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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

It’s sad to realize that such a project would be completely impossible in America now. We’ve become the Microsoft of countries.

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Microsoft is one of the most successful corporations in the world, and is widely considered to be undergoing a sort of renaissance under Nadella, so while the intent of this put-down is clear, its expression is pretty clumsy.

Couldn't you just say or link to something concrete to make your point instead? The cost problems of large American projects are incredibly well covered in the media; you're a trivial Google search away from lots of great material here.

It’s been unsuccessful at building high-quality, user-facing products. Which is where I was going with the analogy. The US makes plenty of money too, but falls short in building things you can point to.

I own an iPhone. It’s as buggy as Microsoft products. In the end, Microsoft products are Okay. The reason people criticize Microsoft is politics. First you decide which side is the right one (that’s easy, it’s Linux) and then you use Bad Faith to make the wrong side look as bad as possible.

I have no dislike of Microsoft as a company. But its products and its ability to execute suck. We deployed Office 365 at work and all the rewritten apps are total crap (Outlook, Teams, etc.) They can’t even manage to maintain their own browser engine, which is pathetic for such a large company. I have a surface Duo 2, which is a promising device that’s just a total disaster in execution. The Surface line is sometimes good, but the execution is so bad. They have no ability to sync up with Intel release cycles, so the hardware is perpetually six months to a year old when new surface models are released.

The bad side of MS was pretty bad with SCO case and VFAT patents and OfficeXML.

Successful to the shareholders, not the users.

No one has been forcing any of the users to give them money. The users are giving them money because they get value out of purchasing their products.

Not true. As a Linux user I have many times been forced to give them money for software I delete as my first step on a new PC.

Can you give an example? Generally speaking, when you buy hardware with bundled software, the hardware is cheaper because the software company is paying the hardware vendor to bundle, effectively subsidizing some of your cost.

I feel a little forced but for context I currently work in the games industry.

That’s what makes a successful company though.

Well, by that reasoning, US are a successful country.

But when you are not the shareholder but the user / citizen, you have the right to decide what "successful" means to you.

The US is a successful country: try to invade us and see :) Or try to outspend us :)

Have you looked at your Southern border recently?

Citizens should be shareholders, but let's not stretch the analogy.

Depends on your definition of success, but yes a lot of companies aim to maximize the monetary gain of shareholders

Microsoft's goal is to make the shareholders money. So that it success to it.

And success or not has nothing to do with OP's point.

That is unfair to Microsoft, which has been an almost impossibly nimble megacorp under Nadella. Afraid that the US is in far worse shape.

IBM more than MS.

Great analogy. Haven't seen a successful acquisition, only lots of failed ones.

github failed, how?

They merely managed to not destroy it like they do with everything they touch. Doing nothing isn't an accomplishment. Having a look at Azure DevOps might make you aware of what could have gone wrong if they actually touched GH

Due to the cost of foreign policy and lobbying, both by domestic corporations and foreign nations.

Our foreign policy experiments are a relatively small percentage of our GDP. It’s not like the money isn’t there for these projects. Even with the foreign wars, the US still spends significantly less of GDP on public services than other developed countries.

Think of how much rail Afghanistan and Iraq could've bought us. Amtrak gets something like 4 billion/year, think of what 2 trillion could've done...

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