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Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

Is it possibly because you were much younger back then and thus likely less jaded? I hear of people even back then who for example hated Microsoft with a burning passion, who were already older, even as today their image has been largely rehabilitated among many young devs.

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This. When was the last time you saw anyone write Micro$ith? Young devs wouldn't even know what you're talking about.

It was never about the quality of Windows, but their attacks against FOSS. And I think Nadella largely repaired the damage from that.

The image, sure. Their ethos never changed.

>their image has been largely rehabilitated among many young devs

Whoa, what? I only hear people complain more about Windows over time.

Lots of people praise VSCode and have neutral to positive opinions about GitHub. I haven't heard any more complaints about Windows than I've been hearing over the past 20 years or so anyway.

I think this is right, but both of those largely escape microsoft branding. I think a better example would be XBox and Windows as a gaming platform (vs macos, though Linux is definitely gaining ground). Windows itself, and especially Teams, have very negative reputations.

Teams, yes, but I don't hear many people having a worse opinion on Windows than the decades before, it seems like it's a vocal minority who care while most people just use Windows and get on with their lives.

> but I don't hear many people having a worse opinion on Windows than the decades before

Well sure, but windows has never exactly been highly praised outside the enterprise world. Much of the praise that is held is mostly nostalgic.

Microsoft came up with some objectively good products both for consumers and developers in the recent decade. For consumers, Xbox would be the biggest one, and for developers, VSCode, WSL/WSL2, Azure.

VSCode is a good example, since you're talking specifically about devs. But I'm not sure how much that makes up for other crappy MS software (Windows, Teams, specific UX issues with OneDrive and the whole Office suite).

I haven't heard love or hate for post-acquisition GitHub changes.

As for Windows, I could be in a bubble. But I use Windows, and I hate the UX more every release. Ads, "suggestions", automatically reenabling features, UI complexity, hard to read text, unintuitive UI, performance issues, audio device issues, useless background processes, new layers on top of configuration UI rather than replacing/updating old layers. I think those have all gotten worse since Win7, some since XP. And I thought I saw that opinion corroborated generally. Maybe there's not literally more complaining, but that doesn't necessarily mean people don't agree it's getting worse. What are they going to do, type the complaint in increasingly larger font each year?

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