanded from each device was so ridiculous that you would have thought it was a payment to license the Android OS itself. Thugs will always be thugs.

Well, I remember they had the FAT patent, which each Android device needed. Was it more than that?

>The disclosure by MOFCOM on April 8, 2014 is a direct result of Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s mobile handset unit as that deal required approval by the Anti-Monopoly Bureau of MOFCOM. The disclosed lists were part of the antitrust review.

>Of the two lists of Microsoft patents disclosed by MOFCOM2, one was a list of 310 patents which included 73 "standard-essential” patents (SEPs) for smartphones; 127 patents which are “implemented in Android”; and 110 “nonstandard-essential” patents and applications (non-SEPs). This list is referred to as Annex “B” by Microsoft.3 The second list is identical to the non-SEP set minus one issued patent, U.S. Patent No.7,111,039. This list is referred to as Annex “A”.

https://www.m-cam.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/patently_ob...

> With this disclosure, China may be attempting to counteract Microsoft’s chokehold on the smartphone market

This is a very strange statement!

But thanks - appreciate the link. Not sure how the "media player in the taskbar" got in there, but that's patents for you.

At the time Microsoft was strong-arming every Android OEM into paying royalty payments or else. Samsung paid more than a billion dollars to Microsoft in royalty payments for those questionable patents. I'd call that a chokehold.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29505439

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