Git, Cloud, Node, Metro, is Microsoft starting to get a little bit cool?

The astroturfing against Google has certainly been going on for the past decade. IV/Myhrvold is current. UEFI is current. A number of EU antitrust issues are current. Gaming the office market (no r/w tools available for Android) is current (and Google are now doing a Claytonesque disruptive innovation in that space as they did with Google Docs in the online space).

There's a whole side rant about the ills the Microsoft have spawned in malware, spam, spyware, etc., which despite several decades of protestation on the part of the company's apologist, have simply failed to materialize on other platforms to any vaguely similar fraction of a magnitude. My reasoned analysis is that the security issues are driven by engineering design decisions, and the engineering design decisions are driven by business and marketing objectives, which again are a conquer-at-all-costs, scorched-earth, mentality. My conclusion is that a world in which proprietary control of both operating systems and applications markets is held within a single corporate entity is fundamentally untenable, and that F/OSS si a very strong countervailing force (Apple presents an interesting side case that can also be explored). We've heard again and again "but it's better now", but ... it's not.

I could go on. I can't go on at length with specific references right now, but you've given me inspiration to do so, for which I give you thanks.

The point remains: the company has a fundamental attitude toward competition and exclusive markets. And the boy had cried "wolf" (or rather "but we're different now") far too often a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

But they haven't changed.

It's not the full story of IBM's 1990s transition, but it touches on some key elements.

The change happened with a replacement at the top. Lou Gerstner. And no, in my list of people earning much intrinsic love from me, tobacco company execs don't score high.

Money quote, however: “I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game – it is the game.”

He had to change the culture. And he did.

There's a lot written on that subject. Makes for interesting reading.

What's the loss leader in this analogy? Google makes money off both Chrome and Firefox.

>They refused to update Java -- Apple refuses to even allow Flash, which is elsewise standard on something like 97% of computers.

I'd agree that this is exactly the same thing. Apple is hoping to replicate Microsoft's success, forcing businesses to choose which platform they develop for so that they can chase their competitors out of the market due to a dearth of choices.

And you realize there's an important difference between "promoting one's own software" and deliberately installing (and making default) a free (!) equivalent to your biggest competitor's software on every single one of your monopoly-sized installed base?

True, but that still doesn't let Microsoft off the hook. "Everybody else is doing it," is about as good of a defense as "I was just following orders".

Oh come on. If you're going to argue here, at least have your facts straight. The Google deal with FF is only about the default search engine and homepage. Most people switch their homepage to something else anyways. And all the major search engine plugins ship with FF; it's just that Google is the default one. (Did MS ship Netscape with Windows?)

Also, it's not "loss leader" for Google, unless you have radically redefined the meaning of "loss". Google makes a ton of money from FF searches; it just chooses to share a portion of the proceeds with Mozilla. Microsoft has deeper pockets than Google, and there's nothing preventing MS from buying out FF's search bar, _given_ that they have lots of money.

> Apple refuses to even allow Flash, which is elsewise standard on something like 97% of computers.

.... and responsible for 97% of the malware out there. I, for one, am glad Apple took this stand. It allowed for HTML5 to blossom.

However, if we're talking about Secure Boot in Windows RT or Firefox on Windows RT, suddenly it's Microsoft trying to kill off Linux and Firefox in Windows 8/RT with their utter dominance of computing.

And what boggles the mind is that it's many of the exact same posters making both these arguments.

So yes, MS still "dominates" their own shrinking niche. But they are no longer able to leverage that to control other parts of the market. So they're not the threat they once were, even if they're still as evil.

They would get the benefit of the doubt, if they changed their ways.

But their boot lockdown requirements for Win8/ARM and patent blackmail against handset producers indicate that they haven't.

So, no, they don't even get the benefit of the doubt.

> You mean like Google's loss leader Android which they put on the market for free by using money from their search dominance resulting in killing WebOS, RIM, Nokia and almost everyone else except Apple?

Android is open source. I can build it, run it, change it and ship it all by myself for whatever I want. So yes: I make a moral exception here. (edit: cooldeal, stop flaming. I'm running CM9 built from source, with my own modifications, on my very own phone. That passes the test. Trying to equate not-as-open-as-I'd-like-it-to-be behavior on Google's part with Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior in the 90's is just plain insane. Stop it.)

I wept for Netscape because its fall broke web browsing on all platforms other than windows (that's the "damage to the market" part -- I didn't and still don't give a crap about Netscape, Inc.)

I shed no tears for RIM or Nokia, sorry. WebOS was open and good (but the market has spoken and prefers Android), so maybe HP gets a misty eye or two.

Not quite the same thing, when Android is Open Source and available for use by anyone. Now, granted, Google don't do as good a job as they could at doing real community oriented, participatory development of Android... but nonetheless, the source is available and it could be forked and developed by a Google competitor...

The Netscape rewrite was like the Titanic snapping in two. By that point, the ship had, for all practical purposes, sunk.

This would have been true if Microsoft wasn't also providing the platform. I have been avoiding MS platforms like the plague for the last 5 years, but when I last developed for Windows, you had to use the Microsoft C/C++ compiler to properly play with many system interfaces (some of which, e.g. IShellFolder, are only exposed this way).

Perhaps gcc is better these days, and you really can do without a Microsoft compiler; that wasn't the case 5 years ago.

> for the line-of-business developers that makes up the bulk of Microsofts dev market, C99 compatibility is simply not important.

Of course, neither was ODF/OASIS support, and neither was OOXML. But the former was an industry standard supported by every other player. And the latter was an incompatible standard introduced by Microsoft for political reasons and not even properly supported by them.

Which supports my claim that Microsoft is not becoming community friendly (for any community other than "Microsoft developers") or helpful in any way.

Microsoft doesn't need to ship a Fortran 2008 or C99 compiler. But I think there's no merit in the claim that Microsoft is trying to be friendly with the open/standard community, or that it has changed its ways (given in my list above) in any way.