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Comment by npteljes | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft was never not a full-blown evil corporation. What they had, at their peak, is some software that worked well. In the background, same evil corporation as ever.

I can't even write a top example why. Just take a glance at the documentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

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There was a time when it looked like they were less "evil". There was a period punctuated by less anticompetitive behavior, embracing open source, no significant user-hostile moves, etc. and naively it did look like they are focused on the product not on abusing competitors or users. Can't say if this was a step in a carefully crafted plan, or just made business sense to be like this at the time. But Microsoft did look less evil for a brief time.

Looks-wise, I agree, the "MS heart Linux" era was better than the current one.

That sounds consistent with their classic embrace-extend-extinguish process [1]. Embracing with no significant user-hostile moves is step 1, and then abusing competitors and users comes as step 3 of the process. They need to briefly look less evil in step 1 to maneuver into position for step 3.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Yes because they were embracing new markets. They've always followed this process but they made a big paradigm change at that point. This is why they suddenly "loved Linux". Because it was no longer a threat but a tool to them, as they were shifting from being an OS vendor to hyperscale cloud vendor.

The same way with other big American tech. Netflix operated for a decade at a loss and now that they saturated the market they are constantly asking more money for less content.

> embracing open source

They needed to grab as much free code as they could to train their AI, so what better way could there be than setting up the GitHub honeypot for this sole purpose, evangelize The Greater Good Of The Open Source, and play along a bit as in "we do open source too, don't be shy to show your code to our gradient descent, erm, we mean world!"

It started long before that. Cloud meant they were under drastic threat of being abandoned, because the cloud was (and still is) dominated by linux compute.

DotNet were shook, and shook bad. They went all out to make their runtime "cross-platform" because they faced an existential thread from lamdba+node.

The rise of the MBP also saw their dotnet ecosystem under thread from the other end of the stick - the developer end. Visual Studio cannot run on macos, so competitor IDEs that can were rising in their numbers. Hence the push for VSCode to try and claw back some IDE market.

EEE

They haven't discovered side loading.

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