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Comment by icey | Hacker News Reader

It was fun to laugh at at the time, but Steve Ballmer has known this for awhile. Remember his big, sweaty "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!" rant?

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Never forget that Microsoft is at heart a languages company. They came from writing computer languages and detoured into operating systems. Frankly, they've always been very, very good to developers.

They've always known that the developers matter.

I still wish MS would ship windows with a usable console.

Windows 7 ships with PowerShell.

Windows 7 hasn't officially shipped yet.

I've been using Windows 7 for a month now as my primary OS. Works fine.

If you're still running Windows XP, Vista, 2003, or 2008, you can download PowerShell from the Download Center or get it as a recommended update via Windows Update.

>> Frankly, they've always been very, very good to developers.

Except when they told everyone to develop for OS/2 - while secretly porting their Mac Apps to Windows 3.

I was a Mac app startup in the days of Mac-128, OS/2 and Windows 1.0. Far from evangelizing OS/2, Microsoft sent Tandy Trower (a very important development manager, still at Microsoft) down to the Valley to visit us and urge us to develop our Mac app for Windows. He told us then that Microsoft was working on Windows versions of its Mac apps. And we were surely not the only Mac startup that Tandy had on his list of visits to make in the Valley. It has always seemed to me that developers who prioritized OS/2 over Windows were fooling themselves (easy to do, since IBM was so important then and backing OS/2), not being fooled by Microsoft.

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