Hacker News Reader

Comment by pwarner | Hacker News Reader

I get the sense the old MS is alive and well.

did their reputation ever change from being a company that produces mostly bad quality unreliable software, that is only ever purchased by someone that wion't have to use it on a daily basis?

Teams, Sharepoint, PowerBI, the ad platform that is Windows, Azure

all terrible

(not to mention the ruthless business practices)

did their reputation ever change from being a company that produces mostly bad quality unreliable software, that is only ever purchased by someone that wion't have to use it on a daily basis?

Yes. Especially on HN.

Microsoft used its video game systems and Linux flirtations as Trojan horses to convince a generation of tech-centric people that the bad old Microsoft of yore is just something that old people worry about and that today MS is all rainbows and unicorns.

HN is full of people willing to fall in their swords for MS because they weren't around for its last round of despicable behavior, and bringing it up just means you're out of touch.

VSCode seems like a biggie as well.

Microsoft don't make tens of billions of dollars in revenue every quarter by "convincing people of rainbows and unicorns". Azure didn't pass $100Bn in annual revenue in 2022 by "Trojan horses".

> "HN is full of people willing to fall in their swords for MS because they weren't around for its last round of despicable behavior"

When was this last round? Is HN full of 20 year olds? Microsoft is really popular with the youth of today? That's nearly halfway back to when Microsoft was founded.

How about that Excel thingy?

They went through a period (Windows 7-ish) where they weren't especially bad about anything that I can recall. Pretty stable OS and drivers, Chrome was taking over the Internet and they weren't putting up much of a fuss, they were sort of focused on phones and tablets which didn't cause harm to anyone else in the market.

> ... which didn't cause harm to anyone else in the market.

Not even Apple nor Android. ;)

All brilliant. In the sense "the user of the software is the group, not the individual". All let normal non-technical employees of companies do things in minutes that they can't do at all in the competition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com