Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

763 pointsseanmcdirmid530 comments

When new the Nokia tablet was announced yesterday, submissions made it to the front page but were promptly flagged off by many saying "this wasn't relevant to HN;" regardless of all the excitement over the new iPad.

So is HN basically becoming Slashdot where Microsoft hate occurs by default? Is it ethical to flag something because the article is related to a company you don't like, even if the source is generally reputable (theverge, engadget, ars)?

Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft (research) and my wife works for Nokia; so ya, ouch.

View on HN

In that particular thread, I was accused of being a shill and an astroturfer by 3 members. All of the accusers had karma greater than 1500, and atleast two of them were on HN since at least 2 years. Why? Because I posted the spec list of the tablet. And I do not have allegiance to any of the tech companies at all, except having used their products one time or another.

MS hate is vicious on here. I remember recoiledsnake [1, 2] alluding to it, and not that particular topic, infact lots of MS topics are bumped off the frontpage while having lots of points. Not on this site, I made a point on neoGAF debunking a point regarding XboxOne related to a technology that I am very much familiar with. I was ambushed by 15-20 people in matter of 10 minutes and banned. One single post, nothing inflammatory. On this site, yes I do see MS hate from lots of members. I do not think I remain enthusiastic in posting on here. Some of the members call themselves veterans and use that status to just point barbs. Disagreements are one thing and can be deliberated in civil manner, but downright unencumbered hate and allegations is another.

[1]- https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=recoiledsnake [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5716419

Nobody in the history of HN has ever made themselves look smarter by calling someone else a shill, and that thread is no exception.

Pleasingly ambiguous phrasing. The first two times I read it, I got that this was the smartest anyone had ever looked (no one has ever looked smarter). Apologies for going off-topic, but I hadn't come across this particular cramp in the language before.

I doubt anyone would disagree that triple negatives aren't easy to parse.

Now I'm curious how natural language parsers handle triple negatives.

You'll be pleased to know that they don't not do them unwell.

I'm not sure if I wouldn't be dissapointed to hear that they couldn't.

It's not the triple negative that is the culprit here though. It's the inherent ambiguity in a phrase such as "never been better", which could be either a negative or positive statement. I'm sure there's a name for that construct?

I think tptacek's sentence would need a 'than' to have a valid reading as a positive statement. 'never been better' is ambiguous by itself, but by the time you put it into a sentence it may or may not be ambiguous.

So my answer is mu.

If that sentence hadn't mentioned triple negatives, I don't think I would have noticed anything abnormal about it.

That article was not flagged off the frontpage. It set off the flamewar detector.

As for recoiledsnake, that is one of many accounts created by a group or individual who is either an astroturfer or indistinguishable from one. Part of his/her/their m.o. is to talk constantly about there being an anti-Microsoft conspiracy on HN. Sometimes he/she/they would use multiple, separate accounts in the same thread.

Thanks for the clarification. I admit that I still don't know how Hackernews works, and that opacity leads to confusion. This is the first time I took something like this personal on HN, and I have been here for awhile.

It might be nice to mark why article have been killed so we don't go off and make the wrong assumptions about what happened.

Thank you for the clarification, appreciated. Yes, that thread was a flamewar in one way or another, and unfortunately it was a product that took the brunt.

About, recoiledsnake I would not know much except his posts.

So the article might be useful to people building businesses in the tech space, but because some users decided to air their petty grievances in the _comments_ to that story, the story itself got buried?

Seems like the flamewar detector would be better aimed at closing comments rather than burying stories.

I like the flamewar detector removing the whole story. As PG has said in the past, flamewars aren't interesting and they do nothing but divide the community. Keeping the story on just causes more drama because the users with comments deleted end up replying asking where their comments went and then start crying about anti-Americanism and the right to comment on a private website ad infinitum. It's pointless.

On the other hand, if you are large-ish and organized, it provides an easy avenue to take down stories you don't like without the paper-trail of flagging...

Considering these flamewars typically involve at least one person who admits to being a Microsoft employee, I don't think that "false-flags flamewars" is something that we are seeing in practice.

Actually, the flamewar involved no one claiming to be an MS employee. I only commented after the submission was killed.

But feel free to believe anything that reinforces your existing beliefs.

Well you are certainly participating in this one.....

Sorry .. I did not intend to imply the flamewar detector was going to delete anyone's comment. It was going to do one of two things:

1. Turn off comments

2. Turn off comments and hide all comments to date.

You can't have it electing to remove one comment or another. At most it could delete a top level comment that was the spawn of the flamewar. But still, I say hide all comments and turn off further comments. That way we still get the benefit of the story.

> 1. Turn off comments

A few days ago, on the topic of turning off comments when there is a flamewar, instead of knocking the entire post down/off the front page, I said this:

"[killing the discussion entirely] is a good thing, if something is on the front page then comments should be enabled, if only in case something in the article desperately needs to be corrected. If we get a post on here about a new study suggesting that vaccines may cause autism, that would almost certainly generate a flamewar but the absolute last thing we would want is for the post to remain on the front page and not permit anyone to post comments that may refute claims made by the study. In situations like those, it is better to kill the discussion and to take the post off the frontpage than to leave it there but disable commenting."

But this is a very weak approach, as it makes it extremely easy for bad actors to 'poison the well.' If there's something you don't like, use a sockpuppet account or two to get a flamewar going, thread gets nuked from orbit, and the people who wanted to discuss it in good faith are marginalized.

Sometimes he/she/they would use multiple, separate accounts in the same thread.

Is it possible they post from work, and hence share the same IP address with other HN posters? Microsoft is a big place.

I often get locked out of Google and Stackoverflow for "botting" from work when its obvious I'm just a casual user. I think this has something to do with the way the proxy is setup.

This is PG. If he doesn't think it is just a bunch of well-meaning commenters coincidentally behind the same NAT, then I am inclined to believe him.

Anyway, do you know what I do when there are discussions online about my employer? I stay the fuck out of it. I think that is good policy, unless participating in those discussions is part of your job description. Best case scenario here: a bunch of well-meaning Microsoft employees got into an internet fight, got mistaken for a sockpuppet ring, and got a discussion about their company pushed off of HN? If that's in their job description, I don't know why they're still getting paid; if it isn't, maybe they should consider spectating next time.

> Anyway, do you know what I do when there are discussions online about my employer? I stay the fuck out of it.

That's a shame, since as an employee you have an unique and very valuable perspective on the company. Why not participate, perhaps add a disclaimer?

I understand that perspective, but what I know is either public knowledge, or behind a few NDAs. Furthermore, my employer politely asks that I don't, and I'd rather not anyway. Online PR, no matter how unofficial, isn't something that I am comfortable with.

Public doesn't mean widely-known. And I feel vaguely uneasy at the idea that everything not explicity public would be NDA.

That said, I fully respect the preference not to and the request not to.

  Anyway, do you know what I do when there are discussions online about my employer? 
  I stay the fuck out of it.

This is an excellent policy. Employee participation (unless they're CEO/Founder, CTO or some combination thereof that can speak with authority) will almost invariably lead to problems. It's good that some employees feel "passionate" and "enthusiastic" about their company/product, but if that's left unchecked and they refuse to remain objective, it will not prevent the thread from going up in a passionate and enthusiastic fire ball.

Same applies to social media.

I don't think this is good policy in this day and age.

While I can see how that would explain separate IPs, I do not see how it would explain separate accounts posting agreement with themselves and it would certainly create an appearance of sockpuppetry.

Multiple users with accounts behind the same proxy could have the same IP address.

There is a perverse incentive here. If commenters can push an article off the front page by flaming, the flamewar detector would actually encourage flaming.

I think that maintaining a community like this is really a dynamic process, so while it's important to make note of bad incentive situations for the future, it's not necessarily the best choice to correct them prematurely. In theory, your reasoning sounds right. In practice, that's probably not happening right now, so the mechanism still serves its purpose with only the (presumably considered acceptable) expected collateral damage.

The important thing with a situation like that is to be ready to kill the feature as soon as people learn how to exploit it. It's one thing to see that it's theoretically exploitable. It's another to actually figure out how to selectively engineer flame wars to make a significant dent in the front page.

It would be a risky strategy because those commenters could get banned.

But unlike flagging, there is no minimum karma requirement to get involved in a flame war, right?

Risky for real commenters who care about their presence on HN. Effectively consequence-free for astroturfers.

New accounts can be handled differently by the flame war flamewar detector than established accounts.

That is, if this is a actually problem and not only a theoretical one.

Not a big problem if you grow a constant number of expendable accounts.

If I were an astroturfer, grooming accounts would be part of my daily routine. I'd probably automate it too.

I didn't know I could be banned. Now that has piqued my interest, sounds like a challenge.

Okay, looks like I am on track. Attempt at humour is a gateway drug to being banned.

It would be neat if the flamewar detector buried threads instead of entire submissions. It could work the same way as hellbanning, where the users involved would have no idea that no one else could see their posts, except it would be local to the thread in question. (Ideally, it wouldn't even hide the entire thread, it would just stop showing new posts from the users involved after a certain "flamewar" threshold--that way there wouldn't be the possibility of burying someone's legitimate commentary by starting a flamewar with them.)

Would you say you are catching 20%, 80%, or an unknown number of PR/shill type accounts on HN?

Given the size of the PR industry and the relatively low cost of posting on forums where influential people hang out I would think HN would be a tempting target, although it would have to be a sophisticated effort to go undetected.

Speaking of the flamewar detector, I'm curious: what's the balance to be struck between discouraging flamewars (or encouraging civility) and discouraging groupthink? If certain topics are in effect verboten due to the types of discussions they tend to breed, does that not induce a sort of hivemind effect that reinforces prevailing views?

For example, if articles on Microsoft tend to get driven off the front page, while articles on Apple dominate it, that presents the appearance of the HN community being pro-Apple and anti-Microsoft, which affects the types of submissions and comments that are made, which affects the types of views people feel comfortable expressing, and eventually the types of people who choose to participate. The end result is that the community actually is more pro-Apple and anti-Microsoft, and the cycle intensifies until something close to homogeneity is reached.

As desirable as it is to discourage low-signal discussion threads, is there any thought given to the side effects of doing so?

People that think this community is pro-Apple should stick around some more. This is the only place were I'm constantly seeing Apple (and Google) badmouthed with good arguments. Personally I hate Apple's products and most of my anti-Apple rhetoric received up-votes.

I've seen plenty of Microsoft related stories, but if Microsoft tends to be driven off the front page, maybe it's because Microsoft is totally uninteresting and some Microsoft proponents behave like shills, especially because they bitch and moan about the lack of interest in Microsoft, as if it's some kind of conspiracy or as if it's our duty to have an interest in Microsoft.

Agreed. The cry for attention from the Microsoft community is becoming a bit annoying, especially on HN.

Says the new account just created :)

Don't you see how paranoid this kind of comment comes across to anyone that doesn't buy the whole anti MS-conspiracy thing?

Grand parent's comment:

> Agreed. The cry for attention from the Microsoft community is becoming a bit annoying, especially on HN.

Implies that they aren't a new user. I guess they just don't post much.

> created: 803 days ago

803 days is 'just created'? Are people aging accounts on HN now?

While I may not contribute much to the chatter here on HN, I have recognized an insane amount of whining from the MSFT community. Again, this is based upon my experience and observations during my time here :)

Being driven off the front page due to lack of upvotes is completely different from having the article killed due to flagging or automatically for other reasons.

People who think all Microsoft proponents are shills are...well, Slashdot already exists, so why do they bother hanging out here? If you aren't interested in something, don't upvote it, but please don't take a dump on it either.

I said "some Microsoft proponents", as in a couple, a loud minority, etc...

Can you provide me with examples that you've had experience with? If anything, I've noticed that any remotely pro-MS gets drowned out very quickly.

Agreed, as happy Apple customer I see plenty of anti-apple sentiment. I suppose I'm a little more sensitive to it. This is a common issue on many forums.

Anti-X sentiment takes a lot less effort than writing a cogent pro-X message supporting something, and everything has it's pro- and anti- crowd. I've seen plenty of posters complain that this, and other forums are anti-Apple, anti-Linux or anti-Microsoft when in fact there's a fairly healthy mix of opinion.

Maybe there is a trend against Microsoft in the news and forum world though. It doesn't seem all that long ago that most tech news and most interesting tech articles were about Microsoft products and technologies. Maybe that's still the case and I'm living under a rock, I doubt it because I still use mostly Microsoft platforms at work but it's possible, but there just doesn't seem to be all that much new and interesting stuff coming out of Microsoft these days. It's fairly rare that anything by them moves the needle in terms of tech punditry. They need to radically increase the value proposition of Windows and Metro just doesn't cut it. Maybe the Metro version of Office will help it get some traction but at this stage even that may not be enough.

> Anti-X sentiment takes a lot less effort than writing a cogent pro-X message supporting something

I would say that both take equally little effort to do lazy, and both take equally large effort to do good.

If someone goes around and say that windows version so and so has great battery time, a lazy response is to simply disagree with it. A good response looks for benchmarks and ask why said sources do not support the original commenter's arguments, and if the commenter himself/herself has any sources to support the claim.

The reverse is equally true, in that finding sources takes equally efforts no matter what point of view one try to share.

While I love macs and some Google services, I think the critique Аpple and Google receives here in HN, about some annoying decisions they make, is completely justified.

So, I guess Microsoft news/posts get pushed back simply because most of the people here are not interested in them and don't want to see them. And I totally don't see how this is a problem.

Anyway, OP, either deal with it or stop posting here. In any case, please stop creating meaningless threads like this one.

> So, I guess Microsoft news/posts get pushed back simply because most of the people here are not interested in them and don't want to see them

Well if that would be the case, the vote counts would look a little bit different. MS related submissions do not lose by votes, they face the problem that a few HN mechanics gives veto powers to small groups that are loud and pissed enough. Likewise, it is very difficult to argue that the whole NSA shit is not an indicator for the US heading towards fascism or that the tech scene may have a problem with sexism.

Agreed. I'm a mostly happy Aple user, however some of my most up voted comments have been those pointing out deep flaws in Apple systems and tool. Discuss iTunes hatred, iCloud pain, design failings or shines screens and watch the up votes roll in.

I don't see it, I commented against apple in minutes some one immediately quoted a comment from another post which seemed anti-apple. Yea I'd say HN is pro Apple.

I'm not arguing that HN is pro-Apple, I was just using it as an easy counter-example to the anti-Microsoft phenomenon raised by OP. It could be any stance on any issue and the mechanisms I described would still be in play.

In fact, it doesn't even need to be specifically pro- or anti-anything. Apple and Google are both companies that generate a lot of discussion on HN, with people both supporting and criticizing them. By contrast, one could argue that HN seems largely apathetic to Microsoft. If this perceived apathy on the part of the community is being amplified by the flamewar detector, then the perception is strengthened until it becomes reality: the people who want to discuss Microsoft simply go elsewhere.

I'd like to stress that this is not an issue I think is leading to the imminent demise of HN, but rather simply a potential long-term problem that should at least be recognized.

> Speaking of the flamewar detector, I'm curious: what's the balance to be struck between discouraging flamewars (or encouraging civility) and discouraging groupthink? If certain topics are in effect verboten due to the types of discussions they tend to breed, does that not induce a sort of hivemind effect that reinforces prevailing views?

I'm really interested in this basic question as well. I come to the comments section to see discussion, even if it may sometimes be somewhat violent discussion. I don't really find I learn much from agreement.

This particular mechanism feels flawed to me because it's so invisible. I don't know what I've missed.

Huh, maybe cooldeals and recoiledsnake were the same entity; looks like both stopped commenting at exactly the same time.

But the more salient point is, were he/she/they completely wrong in their accusations? Were all the examples he/she/they presented of articles dropping off the frontpage just instances of flamewar detection, or natural HN ranking at work, or something else?

Ironically, this submission is at #8 even though it has 290 points and was submitted just 4 hours ago

Meanwhile the #2 item was submitted 5 hours and it only has 90 points.

IMO anyone who observes HN reaction to any Microsoft topic (that isn't a virulently anti-Microsoft submission) knows that these topics will get pushed down to the back pages. In some cases, the reason may be flagging, in other cases, it may be the flamewar reason (that pg cites above)

Regardless of the reasoning, it is unfortunate that pg is unwilling to admit that this is a problem (and unfortunately, he does also reflect the thinking of most HNers). Fwiw in terms of disclosure, I was an SDE, then dev-lead at Microsoft in the 90s/00s and dev-manager for a few years later on, but I left the company in 2007 and since then, I've been running the company I founded.

> it is unfortunate that pg is unwilling to admit that this is a problem

I think pg thinks there is a problem, and is almost surely willing to admit it.

I think he just doesn't see a way of solving it that doesn't involve the discussions here on HN becoming flamewars... Which is also a serious problem...

This looks to me very much like a doctor prescribing a drug with unfortunate side effects. You still do it, but you're also keeping an eye out for new drugs that don't cause as many headaches.

Good point. It's an error tradeoff between detecting too many false flamewars and not detecting enough flamewars. It might be kind of interesting to study the effects in terms of bias on the actual reported articles vs the submitted articles.

Ironically, this submission is at #8 even though it has 290 points and was submitted just 4 hours ago

This is a selfpost, and selfposts are automatically penalized.

I.e. it's an invalid comparison, because the #2 item is a link to a URL, whereas this post isn't. Selfposts require many more votes to keep pace with URL submissions.

Are you speculating that this is an invalid comparison or do you actually know that the only reason (or even ... primary reason) for the push-down was the fact that it was a "Ask HN" post ?

I've been on HN for much longer than your 2-month old account and (based on the ranking of other "Ask HN" and "Show HN" posts I've seen), I suspect that you're speculating and that your assertion is incorrect.

The huge inconsistency between points and ranking happen on a large number of Microsoft-related posts and almost all of them point to external websites.

[update:Reply to LukeShu] Thanks LukeShu, it is good to know how ranking is implemented.

Btw I didn't question whether the absence of URLs reduced the ranking or not. My question was whether the absence of URLs was the only reason (or at least the primary reason) for the push-down of this specific post.

It seems clear that the .4 multiplication rule could not have been the only reason.

As per the .4 multiplication rule, the post with 290 points should have been downgraded to 116 points. Yet, 4 hours after submission, it was at #8. The #2 post only had 90 points and had been submitted 5 hours earlier. So it seems like the push-down was partly caused both by the 0.4 rule and partly by other factors.

Anyway, I appreciate your investigation. In spite of being on HN for the past few years, I never knew that posts without a URL, got hit by this 0.4 rule.

It is an invalid comparison. That isn't to say that the community doesn't punish Microsoft-related posts, but self-posts are penalized by the algorithm. Specifically, the score is multiplied by .4 if it doesn't contain a URL.

HN's ranking algorithm[1] (as of 2010-10-12):

    (= gravity* 1.8 timebase* 120 front-threshold* 1
       nourl-factor* .4 lightweight-factor* .17 gag-factor* .1)

    (def frontpage-rank (s (o scorefn realscore) (o gravity gravity*))
      (* (/ (let base (- (scorefn s) 1)
              (if (> base 0) (expt base .8) base))
            (expt (/ (+ (item-age s) timebase*) 60) gravity))
         (if (no (in s!type 'story 'poll))  .8
             (blank s!url)                  nourl-factor*
             (mem 'bury s!keys)             .001
                                            (* (contro-factor s)
                                               (if (mem 'gag s!keys)
                                                    gag-factor*
                                                   (lightweight s)
                                                    lightweight-factor*
                                                   1)))))

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781417

Flamewar detector sounds like a bad solution IMO. Why not warning/banning system to handle comments? As long as the argument is factual, without fallacies (and not subject to Poe's law), I would be glad if we could keep the discussions open even if people have radically different views.

If you indeed insist on closing the comments on flamewar detection - good courtesy suggests keeping the comments open for public review.

As for the conspiracy folk, why not make a multiple account detector and ban such folk?

Not all factual discussions free of fallacy are productive. An Emacs user and I could easily talk past each other for hours.

> It set off the flamewar detector.

This seems to be a recurring issue on HN, and a reliable generator of conspiracy theories. Would it be possible to have a small label signaling when a given article was flagged by the detector?

I remember that recoiledsnake post and found it baseless then as well. Not only is a claim like that basically impossible to verify using the information we have, it's also a perfect case study of selection bias, since of course the thing that you care about jumping down the page is going to stand out to you, while the many many stories you either don't care about or don't notice sail up and down the page without raising any flags.

Personally I don't flag submissions for the submission itself unless I find it completely egregious, either from a journalistic perspective (many techcrunch-like articles) or just flat out lying/snake-oil, but I will at times flag a story if the conversation here on HN has gone well past the net-negative for humanity limit IMO. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. My understanding is that HN has systems designed to discourage things like that (eg rapid flamewars) and mods may do the same as me. The Nokia tablet story, while fine itself, was attracting pretty shitty comments. I wouldn't be surprised if it was getting knocked for those and not people trying to suppress Microsoft news. (and, yes, that does suggest a DoS approach, but hopefully there are other things (permadeath, etc) keeping that in check).

edit: ninja'd

I do not have qualitative data backing up my conjecture, but i do think MS stories/products tend to have a short life on frontpage. This maybe selective bias at play, but maybe in future I will scrape some data from hnrankings about this. Even though interpretation will still be flimsy. The reason behind flags will not be known and can be various. That particular thread ticked off flamewar detector though.

Microsoft vs Apple vs Google vs ??? ... It's all the same, religion by any other name. They've all done things that aren't exactly in the best interest of the users of their systems... and sometimes act against even their own best interest.

As a recently added employee at GoDaddy, not by acquisition, I was a bit surprised by the visceral hate coming from the buyout of Media Temple.. my understanding is that MT will operate as a separate unit, and a lot of its' practices are moving into GoDaddy. I had a lot of anxiety at first, and sometimes still do. It's a culture that is dramatically and rapidly changing, but it does take time.

I've known plenty of people who work for MS over the years who are pretty bright, and do good work. I happen to be one of those people who like .Net (C# in particular), and can appreciate a lot of the very thoughtful decisions that have been made. On the flip side, I feel that the brand affiliation between products, while keeping windows alive for a long time, at the expense of potentially greater revenues (Office for iOS/Android), has hurt them a lot.

I've been spending roughly half my server-side dev time in node.js, and recently even more than that. I feel that docker.io + LXC + node.js is an incredible combination that MS doesn't match. I think that WebStorm is good enough, and VS is really getting a bit bloated and slow (plugins make it more effective, but more bloated and slow).

Who knows where things may go, I don't always choose MS, but I don't hate them. I currently have my HTPC running Linux+XBMC, my desktop at home and work are Windows (with VMWare for some linux work), and my laptop is a Mac. I use what I feel is best for a given task.

/$.02 + inflation

> i do think MS stories/products tend to have a short life on frontpage. [...] That particular thread ticked off flamewar detector though.

If you look back on times that people have complained about Microsoft posts being persecuted by flagging rings, you will (as far as I can see) without fail find a flamewar.

I don't mean to gloat, but I've been pointing this out for months. It is nice to be vindicated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5759369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6030087

OK, I didn't accuse you but I did accuse another poster of being an MS shill. I'll admit I could have been more diplomatic. Still, as I recall, the person I accused was a professional "evangelist" (or something similar) for MS by their own admission writing an article about, what do you know, hatred of MS.

And that's the thing. By the evangelist's own admission, MS is deeply hated in society at large. It's understandable but unlike a lowly MS engineer (who I do pity), a professional corporate "face" can't play the innocent victim.

Just consider. The very recent imposition of the Metro/Windows 8 interface on a widely unwilling public is prima facie evidence of MS' continuing abuse of it's particular monopoly.

The point isn't that MS has more of a monopoly than other corporations. It is that MS has a long, long history of wielding the big stick of their monopoly openly and brutally against enemies and "non-combatants" alike. A huge number of Windows users woke up without a Start Button because Balmer was gunning for a new market. Lie all you want about this being for the average person's benefit, you only prove my point. Yeah, I just don't think you can spin maneuvers like that into "we just build the future".

Edit: Just to note, I don't do editorial flagging. I'm not out to "get" MS but, well, they bring up feelings.

>The very recent imposition of the Metro/Windows 8 interface on a widely unwilling public is prima facie evidence of MS' continuing abuse of it's particular monopoly.

How is that in any way an evidence for abuse of monopoly? I have Windows 7 on my laptop and have no immediate plans to upgrade it to Windows 8. Unless they force it through automatic updates or cancel my Win 7 license, there is clearly no abuse. You can still vote with your wallet.. you know?

>A huge number of Windows users woke up without a Start Button.

Huh?

I think you are describing things from the point of view of the aware, tech-savy user. The average user buys stuff and things happen.

People bought laptops and the laptops weren't what they were expecting. There's a lot they could have done in the abstract. There's a lot less they were capable of doing in reality.

I can understand from a moral/business perspective that drastic changes should be avoided in new releases but how is that an abuse of monopolistic power?

Would you call Ubuntu's decision to suddenly switch all the window controls (Minimize, Maximize, Close) from left to right in one version an abuse of their "monopoly" in the Linux desktop world?

The majority of users don't live in a Ubuntu world, they have to deal with Microsoft at their job or school. Corporations are demanding Windows 7 over Windows 8.

And Linux users have a full spectrum of distributions to choose from. If Ubuntu acts like an ass-hat, I can easily switch to Mint when the LTS version is no longer supported. I have a choice of desktops environments that all run the same services and applications. I'm not locked in, nor is my data. Squeeeeeee!

I'm no fan of MS: see my comments in general. But your criticisms are a bit too extreme. MS announces EOL dates well in advance of stopping sales [1]. Those who want to hoard up on licences can do so. Windows 7 is still available for sale [1]. Those who did not want Metro could still have used Win 7. In any case, MS listened to its customers and brings back these features in Win 8.1 -- or so I hear: Linux single-booter here.

[1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/products/lifecycl...

The very recent imposition of the Metro/Windows 8 interface on a widely unwilling public is prima facie evidence of MS' continuing abuse of it's particular monopoly.

Huh? First of all, companies impose new things on their customers all the time. Secondly, I thought a company was abusing their monopoly when they use it to extort profit where there was none before? Changing the UI doesn't seem to be exploiting monopoly power for profit...

Umm... You are accusing MS of just forcing their choices upon their users? Isn't that Apple's standard (and actually well documented. Remember that article about Innovator's dillemma and jobs?) policy? I thought apple was famous for completely ignoring their users and telling them WHAT they want. Now THAT is use of monopoly. Google does that too (remember closing off gtalk?).

Secondly, the Metro UI thing, IMHO wasn't a forceful use of power. It was a bet (a lost one) that touchscreen laptops will become predominant. And So they created a UI based on that bet. They (incorrectly) thought that people want exactly the same UI on all their devices. So it's not that they are EVIL, just misguided.

So i don't HATE Microsoft, i just pity them.

The problem is not that MS is forcing choices on their desktop users. Apple, Google, Yahoo, and everyone else does that. The problem is that MS is forcing terrible choices on their desktop users.

They had one job. One job. Don't screw up Windows. And what'd they do? They screwed up Windows.

Metro was a mistake. And again, everybody else makes mistakes, too. But then they went full retard, and refused to backtrack. That part is the reason for the "hate."

You sound like someone who hasn't used Windows 8 before, or not for longer than half a day anyways. Windows 8 in desktop mode really isn't any different from Windows 7, except for the fact that the Start menu is now fullscreen instead of a popup menu. Metro a mistake? That might be your opinion, but I fiercely disagree with it.

Just because you don't like Metro, for whatever reason that might be, does not make it a mistake.

14 years experience in IT. Had to google to find the shutdown switch. Sorry but Win8 is absurd.

I wouldn't say absurd... just different. I mean, if you have been using windows for 14 years and are used to teh Maximize button, and then you use MacOS and click the box button beside the x and.. something COMPLETELY different happens. does that make MacOS absurd? or does that make windows absurd to Mac users? (while proponents of both OS would tell you YES it DOES make it absurd, but they are both WRONG aren't they?) Different isn't necessarily a bad design.

Your computer's power button functions as a shutdown switch. After 14 years in IT, you have never realised that?

My computer's power button is on the other side of the room.

Don't break useful, common functionality because you think it's not important.

I was using it in a touchscreen tabletop.

Sticking to my guns on this one and choosing to let your sarcastic tone slide.

Oh come off it. Name me an established software company that hasn't forced choices on their desktop users that many of them have considered "terrible". Over a similar timescale Apple has been responsible for the debacle that was Apple Maps (to reduce dependence on Google) and the dubious aesthetics of iOS7 whilst Google and Yahoo have forced millions of users to choose other services as they go on shutdown rampages (to focus on more profitable areas) and in Yahoo's case, touted the availability of your old Yahoo email addresses to phishers (because they're crazy?). Meanwhile, despite your "refuse to backtrack" claim Microsoft has brought the much-missed Start button back in the first major patch and continues to ship Windows 7 - you can even downgrade your 8 license if you miss it too much. You can't do that with iOS7 which despite being a relatively conservative update had equally mixed reviews...

Criticising Microsoft is like shooting fish in a barrel, so it's odd you'd pick on them for innovating without thought to convention and backward compatibility - an area where they're generally more cautious than the peers you named - and a product that actually has plenty of fans.

The issue was never about the loss of the Start button. It was about the loss of the Start menu. That hasn't been fixed.

I don't understand why so many people fall for this misdirection.

I don't understand why so many people think a small text menu is better than a full page customizable selection screen with decent built-in search...

It's called "mental context."

Also, what kind of drugs does one need to ingest to make it seem like a good idea to enforce UI conventions optimized for 4" cell phones on a user with a pair of 30" desktop monitors? Are we talking plant-based alkaloids, aromatic hydrocarbons, or what?

I guess it's a person to person thing. I am still on win7 and i usually have a lot of windows open, and i rarely ever browse through the start menu. What i usually do is press the windows button, and start typing the name of the program i wanna use. OR I press win+D to get straight to the desktop (a full screen menu consisting of things i frequently use) and choose from there.

So for someone like me, isn't the Metro Start menu good design? It has both the type-to-search thing and a full screen menu of icons i usually use.

Look i admit it seemed a little intimidating when i first saw it. Heck we have been using the start menu for more than a decade! It's almost part of our DNA now, so seeing the entire screen change in place of a menu is.... unexpected. But is it really that bad? Do you REALLY still browse through the start menu?

What i usually do is press the windows button, and start typing the name of the program i wanna use.

This debate was settled when Windows replaced MS-DOS. Most users do not want to remember, or type, the names of the programs they want to use.

Do you REALLY still browse through the start menu?

Yes, frequently.

Then you are simply a different user type.

Btw I presume from the bit about ms dos that you dont llike shells. But thats ur preference

No, I live at the Windows command prompt, pretty much. But like you said, I'm a different user type.

The difference between me and the people at Microsoft is that I understand that there are different user types. None of which asked for their desktop PC to behave more like their cell phone.

Exactly. That was the big mistake behind windows 8. Their "one interface for all devices" idea. We didnt WANT same interface on all devices

But they're not forcing you to use Windows 8, do they? In the days of DOS and Win 95, they used every dirty trick in the book to force competitors out of the market. Nowadays they can't do that anymore. A lot of software that was only available on DOS or Windows is now available on Mac and Linux.

And even if you do need Windows, Win7 works fine. I feel forced to switch from XP to 7, but that's not such a terrible move. I'll skip Win8, and maybe there won't even be a Win9.

Or maybe it'll be better. Microsoft has a history of alternating good and bad products. XP, Vista, win7, Win8... just one example

Just consider. The very recent imposition of the Metro/Windows 8 interface on a widely unwilling public is prima facie evidence of MS' continuing abuse of it's particular monopoly.

If they were truly a monopoly, they would not have seen it as important to respond and revise Windows 8. Real monopolies can abuse their customers and have no qualms about it. Microsoft is no longer in that position, so they changed direction once they saw what was happening in the market. The fact that they responded to the market and changed course is evidence that they have no monopoly power in this matter. They simply made a huge mistake due to being terrified of what iPad was doing to them, and they decided wrong. It's nothing more than that.

And besides, it's not like they didn't have a public beta program in the first place.

If they were truly a monopoly, they would not have seen it as important to respond and revise Windows 8.

Obviously things aren't black and white, we're arguing the degree of monopoly of MS. Consider, yes, eventually you hit the elephant hard enough with a 2x4 and it responds. It didn't respond much even then. And even government granted, official monopolies respond a little bit criticism.

Real monopolies can abuse their customers and have no qualms about it.

Many people would view MS as being just that way. But sure, maybe there's some leeway. But "no monopoly power" is bending the stick ridiculously far in the other direction. I mean, MS is convicted monopolist. They already lost a lawsuit in the 90's. [1] MS' strangle-hold PC operating system remains the same even if other markets (the web, the phone etc) have risen. (Edit: Consider, if MS did face competition in the PC operating system market, they might feel pressure to improve the PC rather than just milking their position for the purpose of entering other markets.)

And besides, it's not like they didn't have a public beta program in the first place.

Now there's some counter evidence to all your earlier argument. All the beta people were expressing shock and horror and MS did ... nothing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.

Wait... how is getting rid of the start button monopolistic, exactly?

Oh how you must suffer typing that comment on the Surface RT you've been forced at gunpoint to use.

This karma is just so ---. Sorry, dudes, I think some of you act like petty Hens sometimes. Watch--I get banned?

Bear in mind that Microsoft isn't exactly a well regarded player with the tech crowd. Many of us grew up watching our favourite technologies being assimilated and/or wiped out by them, so there is always going to be suspicion and resentment.

In case you are genuinely wondering, a lot of the hate towards Microsoft stems from their historical hostility towards open standards[0] and open source[1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

And things like ACPI: http://www.osnews.com/story/17689

This! Many hackers who were growing up in the nineties had their opinions of Microsoft negatively affected by the strongarm tactics applied against Linux and open-source/free software. I'd say this strategy continues - e.g. "secure" boot, but the late nineties was when the animosity between the two groups peaked and it has never quite gone away.

And I'd add the antitrust case and IE's intransigence to web standards as another major reason that this distrust exists.

Speaking only from my own experience, the Microsoft shops I worked in were quick to regurgitate the FUD talking points that Microsoft had been spreading. This strengthened my Anti-MS resolve instead of weakening it, and the shops since then have increasingly enjoyed the benefits of that resolve, creating a positive feedback loop in the process.

I owe Microsoft a huge debt of gratitude for stoking the fire. As much as I zealot-level hate them, we're all better off because they put the debate front-and-center.

They created a useless debate as FUD. There is no real debate about e.g. GPL vitality any more than MS stack virality. There is no real debate about Linux copyright or patent legitimacy.

Merit or not, the debate made going to work a lot more fun. Being a rebel against the empire gave me purpose, causing me to marshall my career into a series of deliberate steps instead of slipping into the complacency of just being a "day coder".

Let us also not forget the fact that microsoft uses their patent portfolio to extort money from android OEMs...

Apple?

excusing one asshole with another?

Yes, growing up in the 90s with awesome software that didn't need Windows. I loved DOS. And somebody else mentioned Amiga, probably the most awesome computer and community ever, too bad they went out of business. And OS/2 2.0 really impressed me, the ability to multitask Windows and DOS applications on the screen at the same time. So many interesting applications, too many to list here.

So Microsoft in the 90s was like bulldozing an eclectic downtown to build a Walmart. (The same way Facebook is destroying the Internet, but I digress.) At the time Windows was compelling to Joe Blow, a straightforward, boring UI that anybody could figure out. Computer technology was just not very popular yet so there was only room for so many players.

But thanks to Linux I'm finally free of Microsoft! I can't remember the last time I used Windows for anything. OpenOffice and GIMP are totally awesome BTW if you are still stuck with Windows.

To add to the MS complaints: random reboots to update the software while you're working on something important. This is typical of Microsoft's poor treatment of the user. To Windows you're an idiot child. Linux is respectful and assumes you're an adult.

This is pretty much exactly how I feel... I started learning to code in 1988. DOS + Desqview, OS/2 1.x, OS/2 2.x, Some Early '90s Unix with 2 3foot x 3foot boxes of documentation...

Texas A and M Linux, Yggdrasil...

In all that time I used and tried to function with Windows, starting with 3.x. It didn't really work for me. Add to that the bundled aspect (which pissed me off greatly, I had to pay for a DOS/Windows license only to wipe the machine and install OS/2 or Linux)

I spent ~$2000 with Microsoft for their OS/2 SDK only to have it abandoned a short time later with no refund available.

Microsoft has earned my dislike. But still, it's hard to get a quality laptop without Windows, unless you want to way overpay for Apple or deal with not getting exactly what you want (Linux based laptops).

Microsoft has, without a doubt, the best overall bunch of development tools but feels the need to break things every year or two...

sigh

Idiot child indeed. :)

Yes Quarterdeck (DESQview) was awesome for multitasking. I used it to run a multi-node BBS (two phone lines) on a 286! Multiplayer games, split-screen chat. Though for games Galacticom was so much more awesome at multitasking--I actually interviewed there in high school.

And don't forget Microsoft took a big crap on the Internet with free copies of Frontpage ;-)

Apple maintains many of the same positions, yet they are loved. Apple actually uses a lot of open source, yet rarely contribute back. Microsoft Research contributes a ton to computing research.

Note: writing this in Google Chrome on my Macbook

Well Google Chrome as of last year was based on Apple's open source Webkit so that's not quite true.

Webkit comes from KDE's KHTML project which was GPL'ed. Apple was required to open-source it.

WebKit is not GPL. Its admixture of BSD and LGPL.

Webkit isn't Apple's open source. It was already open source when KDE started it.

KDE didn't start "WebKit" per se. Apple definitely deserves some credit for what they did, but you're right: Konqueror originated it all.

I don't love Apple for some of the same reasons I don't love Microsoft.

Embrace, extend, extinguish is a tactic more aggressive than using open source but not contributing much back. Maybe you've forgotten how strong the MS dominance became in the late 1990s. Governments (US and EU) were going after MS -- not just aspects of their privacy agreements (as with Google today), but threatening to divide MS into separate corporations. Friendships were broken when people changed sides.

This was before the current tumult caused by the internet and mobile computing. It kind of seemed, back then, that things were going to just continue as they had been, only more so, and everything would be built on top of Windows.

This reaction (over-reaction?) to MS, then, comes from historically-rooted fear. It's a powerful emotion, and sometimes it can be correct.

You know, maybe there's an argument that the Unix world has a persecution complex, because there have been license and freedom debates since the very beginning. Here's an illustrative fragment: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/origins-of-geek...

Define rarely? What about Webkit, LLVM, and CUPS?

> Define rarely? What about Webkit, LLVM, and CUPS? These were already established opensource technologies. Apple has improved these technologies. But LLVM, Webkit or CUPS would exist even if there was no Apple.

Erhm, "established" yes, but with a very small base. LLVM was an academic project - Apple hired Lattner to form a team and fund the development of the project.

WebKit was not established, Apple forked it from KHTML and it would not be the dominant engine without Apple.

Let's also not forget that BSD would be a rare sight at this point if not for Apple.

Apple maintains many of the same positions, yet they are loved.

There are more than a handful of us who despise Apple, and for mostly the same reasons we despise Microsoft. They pimp their closed-source, proprietary, locked-down bullshit, and it's "walled garden", closed-off ecosystem just like MS pimp theirs. I have no use for either of them.

Note: written using Chrome on Fedora Linux.

These days, Apple is probably more hated than Microsoft. Not as much as MS was back in the day, but more than modern, sheepish-looking Microsoft.

I gotta say it weirds me out when people assert that everyone loves Apple, because it happens a lot; almost as often as people go on vitriolic rants against everything Apple-related.

> These days, Apple is probably more hated than Microsoft.

Perhaps, but the HN sample population is still biased favorably towards Apple.

I deem myself biased towards Microsoft, i.e. I would prefer to work for Microsoft over Google, Apple, Facebook, et al. I use Microsoft products (alongside OSS, Apple, Google,...) and quite like what they are doing in the last years. I find .NET very good for what it is meant for, etc.

And I think that while there are some MS haters around here. There are not nearly as many as die hard MS fans would have us believe.

And then there's their stand that Open Source is un-American.

http://www.salon.com/2001/02/15/unamerican/

Wasn't it Steve Ballmer who called Linux cancer or something?

Hiya Sean,

So you posted a real classic flamewar topic here... heh. Enjoy the war. But here's my take on Microsoft Corp, since you asked nicely.

You guys don't play nice. You've never played nice, and the fact that you've gotten better lately seems to be more due to the fact that you've lost dominance and have to interop with other operating systems. I'm not really going to provide significant examples, there are lots out there for a quick search. Things like file formats, threading models, frigging slash directions in filenames, deviance in compiler standards. Not to mention that MS had a terrible rep for being aggressive and with bad ethics in the 80s and 90s (leaving aside the F/OSS fight).

Technically, I find MS offerings to still be catching up in automatability to Linux. Still. Not only that, but you have had since the 90s this obnoxious habit of having "moving targets" for your APIs. So learning one API just meant that I'd have to learn a new one to do the same thing in a year.

I've recently had the opportunity to do heavy .NET development, and my opinion is that as a developer whose worked for years in Linux, Microsoft technologies wasted my time comparatively. Everything from Windows 8 out to the shenanagins with IIS to actually get my webapp deployed. I was able to do equivalent work in Ruby on Rails (a language and framework I didn't know) in a fraction of the time I spent fighting C#, MVC API and IIS; this experience was repeated with Caveman and Common Lisp (a framework I didn't know, a language I did). I can not believe how painful it is to develop on Microsoft tooling, and how meekly people accept it as the way it is. I don't like having my time wasted.

I'm not going to say Apple or Google (or Oracle, SAP, etc, etc, etc) is blameless, okay? But I don't really like Microsoft policy and technologies, as a rule of thumb. Note that I really respect your arm of the company - MSR - and think that it does great stuff like F#, Pex, and others. That still doesn't obviate my dislike of MS as a corporation.

Regards, Paul

I work with ruby/rails, node.js/coffeescript, python, scala and some other stuff on a daily basis on my day job. Thanks to MSDN-AA, i had to work with the complete Microsoft-Stack at University the last year, given every single tool for free (including visual studio ultimate). Guess what? It was just a pain. I can't even describe in words how unproductive it feels to work with .NET when you are used to the latest "hipster"-stuff to get things done beautiful in minutes instead of hours/days. Not to mention that all the tools usually cost a few bucks if you have to buy it... i wouldn't. Thanks to the MSDN-AA program, I and most of my fellow students never want to touch Microsoft stuff again.

Microsoft spend huge affords to create nice stuff, but for decades they just don't get it. And i don't get why people working with .NET regulary stop complaining after a while and think that ugly workflows are "ususal".

Meh, some of the tools are like vim. Hard to get started, great when you know them. It sounds to me like you are hating because you didn't spend enough time using these things.

That's what I'm getting out of pretty much this entire post.

As an asp.net mvc developer by trade, I could easily say that it could take me hours/days to get stuff done in node.js/rails/django/name-your-framework, that I could otherwise get done in minutes in mvc. Of course, I'm self-aware enough to realize that it's because I have 4 consecutive years of experience with .net, but only a cumulative of maybe a few months in all other technologies (php/rails/python/c/c++) combined (not including school-work.)

That's a reasonable thing to say, but when I could get a RoR app developed in a fraction of the same time as MVC .NET, despite being ignorant of Ruby or Rails and MVC (I knew C# a bit beforehand), it was pretty much game over, RoR won.

I've worked with a lot of languages and a lot of frameworks over the years, and the ones from Microsoft are always hands down the most needlessly complicated and poorly documented of the bunch. PHP may be a double claw hammer, but at least it's a really well documented double claw hammer. MVC includes at least 5 different kinds of double claw hammer, a normal hammer, a combination hammer/chainsaw, a mislabeled jar of nitric acid, and a swiss army knife, and half complete and half accurate documentation of 2/3rds of it.

You like MVC because you've basically spent the time to find all the good bits and just pretend all the tons and tons of horrible bits don't exist. Good for you, but that also means anyone new to basically any MS tech has to spend years learning where all the mines are buried, when instead they could use basically any other tech stack in the world and not have to worry about navigating a mine field in the first place.

Oh, and just for fun every 5 years or so MS deprecates that particular mine field, lays a new one, and forces everyone to go play in the new minefield instead.

I disagree that MVC is not well documented, but perhaps I've just learned where the good documentation is (for MVC.)

That said, I have to agree that every time I've dived into PHP/RoR, there have been plenty of articles with well-drawn maps of the minefield (to borrow your analogy.)

> Oh, and just for fun every 5 years or so MS deprecates that particular mine field, lays a new one, and forces everyone to go play in the new minefield instead.

I know I started at the beginning with this new minefield (MVC came out less than a year before I started using it,) but I don't see this happening as much, at least not with MS's web offerings. The last version or two of MVC and EntityFramework have been OSS under Apache 2, so they can continue to be developed even if MS decides to go a separate route.

I understand that this is not the case for their desktop and mobile offerings, and that they have jerked their developers in that field around in different directions each time they come out with a new OS. I think that their web offerings are more stable. The only things that may change fundamentally are server components (IIS, SQL Server, MVC, EF, etc.), or the browser. If the browser changes, everyone's screwed; and if the server components change, the developer can simply decide to stay on older versions (until licenses run out, which I'll concede as one problem.)

And of course, all this flows back to documentation. PHP/Python/RoR have much better documentation because they're all much more widely used. If more people used MVC, more people would write about it, and there would be more documentation for it.

The only remaining issue is a pretty big one: cost. Yes, there's a VS Express Web Edition, but that has its own issues. So, you're left with BizSpark as the next best option. It's what I've done. I have 2 more years left before I have to decide whether to start paying. So far it's great, but I know that it's going to come back and bite me in the ass unless I start something profitable before then.

And I believe that that's the real reason that it's not more widely used; or at least the original reason, with lack of documentation and other MS-hate being secondary to and/or consequences of it. In a community where people have 5 ideas fail before hitting something profitable, it's hard to justify the extra cost of $1000 or more per developer, even if it's actually free for the first few years. Why risk paying $1000+ per developer and an extra $100+ per server 3 years from now, when you can start with something free and have it still be free 3 years from now? That's what it all boils down to.

I'll admit, I'm probably tossing in the towel on MVC soon. But it's not because of poor documentation or fear of being forced to switch to a new API requiring a large rewrite on my part. It's because 1) the IDE and servers are 5-10x more expensive than those for Python/Ruby/Node/PHP; and 2) everybody's using Python/Ruby/Node/PHP, so finding work is tough. After all, what good is working on a side project to show off my MVC skills, if nobody will hire me for it anyway?

Couple of things that might help you in dealing with the ASP.net stack:

REST - ignore WebApi and jump straight into ServiceStack. Deployment - Octopus is your best friend IIS - if you really hate IIS then run .net on Linux with Mono.

http://www.servicestack.net/ http://octopusdeploy.com/documentation/getting-started

This post resonated with me. I love C#, but I refuse to use it. Much of the community is tied down to proprietary API's which would mean being sucked into the MS ecosystem, meaning I'd have to kill off over half my potential market. Microsoft makes some wonderful things, but only in reaction to their competitors. Almost everything they make is better. But that's the problem. As soon as they have you, you're trapped. Then it's down the rabbit hole, and you'll find bugs you can't fix. Hideous work arounds. Limitations that force upgrading products. You're going to get stressed.

I'm not a Linux, Google, or Apple shill; but I this is why I refuse to be pulled into the Microsoft ecosystem. I simply can't respect Microsoft as they are still blatantly trying EEE with mobile/ tablet/ laptop markets. It will be sad day if Microsoft actually achieves a monopoly on any of these markets, because they'll stop innovating. They'll come out with closed libraries that only work on their devices. They'll force you to do things their way.

I'm not delusional, MS competitors aren't saints. But they all never seem to stoop that low. Shit, even Google Chrome _asks_ you if you want to use Bing as a search provider.

> MS had a terrible rep for being aggressive and with bad ethics in the 80s and 90s

That's a really important consideration. Hackers have long memories, and a lot of us don't consider "it's just business" to be in any way a relevant defense.

Basically this, particularly that last part. MS Research is awesome, they do great work. People like Simon Peyton Jones are doing really cool stuff and really helping the industry grow. That said, MS proper is basically in the exact opposite business. It boggles my mind how you can have two groups inside the same company that are so completely in opposition to each other.

I'll tell you the story of my friend Greg.

Greg has been a believer in Microsoft. He went to all the Tech-Ed conferences, attended every MSDN event he could. Conferences are grand stages that leave an impression. He drank all the cool-aid that was served at these conferences.

Things were really good early on, this was the last decade. The computing scene at that time revolved around Microsoft like the many moons of Jupiter. Greg and his team built products with Silverlight, WPF, .Net, Windows Workflow, Biztalk, Remoting, and the like. Every conference offered something new, something exciting. The apps they built worked great, looked great.

Fast forward to now. Greg is a decent programmer, but he wants a new job badly. The problem is that nobody wants to use all that stuff that he knows. People want to build on standards; apps that work on every device. Not just on Windows and not just on Internet Explorer. Greg still doesn't get it. He hasn't seen much of the world outside Microsoft, and still wonders why people don't want Silverlight. Still tells me how WPF is so much better that anything else out there. And running only on IE, why is that even a problem? Everybody has IE. Poor Greg, tough times.

There may be many issues with Microsoft. But more than anything else, I would fault them for building their entire ecosystem with total disregard for standards, their refusal to work with whatever community existed outside. This probably wasn't intentional, they must have probably believed in what they told their developers. Even though so much has changed since their glory days, there's a part of Microsoft which still refuses to engage.

There was a Steve Jobs interview from the late 90s in which he said, "The problem with Microsoft is that they have absolutely no taste". Jobs wasn't talking about aesthetics; it is true of pretty much everything from Microsoft. From UIs, to development frameworks, to tools, to shells and even APIs. Back then, having "no taste" was totally fine because people communicated far less.

Now we have a whole bunch of people who are stuck using this stuff. And many of them don't really get it yet.

Edit: I just saw that you work for Microsoft, and specifically Microsoft Research. You guys make awesome stuff. The above is mostly about the Windows platform.

Interesting take. At the moment, though, there's no "standard" for apps - just a variety of different platforms, of which Windows is one (with an ever-declining market share). Obviously there's the web-as-platform, but I wouldn't treat that the same as a native system.

Yes, because Apple always follow standards and have open implementations.

WebKit? ALAC?

On top of that, Apple's done more than any other single player (except perhaps Adobe!) to move the industry away from Flash, to open alternatives.

No, they don't always follow standards or always have open implementations, but their garden is arguably quite a bit less walled than the one in Redmond. Which makes your point a little confusing, at best.

Also related: http://www.apple.com/opensource/

Webkit was already open source before Apple started using it. ALAC was closed source until 2011.

Microsoft has released open formats as well, like XPS. And Microsoft does open source today as well. That's how the industry works today.

Sure flash is bad thing but if Sun had its way with the internet and Microsoft had not stopped them we be all doing Java applets by now.

However that's all beside the point, the point is that complaining against Microsofts closed culture and in the same sentence referencing Steve Jobs is like taking a bath in koolaid, regardless of Microsofts closed culture.

It's just double standards.

Webkit was already open source before Apple started using it.

Apple created Webkit. They were using/forked KHTML for that, but it quickly diverged.

Sorry for the error, but yes they forked something already open source.

And moreover, they could have closed-source the parts that they eventually released under BSD.

KDE started the Webkit stuff. I don't quite get why Apple made ALAC (2004) when FLAC (2001) was already there.

> Also related: http://www.apple.com/opensource/

Sure, it had its roots in KDE's KHTML and KJS, but WebKit was started as an internal Apple project, and without their efforts it's highly unlikely that KHTML/KJS would have ever developed into the dominant layout engine.

According to the guy who implemented FFmpeg's ALAC encoder, there are power benefits to ALAC over FLAC. ALAC was developed when iPods were struggling to get 8 hours of playback, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that Apple's engineers wanted to be able to match the codec to the hardware as efficiently as possible.

clang clang clang went the compiler!

Like the other projects mentioned, LLVM was open source before Apple starting leading its development.

.. But you can be sure that Apple's contributions have taken it far further than it would otherwise be.

But _clang_ wasn't; it didn't exist. Clang isn't just another name for LLVM or something; it's a compiler using LLVM.

You do know that OSX is almost entirely built on BSD? Even their compiler that builds everything was open sourced by Apple.

Well, I run Elementary on my laptop, OS X on my iMac, have an iPhone, a Nexus 7, and a BlackBerry Playbook (quite an underrated tablet for it's time). I'm a developer, and build apps for all of those devices.

And you know what? WPF _is_ nice. I _liked_ Silverlight (but am frustrated that it doesn't work under Linux, though not surprised). Microsoft make _good_ developer tools, in my personal humble opinion.

The problem I see are they still make a large amount of missteps, and don't engage the "tastemakers" of tech anymore. Any goodwill they once had has been squandered, and if you look at Yahoo! you can see that it's super difficult to get it back.

Now that Ballmer is leaving, it will be interesting to see what happens in the future -- will they get a CEO that isn't afraid to take big, bold risks? To cook the golden goose in the short-term, perhaps, to allow for growth into new markets?

Somehow I doubt it, but I wish they would.

Windows 8 has been really good to me; I've installed it (and Office 2013) on all the devices of my family and (ex)girlfriends, my ex has a Windows Phone on my recommendation. They all love it, and find it easier to use than anything in the past. Just today, I purchased a touch-screen HP All-In-One for my Grandfather, and he loves it (and is super excited about using the Kindle app while in his lean-back chair on the 22" screen, synced with his Kindle itself).

When I was working at Harvey Norman, I sold $15 000 worth of Surface and Surface Pros to customers in one month; They were easy to sell as long as you knew how to appeal to the consumers _actual_ needs. They didn't suit everyone, but for those that did no other Tablet came close.

Basically, they have more potential than nearly any other tech company out there. Something has been holding them back, and they've succeeded in spite of themselves. I hope that they can turn it around moving forward.

I recently installed a new version of Office on my dad's machine and was shocked to see that you can start using Office pretty much right away, even while it's still installing. The more complicated features (e.g., making charts) are locked out, but will be available as those bits are streamed in. Basically it bootstraps a bare bones document reader and advanced features become available as they are downloaded.

Awesome, but really brings to light how poorly MS handles advertising.

Microsoft are doing the same thing for Xbox One games- install them and play while extra levels/assets are downloaded. Sony are doing the same

What did you try to accomplish with this post? The parent post talks about the perceived mono-culture of Microsoft, and the effects this has on his "friend Greg" when Greg later tries to seek a new job.

Your post is all about how much you like Microsoft. It could likely be replaced by the words "But I like Microsoft developer tools", and still get the exact same message across. There is no sources to back it up, or arguments against or in favor of the parent post. Its the exact style of comment that creates flame-wars which HN want to eliminate.

Please, if you reply to a commenter about mono-culture and job seeking, focus your comment on that subject. Do not fall into "but I like X" kind of replies, or all you get back is "you are wrong, X is bad".

I find people that "like" companies quite amusing.

I think Microsoft has potential, but currently there is a reason I don't use any of their products nor plan to personally. Doesn't mean they don't have their place, like any product.

Also, an argument could easily be made that OP's post, which I found really interesting, is just another way of saying "Microsoft sucks", as it is merely anecdotes without sources again.

Regardless, I merely posted my opinion, like many others here. Sorry that it doesn't conform to your ideal.

> I find people that "like" companies quite amusing.

I think they pretty much account for most of the hate you see on HN. Brand identity is the new opiate of the masses.

"Endorsing products is the American way to express individuality." -- Calvin and Hobbes

http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/08/27

20 years old and still so true.

Anecdotes is better than pure opinion. They can be poked at and questioned as any other unreliable evidence, and has a place in discussions (if somewhat far down).

However, saying "I _liked_ Silverlight" is not an anecdote. I can't discuss it, poke or question it, as it is without doubt true that you do indeed like Silverlight. As substance for a discussion, it as empty as it can be. At best, I can ask you to write a new comment which explains why you like Silverlight, in which you maybe then end up using anecdotes to support your view. That would then be the actually comment of substance, in which debate, research and discussion might flow from.

In the hierarchy, "I like X" and "I don't like X" is at the bottom. As such, my "ideal" is that comments should indeed strive to be above the lowest of the lowest, even if that means just going a step above into the realm of Anecdotes.

With all due respect, anecdotes vs opinion? A blurry distinction if ever there was one. Who gets to be the arbiter of that distinction, and placement in "the" hierarchy of HN comments? It's plain as day that girvo's comment as much as jeswin's included first hand accounts of real world events (Greg and his myopia regarding non-MS tech, and satisfied friends/family/grandfather/customers that demonstrate MS' market viability). jeswin's comment as much as girvo's included personal opinion.

There was a recent HN discussion about anti-MS bias on the site. I wonder if that may be relevant.

The whole point is that although WPF / Silverlight may feel nice, they are a very rare exception that isn't crossplatform. For any non-MS development platform and language currently I've been able to trivially get a working environment on my company Mac, my home PC, and remote Ubuntu servers, where all the environment just works. (And if it doesn't 'just work' then it's on Win.) With MS developer tools, well... you sort-of kind-of can, but generally it's a basic 'hygiene factor' that they don't have.

And if you're stating '_good_ developer tools', then what is your opinion on MS-supplied basic tools - ssh app? copy/paste in Powershell? Connection libraries for their SQL server in all common (including non-MS) languages? Unicode support in console? I mean, theres a bajillion tiny, insignificant things that add up to a death by papercuts, since on Mac or Linux all third-party development environments for common languages Just Work the way they should, but I've seen numerous cases where getting up the same perl/haskell/whatever package on windows requires jumping through a dozen hoops.

C# is a quite nice language - but can I get one-click setup of it's tools on all major OS'es, and deploy code on non-windows servers as easily as with java or ruby?

Surface Pro seems like really nice hardware - but for any development needs, I'd rather want Ubuntu or MacOS on similar hardware.

MS problem is not, in general, poor tools - the problem is that it doesn't play well and integrate with the rest of the world; and in the rest of the world good integration with everything is a basic assumption even for low-quality recently started tools.

Two quick notes:

1. s/for it's time/for its time/

2. Instead of using _underscores_ for emphasis, on HN you can use asterisks, like this:

    asterisks, *like this*

When I was trying to get into the developer game (I'm self-taught with no degree so couldn't follow the normal progression) the biggest market in my hometown was (and still is) for .NET developers.

So, I joined a .NET user group, I installed VS, I started learning.

Problem was, MS was churning out the "next great thing" faster than I could learn the last great thing. While I was getting my head around WinForms, WPF came out. I started using WPF, then Silverlight arrived, which was like WPF, just a subset of it, and therefore different enough to be problematic.

But that wasn't too bad. It was the 'blessed' data layer stuff that threw me. When I started it was DataSets etc. Then it was LINQ-to-SQL, then it was very much not LINQ-to-SQL, but instead was Entity Framework.

As a newbie who was trying to make myself marketable, it felt like a bit of a hamster wheel, but then through the user group, I met .NET pros who felt exactly the same way.

And at the end of the day, the greatest irony was that when I finally broke into the market, it was a Java-based developer role on the basis of my JavaScript. So all my years of frantically spinning the .NET wheel was for naught.

I still do love F# though.

In hindsight, the thing that strikes me about .NET development is that most businesses using it really want the whole stack to be from one provider whom they trust - and as a result, third party alternatives never really get a look-in if an MS or MS blessed technology such as JSON.net (http://james.newtonking.com/json) can do the same job.

That is a massive sweeping generalisation of course, and only applicable to the limits of my experience in a small city in a small country.

I guess you also suffered from being a newbie into a myriad of technologies.

WPF and Silverlight share almost the XAML stack with little differences. One just needs to know those differences.

LINQ-to-SQL and Entity Framework are usually used together and also share common concepts.

Other vendors also keep changing their stacks, it is the job of a developer to keep up with changes and learn to quickly pick up what is relevant for a given project.

I like the Unix / OpenGL way where you start with a sensible thing and then extend it, keeping the underlying architecture somewhat consistent.

Have you ever done portable UNIX development across commercial UNIX systems?

Consistency leaves a lot to be desired as well.

It's an interesting area. I've worked with Microsoft tools and technologies since 1986, right through to today. LINQ and the Entity Framework are two technologies I avoid because they push me into a design paradigm that doesn't work for me. Try encrypting an object before saving it to a database. And then try saving that object to SQL Server and a service end point, using the same data access layer. Try loading 500k records using LINQ on a netbook.

Sure, on Windows Phone I'm forced to use LINQ, and I've written some really crazy code to hide it from my app, but at least my app is fast.

>Problem was, MS was churning out the "next great thing" >faster than I could learn the last great thing.

Same here. I design databases, and MS kept bringing new data access methods every three years; I never could wrap my head around the ADO/DAO difference, but that did not matter for long because both were replaced by .Net

I sincerely wondered if this was not a deliberate tactic by Microsoft : while developpers are busy learning their newest "next great thing", they can't invest time in anything else.

Meanwhile I learned how to use an OSS lamp stack and have been happily using it for the last 10 years. Very stable and reliable, I could not be happier.

"I sincerely wondered if this was not a deliberate tactic by Microsoft : while developers are busy learning their newest "next great thing", they can't invest time in anything else."

Bingo!

On what grounds do you confirm his speculation?

Occam's razor.

Either Microsoft is incompetent or promoting/retirement of APIs is more profitable.

A, in my opinion, simpler explanation is that they change their product to try to make it better.

>A, in my opinion

mmmh... I thought about this too.

However, MS is anything but stupid marketing wise, I find. So I dismissed incompetence.

> Meanwhile I learned how to use an OSS lamp stack and have been happily using it for the last 10 years. Very stable and reliable, I could not be happier.

I find that Java's biggest problem (stability/stagnation depending on who you ask) is also the JVM development ecosystem's benefit. There's not one body driving adoption of technologies by deciding what's supported and what's not, so technology choice is less dictated by economic imperatives.

Not sure what you mean exactly, but in any case I know nothing about Java; my LAMP stack is :

Linux, Apache, Mod_perl, Postgresql

All very pleasant to work with (1) and stable; mod_perl has a rather steep learning curve, but worth it for web work. Very powerful _and_ low cost.

( 1 : if you like Perl, obviously )

[Edit] asterik in note caused weird formatting; replaced with 1

It was the 'blessed' data layer stuff that threw me. When I started it was DataSets etc. Then it was LINQ-to-SQL, then it was very much not LINQ-to-SQL, but instead was Entity Framework.

As a newbie who was trying to make myself marketable, it felt like a bit of a hamster wheel, but then through the user group, I met .NET pros who felt exactly the same way.

Most .NET developers learn what they need to know for the project at hand. A year ago, I worked on a fairly cutting-edge EF Code-First n-tier project, with knockout.js on the front end, using ASP.NET MVC web API. I am currently extending a crufty ASP.NET 2.0 webforms app.

Adaptability is an important skill for developers. Also, each iteration of the Microsoft data access stack feels like an improvement over the earlier ones, so it's not an unbearable burden to learn it.

Hiring someone for a Java job, based on their JavaScript knowledge is fairly unconventional (to put it politely). Are you certain that the general programming knowledge you acquired through "spinning the wheel" wasn't a factor?

> Are you certain that the general programming knowledge you acquired through "spinning the wheel" wasn't a factor?

I never stopped (and never do stop) learning as much as I could, and I apologise if I gave the impression I was only learning .NET stuff. I was primarily coding in Python, but got into JS to write stealth code to automate a horrendously manual part of my day job in a government contact centre.

To clarify for you on the hire, I was hired for the JS, but expected to learn Java pretty quickly.

> Adaptability is an important skill for developers.

For sure.

If Greg is a real person, he's in great shape job-wise. There's incredible demand for .NET developers right now. Not so much in the West Coast startup world, but nearly everywhere in the corporate world.

This is my problem right now. I recently quit my corporate job doing asp.net mvc for the financial industry in NYC. I'd like to move into a startup on the west coast, but I'm having trouble finding anything that uses asp.net mvc. I'm applying to non-.net shops too, but I get the feeling that they throw my resume in the trash as soon as they notice the lack of node.js/ruby/python/java experience.

west coast can be hard to get into. They really like to know someone that knows you before pulling the trigger.

Show up at a few meetings (ther's various hacker stuff going on) and get some names on your LinkedIn. I bet that'll fix it.

One of my friends is starting a programming bootcamp. He and his assistant have been calling recruiters and tech companies all over the region, cataloguing available jobs and figuring out where the demand is.

Their findings: PHP and .Net. That's what the vast majority of companies they spoke to are hiring for.

My point is that there's a whole world of tech outside HN.

Was the survey conducted in India, by any chance?

Monster.com job listings in the US by keyword:

.NET - 1000+ positions

Java - 1000+ positions

PHP - 454 positions

Python - 295 positions

Ruby - 280 positions

Node.js - 55 positions

Lisp, Haskell, Scheme - 0 positions

It's not just the US (or India). Denmark is also, sadly, a Microsoft stronghold.

Quantity is not the same as Quality.

I expect to find a larger percentage of competent programmers for the python/ruby jobs than for the .net/java jobs.

Every job I've had so far seems to prove this true.

Personal examples hardly prove a point, but I'm a seasoned, nearly exclusive (11yr) .NET developer and I can probably code the pants off the average ruby/python developer off the street. As can many of my coworkers. See, we use this old-school knowledge of design patterns, MVC, and SOA instead of worrying about whether our code is clever enough. Do you sometimes have to interview people who learned a few buzzwords and somehow passed an MSCD test but don't understand what encapsulation means? Yes. Just like you get people in the Ruby world who opened a console and typed in "rails new" and now they have a new resume topic.

Competent programmers exist in all types of jobs with all types of platforms. In fact, I would argue that those of us who don't jump to every new fad language that comes out may likely be more productive by default. Instead of worrying about what frameworks we're going to use to supplement our Node+Json+Rails+Bootstrap+Coffeescript+blergh security nightmare, we just start coding.

One of the best programmers I've ever known and mentor to me is a .Net guy. (I'm not a .Net developer, FYI)

There are fantastic programmers in every language and lousy programmers in every language. Just the way it is.

Who is talking about quality? OP posted that the majority of development jobs are within .NET and PHP. Some guy gave the low-brow dismissal "was this in India by any chance?". I just supplied position numbers from one of the largest job sites in the US, confirming that .NET and PHP jobs (adding Java), really are the most plentiful in the US by far.

It is still pretty trivial to find a job in Python, Ruby, or JS in just about any metro area in the US. I do not know anyone in the node.js community that would even go to someplace like monster to find a job. Most of these positions are found through networking with the community, which tends to lead to finding better quality jobs anyway.

I think this says a lot more about the types of companies that post their job listings on monster.com than the types of jobs that people are being hired for generally.

Do tech companies even post on monster?

You mean tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Nvidia, Intel and IBM? Yes they do have positions listed at Monster. If by tech companies you mean week-over-week growth companies like fart.io and sfnavelgazer.com then no I don't think so. Probably Monster is not serious enough a platform for such companies, who only staff with top-tier talent. Or maybe they just can't afford the listing fees, since their 30k funding ran out.

Not everyone hires through Monster (or LinkedIn). Most of my hiring is done through networking.

Yes the majority of positions are never listed publicly, so numbers from Monster is only the tip of the iceberg. But that goes for all positions regardless of language. If you have 5 times the listed positions for one tech over the other, it would be logical to assume the amount of unlisted positions have roughly the same ratio.

It's impossible to verify this statement since the positions are never published. I have a strong feeling the most boring companies have to resort more to professional recruiters while the most fun to work for can rely on networking.

No, the US.

No. San Antonio for jobs throughout Texas.

Makes sense if you are aiming to disappear in the crowd. Just get hired because you learned the right language, not because you are good at your job, not because you are productive.

Yes, because everyone who learns .Net is a a no good unproductive drone who will disappear while every node.js/scala/weeklyhiplanguage dev is a superproductive genius.

Get a grip on reality.

Whenever i hear somebody talking MS down for not going with "standards" i have to look at the keyboard layout of my mac and start to laugh.

Seriously, this is my biggest pain when changing between OSes.

The Mac keyboard layout is older than the Windows keyboard layout, so yes, that is an example of Microsoft choosing to create its own standard.

Actually, IBM invented that keyboard layout (in 1981, which was a few years after the Apple II)

You are correct, but I mentioned ‘Microsoft’ and the ‘Windows keyboard’ because the original IBM PC keyboards did not have a ‘Windows’ key. Original Macs did have a ‘command’ key.

I suspect ‘Kayoone’ was referring to the functionality of the ‘alt’ and ‘ctrl’ keys on a Mac keyboard versus what those keys do in Windows. For example, in Windows, ‘ctrl-C‘ is used to copy, while on OS X, it’s done with ‘command-C’. The placement of the actual keys are quite similar between PCs and Macs.

The Apple ][ keyboard didn’t have an ‘alt’ or ‘ctrl’ key. The Apple IIGS had both keys, and they were placed in the same arrangement as the original IBM PC keyboard (with the ‘ctrl’ key above the left ‘shift’ key.) On later Apple and IBM PC compatible keyboards, the ‘ctrl’ key was moved to the bottom row, to the left of the alt key.

Not only the ctrl+command key but also the behavior for HOME/END/POS1 when selecting text etc. That makes it really hard for me to transition between Linux/Windows and OSX..if it werent for that i wouldnt really care which OS i use.

I already changed to the US keyboard layout which makes this alot better, the standard german Mac Layout is just total garbage.

Sorry, I don’t use of those keys. I can see how differing behavior of those keys could cramp your style, but your original argument was that Apple is to blame for that. I don’t think history is on your side there.

> Jobs wasn't talking about aesthetics; it is true of pretty much everything from Microsoft. From UIs, to development frameworks, to tools, to shells and even APIs. Back then, having "no taste" was totally fine because people communicated far less.

I think that the main problem is the MS has always tried to make things appealing to a certain crowd known as "VB developers", "drag and drop developers", etc.

I've heard too many times "You can do this with almost no code" with our cool new "Microsoft Foundation For Next Big Bullsh Blah Blah". And this is presented as a good practice. And the whole army of evangelists starts touting and praising the next BS framework. People start adopting it, other people start building other things on top of it, until everyone realizes it's BS and such practices, proclaiming "you'll write less code" lead to a pile of bad design decisions that you will later deeply regret.

tl;dr Silverlight devs don't have homes.

This story could be told of any developer who doesn't update his skills for seven years. You could tell this story for Java developers, Flash developers, PHP developers, etc. Anyone peddling skills from 2006 is going to be looking pretty dated, no matter what stack you're talking about.

I also don't see this: "I would fault them for building their entire ecosystem with total disregard for standards, their refusal to work with whatever community existed outside." My daily experience is very different. If I start a new project, it'll almost certainly be on the open-source (Apache 2.0) ASP.NET MVC platform. That gives me Twitter Bootstrap, Knockout.js, OAuth2.0, etc. It's a neatly integrated patchwork of commonly-used, standards-happy, open-source frameworks and libraries, and it'll work happily on safari and chrome and on my phone. So I don't feel particularly isolated away from the rest of the development world.

Summary is, I'm sure this vision was true years ago, but things seem to have moved on. I think that now, if I want to put together software using modern approach, there aren't approaches or technologies that the MS stack makes tricky. But I'm happy to be corrected; are there technologies or approaches I can't use fairly easily on the MS stack? Cloud computing? single page apps? continuous integration? BDD? etc. What am I missing?

Cool story, but the last time I was looking for a programming job (six months ago) I remember seeing quite a few listings for .NET developers. Probably just as many as I saw for Rails, though maybe fewer than for PHP.

> I would fault them for building their entire ecosystem with total disregard for standards, their refusal to work with whatever community existed outside.This probably wasn't intentional, they must have probably believed in what they told their developers.

No, this was very much intentional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_...

> Greg still doesn't get it. He hasn't seen much of the world outside Microsoft, and still wonders why people don't want Silverlight. Still tells me how WPF is so much better that anything else out there.

Aren't both of those technologies, if not actually dead, certainly not the things that even _Microsoft_ wants people to be using these days?

I started my career working on VB apps, and ASP then ASP.NET websites, using a Windows dev box.

After learning several OSS stacks, I have nothing but contempt for Microsoft technologies. I wouldn't say I hate MS - they are what they are - but I am certainly conditioned to be very suspicious of their offerings. I would never take a job working on a MS stack again, ever.

I currently work for a large enterprise that uses a mix of MS and OSS, and I take every chance I get to swap out the MS tech with OSS. The devs love it and it makes me happy.

I started a little later than you, same endpoint.

Same here. With the caveat that C# + F# are crazy awesome, not that I'm jumping at the bit to work with them again...

I've done some fun stuff with Mono and C# but it's significantly more clunky than just apt-get install

What does a virtual machine + language have to do with a package manager?

Installing mono was significantly more complicated than most vm/language packages on Ubuntu, and required commensurately more upkeep.

That maybe a while ago, like when Ubuntu was 9.0 and you had to compile from source code in order to get sgen? Things are much better now. Since early this year, I've been running a web service written in C# serving one of my iOS apps. That piece of service has been running happily in a tiny VPS for half a year now. Installation of the Mono runtime was an easy apt-get.

Mono is completely installed by default on older versions of Ubuntu (8-11). The runtime with some development tools is installed in 12 and 13. You can get it on any version since 8 with apt-get.

$ sudo apt-get mono-complete $ echo "using System; static class Entry { static void Main() { Console.WriteLine(\"Hello World\"); }}" > hello.cs $ mono-csc hello.cs $ ./hello.exe Hello World

It's much like ruby in that to get everything I wanted I had to go to source, which means jumping through some hoops. That's all.

F# is the bomb. Once in a while I even consider running ASP on mono so I can use F#, then I realize I'd need a windows box with Visual Studio and decide against it.

Why would you need that? The F# compiler's open source and runs just fine in MonoDevelop/Xamarin Studio (or outside of an IDE, for that matter).

you can run mvc on mono with nginx.

Will try MonoDevelop, to be honest the last time I tried MonoDevelop was when the Intel MacBooks were new, and it wouldn't run on OS X.

Downloading MonoDevelop as we speak, thanks for the reminder :)

You could just use OCaml, of which it is an obvious copy. You wouldn't get the whole MS stack, for better or worse.

Don Syme has added some interesting features to F# like type providers, so I think it is OK to say that F# has transcended its OCaml roots to become an interesting language in its own right.

Not to mention the approach to OOP is rather different in F#. It's syntactically and culturally different. Most OCaml programmers I know avoid OOP for the most part, whereas it's embraced to some extent in F#. Seems like a sort of "functional first, but feel free to use objects as you see fit" philosophy in F# versus a "functional always, objects are a failed experiment" philosophy in OCaml.

I don't mean to imply any judgment here, I'm just noting another difference between F# and OCaml.

> It's syntactically and culturally different.

Most people seem to think it's not syntactically very different: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/179492/f-changes-to-ocaml

I mean specifically the syntax for OOP support. Otherwise, much of the syntax is the same.

Absolutely, I have much love for OCaml.

Hmm, any specific examples? I really like c# as a language. ASP.NET whilst not as new and shiny as Rails etc., it's still moving in the right direction with new additions like WebAPI.

And VS is I think one of the best IDEs out there.

You could certainly provide specific examples. How exactly is VS so much better than anything else? I've used other things that worked just as well for me. And, what is "the right direction" - MS is always moving in some direction with new APIs or frameworks.

Intellisense for anything other than JS has worked far better and more consistently than IntelliJ or Eclipse. Setting up a project in Eclipse often seems like pulling teeth (with respect to tomcat, jake, etc). Most options in VS are available via the GUI or easier to install extensions.

I mostly use WebStorm, while having pretty shitty intellisense for JS itself, is a much better experience for node.js development. Second would probably be MS's Web Matrix, and I'm disappointed that MS chose not to include the, imho (with an addon) much better support for node.js into VS.

I'll say that for C# development, I really like ASP.Net MVC, I've used classic ASP in the past (both JScript and VBScript) and also used VB.Net with ASP.Net. I've used PHP in the past (hate it with a passion), as well as a dabble of Ruby (like some aspects, not as much with others). I'm warming up to CoffeeScript, and have also done a bit of Python (desktop UI) and currently toying with Go.

I'm not really tethered to MS by any means, I'm pushing for moving away from what little MS tech we're using in the product I work on. That said, VS is pretty damned good, and on a whole, I haven't used better.

Similar career arc to me but I actually recognize that a company is not a person, it is a collection of people that change. The Microsoft that exists today is far better than that of a decade or two decades ago.

Don't let prior experience prevent you from seeing when great stuff is happening.

This kind of argument appears often in threads about companies not being one entity - but it is wrong. An engineer asked by management to implement enthical program parts can either play along (thereby endorsing behavior) or go home.

A member of the legal team cannot decide to NOT extort e.g. Patent fees from e.g. Android handset makers, or allow e.g. BeOS to be installed by licensed vendors that were forbidden to do so.

A company behaves like an individual, sometimes schizophrenic, often psychopathic or sociopathic. But policy, and reponsibility is not, in fact, up to individual employees.

What you say is true of a group of sports fans, not of a company. And having watched Microsoft's stacking of the ISO committees, patent extortion and chilling effects, SCO proxy war, scathing disregard for industry standards etc - I'll say that I think they have earned all the hate they get here, and then some. The fact they they are not doing as much damage these days is mostly thanks to sliding away from the dominant position - but the culture is still one of bullying.

In what ways is RoR superior to asp.net (besides the fact it is not microsoft?) RoR is still it it's relatively infancy, has security issues, is significantly slower, and good luck finding a good IDE. To the author's point, don't just hate, give some specific reasons why one technology is superior or inferior.

Rails initial release: 2004 ASP.NET initial release: 2002

I've heard nothing but good things about RubyMine, but few people use it because a good text editor is all you need to work with most dynamic languages. C# is practically unusable without Visual Studio.

I've worked with both, give me Rails any day.

C# is practically unusable without Visual Studio.

Why?

xamarin studio is great to work with. Mono has a c# repl. OTOH if you said c# is practically unusable without resharper, I'd have some sympathy.

Little known fact about Xamarin Studio (MonoDevelop) is that there is a option to enable source analysis which is for some reason off by default. Flipping it on essentially enables resharper mode. Only item missing is auto namespace resolution for references.

Thanks, it's under: Preferences -> Text Editor -> Source Analysis

MVC released 2007/2008. WebForms has it's own purpose: RAD development in corporate environment, for vast amount of ex-VB6 devs (or any desktop RAD drag'n'drop tool). It should bring desktop devs to webs, nothing else, and its done great job. Not that I like the result, but you could build forms - heavy apps in no time! Under the WebForms and MVC is ASP.NET, and anybody could build their own web framework (and server) on top of it! Like today we have NancyFx, 6-7 years ago there was Monorail and some other MVC frameworks - but nobody used that. Because 90% of asp.net devs was exVB6 locked inside some corp building. Today, with MVC, OWIN and healthy OSS ecosystem, things are different. Even MS is supporting OWIN web middleware, which will in the end allow running web app under win/linux without any change.

Rails is an actual MVC framework, ASP.NET was an over-complicated, leaky, fairly opaque abstraction for web programming. And it took years for MS to then come out with their own MVC framework.

ASP.net MVC is still ASP.net. You're probably thinking of WebForms.

Yes, ASP.NET MVC is ASP.NET, but that neither changes, nor invalidates anything that I said.

a) Rails is an actual MVC framework. b) ASP.NET was an over-complicated, leaky, fairly opaque abstraction for web programming. c) It took years for MS to then come out with their own MVC framework.

RoR vs Asp.Net is largely community (and modules) vs tools. Both are important and I am not sure if a combination of the two is even feasible. VS is like crack, it's so good, but at the same time nuget looks like a joke compared to gems. TLDR; nobody is good at everything because different things are optimized for different cases.

''The devs love it and it makes me happy.''

Not all devs. Microsoft tools have contributed to a long, successful, and enjoyable career for me, and I have yet to find an IDE as nice as VS (any contemporary version). The MS toolsets have been mostly good to work with, a few warts not withstanding.

What OSS tools and IDEs are making your devs so happy, and making their jobs better than say, VS 2012? (serious question)

• The biggest smile was moving them from VSS to GIT (+GHE)

• Replacing Windows servers with Redhat has opened up a wealth of automation opportunities

• RoR on the frontend has allowed a much faster development and deployment pipeline (ASP.NET and Java are still used for the high-ceremony stuff)

• Our monitoring and alerting is much more straightforward and comprehensive for the OSS components

• I am so tired of propping up sickly MS servers, the Redhat servers are rock solid straight out the gate

OTOH for large enterprise, Sharepoint and Office integration works very well, that's really the MS sweetspot. I'm also interested in their new ALM offering (TFS), I haven't seen an OSS equivalent as yet. However these are not dev stacks.

I'm not saying you can't do great stuff using MS tech - stackoverflow is proof of that. But I have extensive experience in both worlds, and I'll take OSS any day.

Sure. And we shouldn't forget that Microsoft was primarily a development tools manufacturer for a long time. They have a long track record in such tools.

> What OSS tools and IDEs are making your devs so happy, and making their jobs better than say, VS 2012?

It depends to a large extent on what people are doing. To be honest, I have become so happy with VIM, BASH, base UNIX utilities, and such that I don't think I am ever likely to achieve the same productivity in an IDE. The thing is that IDE's are a fundamentally different paradigm and they make easy things a bit easier, but I think a text processing paradigm is better for the hard problems.

"What OSS tools and IDEs are making your devs so happy, and making their jobs better than say, VS 2012?"

You will believe that I am joking, but Vim, bash, git, grep, gdb, valgrind, llvm and lots of UNIX tools. We use IDA Pro a lot too.

Most of the people that work with me learned with Microsoft tools, myself included but we can't stand it anymore. Why? They are so powerless and limited, specially in the extension mechanism: extending it using your own tools, which basically do 90% of our work.

The main reason for that is that commercial companies can't let you do what you want, they can't let you do what you need like reading the system internals like with linux system utilities(Windows or Apple monopolizes access to it making amazing tools like Numega SoftIce dead) and even reading the source code.

We use VS 2012 and Xcode for compiling Windows and Mac versions of our software, that is mainly designed and tested in pure Unix.

I actually come from the opposite side of you. I've always developed with opensource tools on windows machines (running VM for Ruby, but most others run just find in windows).

I really like all the consumer products by Microsoft, but never liked or got into the development stuff.

At the same time, I've tried OSX a few times (I have both a Windows and a Mac), and just never got into it as an OS.

With all due respect you're just another OSS evangelist comparing RoR to Visual Basic, Classic ASP and ASP.NET.

It is a silly comparison but it is so unbelievably common here. Try comparing it to ASP.NET MVC and you'll see that Microsoft actually has a modern and compelling offering. They really haven't sit still since you've been gone.

The funny thing is I never mentioned RoR in my GP, so you inserted that comparison in your own head. I'm talking about a complete OSS ecosystem - dev language, servers, VC, deployment tools, monitoring etc. I work at enterprise scale in FIRE, and there is so much more to successful project delivery than just language/IDE.

BTW I had to bandage up a limping ASP.NET MVC app about three years ago for a large Canadian telco. Nothing I saw under the hood changed my mind about MS.

Inserted the comparison in my head or read your subsequent comment that prominently mentions RoR? For a hint, it is the latter.

As for your claim to have "bandaged a limping ASP.NET MVC app about three years ago", you might not be aware that version 1.0 was only released about 4 years ago and that they're currently at version 5.1. How much work with Razor syntax have you done considering it didn't exist three years ago?

Well, he did reply half an hour after you mentioned RoR. So it's possible that he just chose to reply to your first post because he thought replying to the other one would derail that discussion.

Not that I care, not having used any of the technologies discussed here other than a little VS, that a I liked, and a little VSS, that I hated.

I hate when people do that, 'I had to mess with some shitty code and it was made in X, therefore all of X is shitty'

Crappy work can be done in any language/framework

Quite so~

There is a difference between being keen to see the new features in the next version of .Net, and having Microsoft suddenly decide, actually, we dont care about .Net anymore, XNA is cancelled, metro apps are javascript only now. All that WFC stuff you were doing with windows phone... yeah, forget that.

People invest their time and knowledge in a technology stack, and Microsoft just seem to love throwing things away rather than improving them.

When you set fire to the developers that use your technology, are you really surprised when they don't want to have anything to do with you?

I've only seen this anecdotally, but new developers who haven't yet been set on fire seem to be very positive about the integrated MS stack.

...and slightly older jaded developers who are on fire, and looking for jobs using technology no one cares about anymore say things like 'I'll never use microsoft technology again'.

That's just been my personal experience, but I've got to admit, seeing it, I'm pretty skeptical about investing any more of my time in learning to use MS stack for anything.

...but yes. C# is quite a nice language. I fully endorse the use of Xamarins offerings (ie. C# .Net outside of microsofts control)

The Alt.Net movement is a powerful force; always looking for better ways of doing things no matter where that alternative might come from. So if it's something new from Microsoft, that's great - if it's an approach from the open source world or an alternate language or somewhere else entirely then that's great too.

Xamarin deserves particular mention as the ability to share 80-90% of your core codebase between all mobile phone platforms is just stellar. It makes absolutely no business sense to re-write your core business logic for each platform and in that platforms language. So much less project risk, merge three/four code bases into one. Do it once then implement native UI's for each platform and bind back to the core library? Spot a problem in the core library on iOS? Android gets the hotfix for free. Just ask Rdio ;-)

Other hotness:

- https://www.nuget.org/ - http://www.servicestack.net/ - http://owin.org/ - http://nancyfx.org/ - https://github.com/MvvmCross/MvvmCross - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/ - https://github.com/swax/CodePerspective - http://signalr.net/ - https://github.com/Redth/PushSharp - https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows

Last but not least:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2013/06/26/d...

And all latest Microsoft technologies are Open Source as well by the way.

> Why the Microsoft hate?

Because of Microsoft's shady business practices over the years (including Elop killing Nokia's most promising phone OS, Meego, and driving the share price down so MS could scoop it up) and the fact their software is just plain bad.

No one actually wants to use MS Windows. Microsoft ruined/killed some of their most beloved franchises (Age of Empires, Flight Simulator, Combat Flight Simulator). Internet Explorer is a joke.

Not to mention, the ridiculous licencing terms that come with MS software, the high prices, and questionable functionality. If paying for Vista was bad, it was worse that Windows 7 wasn't a free update.

And then there's all the attack ads and FUD Microsoft has spread over the years (especially against Linux), which continues to this day with the 'Scroogled' campaign and attacks on non-Windows phones.

Anyhow, a better question would be who actually likes Microsoft? Even OEMs are jumping ship and desperately searching for alternatives (witness all the Chromebooks coming out now)...

> Microsoft ruined/killed some of their most beloved franchises (Age of Empires, Flight Simulator, Combat Flight Simulator). Internet Explorer is a joke.

This! The AOE series was and IS a central piece of rts history. Ensemble Studios. AOE Online :(

WTF Microsoft?

I (speaking for myself, obviously, not anyone else on HN) don't hate Microsoft. I use Windows! Windows 8 in fact!

For context because I'm sure some people (I do think there is an anti-MS bias here on HN, though not as pronounced as OP thinks it is) may think I'm some stereotypical Microsoft-using rube. I grew up in the 80s, programming first on the C64 (BASIC, 6510 Assembler), then Amiga, then various UNIX systems (SunOS, IRIX, AIX, Ultrix, Solaris, later Linux).

I avoided Windows like crazy until Windows 2000 came out because prior to that release the idea of using an OS where one process could crash the system at any time seemed ridiculous (post my Amiga days), and running NT was only for "enterprises" (at that time). But since I first started using Windows 2000, Windows has always been my "primary" OS, partly for gaming reasons, partly for access to commercial software (currently Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop), and partly because I simply actually just like the look and feel of it.

In the meantime I spent quite a number of years doing Win32 software development (though now I'm mostly doing Android/Java and some embedded stuff with Go) and to this day, Visual Studio is still the programming environment by which all others I use are measured and found wanting. There are some pretty decent other ones, but I still miss the absolute power of the VS debugger (against C, C++ and C#) and everytime I find myself doing printf-debugging because the FOSS tool I'm using doesn't have solid debugging support I cry a little inside.

I also still do a lot of Linux-based programming these days, each Windows system I use has half a dozen or more Linux VMs running on them regularly, but I still prefer Windows as an overall primary desktop. It is fast and extremely stable these days (hell, the GPU driver can crash due to Nvidia bugs and Windows will just restart that mofo and keep going, how cool is that?).

All that said, yes, Microsoft hasn't always acted in the best interests of the overall industry (but neither has any other company near their size, and Microsoft has gotten better over the years while some others I won't name have gotten worse, IMO). Also, I still haven't found any good reason to buy a WinRT device. But my overall impression of Microsoft is pretty positive.

Agreed. The power of the VS debugger is unparalleled!! You can actually look into everything and figure out exactly what is happening. Though you should try IntelliJ IDEA for Java. I love the "Evaluate expression" feature in their debugger

IDEA's development environments are only ones, in my experience, that outdo MS's. Way better refactoring support (any VS user who doesn't also have a copy of IDEA's Resharper plugin installed is crazy), better debugger. Better all around.

Under the assumption that you're a developer, how do you deal with the lack of a great Terminal/Command line interface on Windows?

As a developer (just jumping in) I'd hazard a guess the same way I deal with the horrific lack on consistency with a command line interface on any posix platform I use.

There is a bit of a shift I find, if I'm doing something all Microsoft, I've got Visual Studio and plugins loaded, it is effectively a 3,000lb sledge hammer. A few years ago it was an effort to ensure my PC had enough RAM to run such a beast, complete with Resharper. However I don't have to leave VS for pretty much anything. This is really nice.

When you get used to having a proper IDE, by that I mean one which does everything you need effortlessly, it you don't really ever go outside it.

Ultimately, as a developer rather than a SysAdmin I never need a CLI for getting code made. Managing servers and such is a different union! However I will say powershell isn't bad at all.

I use command line in both linux and windows, they offer the exact same thing, just different commands. Of course it windows has a few problems with it, but mostly just presentation (like static buffer size for width). I'd say 90% of microsoft tools have a CLI you just have to know how to use them, which is the exact same thing when you are going to linux for the first time.

It's like asking people from the future how do they deal with the lack of internal combustion engines. Well, we kind of don't need them in most cases. Because things evolved. GUI has been invented long enough for everyone to catch up.

You should contact Microsoft and tell them that creating PowerShell was a mistake because GUIs are the future. I'm sure they'll weigh your "GUIs are the future" argument carefully, as we have.

Powershell is actually pretty cool if you embrace it for what it is and don't try to use it like a unix shell.

Of course, through Cygwin, MingW, et al you can also just run bash or whatever shell you want on Windows.

To be honest I don't spend a ton of time in terminal windows on Windows for some of the reasons others mentioned, though I do tend to constantly be using the shell on the Linux VMs I mentioned (often just sshed into a local VM).

As a .Net (work) and FOSS* (free time) developer, I find that the ecosystem just doesn't require the use of the CLI nearly as much. Sure, you can interact with TFS from the CLI (and maybe it's better, I don't know) but the first exposure most have to it is GUI so you learn that way. That's just one example but Visual Studio et. al. tend to take care of many things I use the CLI for on OS X/Linux systems, via a GUI. I'm certainly not saying it's better but it is better than most CLI-gone-GUI tools I've used in the FOSS world. I think this is because Windows dev tools are built for the GUI first (and often have a complete lack of, or a lacking support for, CLI UX) first as opposed to many FOSS tools that assume an understanding of the CLI and are built for that first. Personally I enjoy CLI and, while it has a steeper learning curve, I am more productive with my definition of a "proper" CLI (bash, zsh, etc.) than without. So I am attempting to learn Powershell in order to regain some of lost productivity on Windows. But, that's just me. I know many .Net devs that don't feel that productivity loss without a CLI.

* I use Ruby, Python, and Javascript/Node.JS on a Mac for side projects.

Ah, the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco, though my favorite limitation of Win9x is actually how it depended on DOS which allowed Caldera to continue the lawsuit against MS.

I'm almost afraid to reply to this. It's like the hunt for Communists in the US during the cold war - ah another MS sympathizer.

MS made a lot of mistakes - so did Apple. I was an Apple tech support - it really sucked not having multitasking and dealing with so many OS issues. Now I make a living off the MS stack.

I think MS sticking with RT is a bad move - go with full Windows support. I would still say a Nexus device is probably the best bang for the buck.

In the end it's just an opinion, but you don't need to jump down a company's throat because their not the ones in vogue at the moment.

And much like the Communist thing, there are some good underlying reasons even if the end result is not necessarily good. For the Communists, it's because they were horrible oppressors. For Microsoft, it's because they nearly destroyed the industry back in the day, and to many of us it seems like they set back computing about a decade with their monopolistic tactics.

That doesn't mean that the Microsoft of today, much diminished in power and much increased in reasonable behavior, deserves our continued ire. But it's hard to shake the reaction to that kind of massive mistreatment.

Aside the whole Communist topic.. Ye who enters that debate lies in Internet flamewars.

Who cares what Microsoft did to the community. They changed SMB protocol to screw up open source devs. They intentionally fouled up Kerberos authentication. They added API after API in part to foul up WINE. Not only that, but then they continuously stagnated on any sort of browser development until Mozilla kicked in.

But that's the past.

Now, we have them to thank for 'trusted computing', where the computer trusts the owner (hint: we aren't one). We can thank them for bringing in the forefront HDMI and trusted video/audio path. I can only remember how many sound/graphics cards were trashed after the newest Win Vista refused to even work with them. And I now do tech support for the industry that requires 'secure boot' turned on all newer machines. If you're one of them unlucky ones running SurfaceRT with an ARM, sorry, it's not compatible with anything other than what the owner wants (another hint: you still aren't the owner).

Yeah, the MS dev team does seem pretty cool. But you all get criticized over what the whole company has and still does. If you don't like it, dnot tell people you work for them. There are other research places other than MS, if you don't like them.

Microsoft Research is the only company still doing pure CS research that I'm aware of. This is widely acknowledged also, even by my peers who are working for Google (we talk often, Apple is completely MIA from the research space).

And that gives MS some love in academic circles. But that's all it should give them.

Do you it's time MS cut funding to do pure research and focus on research that'll lead to products instead? Like Google research does? There seems to be waay too much fluff in MSR too. I mean the number of techfest posters on campus showing off social (facebook, twitter data) related research was just ridiculous - I don't see that even remotely benefiting us in the near future.

Also, most of these researchers do not collaborate or are otherwise unaware of similar product projects going on in-house. For example, we have a ZooKeeper committer and contributer from MSR, yet we ended up building a distantly similar one in azure only to find out later that it existed (this was in it's early days).

Then why such crazy love for Apple when Jobs was trying to do the same thing with the iphone suing companies left and right and patenting a button?

They both have bad sides, it just seems one is ignored.

Apple never did anything remotely comparable to MS's rampage of destruction in the 90s. A few lawsuits against smartphone makers is small potatoes by comparison, especially since they didn't really work out. How many competitors has Apple put out of business, not by having better products, but by simply leveraging a monopoly to drive them out? The answer, of course, is none, because they don't have any monopolies and aren't in a position to drive better products out of business.

shakes fist at Win98

Never forget.

Of course in both cases, it's very important to not let the hunt for one particular type of witch take on a life of its own - the ensuing hysterical myopia makes it easy for differently-branded beasts (in these cases, Apple and Democracy) to escape scrutiny.

You have not provided any evidence that flagging is the reason that articles about the Nokia Lumia 2520 fell off of the front page. It is entirely possible that they disappeared because not enough people were interested in upvoting marketing information about a tablet running Windows RT.

So is HN basically becoming Slashdot where Microsoft hate occurs by default?

The guidelines for this site suggest that it is bad form to compare HN to other sites, especially when your account is under a year old. They also suggest that users should not complain about downmodding (which you are doing).

I think this would have been a reasonable post if you had found evidence that articles involving Microsoft consumer electronics received more negative comments or flags that articles from other companies. Instead, the post and its comments are just a bunch of unfounded accusations of anti-Microsoft bias.

I would argue that the facts that you assumed that articles about the Lumia disappeared because people were maliciously flagging them, that you posted an extremely positive comment about it [1] without disclosing your Microsoft affiliation, and that you reposted an Engadget article about it [2] just 6 hours after it was originally submitted, and at the same time you were insulting people in the original submission's comments [3] just as troubling.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6590538

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6591911

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6591575

The article definitely had enough upvotes to stay on the front page; it was definitely knocked two pages back for some reason, and someone admitted to flagging.

My account is more than a year old, I have 3000+ karma, and I have a low number on Slashdot as well (and made the front page in 1998).

The bias is real and documented. I posted my own original comment with no expectation but to express my pleasure, most people who know me on HN know my affiliation, and it is in my user info. I didn't start fighting until the comments got very nasty. I reposted because I didn't think the article got a fair shake the first time.

> The bias is real and documented

as I mentioned above, this is not the case. While some Microsoft stories may be knocked down the page, you would have to measure what happens to every other kind of story to know if Microsoft stories are in any way special.

I meant, the bias was real and documented in this case. But as pg pointed out, the article got killed because a flamewar was detected: basically a bunch of Microsoft haters took a dump on the article...and its history.

In general, many MS articles make it through, and I didn't notice any overt Microsoft hate until last night (or this morning your guys time).

It takes two to tango. There was a lot of "vote down and move on" behavior in that thread. Instead, people kept responding to content-free posts, which predictably got content-free re-responses--because the kind of person who says something dumb is also the kind of person that demands to get the last word in.

Responding to threadshitting is a form of threadshitting. It's not very enjoyable for anyone who clicked in hoping to see interesting discussion about the subject of the link.

Compare the front page yesterday. Nokia news being moved off the front page, versus Mac Pro, iPad Mini, iPad Air, and Mavericks stories gaining the top spots.

...made the front page in 1998.

Congratulations!

I agree, it's just pack behavior. And no, I don't work for MS, nor have I ever.

Having said that, launching the day before the iPad was bound to invite negative comparison without something really special, notwithstanding the good value proposition of this tablet. What has personally held me back is that Windows RT has nothing in particular for me because it can't run any x86 legacy apps, while surface Pro seems rather expensive.

As with Google & Android, and MS with many previous versions of Windows, this platform is poor for musicians and not great for visual artists. I know creatives are a small market, but they're a very influential one. I don't like Apple or iOS much, but next time I buy a tablet with a view to making music, what other choice do I have?

> What has personally held me back is that Windows RT has nothing in particular for me because it can't run any x86 legacy apps, while surface Pro seems rather expensive.

I agree with that personally, but I would hope that Windows RT could grow a strong enough ecosystem that this wouldn't be a big deal.

> As with Google & Android, and MS with many previous versions of Windows, this platform is poor for musicians and not great for visual artists. I know creatives are a small market, but they're a very influential one. I don't like Apple or iOS much, but next time I buy a tablet with a view to making music, what other choice do I have?

I think focusing on creatives is key also. In particular, I would like to see some decent touch-friendly programming environment on a tablet; without which I'm still stuck using a laptop for relatively dumb reasons.

Since you work for MS Labs, I beg you to investigate the state machine possibilities of tools like Reaktor and Flowstone, which are geared towards signal processing but which are plenty versatile, and seem like they'd be ideal for touch deployment in principle. I can rant on about this at length in email if you're interested.

Let me take a look. This isn't my field but I have a couple of colleagues who might have an interest here.

Thanks for being so open to an off-the-wall suggestion. You're welcome to contact me any time if I can help.

I have to work with their system every day at work. I don't have a choice.

I'd really like to go out of Microsoft's way, but they don't let me. I'd like to look for any workplace and be asked the first day: "which OS / software stack I prefer?" or give me a blank box to set up. But I usually just get a Windows box which I'd choose last (somewhere behind pen and paper).

They do patent extortion (they make more money of Android than Windows Phone).

They don't contribute much back to the world at large. I don't mind proprietary software, but I insist on open interfaces that let software play together. They don't do that. They don't publish essential specifications, don't contribute code to the community much and if you reserve engineer their protocols to provide compatible services, they sue you and extort royalties. And then there are things like OOXML that they forced through ISO.

Companies working together with Microsoft are regularly burned.

They have been repeatedly used very dirty tactics to corner the market and got fined for it.

I don't particularly fancy their software (I'm much more comfortable with Linux systems). Automation of Windows software is horrible and they suffer a bad form of NIH.

This rubs me the wrong way.

Make them an optional thing in my life that I can avoid and I stop having hard feelings for them.

You don't _have_ to do anything. My friend, be more confident. Learn the stuff you want to learn. Polish your CV. Look around for work that _you_ want to do. Bide your time and look around. There are alternatives.

At one point in my career in the mid-90s I decided that I had enough of working with MS technologies because of the way they abused their position of dominance and killed companies I liked like Borland and Netscape and because I learned about F/OSS and started getting into Linux. Then came the Halloween documents and that was it really. It did hurt my pocket, but you know what? Sometimes you have to act on principle. These days it is much easier to ignore Microsoft tech though it's annoying they bought Skype and poisoned Nokia. I do think that MS Research is a bunch of awesome though, those people rock.

Anyway. I'll say it again. Don't continue being unhappy in what you do. You don't _have_ to do anything. Take control of your own destiny. If you need help/advice just reply to this post. Take care.

Oh, I did not say I was unhappy. I just said I'm not content with the status quo.

And what does an engineer (by heart) do when things are off? Fix them. For me this means strengthening alternatives. I just recently released a side project in the Ubuntu Software Center growing the ecosystem with it.

I can't make a living with this though (yet), so I'm doing a regular day job too and there is not much choice there sadly around here (Germany).

I also have a family, so I have a strong incentive to keep a stable baseline income.

I'm working in the direction of doing something nice with my own company where I can write the rules. It just takes some time and effort.

I am personally rooting for Microsoft because, hey, you're the underdog. But the seriously botched up release process of Windows 8.1 brought me back to hate.

I can't download an ISO - I have two computers in my house and I'm in India with 2mbps,30 gb bandwidth (which is not cheap). Seriously, why would you do that?

I could not ask my friends for a CD.

The second problem - I can't do a clean install of 8.1 using a windows 8 key. Because Windows 8.1 is supposed to be "an upgrade from Windows 8, if you have a 8 key". So the only way to clean install 8.1 is to clean install 8 and THEN launch the upgrade installer. Combining with the above issue, Im looking at about 12-15 gb of download to install two computers. All because some sales suit thought it was a bad idea. Again, seriously? Look at how Apple did the Mavericks release - the bar is much higher.

I want to like Microsoft - I really think you guys innovated with Windows Mobile (although Win 8 Metro sucks) , but your business practices soon turns that into hate.

> Is it ethical to flag something because the article is related to a company you don't like

I do not think the important topic of Ethics should be brought so low as to help us decide on whether to flag or not a link on HN. Let's replace it by "stupid".

Then yes, it is stupid to flag a post just because it relates to a company we do not like.

However, it is not stupid to dislike Microsoft. You might remember Paul Graham's Microsoft is Dead(1): for people a bit older than 20, Microsoft is a company which was very frightening, a company which did really try to kill Internet, and force all our industry into a nightmarish path where we programmers would all be happy slaves.

Just because they have changed the color of their last make-up will not change this, and I would hope Hackers here and there would actually despise more Microsoft and other similarly dangerous companies.

(1) http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Another reason for being wary of Microsoft:

Their OSes and applications have an auto-run policy (run stuff automatically when a CD is inserted, or scripts in Excel, etc). It is clearly a way to allow viruses into the system, and then make some money from updates and anti-viruses!

Maybe my sarcasm detector if off, but aren't windows updates and Microsoft Security Essentials (a pretty good AV from what I hear, I wouldn't know as I run Linux) completely free?

I don't run Windows either but I read articles in which Microsoft plans to sell their anti-virus service, for example [1].

Moreover, even if these are presently free, in the context of this thread we should consider the experience of users over two decades of history of Windows and Office products!

[1]: http://windowsitpro.com/security/microsoft-should-offer-free...

I understand being wary of MS, I've used their products since the mid 1980s, (Switched over to Linux for everything but gaming about 10 years ago), but you do realize the article you referenced is from 2003?

For me, it's kind of like sports. Why do you hate certain teams?

I'm a 90's linux user so my hate for MS is self explanatory and these days mostly irrational. Recently I found myself working with a group of Microsoft employees and it's tough to "hate" them, their company or the really nice products they flaunt around (Surface, Windows Phones, etc).

There are a lot things that continue to feed my dislike for the company though. It's silly things, like the way they continue to ignore the existence of industry standard protocols (ssh! there is BSD code! just copy it!!).

In day to day dealings with the company I sometimes still get a sense of arrogance and not-invented-here type scenarios that prevent a better solution from being perused.

You don't have to love MS or upvote their articles, just not use the flag button to kill articles because you don't like them.

I definitely empathize with much of what you are saying. But many of us are just average joes working for a big company with diverse interests. You might still want to interact with us because we know things and have interesting stories to tell. Even if you hate a certain team, would you really give their players a cold shoulder?

I work for a telco so I understand what it's like to work for a big unloved corporation. FWIW, the MSFT employees I work with are a great group of very talented and helpful people.

I think I'd consider myself to be 90's Linux user (I have been using it since late 95 or so) and I think what I have to Microsoft is not really "hate" but strong distrust, that I actually, personally, as a Linux user, was receiving many of those harm. Just the word "Winmodem" gives me a chill.

Although today, it looks like it's not as bad as it used to be, but I would never forget about that. Around that time, I was high school age, so I guess I was more susceptible, too :-)

Are you sure about this? If I go to HNSearch, look for Nokia stories, and sort by date, I can't find a comment saying that any of them aren't relevant to HN... which doesn't surprise me because there's no argument under which Nokia wouldn't be relevant to HN.

Can you link to one of these stories that got flagged off the site?

Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6590378

I see one guy saying he flagged the story ('JanezStupar). That person abused the flag button and needs to stop doing that. I don't see a lot of people saying the story wasn't relevant, or saying they flagged the story.

I'm asking because there is more than one reason why a story might drop off the front page; flagging is one of them, but so is the voting ring detector.

Here's the chart for that story: http://hnrankings.info/6590378/

I do not know what the correct interpretation of it is though. Not at persons flagging will write a comment though.

I don't think I abused the flag function. As at the time my perception was that the thread was an astroturf PR attempt.

I am now extremely sorry that I have participated in that thread at all (before it got off the front page and especially after it got off the front page) since now instead of one crappy thread taking place on the front page of HN we have two and we might have more in the future.

With my disclaimer out of the way I would be extremely glad if you tell my why you think I abused my flagging privilege (besides breaching guidelines by talking about it).

I noticed this morning there was a link to the Engadget story about the new Nokia tablet on the front page. The first commenter was called out as a Msft PR flack. Another comment pointed out that since it's not an iPad it's not innovative enough to be on HN (I'm paraphrasing but not exagerating). When I made it to the office and checked to see what other sorts of comments had been posted I couldn't find the story anywhere on the first three pages. I figured it was flagged into oblivion for reasons the OP mentions.

I know it's been too long and it's an unreasonable position to take, but I'm still upset about Stacker.

Add on wasting the purchase of Danger (Sidekicks were amazing), intentionally changing their OS solely to screw with competitors, the terribleness of embrace and extend, and I just can't get excited about anything from Microsoft. Sure, they've behaved better recently, but they've had real competition recently. I stop short of hate, but I'm not excited about their stuff unless it's something as big as the Kinect can drive my car to the moon.

I don't think people hate MS, they just don't even think about them. Whenever I am at tech events(usually web related ones) MS isn't openly criticised, they're not even discussed as an option.

I spend about 50% of my time developing .net apps and the other half on linux/web stuff so I'm pretty familiar with the MS tech stack and it always feels very clunky and outdated.

MS hasn't created a really compelling consumer product since the Xbox and they have just totally lost consumer mindshare, they are the slow, clunky old thing you use at work because you have to, not the thing you buy when spending your own money.

In my view the future is(at least in the medium term) Linux on the server and mobile devices, Unix on the laptop/desktop in the form of OSX and maybe MS on the console and Windows running legacy systems and some servers.

I'm not a particular fan of Apple either(I've never purchased any of their products) and only use Linux(Ubuntu) and Windows in a VM but it seems to me consumers just don't care about MS any more and I'm not sure that MS has the skills to change that.

"it always feels very clunky and outdated." - can you elaborate? And please don't mention Java, JavaScript, C++ as those are all old and barely evolving. Web - maybe (Ruby is quite good at one specific thing). I would like to hear about something that makes e.g. TPL and Rx "clunky and outdated". I would like to see something that beats Visual Studio + R#.

It's mainly things like the lack of a good package manager for provisioning, inexplicably large installers, sub-par automation, inscrutable GUI's packed with useless features, having to RDP into a server to perform basic tasks rather than just using SSH, massive bloat(why is everything so huge?), a general disregard for dev ops.

Also I find the licencing really irritating when creating VMs and servers. In the end thinking something "feels" old and clunky is a subjective perception but every time I use MS products it feels like they were created with little or no insight or knowledge into what anyone else is doing, leading to a lot of NIH syndrome.

Absolutely garbage browsers are also a big problem, I know IE 10 is passable but in 4 years when it hasn't been updated and people using Win7 and 8 are stuck using it, it will be the IE6 of its day.

Don't get me wrong, I used MS products basically exclusively for the first 5 years of my developer career, and still use them a fair bit now, and thought it was amazing, it's not until you move outside that bubble and start using better tools and methodologies that you realise how far behind they are.

Here's the deal: Despite having some awesome tech and many talented employees, Microsoft as a corporation has a history of shitting on developers, smaller companies and independents. There's a history of threatening OSS, monopoly abuse, abandoning APIs, bad certs, crapware, gross mismanagement, ignoring constructive requests and a very bad case of Not Invented Here. And they do have an history of astro-turfing and aggressive social media promotion.

Disclosure: I've primarily worked as a MS stack developer and admin for over two decades. But I've also used a full spectrum of other technologies over the years, too. I've been agnostic and objective when it come to the industry, but I've eaten enough excuses from Redmond. There's good alternatives, I'm exploring more of them.

Abandoning APIs to me is a sign of bad management, and that's what I really can't stand any more. I have spent my career building apps side by side for OS X and Windows and I just can't stomach Windows any more. The thing is, unless you're really lucky, you probably have worked at a few places that had really bad management. I know I have. When you get the same vibe from the company that manages your IDE and complete computing (operating system) experience it's a terrible feeling. Take Metro for example. I can't stand the thought of developing for it because I have this sinking feeling that in 2 years Microsoft will have to abandon it and I will have wasted hours of my life that I can never get back. Conversely, take Objective-C. I have been greatly rewarded for taking the time to learn that. Something tells me that isn't going anywhere. Granted, any company will have some misses and drop things, but Microsoft it's like loading the barrel of a gun with 5 bullets and putting it to your head.

Disclaimer: This is opinionated commentary partially describing the bad feelings that I actually feel towards Microsoft after all these years. They are more emotional and less factual, but I think the fact that I arrived here associating these bad feelings towards Microsoft shows what a deep hole they are in with developers.

People in tech, including those on HN, are often prone to hyperbole (myself included).

I've got a bunch of example topics: MS, the NSA, F/OSS, Google & privacy, CISPA, etc.

In each of these cases, there's usually some voices of reason (grellas, anigbrowl, tptacek, masklinn, gruseom, I'm looking at you) and a lot of people who treat the story as life and death.

CISPA is the END of net neutrality. Google is the END of privacy on the internet. F/OSS is about what's RIGHT and what's WRONG and F/OSS is RIGHT and proprietary software is WRONG. MS SecureBoot isn't about addressing a well-studied security problem by Microsoft and the security industry, it's about PUTTING DOWN the Linux desktop. The NSA is the END OF ALL PRIVACY.

I'm not sure what the reason is but people just overreact.

So here's my take on MS. It's a software company. Use their stuff, don't use their stuff: whatever. The days when it was THE software company are over. If we don't ship you a compelling experience, use something else.

Why the past tense in so many of these posts? Windows and especially Office are still an efficiency and $$ tax on businesses and consumers around the world.

I would guess that 1% of Office sales are for folks who "need" the functionality of (most likely) Excel over what is offered by OpenOffice, Google Docs, etc. All the rest are driven by the effective monopoly of the Office file system "standard."

I am happy to pay for great products, like my MBP, but these aren't great products - even after decades, Word is still a <NSFW> to use.

I don't understand your argument... The popular standards in all proprietary formats exert a "tax" on businesses and consumers in the context you describe. Witness Adobe with Photoshop and Flash, Apple with iOS devices, etc. Yet people pay the $240/year for the Photoshop license instead of a one-time $30 for Paint Shop Pro (or free for GIMP). It's not a conspiracy - everyone else using the same ecosystem as you has external benefits and that's why people buy in.

It's not just that Excel is powerful (and it is...). It's that as a user, I have access to all the pre-made macros and VBA tools from an army of other users. I have the availability of help from a plethora of well-staffed volunteer forums. I have the ability to natively open any XLS, XLSX, XLSM, and XLSB file that a colleague or customer sends me.

I think it is unwise to underestimate the power and privileges gained by working in the dominant ecosystem. People don't part with their money that blindly or lightly - it is the easy choice to go with the herd on many of these decisions rather than paving your own road with a (relatively) un-tested marginal player.

You are conflating two completely different properties of MS Office: (1) product functionality (e.g. macros) and ecosystem, and (2) proprietary file format lockin.

I'm objecting to the latter, when it is a virtual monopoly, and I'm suggesting that the vast majority of Office sales are for the latter reason, not the former.

So, by extension, the vast majority of Photoshop sales are due to PSD lock-in? And the vast majority of Apple sales are due to iOS lock-in?

I'm seeking a distinction here. If my statements about Adobe and Apple are not true, what makes Microsoft different?

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're not trolling me; this has been widely discussed for years ...

Apple and Adobe do not have the segment market share that Microsoft does with Office. More importantly (to me), people buy Apple and Adobe products because they want to. People buy Microsoft Office because they have to. And they feel they have to not because Office has functionality that is so unsurpassed to help them get work done, but for one reason alone: file-format lock in.

As if, and again this is hardly original with me, a private company controlled the protocol to make phone calls and forced you to buy their (overpriced, crappy) phones to access the phone network.

Guarantee I'm not trolling. I simply disagree with your appraisal of the situation. This is the quote I have the most problem with:

"People buy Apple and Adobe products because they want to. People buy Microsoft Office because they have to."

By what possible criteria could you assert this? Each company exists in a free market with multiple competitors - the very ones that you wish people would use instead of the leaders (e.g. OpenOffice or Google Docs). Furthermore, in certain segments (like cloud-based office offerings), people are migrating in droves to Google Docs. They held between 33-50% user share in 2012 according to Gartner.* This is not the behavior of a locked-in market.

*Cite: http://rcpmag.com/articles/2013/04/23/google-apps-vs-microso...

Finally, an AT&T-style hardware infrastructure monopoly is not in play here. File formats don't lock you out of word processing any more than iOS apps keep you out of the smartphone business. They just offer a perk. I can't get every cool app on my Android phone. That doesn't mean that Apple is exerting a tax on me. It's just a selling point I have to consider.

I don't buy this argument. In my experience OpenOffice has no problem interoperating with MS Office's formats, but MS Office is simply a far better program. The reason I use MS Office is that's it's better enough to warrant the price compared to the free OpenOffice, and not any other reason.

I'd like to thank you for offering that "Full Disclosure" - it represents how Microsoft culture has changed over the years (for the better). In earlier times, Microsoft would often encourage its employees to covertly astroturf on its behalf on various internet forums or news groups. This happened on Arstechnica years ago, and involved quite a bit of drama when one of the mods traced the IP of a poster back to Redmond's office after the convert employee was trolling the Linux/OSS forums.

I have never heard about astroturfing happening in the company before, and besides, I'm in research.

We are allowed to post from our computers at work. I'm sure, given that Microsoft has 100k employees, that there must be a few bad apples in the bunch: you know, statistically speaking, their will be a few mentally unbalanced people doing things that Microsoft might not otherwise approve of.

John Dvorak, quoted on http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com/gizmos/2005/11/2_grassroot...:

"Some years back, Microsoft practiced a lot of dirty tricks using online mavens to go into forums and create Web sites extolling the virtues of Windows over OS/2. They were dubbed the Microsoft Munchkins, and it was obvious who they were and what they were up to. But their numbers and energy (and they way they joined forces with nonaligned dummies who liked to pile on) proved too much for IBM marketers, and Windows won the operating-system war through fifth-column tactics."

Also, googling "Steve Barkto" will turn up interesting information.

I wouldn't know. Back then I was working for IBM on OS/2 in Boca Raton, in, as I was told, the very office space that Microsoft vacated a few years earlier when the NT/OS/2 collaboration broke down.

But if I had to choose between IBM and Microsoft, I think Microsoft wins as the more ethical company. IBM seemed like a very shady place to work business practice wise. And no one is talking about IBM these days on HN, unless they happen to do something like Watson occasionally.

the very office space that Microsoft vacated a few years earlier when the NT/OS/2 collaboration broke down

After MS has already sent the original OS/2 2.0 SDKs to developers. I wrote a blog post about this entire fiasco you should read: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-...

It is true that Microsoft has changed a lot. (I used to work there.)

However I have trouble getting too excited about a lot of Microsoft technologies. There are some good ones out there for some things, don't get me wrong. Microsoft SQL Server has some really nice features for developers, for example, and Microsoft Access is a really nice db front-end RAD tool, if you pair it with a real database server.

But, in the end, I there are only so many things one can get excited about. I find PostgreSQL more exciting than MS SQL Server, for example.

Microsoft has become a lot more accepting of FOSS than it was when I was first hired (I watched some of this shift while I was there, but it has gone a lot further since I left). This is good. But in the end, it feels like so much Microsoft stuff is legacy technology for those of us who have made the switch that it is just hard to stay excited.

>So is HN basically becoming Slashdot where Microsoft hate occurs by default? Is it ethical to flag something because the article is related to a company you don't like, even if the source is generally reputable (theverge, engadget, ars)?

I've been browsing slashdot practically since it started and if thats your barometer, then the most tech websites are 'Slashdot!'. In my opinion, the vast majority of the anti-ms comments can be safely ignored as they are just trolls looking for attention. Whats interesting is that the trolls that attempt technical arguments are also wrong the vast majority of the time. And if they bring an ideological argument, then they are some kind of open source zealot and bring nothing new to the already dead old open-close source flamewar. (Open-Source won BTW :P)

I know several people at MS.. and MS has great talent as well as some extremely well engineered products. With all that said, MS has done some pretty shitty things in the past. And all of those shitty things have been bouncing around in the internets echo chamber - being twisted into half-truths to complete lies for about 10 years. There is just too much misinformation entrenched in the community for MS to be able to counter that. I don't know if they deserve it but its going to be a long long time before you can expect any kind of fair treatment from average geeks.

My startup friends and I here in Brisbane, Australia talk quite a bit about going to San Fran to "soak up the start-up vibe".

I often joke about having the nerve to set up camp in a coffee shop there and whip out my Surface Pro, fire up visual studio, and sling some C# and see how quickly I'll get hated on.

I do wonder, will that really happen? Honest question.

Not sure, but if you had a Nokia tablet instead, you might have some cute girls come up to you and say "hey that's pretty!"

Where is the startup culture in Brisbane? I dunno where to look.

Silicon Beach is a good start. http://www.meetup.com/Silicon-Beach-Brisbane/

If you can stomach being in a Microsoft building, the Startup Masterminds group is fantastic. I go each time I can. http://www.meetup.com/StartUp-Mastermind-Groups/

Just begging for some sort of poke.... Hmm how about: Even if you got some negative comments it wouldn't be much as you would have to put it away when its battery died before long ;D

Seriously C# is nice and while I am a die hard unix guy I wouldn't be caught owning a MS laptop myself I am coding with C# server code at work at am enjoying the experience. I would honestly be curious what you could do doing in C#. MS is giving no direction on the future of C#, desktop is suppose to be JavaScript now? Server isn't about C#, but supports everything? XBox cross platform stuff is shutdown, silverlight dead.... So you hacking in it in a coffee shop would be a curiosity.

"MS is giving no direction on the future of C#, desktop is suppose to be JavaScript now..."

What planet did that come from? Microsoft made a play to get Javascript devs to be capable of building native windows apps which all things considered was a smart strategic move - that has not worked out. So no, Javascript is not the way to build desktop apps - it is one way, to build one type of app for Windows 8.

Future of C#? Are you kidding me? That is just lazy to make a statement like that. For all the recent love of F# and the resurgence of focus on C++, C# is still the king in Redmond.

According to Microsoft, JavaScript has been the future of Windows desktop applications since at least 1997. I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Things you can do with C#:

1) Web using ASP.NET MVC 2) Desktop using WPF, XAML 3) Mobile on any platform via Xamarin Mono

PS: if you see someone hacking C# in a coffee shop, than it's most likely something for mobile, highly-portable and probably a game (MonoGame and Unity are pushing C# mainstream as it's much better than dealing with Obj C or JavaScript).

I'll give you #1, but from digging into the topic #2 is very much up in the air long term and I would be very wary of starting any new project with it #3 doesn't count as it is through Xamarin as I was explicitly talking about Microsoft plans.

Well Brisbane is pretty Java/MS stack heavy. I haven't found many lean startups or bigger companies that don't use a heavy off the shelf stack.

You're right about that. My background is MS since I started getting a real job in the late 90's.

I'd like to be more hipsterish and start-up with open source, but with BizSpark and free Visual Studio and Azure and being able to build quickly just because of my familiarity with the MS stack it's very hard not to stay locked in to that ecosystem.

I'm writing this now inside Microsoft on George street who let's you use their offices for free surrounded by MS <3 start-up standees and brochures.

We all know suspiciously it's MS's evil lurings to try to appeal to the startup scene so we can keep giving $$$ to them after our freebies have expired. However I'm also sanguine that they may have a change in attitude with their open source contributions and startup initiatives and linux or node images on Azure they might be genuinely wanting to be more "open".

That's what I'm hoping for. I am not looking forward to being stung with a massive SQL licence bill.

My coworkers and I in SF went to a coffee shop / workspace subsidized by a megabank today. Odd vibe, but everyone's nice and the coffee's cheap, so...

We saw a few people using Dells and other Windows laptops. No one hated on them, but they definitely drew odd looks - not of aggression, but of confusion. At worst, people would dismiss you as a banker who got lost and ended up in a tech neighborhood. You just don't see anyone here in startup-friendly places using Windows.

Because why would you? You have to pay money for an inferior product.

I can't imagine so. Really, most people do not care what computer you use.

If you see a comment you think is ridiculous click "link" and you should be able to flag them. I don't think HNers in general hate MS but this community is pretty biased towards OS X and Linux, it's hard to feign interest in stuff you don't use.

Engadget and The Verge are professional plagiarists, it would be bad for this community to adopt those sites as some kind of standard for tech news, and it's awesome seeing them fail over and over again to get a foothold here.

I'm a technologist, and eat up everything related to OS X, Android, iOS, and so on. At home, I don't even own a PC (we have 4 macbooks, two ipads). But this Nokia tablet seems exciting, if only for the industrial design, but they also seem to have taken a lot of care in the rest of the design also.

Theverge is quite nice: they actually write decent full length articles with a graphic design that is similar to but exceeds Ars. Engadget is still useful, but theverge is my favorite. And I was blown away recently by how well Polygon was done as a gaming site. Really beautiful, with great content.

> If you see a comment you think is ridiculous click "link" and you should be able to flag them.

This option isn't available to everyone - I, for one, don't have flagging privileges.

I'd assume that this is probably a karma threshold, but it appears I actually have slightly more karma than you do, so they must be using some other metric.

So when you click "link", you don't actually see the "flag" link at all? With my low karma it's appearing for me. FWIW, I've never flagged anyone before.

Nope. I can downvote people, but I can't flag them.

I don't remember ever having this privilege, on either comments or on stories.

It's because Microsoft used to be such a horrible company. It's debatable whether or not they still are, but that's not the point. I still haven't forgiven them for their tactics that destroyed competitors who often had superior products, and I probably never will. Not only that, but typically speaking, it sucks hacking on Microsoft products. All of Microsoft is also anti-hacker; I can't hack my OS, I can't hack the programs they make, etc. That was probably the mentality of HN when they claimed it wasn't relevant. Since iOS and OS X work well together and OS X is somewhat hackable, it gets more love.

Without reading any other comments, I would say that Microsoft does not have any goodwill left. Everyone respects Microsoft research, but it has to be something interesting enough to stand on its own merit to be worth caring about. The flipside is that there are tons of people that really like Apple for some reason, though I suspect that will fade in time.

I'm relatively new to HN. It's disappointing but I kind of just accepted the Microsoft hate, as a given(like nick cage on reddit).

Also recently I started to see posts from older HN members who don't like what the community is turning into.

I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I hate Microsoft because they're crooks. They made their money not by creating a better product at a competitive price, but by breaking the law. And then they used the position of power and influence that they had attained by breaking the law not to make the world a better place, but to crush competition and inhibit innovation.

You asked.

In this thread: People getting confused over what Hacker News is.

We're not the OSDN. In fact we (as a collective group of users) are not related to the open source movement in any way. Why should MS's closed-source viewpoint matter to us? Are we not here to build businesses in the tech space?

Sometimes the right tool to use is made by Microsoft. Sometimes it's open source.

That wasn't the point: you don't have to upvote their articles to not flag them.

Which is kind of my point. Flagging stories just because you don't like Microsoft is counter to the site's purpose. Even downvoting because you don't like Microsoft doesn't improve the site.

If I'm building something, and I'd benefit hugely from some Microsoft news, your disdain for the company has just hurt my project.

Flag or downvote a cat picture. But not because you happen to dislike the camera the picture was taken on, but because cat pictures aren't relevant to the site.

Then we are in agreement. Is it possible to downvote articles? Maybe I haven't reached that karma threshold yet.

I dunno. I haven't either. :-D

Don't forget the "Hacker" in Hacker news: it is very natural, reasonable, expected and even necessary for Hackers to have a strong and marked preference towards open protocols, open source software, and to dislike monopolies, walls, closedness, blind rule abiding, etcetera.

A convoluted spirit might believe hackers like closed doors because they enjoy breaking in and would like more of them. But that is wrong, just as it is wrong to believe that physicians would love to have more deadly diseases to play with.

And yet we have apple stuff all over frontage when they are clearly against hackers

Yes, it worries me too, but it seems the tide retreats slowly.

Well I dont hate them. I actually always admired MS. When I was a kid, Windows 3.1 just amazed me.

And I continued to be a fan. But then one day I realized GMail was so much better than hotmail. So much free space! No more deleting! Hotmail refused to change, so I switched over. Then one day I realized that linux was such a great place for me to learn how to program. So I picked it up.

With time I tried other products and, one by one, I realized there were alternatives I prefer to MS's offerings. Today I bought my first Macbook. My first non windows machine. I dont plan on purchasing any more Office licenses. And for the first time in a while, I see no MS products on the horizon for me. Not the XBox One. Not Windows 8 mobile. Not surface pro. Nothing.

Why? I prefer their competitors products. Its not MS hate. They just dont have a single product that exites me. Nothing.

Now if you asked me about Windows 8 UI, I would tell you that I think its an abomination. That might look like MS hate.

If you asked me about the Surface, I would tell you I hate how it tries to do so much and fails to lead in just about anything. If you ask me about IE, I would tell you that I think Firefox and Chrome are better, although the new one seems crisp.

Nothing to do with the brand, all to do with the product.

I was disappointed that the Nokia thread was nuked. I was interested to see HN's take on it. Instead it ended with a silly flamewars about astroturfing and we ended up with half a dozen articles about OS X and the iPad on the home page.

So you work for Microsoft and your wife is from a company that is being bought by Microsoft, so everything in your life is Microsoft.

That's ok, great, you are totally biased in favor of this company.

So you can't understand or respect other people opinions. "hate" is a very strong term for not caring enough, or not caring as much as some family with all members working for the company.

Troll comment is fail.

Nokia isn't a part of Microsoft, even if that could happen in the future. My wife was working for Nokia before recent events.

I don't hate Microsoft, but as an older (54) hacker who was plenty happy on his 11/780 running Mt. Xinu BSD in 1989, I'm still waiting for this whole "Windows" thing to blow over.

> So is HN basically becoming Slashdot where Microsoft hate occurs by default?

Well. HN has a strong proportion of open-source people, and Microsoft's relationship with the open-source community has been historically poor, in no small part due to ethically-challenged decisions made by Microsoft management. I'd even argue that Microsoft has essentially lost all trust when it comes down to it. Embrace, extend, extinguish, etc. Much as Oracle's brand does not attract the best feelings here.

Though I'll point out that Microsoft Research as a distinct unit produces extremely valuable work, and that many folks talking about the bad quality of Microsoft products haven't touched Windows since the dawn of the century.

> Is it ethical to flag something because the article is related to a company you don't like, even if the source is generally reputable (theverge, engadget, ars)?

No, I wouldn't say that it is.

In my case it's more grudge than hatred. The fact that a company made me pay for VISTA is unforgivable. \joke

More seriously, I've noticed that a large portion (like in 90%) of the CS department and Statistics department in my Uni (US, Ivy) run mac os x, or linux. Is that a general trend elsewhere? I have my own reasons for preferring OSX, and I have a hard time believing that these 90% picked osx or linux just because of a "vogue" or "trend". Genuinely curious here.

I think this is a real trend. When I go to an academic CS conference, 70% of my peers are using Macbooks these days.

Yup I go to a well known state school and literally everyone has Macbooks. All the students, all the professors; EVERYONE.

Every company I've worked at in the past (both in SV and elsewhere) were ALL using Macbooks exclusively. Go to Silicon Valley and every company/startup there is probably all Mac'ed up from top to bottom with some remote linux boxes thrown in, usually accessed through a Macbook.

In fact I've seen the transition firsthand from my younger High School days to College. When I was in High School, it'd be very rare to see my friends or teachers, or just people in general with Macs. Now, it's surprising when someone DOESN'T have a Macbook. It's crazy. Macbooks are THE quintessential laptops... nay... computing devices in general for most people. Honestly, it's for a good reason too, they're solid for both the pros and mom/dads everywhere.

I might come off as a bit of an Apple fanboy here, and it's true I love their products, but the phenomenon I described above is independent of my personal views; it's something I've really observed around me.

1. IE 6, Is that not enough to hate them? Anyone who has done any sort of web development during the IE6 era would hate them.

2. The ugliness of Microsoft Office. I dont see each version of M$ office were ever an improvement. While it did generate excitement, it wasn't until someone who actually tired iWork to know how easy it is to do beautiful documents and charts. And to be it wasn't until the Office 2k7 did they start to react ( But they got Ribbon in there which is an even bigger let off ). And although many improvement since then, those days i would remember how i am forced to use office.

To me, i see absolutely no heart and souls in those Microsoft Products. They aren't well thought out, most of the time contradicting or even annoying. Purely in terms of user experience it was very bad.

And M$ was really rich. The Richest company at one point in time. That is not to say people hate the riches. It is merely a point that they have so much money why didn't they go and fix things. Things that should have been done long long time ago. And as the Mac Vs PC ads have put it, they put so much more budget inside marketing then fixing bugs!

Their Business Practice is also a point of hate. Using Windows Monopoly to get rid of competing technology by including something similar of their own. Personally I have no problem with that. Honestly if the product offering from Microsoft were superior then people would use it anyway. BUT THEY WERE NOT.

And there were a lots of other little things there and there that shows they are just a huge pile of mess.

Of coz Credit where credits due. There are amazing things Microsoft did. Microsoft Research for instance, i saw the presentation on real time voice recognition and translation. And many other things from Microsoft Research as well. Xbox 360, from PS3 prospective were quite good ( not great, but good ). And Mouse and Keyboard, that is the only competitor against Logitech in consumer range.

And I dont think People are Pro Apple and therefore Anti M$.

Up front, social media is largely about signalling. If X is deemed unpopular amongst 'those in the know', you signal your disapproval and vice versa.

Context matters a lot for Microsoft.

Amongst older people, there are enough casualties of Microsoft's success around to warrant a default hatred for the company and it's values.

However, the saddest indictment is even at the height of their success many people didn't like or even hated using their products (take the parody of Windows/BG in South Park the movie in 1999 as an example if you like).

So I think Microsoft as a deserved reputation for considering the enjoyment of their products as a separate from the success of their business, at least in the mainstream. It's not to say that Microsoft don't do good products, but it's difficult to regain trust which is lost.

> So is HN basically becoming Slashdot where Microsoft hate occurs by default?

It's been like this for some time. Bias is slightly changed from being very google-centric to apple-centric and back, but hate for microsoft is pretty much clandestine. So much for anti-flamewar features, encouraging group thinking.

I don't think you can fight it much, just don't read hn in the days of apple presentations, you won't miss anything.

The main reason I hate Microsoft is because of all the time I had to waste getting websites to display correctly in their browser. And the fact that I know they made it incompatible on purpose.

Personally, some of the stuff microsoft has been building recently looks really appealing. I want to give some of their stuff a chance, particularly their direction with tablets. I have a convertible tablet and in college used things like onenote and the text recognition it has is simply amazing, better than anything else I've used. I could stash an image on it, then write on top of it, then search it immediately after! So I think microsoft has had a good track record with tablet technology, and I'm definitely interested in trying out the new stuff. I haven't yet, simply because I haven't had a chance to test the new surface pro.

This article nails it...the Worst Part about Working at Microsoft

http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/10/09/what-is-the-wor...

It's the number of people who doubt us. We suck, we hate OSS, we are evil, we are incompetent.

Thing is, Microsoft isn't a monolith. It's little startups, small groups and big groups. I went there 5 years ago to do open source and I'm doing it. I can't speak for the other gajillion groups but mine doesn't suck and we work hard doing nice things.

It's tiring be to doubted so consistently.

Oh, you mean the article that claims MS should get credit for the chair I'm sitting on? Uh, ok...

Making OSS that only works on the MS stack doesn't really count.

Ya, his article jumped the shark there and went downhill from there, but the essence is there. We dropped the ball on Smart Watches, Tablet PCs, Pens, etc.

Agreed on the OSS thing, that's why my group doesn't do that whenever possible.

You know those articles on stackoverflow which are marked 'matter of opinion, not constructive'?

yeah. this. That.

(I fully endorse discussion about meaningful topics, but I think it's a bit stupid to have a microsoft vs. not microsoft post push up at the top of HN. Everyone, post your opinion on this topic now, instead of actually talking to each other~)

This post wouldn't have happened if that Nokia Tablet incident yesterday didn't occur, where people were stopped from talking to each other through a few anti-MS trolls throwing shill accusations around. You are free to completely ignore this post, but given the number of upvotes, I guess there are some pent up feelings about this.

I've seen more hate directed against Oracle than Microsoft, and I don't see much hate against products like .NET, C# or Xbox, when they are discussed.

I guess that Microsoft-related topics are not regarded as supremely interesting to most of the startup scene, which still drives this site in many ways. MS aren't high growth, haven't been a startup for decades, and their stack doesn't seem popular with startups. Even if a few people hate Microsoft, I'd characterize the overall tone I've observed on HN regarding Microsoft as largely indifferent.

Of course there's prejudice, but the main reason is that the HN crowd doesn't believe that MS has what it takes to make a dent in the smartphone market. And I'm with the crowd on this one.

Given the strength of the incumbents, Microsoft is going to have to pull off something pretty special to make a dent in the smartphone market. Microsoft played to its strengths by buying Nokia, but that's the only strength Microsoft has in this brave new world of lightweight, portable always-on devices, and its nowhere near enough. The organisation just isn't capable of producing a smartphone consumers will want to own and use.

Take my wife: she's no computer lover, and certainly not a Linux nerd or Mac fanboy. She has to use computers in her day-to-day life, and she finds it stressful and confusing. But she loves her Android Nexus 7. In her mind, the Nexus 7 tablet and her Windows laptop belong in different categories. If I told her someone was trying to merge those categories ("The guys who make Windows and Excel are going to make smartphones. Do you want one?") I know she'd run a mile.

I can understand why we have very different takes on Microsoft. I'm also well aware that Microsoft have solved a whole lot of problems so well that people don't even think about them any more. And I LOVE the awesome work you guys do in MSR. But I don't see enough of that awesome in the products people have to work with every day, and in the smartphone market that's going to hurt!

There is always hate for the big player.

In early Steve Jobs/Apple meetings their was a lot of hate for IBM. After some time the hate was reserved for Bill Gates/Microsoft. The latest enemy is Google.

Every company has their faults.

Apple is so much worse than Microsoft, business practices wise, in nearly every way. But they're a minority, and they compensate for their rapaciousness with a level of quality and attention to detail that nobody else does, period.

Linux and their ecosystem is like the Borg. Everybody will be open source eventually, and if you don't get on board they'll just clone you. And eventually they'll win. Look at how far gimp has come. They're gonna get everybody sooner or later.

Google wants to be Microsoft in the worst way, but has not yet achieved the level of hubris that would allow them to forget that a new search engine is just a click away. And it is. If google pisses us off enough, they could be wrapped up overnight. And they know it.

Microsoft, on the other hand, is a mean competitor that doesn't really do quality and has its roots in the nineties when it OWNED EVERYTHING. And it still owns the desktop, and office productivity. Which is the company, frankly. Anything else they do is window dressing or a loss leader in search of finding their way back to the center of the universe, which isn't going to happen. And the beef people have with them comes from our remembrance of their tender mercies when they ran everything everywhere. We, the consumers, are vastly better off in a multipolar tech world, and its difficult to imagine anybody allowing a single company to accumulate that level of monopoly ever again.

Plus Microsoft astroturfs for pr like nobody else, so fans are automatically suspect.

Do you recall anything of the 1990's? IE 6? Embrace, extend, and extinguish? The Halloween documents? Microsoft's conviction of anticompetitive business practices left unpunished when the Bush administration took over? The decades of terrible products?

And let's not forget their use of SCO as a sock puppet with which to attack and possibly destroy Linux (see: perhaps 50% of the Groklaw archives).

Note: There may not be a "smoking gun" that establishes M$ as the true force behind the SCO v. world+dog lawsuits, but there's enough circumstantial evidence out there to establish "probable cause." Besides, if Linux were to suddenly be outlawed and/or made non-free as the result of a court decision going SCO's way, cui bono?

Why should the Nokia tablet deserve to be on the front page any more than the new Sony tablet or a new Acer tablet? Does it have any new technology that makes it stand out (like the 41MP camera in the Nokia 1020)? Does it introduce a new form factor that's unique (like the 0.71" 1lb iPad Air or the trashcan Mac Pro) ? Is it priced uniquely or does it use a new OS or processor that other tablets don't?

Or is it just another 'me too' product? It is.

The iPad Air isn't really a unique form factor; its just thin and light.

and, you know, actually relevant given the thriving ios app business and wide deployment. Unlike microsoft phones and tablets.

Exactly, I'm tired of hearing PC-esque defence of these incompetent companies. Their products have always been a bane, they suck.

I remember my HTC Diamond on the original Windows Phone failure.

Then don't upvote the PC-esque articles, but why flag them?

When you get as big and as powerful as Microsoft you could almost see the company as a country. It's akin to America and its export of culture (hollywood, music, tv shows, etc..).

You will find people that embrace it (large majority all over the world) and others who despise it with a passion and still others who are indifferent. There are those that dabble in it once in a while to see what the fuss is all about and those that actively resist it to make sure their culture doesn't get polluted.

I would say for the most part, the HN community is like Quebec in Canada. Largely in love with their own culture and heritage (in this case open source stacks and Linux) with a strong feeling to keep it that away. But, Quebec also knows that English culture and the English language won't go ahead as its too pervasive so they try to do their best to keep it in check. Just as in Quebec, you have people that love the English culture and follow it but not too publicly.

I have noticed HN crowd is likely very SF focused and the biases tend to skew that away.

Well, so much for the analogy but at the end of the day, its part of the territory when you become as big and successful as Microsoft. The same ASK HN would be relevant if the company was changed to Google, Apple, IBM and so forth.

The unjustified MS hate is a remnant of the justified MS hate of the past, when they used shady business practices to force DOS and Windows down the world's throat.

Nowadays they're fairly tame, however. It's time to treat them as any other tech company.

i wouldn't say that HN or the open source community in general has shut the doors on microsoft as much as microsoft has shut the doors on the open source community. developers who get into the microsoft bubble never seem to make their way out, and the number of open-source c# projects is limited in comparison to those written in other languages, simply due to their system dependence.

Microsoft has a reputation problem in the open source community. There are some serious philosophical differences and its unlikely Microsoft can amend its reputation without drastically changing its business practices.

I actually enjoy this Microsoft bashing. It's like seeing a former school bully, who is now living of benefits and drinking cheap beer. Microsoft totally deserves it after decades of aggression towards FOSS, unfair competition and monopolising PC business. Of course, there are also really good stuff coming from Microsoft, but that's nothing compared to the harm done.

"Hate the sin, but not the sinner".

It is important as a community that we keep an open view about the products that we see getting posted here. Microsoft might have made mistakes in the past and had produced lowly products.

But who knows, it is possible that the next best thing in the world may come from one of them - or for that matter, anybody. A prejudiced eye can only have a blurred vision.

I feel the dislike of Microsoft stems from two major things:

1) Its history both when it was dominant and even with recent stuff like trying to force always on DRM with xbone. Techies at large just distrust MS. In MS's defense, I feel that both Apple and Google are working their way to the same place, a lot more slowly but surely.

2) The difficulty of developing in Windows while not using the MS stack. Sure, it's gotten a lot better over the years, but it's still not as easy as using OSX or some Linux distro. Even when you do use the Windows stack you get burned, I've known former VB devs as well as .NET devs who were with the Windows 8 transition. Your open source eco-system also really sucks, leading to a lot of unnecessary re-inventions of the wheel, which I don't have to do when using other tech stacks. (Codeplex was really too little and too late.)

I also think the second point is why there's not as much hate for Google and Apple, since their main offerings just work better from the techie perspective.

I don't hate Microsoft (I used to work at Microsoft Product Support Services). At the same time, I think after watching Microsoft try to break into the consumer smartphone market for the last 14 years, I think there is a point when one wonders if they should just give up. The only people I know using Microsoft phones and tablets are Microsoft employees.

Just so you know there are a few guys out here (I'm one) that do like Microsoft and my Nokia Lumia is going great.

Did you set the default megapixel setting for the camera lower then 41?

I suspect that most people here who hate Microsoft still use products like Excel (for which there is no good competitor :) And maybe that's part of the reason for the hate: for all the problems, there are a few indispensable products that keep us coming back to windows and office and other Microsoft products.

As a developer I have no need for office programs. On the odd chance I get sent a file, libre-office is plenty fine.

Microsoft has had their day - their time has been and gone. Their software is more bloated than ever and their organisational model is still 'build to sell'.

I think the problem is that it is not 'hate' like people are hating java. I think it is more that MS has become 'irrelevant' in circles that matter :) i.e. the consultants who go around telling new companies what to develop in.

If you see the pattern of adoption by developers, I see more developers walking around with Macs, and linux boxes and running VMs to test out IE compat than anything else.

So, MS has become another OS to work with than the OS to develop on. imo.

I had been in MS ecosystem for 10+ years before moving to other technologies and it has taught me more about concepts of distributed computing (dos and donts) than anything else. I can apply those to any problems i see today. But, I will likely not not develop another asmx and aspx page.. :(

No one does asmx and aspx anymore. It has been ages since ASP.NET MVC had been released - now it's just controllers, models and pure HTML - especially if you use the latest flavour - Web API.

Many of us lived through the 90s, when Microsoft strongarmed their technically inferior products to the whole PC industry. In fact, they pretty much invented the whole closed-source proprietary software model, and I totally agree with Stallman that it is a horrible invention. And they were rewarded for it handsomely. Then the numerous FUD attacks against many things I like, such as Linux and the open-source community in general.

At least for me, all this has created strong dislike towards that company. It's nothing that cannot be fixed, but not quickly, and I really don't see them trying a lot yet.

Fortunately, the situation these days is much better than in the 90s since now there are real alternatives. What was once hatred is now just suspicion.

> In fact, they pretty much invented the whole closed-source proprietary software model

Wow...are you sure you know your history?

Software is much older than the 1990s. Before there was Microsoft, there was IBM (Apple and MS started at the same time, roughly). Before that, there were no PC clones, only sanctioned hardware running sanctioned software, all with big fat IBM support contracts. Even Apple practiced this, very closed-source proprietary; Microsoft was actually the "open" alternative back then (Stallman was probably playing around with PDPs, very much proprietary uncloneable hardware systems that came with an open Unix).

Then Microsoft comes along and disrupted the entire industry. How? By shipping an operating system for commodity hardware that could easily and cheaply be cloned (IBM's accidental doing as they needed to ship the PC quickly). This happened in the early 80s, which occurred before the 90s.

> Fortunately, the situation these days is much better than in the 90s since now there are real alternatives. What was once hatred is now just suspicion.

Fortunately, the situation these days is much better than in the 90s since now there are real alternatives (DELL, Compaq, Gateway). What was once hatred (against IBM) is now just sympathy.

> Wow...are you sure you know your history?

Oh, that's right, it sort of was actually IBM. Then again, Bill Gates perfected it -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

As a web developer, I will hate them as long as I have to support IE7-8

Latest reason...if you run Windows server in a VM cluster you have to buy a OS license for each VM for EACH POTENTIAL VM HOST. Read that again... The vm is only ever running on one host at one time, but you have to license it for every host. BS

Things may have changed, but you should take a look at Datacenter licensing. Last time I researched this (2 years ago), a Datacenter license covered an unlimited number of guests on that host.

That said, I think most businesses where this really matters have an Enterprise Agreement with a yearly true-up. We're mid sized (<1000) and we have one. No idea what we actually pay, but having an EA and a working KMS infrastructure at least treats the symptoms.

I guess the OS licensing is really one of the bigger annoyances though. All these guys waxing poetic about how great Visual Studio and C# and MVC.NET and whatever are, might not be singing the same tune if those products weren't being subsidized by the other components they rarely have to think about.

> That said, I think most businesses where this really matters have an Enterprise Agreement with a yearly true-up.

There may be a chicken and egg situation there; most people effected have an enterprise agreement because most people too small to have an enterprise agreement or where the enterprise agreement is not economical won't touch Windows Server with a bargepole, because you need the enterprise agreement to make it vaguely cost-effective.

Microsoft was/is a horrible company who abused it's monopoly position to crush other companies. They tried to co-opt the internet by having major sites only work in Internet Explorer. Most of the older tech crowd remembers them for this.

> So is HN basically becoming Slashdot where Microsoft hate occurs by default?

Like Slashdot, HN is a diverse community of people who tend to have strong feelings about technology and tech companies, and negative views are naturally highly visible. So, yes, there's a subgroup from whom consistent Microsoft hate is to be expected, a subgroup from which consistent Google hate is to be expected (including at least two distinct smaller, overlapping subgroups -- one which will refer to NSA collaboration in every Google story, and one which will dismiss every Google story with a reference to the Reader shutdown), and on and on and on.

I didn't flag the article, nor would I have, unless I thought there was an active advert-spamming campaign or something. But, to answer your question: They are just so badly behaved as a company. The issues are as old as the hills and have been beaten to death (the Halloween Documents were ca 1998, for example) and were ongoing for many years and even continue to this day (USDOJ antitrust, Java, SCO vs Everything, IE, Word Document formats, interoperability & standards, etc., etc.). So much energy was wasted doing unproductive things to the industry. I'm surprised if any of this is news to anyone.

I agree. Even the biggest Apple fanboys should keep an open mind towards at least reading the reviews of other products. Only competition (even if you deem it inferior competition) can give rise to disruptive technology.

Even if MS is your "enemy", it's obviously self-destructive to close your eyes to what they're doing.

I hate Microsoft because I would say that they probably do not utilize you to your full extent or that they must shelve alot of your projects, Microsoft does not appear to be innovating and or utilizing R and D properly, the next thing is just half assing everything they have built. If they could build things like how they built visio my god that company would be in a good place in my mind. Another reason I hate Microsoft is that they are not unix based. I mean like unix solved like 90% of the the OS problems. Like for fucks sake adopt open standards. That is all.

Microsoft Research is a great place for a PhD to work! We get lots of freedom in our research, some of which goes on to make big contributions to not only our products, but to the field as a whole!

Actually, when it comes to Microsoft Research, Microsoft does it the right way. Although it is considered a good thing for research projects to be incorporated into products, many projects are free to take a longer view and contribute to base knowledge that benefits all. Kind of the way Xerox Park worked in the days of old.

Why should everything be Unix based? Aren't alternatives and competing ideas a good thing? Adoption of open standards isn't enough. Just look at Google's tactics with Android as described in the recent Ars article or Apple's control over iOS. In many ways classic Windows (and MacOS) were/are more open than either of those systems. It's too bad that Microsoft is being forced (by the market)to follow that model. In the end companies will do what they feel is in their own interest limited only by government regulation. That's the capitalist way. Enlightened self interest will result in benefits for all that are worth the cost of creative destruction. No need to hate on any company. The market and the system will self correct.

Slightly offtopic but related: can someone explain the difference between HN and Slashdot like I'm five?

HN is the new cool piece of playground equipment, the old cool piece of playground equipment has been overrun by losers and is now lame.

Eventually HN will become /. or reddit and we'll move on. It's essentially nerd fashion.

This comment made my day.

It is all about your community and once it becomes too biased one way or the other, everyone else moves on.

FWIW, I think it's less about bias (as a sort of measure of noise) and more about the general quality of conversation. Even if all of the biased camps balanced each other out, the noise just becomes too much and people start looking for another forum.

Or perhaps I'm just projecting my own experiences with /., digg, reddit, et al.

Many years ago towards the beginning of my career proper in technology I first came across the phrase "the September that never ended." Asking a close grey beard he chuckled, explained poetically about newsgroups and finished with the anecdote that when he first started his career he had come across a similar phrase, asked a similar question and thus the cycle was complete.

That's funny, I was going to make the post about eternal september, and compare HN to /. and /. to USENET.

HN and Slashdot are the exact same site at different stages of life.

They begin as the news site with articles that only about 1000 people care about. So you'll go there because reading every single post on Lambda the Ultimate takes too long and you want a community that does the hard work for you of picking out the wheat from the chaff.

Then, after about three years, articles that compare the performance of subroutine threading vs. switch statements in interpreters slowly disappear and are replaced by articles about how the new Apple product is ingenious because it's the size of most people's thumb. Then comments become shorter, and you realize you no longer read the comments to gain a depth of knowledge. Where before you were continually amazed at some people's insight, now when you ask an honest question you are more likely to be flamed by a nerd with a chip on his shoulder that's desperate to start and win an argument.

For another year or two occasional glimpses of the better articles and comments keep you coming back, but after a while you start to go looking for the next site that's long on interesting and short on raging arrogance.

Then, five years after that, you might go back to the old site to see if it ever changed, and instead marvel at the cesspool it's become.

As a techie, you will have this experience once or twice a decade. Slashdot in its heyday (1997-98) was the HN of its time.

If you can't see how much Microsoft is screwing everyone over, then you're not paying attention. It's that simple.

At least they're transparent about it... Even if by accident.

Obviously I can't speak for other people, but since you asked:

I'm an OS X user, and before that I was a Linux/Unix user. I'm not really familiar with Microsoft products (especially recent ones). When some cool new tech gets announced, I'm interested by default.

I have nothing against hearing about stuff from "foreign ecosystems", on the contrary. I was an active member on Channel 9 back in the Scobleizer days, and I loved hearing about the interesting things you guys had been working on.

I didn't catch the Nokia article today, but chances are it wouldn't have caught my eye even if it had been among the top ten on the front page. First, it's not actually interesting on a technical level. Second, a lot of us here on HN speculated what MS was doing when you positioned that trojan CEO at Nokia, and then of course it turned out to be true. Not that there is anything wrong with it per se, but I don't see how that dishonest-yet-obvious takeover puts MS in a position to offer anything interesting that it couldn't offer before. The Nokia name accomplishes very little in this case.

It's true that there can be some group hate on HN, however I don't see a lot of it projected at MS - at least not beyond the usual background noise. We as a community are way more hostile towards certain programming languages and startups. Sure, every Apple thread, every MS thread, every time something from 37signals comes up, there are disgruntled people. But enough to single out MS hatred specifically? I don't think so. Disinterest is the more likely culprit.

As someone who has all of 1 karma and that's only because something made me stop lurking, my take is that if enough members of an online community think something is not relevant to that community, then perhaps it isn't.

Specifically regarding MS v. Apple - because of Apple's position in the marketplace and the timing of their product releases, I think it entirely reasonable that discussion of their new tablet trumps discussion of one of the host of new Windows tablets.

Companies should have values and vision. Microsoft have proving for so many years that their only objective is money.

I still remember when they give money to SCO to send us letters to stop using linux, and right now they offer linux servers. If your market sector is not profit for microsoft, you are going to be ignored.

Also, because of microsoft, our goverments spent a lot of our money.

I don't say Microsoft is bad, neither that I hate it. It is just one more.

closed source since 1975.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html

Microsoft was built around a BASIC interpreter coded by billg himself! But more to the point, Apple doesn't even really uphold open source values either, so regardless of whether they are right or not, it doesn't make sense to ding Microsoft and not Apple.

That's true, there should be more a stronger anti-apple sentiment on this site because restricting the freedom of your users is against hacker ethics. I am only half-joking here, but I agree with the OP that flagging just because you don't like the company is unfair and, personally I just don't up-vote those submissions.

Haha okay, unless you're a high-school senior or college freshman who's just discovered open source, you can't be serious.

except not: http://msopentech.com/

For developers it's open standards and such, but for typical users it is a history of bad experiences.

Microsoft had the great misfortune of being the dominate computing platform in the 90's and early 00's. Computers just weren't as reliable or easy to use back then. Maybe Microsoft could have made Windows better back then, maybe not. Mac System 7/8/9 was by all accounts less reliable than windows and anything 'nix would have been unthinkable to a typical user.

So just about everyone has had a crapware infested computer running something like windows ME or Vista that crashed every few hours. For many people, the first non-widows computer they used was an android or iOS phone. Therefore the association is Microsoft == crappy/unreliable vs Apple/Google == easy to use/dependable. OEMs in a race to the bottom on hardware don't help Microsoft at all.

I actually think windows 7 was a rock solid OS and Windows 8 is good once you get over the awkward interface changes. But Microsoft's brand image has been permanently damaged.

I don't personally hate Microsoft, but it's true that it is perhaps not the most popular tablet manufacturer in the world right now.

I know many people who own an iPad, several others who have Android tablets, but zero Windows tablet owners. I guess that should explain by itself why people are not really excited about it. Fuss and hype are not basic human rights.

I do not think that hate is the appropriate word for it, though I have found myself almost hating this company in the past. I have thought about it, as it is not a rational thing to "hate" a company and I came to the conclusion that there is a reasonable explanation:

This company has caused me pain time and time again, so this is the first reason I strongly dislike them.

That aside, this company may have had successful agreements and marketing strategies but for a range of technical people they are more of a pain and problem than a solution. They give attitude, they do not respect their users, they do not innovate, they charge for ridiculous things (eg starter, home, professional), they haven't managed to build an os+GUI in the last 25 years!

You (or a lot of other people) may not agree with the above opinion. The truth is that a lot of people agree and it looks like a lot of them can be found around here. This is my explanation.

Why the Microsoft hate?

I was here in the browser war of the 90s. I was present when it destroyed Wordperfect. I was present when it trampled on Netscape and others.

Now I see what they're doing with Internet Explorer and I'm thinking it's just more of the same. They're only not in a position to assert themselves as they used to.

What do you think about Apple's company practices? There isn't a more greedier company right now. Yet they are viewed as magical. Please.

I don't care about any of the politics but Microsoft has horrible products that have sub-par user experience.

So does Apple (iTunes, XCode).

I was thinking, the new iPad Air are so expensive, I won't have money left to buy and try a Nokia tablet...

:) they haven't announced pricing for the Nokia tablet yet, and the air definitely looks nice. I mean, they are both interesting stories, and there is no reason to flag one of them to bury it just because it is Microsoft/Nokia/whatever.

People that had to deal with supporting Internet Explorer for the past 10 years. Here's something I made to express my contempt in 2005 http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v381/s1e/ass.gif

Flags for what type of comments? Did the comment provide constructive feedback? Or did it simply state an opinion with no support to fuel the discussion?

It's -ethical- to flag comments that are false, off-topic, or do not contribute to the discussion; not ones of differing opinion.

I have to say, as someone of 40+ years, a lot of the Microsoft hate seems kind of quaint now.

I definitely remember being anti them when I worked for Lotus, and when they tried to push horrible non-standards on the world.

Now though? I just don't think they're that scarey any more.

I visit Hacker News throughout the day and couldn't agree with you more. The dislike for anything having to do with MS is undeniable. I like HN and have apps installed on my Android tablet and on my Nokia Windows phone (best phone IMO).

Other than past things, like their attempts to thwart open standards in the 90s and their bankrolling of the SCO lawsuits against Linux, I can speak to one reason that's contemporary:

As a software developer, everything is harder on Windows. I have three choices:

1) Ignore Windows and ignore >50% of desktop market share.

2) Ignore non-Windows OSes, because things get easy if you do everything the Microsoft way.

3) Endure the pain of porting to Windows, which is greater by orders of magnitude than the pain of porting to Android, iOS, or small-market-share OSS OSes like OpenBSD. It's like task one is "support the entire universe except Microsoft," and task two is "support Microsoft."

Can you elaborate on pain of porting to Windows? Have you tried programming C#/JavaScript/Java? AFAIK all those languages are portable to various extent. If you want to use non-platform-idiomatic GUI then you can use something like Awesomium and reuse HTML5.

I'm talking about writing lower level app code, especially code that interacts with the network and the filesystem and uses things like threads.

All the world is not a webapp.

Be what it may, MS is still a great tech company. Windows many not be very good for computing in general but it still is the OS that we write reports on and play games on. And its stability with home computers is unmatched by linux (the kind of systems with crossfire and SLI). And even now there is nothing that can match MS Office in functionality.

Dismissing something just because it is related to MS is just discrimination. Nokia tablet seems to be quite promising.. and unless its priced like 30-40k INR I would like to get one. (btw I am a Hadoop/BigData developer working primary on linux)

I think its (a) because MS has earned decent amount of ire for decades of FUD-tastic practices and (b) like Blackberry, no one is really terribly interested (by comparison to Android/iOS) more than marginally.

The only things that really irk me about Microsoft is 1) Windows isn't Unix based, and 2) IE doesn't update quickly enough, , which sets web development for the future back.

Otherwise, Microsoft doesn't bother me.

I suspect it's less that people here hate Microsoft, and more that many people here don't use Microsoft's products and don't really care about Microsoft. I haven't used a Microsoft product to any significant degree since the early noughties; this isn't because I hate Microsoft (I don't; I'm largely indifferent to it); I just found that other things fit my needs better.

I don't understand it personally I hate Apple. :P

A majority of power users do not particularly enjoy Microsoft products, and they have their reasons. Those are based on rational decisions i.e. lack of efficiency, support, integrity etc. "Hate" is someting different.

If you think people hate MS, ask them specifically what they do not like. Maybe THEY CAN'T EVEN GET TO SAY WHAT THEY DO NOT LIKE about the product and discomfort grows into hate?

just saying.

Actually, Microsoft has very easy feedback systems by which you can tell us what you think about basically every single product we have. So you can freely say what you don't like - you can even do it here and probably even get a few employees like me to answer back.

As for your contention that people's feelings about Microsoft are based on rational decision making - are you making the case that that is true of the majority of users? If so, that case seems fundamentally untrue. Look at studies of Bing results versus Google results: in a brand-blind test, people prefer Bing over Google. If you switch the label, the thing people prefer most is Google brand with Bing results. It is abundantly clear that there is much more to how people feel about Microsoft than rationality, and I can't think of a credible scientist who would say otherwise.

Personally, I remember when the Halloween Documents came out:

http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/

Amongst other things, they spelled out how Microsoft intended to 'embrace and extend' standards in order to break interoperability.

If you want to know why people don't trust Microsoft, years later, have a read of them.

I use a PC with Windows 7. I have a Macbook but I'm not crazy about the Office apps on Macbook so use the PC most of the time.

This past week, I spilled water on the PC and took it into the shop. I picked-up a back-up ASUS, loaded with Win 8.

This was the beginning of my nightmare.

1. Win 8 was just terrible. It took me way too long to figure out how to perform simple actions. Win 8 is Frankenstien - it is Microsoft's attempt to unify the computing experience by (a) copying numerous OS UI elements; (b) slapping a tablet version of their operating system on top of a desktop version; (c) burying elements behind keyboard shortcuts and some gaudy, horrible startup screen that advertises other Microsoft products.

In a nutshell, they have built the perfect operating system for a schizophrenic blind person.

After a day of cursing out Microsoft while trying to figure out basic things (like getting to the "start" menu), I tried installing Office, the entire reason I still use a PC. I rebooted the PC and voila - Win 8 told me it couldn't start Win 8 and I had to revert to an earlier point in time.

I tried doing that and after another hour, Win 8 told me it couldn't do that either and I had to reinstall Win 8.

I put the laptop back in its box and returned it and just started learning how to use Office on Mac.

This is why Microsoft is just pathetic. I feel pathetic for giving Microsoft a chance. This isn't hyperbole: Windows 8 is really a complete and utter failure.

See Bill Gates letter to Hobbyists in this thread http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Microsoft has always had animosity with the hacker crowd, and vice versa. This has been going on for four decades.

I should upvote the articles I like more often, instead of just clicking on those with interesting headings.

First of all let me say that of the research I follow, MS research is definitely in my top list. And you personally (with non MSR people like Jonathan Edwards) are among the few who try to help the crap we call programming which I hope you will pursue for a long time. I follow your research and your comments on HN.

On MS (mostly opinion here as most posters in this kind of thread):

I used to love MS in the 80s, because of the MSX [1]; to me that all was very open and nice.

With Windows 3.1 I saw something different; I was used to unix in university by then and Windows 3.1 was so horribly unstable and generally completely worthless that I thought the world had gone mad from buying and using that crap. I used to look in pity on the people sitting behind the very frequently crashing 3.1 (browsing with Netscape on 3.1 was like pulling teeth) machines as I sat behind Solaris which never crashed. Which made MS, to me, the company who releases things into the wild which do not work and they dare to ask money for it. I know they couldn't really help some of that; you could crash 3.1 as easy as DOS, but software under DOS crashed less frequently, wasn't that much of a pain to work with (one open application at a time; good for focusing too :). Matters became worse that, after a while, they had NT and still they were peddling, for money!, that 3.1 abomination on humanity.

With 95 things didn't improve much (at the time it seemed it did and up from 3.1 it did, but in the big scheme of things it still crashed all the time) and by then a solid version of NT was on the market so there was not much excuse for releasing '95. I became aware of their dubious business tactics against small companies and with their partners; as a result of the technical crap they released and their tactics I got 5 sparcstation 5 machines from my old uni for free and installed redhat on my PC.

I try Windows and the eco system ever so often;I have a Lumia; love the hardware, not the OS; many issues I've written about before. I tried to like Windows 7 and 8; 7 is ok, but not more than that and 8 is... weird. I wish they would've just had some balls and just only put Metro all the way with no way to go back. Now it's just, like the Surface; neither meat nor fish; not tablet, not laptop. For a client I had to install the MS-SQL/Sharepoint/Exchange etc stack and write some software on it; I thought I liked it at first, but after a while I got into the quirks which had no documentation and not much online relief.

Basically; I try to like MS their products ever so often because I think their should be competition; I just don't see any competition compared to what I use daily. And stuff like the Android patents still stings; unless they turn that back they haven't changed since the 90s and are still evil.

I don't 'hate' anything though; it's just something they shouldn't do if they want my money.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX

Thanks for the comment. I'm attending Splash next week and Jonathan will be there, I can't wait!

My post was about whether Microsoft articles were getting an unfair shake due to flagging; I truly believe that people should upvote for what they want to talk about and ignore what they don't. That's it. This is not about attention or whether MS products are good or not. Its whether the Nokia tablet story deserved to be thrown off the front page by a bunch of trolls even if it had the upvotes to stay on for an hour or so more.

Cool. Wish I could be there :) No such stuff in the EU as far as I know :/

And yes I know; but this gives some background maybe of why people would hate MS so much. They have been stung too many times in the (recent) past to allow anything of theirs to rise to fame. I know quite a lot of (older) people who are like that for the reasons I detailed.

I upvoted the Nokia tablet story and of course it did not deserve to be thrown off. It looks like a nice product hardware wise. I noticed it too that high ranking MS stories suddenly disappear, but I noticed that with other stories (I found interesting) as well. I don't know exactly how that works here.

I also look forward to chatting with Gilad Bracha, many of the Google PL people will be there that I don't get to see very often. EU has ECOOP (every) and PLDI (this) year, I also went this summer to a nice workshop in Leiden on language design.

I have good ideas on why people dislike Microsoft, but it baffles me that they hate it enough to play dirty in getting those stories revoked. Why would they even bother commenting on an article they weren't interested in anyways? It doesn't make sense, it begins to look like Slashdot all over again. Did microsoft cause so much trauma to them when they were children, or is this just some sort of bandwagon-based nerd rage?

HN basically is the same draw as the Slashdot crowd ... with iPhone vs Android being the dominant flamewar in place of Linux vs MS. (or KDE vs Gnome).

And fewer hot grits.

I'd say a lot of it was due to trauma in the 90s and early 2000's. People really, really grew to hate Microsoft on a personal level, more intense than the relatively trendy/casual Apple hate these days.

Things like the Halloween memos. The Java debacle. The massive industry time waster known as WS-* (thanks IBM too). But also business practices like using patents to try to dissuade Linux adoption in 2004 by threatening to sue their customers if they don't pass over some payola (happened to my company at the time). I truly am not lying about that last one - I worked for a large telecom that received this threat.

That said I still have respect for MS Research and a lot of the work being done on C# and .NET. Early in my career I was a COM/COM+/.NET guy but decided it wasn't a company I wanted to do business with.

Thanks for the heads up about the EU events (and people)!

Oh, but 3.1 was freaking light years ahead of Windows 286/386. It was the first remotely usable version of Windows.

But it wasn't usable IMHO. While the competition did have usable software.

Probably also a bit of Nokia hate. They basically axed everything interesting they worked on, missed every innovation (totally not related to Elop) and got bought for really cheap by MS (totally not related to Elop).

Over the past few years I have found myself respecting Microsoft and losing faith in Google. I actually feel bad for Microsoft's missteps, but maybe that is what is making them a more respectable company.

I guess the reason is because hackers love open systems. Even companies like google get shit from this place because "the best parts of Android are not open".

Doesn't explain why Apple gets praise (most closed of them all). I think it's more of a hype/image issue.

I didn't know Apple got praise from hackers. At least not in my circles.

This - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6603008

I'd say the causes of hate range from their participation with the NSA surveillance programs to just plain making faulty software.

I'll ask a question, serious for me:

Mostly you guys are way ahead of me in knowledge of current software tools, especially on Linux and 'open source software' (OSS -- I had to look up that one!).

But I'm doing a startup the center of which is a Web site. If people like the site, a huge if, then it could grow to be a big thing around the world. Did I mention if people like the site? People might not like the site. But if they do then I will need to grow a significant server farm, etc.

So far I'm a solo founder and doing all the work.

I'm keeping most of the site architecture and software dirt simple. At the core of some of the server side software are two servers that have some software I wrote implementing some applied math I derived -- still, just as computing, the architecture and software are simple.

For various reasons, I decided to stand on Microsoft's software. Here is my thinking, and where am I on thin ice?

(1) I can understand that if I had the knowledge and/or staff to know some version of Linux and other OSS in detail, then Linux and OSS might offer me more power and flexibility. My concern, forever, would be that I would be getting in the business of operating systems, middle ware, and tools, and that is definitely not my business. So, I'm eager to leave that work to a vendor that specializes in such things, and for such a vendor all I could see was Microsoft. So, right, it sounds like I want to pay money for my operating system, middle ware, tools, etc., and in a sense that is correct. I.e., if something goes wrong, then I want an 'account executive' to call and ask for help.

(2) Sure, Linux and Unix have a long and powerful background back through Sun, Silicon Graphics, BSD, AT&T, etc. But for my time on x86 I went from PC/DOS to OS/2 to Windows XP, and along that path, each year, I thought that the OS I was using was likely the most suitable for me on x86. E.g., instead of PC/DOS or OS/2 on x86, I was not going to buy a Sun or SGI workstation at several times higher price.

(3) As of now, as a desktop OS on x86, 32 and/or 64 bit addressing, as far as I can tell, XP and/or Windows 7 look okay with Linux and OSS without huge advantages. Where am I going wrong here?

(4) There are a lot of developers writing for Microsoft, and just what the 'platform' is is fairly clear, e.g., the .NET Framework of some version 2, 3, 4, 4.5 on Windows XP, 7, or Server. So there is some definiteness to the platform. On Linux I would have to learn about the versions of the different 'distributions'. I don't even know what would be involved.

Due to the definiteness and the large number of developers, on the Internet it should be relatively easy to get answer to questions for the Windows platform. Is this roughly correct?

(5) My biggest complaint with Microsoft is the quality of the technical writing in their documentation. It looks like the documentation is from some nerds who know the software but have no idea how to explain it to others and writers who know spelling, punctuation, and a little more and are highly diligent but, still, don't know how to explain software. My fear is that bad technical writing is common in computing and that in the world of Linux and OSS the situation would be worse. E.g., for serious questions, maybe commonly the solutions is just to read the code. Is this roughly correct?

(6) So far I've been pleased with the reliability of the Microsoft software I've been using -- XP SP3, .NET Framework 4, Visual Basic .NET, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, IIS, and SQL Server. And from some of the large, busy Web sites standing on the Microsoft platform, I suspect that Microsoft will be able, maybe if at times I talk to them one on one, to provide what I need from them for my site. Of course then I will be using Windows Server and developing on Windows 7 with XP out'a here.

(7) The Microsoft software is from, right, Microsoft, and since they wrote it and sell it, my understanding is that they support it. Actually via some forums, I've already gotten some quite good support for free from some Microsoft people apparently assigned to give serious answers to serious questions. But it's been a while since I had such a question. But in the future I anticipate questions, from me and/or my staff (if my site is successful enough for me to have staff), and then I will want the option of getting high quality paid support for serious questions. So, maybe my site is crashing; I don't know why; and I want to call for serious help. I suspect that I can get such help from Microsoft (even if I have to pay) but am unsure just what the situation is for Linux and OSS where, e.g., where's the company with account executives?

(8) So far I like the Windows Common Language Runtime (CLR) and .NET Framework and the managed code of Visual Basic .NET, C#, etc. So far I'm writing just Visual Basic .NET and am quite happy with it; as far as I can tell C# offers little or nothing more but has just a different flavor of syntactic sugar, one related to C and that I don't like. I believe that, compared with C#, Visual Basic .NET is easier to read on the page, is less prone to bugs due to being more verbose, and will be easier to teach to new staff. Where am I going wrong?

For the world of Linux and OSS, I don't know what programming language I would use that I would like as well as Visual Basic .NET. What would the options be?

(9) From some of what I've seen of high end server farms on the Microsoft platform, the automation of system installation, configuration, monitoring, and management is excellent, but my view has been only from, say, 1000 feet up. If this is so, then I'm impressed. Where am I going wrong?

I've known people who made the same decision for many of the same reasons, and the universal experience I've heard was "it was all nice until we had to scale, and then it got expensive quickly". If your stack works for you, great! That's the important part! But if your traffic and income scaled by a factor of 100, would you be turning a profit or desperately looking for financing? You're the only one who can answer that, and it's something to consider.

Same as kstrauser: Microsoft products are great, but they're more expensive to scale.

I've been working with Microsoft products for close to a decade, and I think their software stack is great.

However, for my current side project, I went with another platform (Groovy+Grails, running on the JVM), purely because of cost (and also because I wanted to learn it :) ).

You can choose to be part of the BizSpark program and get all Microsoft software for free for 3 years, but you have to pay afterwards.

Prices for Microsoft software hosting is usually 2 or 3 times what it costs for a mostly equivalent software.

For example, something I'm using now (Amazon AWS), the price of a small Linux instance is $0,060/hr, while the equivalent Microsoft instance is $0,091/hr

Azure pricing is too expensive for me, I discarded it.

If I had money (maybe angel or VC backing), I might have considered it, but it's a bootstrapped side project.

As far as I can tell from my software timings, likely revenue from ads as I need to scale, and Microsoft's prices, I should be able to afford Microsoft as I scale.

But at some point, if Microsoft's charges to me are so high I could hire a good team to refactor and convert my code to Linux and OSS, then I could save money. I have to believe that Microsoft has seen that issue before and has responses to it.

> So, I'm eager to leave that work to a vendor that specializes in such things, and for such a vendor all I could see was Microsoft. So, right, it sounds like I want to pay money for my operating system, middle ware, tools, etc., and in a sense that is correct. I.e., if something goes wrong, then I want an 'account executive' to call and ask for help.

Novell will sell you SuSE with support if that's what you want. No doubt there are other options. You're right that MS are probably the biggest, most obvious OS vendor that sell straight to customers.

> Sure, Linux and Unix have a long and powerful background back through Sun, Silicon Graphics, BSD, AT&T, etc. But for my time on x86 I went from PC/DOS to OS/2 to Windows XP, and along that path, each year, I thought that the OS I was using was likely the most suitable for me on x86. E.g., instead of PC/DOS or OS/2 on x86, I was not going to buy a Sun or SGI workstation at several times higher price.

Modern computers (even desktop/laptop) are much more similar to those workstations than to DOS-era consumer PCs.

> As of now, as a desktop OS on x86, 32 and/or 64 bit addressing, as far as I can tell, XP and/or Windows 7 look okay with Linux and OSS without huge advantages. Where am I going wrong here?

There's the customizability side. You say that you're not in the business of tools, but if you're in the business of making something that almost inherently becomes the business of making tools, because existing tools never fit exactly to your needs. Every serious programmer I've known customizes their environment, and linux makes this easier.

But you're right that most of the value in linux comes from using it on the server. Once you've made the decision to run linux on the server it makes a lot of sense to run the same thing on your desktop.

> (4) There are a lot of developers writing for Microsoft, and just what the 'platform' is is fairly clear, e.g., the .NET Framework of some version 2, 3, 4, 4.5 on Windows XP, 7, or Server. So there is some definiteness to the platform. On Linux I would have to learn about the versions of the different 'distributions'. I don't even know what would be involved.

I think this is a red herring. Pick a reasonably popular linux platform at random, or pick a hosting service and go with their default / what they recommend. The fact that you've got a choice shouldn't be a downside.

> Due to the definiteness and the large number of developers, on the Internet it should be relatively easy to get answer to questions for the Windows platform. Is this roughly correct?

IME no. Open source platforms have a much stronger culture of mailing lists, IRC channels etc. because it's how the platforms themselves were developed. While there are probably more developers "out there" who know how to solve a particular problem in .net, the information is probably locked away in their heads or on internal-corporation servers. You've got better odds of finding someone to talk to on IRC or getting a question answered on StackOverflow with an OSS platform.

> E.g., for serious questions, maybe commonly the solutions is just to read the code. Is this roughly correct?

I won't say it doesn't happen, but my experience is that you've got a better chance of finding a high-quality, well-documented library with OSS - I think for the same reasons. There's a thriving community of open-source libraries for java/python/ruby/etc., and - very importantly - a global index for each of them, so it's easy to search for a library for your problem, and the popular ones tend to be well-documented. Whereas for .net there doesn't seem to be that culture.

If you're talking about the languages themselves, again people seem much more willing to publish their own tutorials/guides when we're talking about an open source language. And IMO the official documentation for e.g. python or ruby is much clearer than MS'.

> But in the future I anticipate questions, from me and/or my staff (if my site is successful enough for me to have staff), and then I will want the option of getting high quality paid support for serious questions. So, maybe my site is crashing; I don't know why; and I want to call for serious help. I suspect that I can get such help from Microsoft (even if I have to pay) but am unsure just what the situation is for Linux and OSS where, e.g., where's the company with account executives?

Shrug. There are any number of consultancies. My experience is that the free support on the internet available for OSS is vastly superior to paid support. In fact, the free support available on the internet even for proprietary technologies is vastly superior to the paid support. But if this is what matters to you then you're making the correct choice.

> as far as I can tell C# offers little or nothing more but has just a different flavor of syntactic sugar, one related to C and that I don't like. I believe that, compared with C#, Visual Basic .NET is easier to read on the page, is less prone to bugs due to being more verbose, and will be easier to teach to new staff. Where am I going wrong?

VB.NET suffers somewhat from the poor reputation of previous variants; it is probably not as bad as all that. That said, more verbose code tends to be more prone to bugs, not less, and I imagine it's a less structured language. Less structure makes it easier to start a program but harder to maintain and develop it - for a maintainable program you need a language that enforces separation between different layers and makes it very clear which parts of the program can and can't affect other parts of the program. Whereas in the early stages it's very convenient if you can just change everything from everywhere.

At a meta level, you're presumably not going to be writing all the code for long (at least if it's successful), and it sounds like you're not a programming expert yourself. So I think unless you're going to put a lot of effort into learning technical skills (which is probably not the best use of your time), you should probably accept that highly skilled programmers have particular preferences even if you don't understand them yourself (ideally you should find a CTO/cofounder you trust to make technical decisions, and then, well, trust them to make technical decisions). Hopefully you can at least see the value in using a language for which it is easy to hire skilled programmers; IMO VB.NET is not such a language, though you should of course use your own judgement.

> For the world of Linux and OSS, I don't know what programming language I would use that I would like as well as Visual Basic .NET. What would the options be?

Ruby or Python. They're pretty similar, so don't sweat the decision too much, it doesn't make much difference which you pick.

> From some of what I've seen of high end server farms on the Microsoft platform, the automation of system installation, configuration, monitoring, and management is excellent, but my view has been only from, say, 1000 feet up. If this is so, then I'm impressed. Where am I going wrong?

Some of MS' reputation is legacy, but what's impressive to one person may not be impressive to another. How easy would it be under this stack to e.g. automatically bring up another server whenever load rose above a certain threshold?

Also, how well do the server automation tools interact with the other tools programmers like to use? Can I check my server automation into the same VCS I use for my code? Can I use the same toolkit to monitor the server itself and my application? Can I write my server definitions in the same IDE as my program?

(This is why programmers are deeply mistrustful of GUIs; we have a lot of powerful tools for working very effectively with text formats and command lines, and these tend to work with any program. Whereas GUIs, when automatable at all, seem to each have their own macro language that doesn't work with any other tools).

"> as far as I can tell C# offers little or nothing more but has just a different flavor of syntactic sugar, one related to C and that I don't like. I believe that, compared with C#, Visual Basic .NET is easier to read on the page, is less prone to bugs due to being more verbose, and will be easier to teach to new staff. Where am I going wrong?"

"VB.NET suffers somewhat from the poor reputation of previous variants; it is probably not as bad as all that. "

Absolutely. Nothing to do with VB6.

"That said, more verbose code tends to be more prone to bugs, not less, and I imagine it's a less structured language."

It doesn't need to be. I have in front of me a very nice codebase in VB.NET.

"Less structure makes it easier to start a program but harder to maintain and develop it - for a maintainable program you need a language that enforces separation between different layers and makes it very clear which parts of the program can and can't affect other parts of the program. "

That's exactly the same in VB.NET than in C#. You declare your classes as Public, Private, etc..

"Whereas in the early stages it's very convenient if you can just change everything from everywhere."

I think the differences are mostly syntactic and readability.

I prefer VB style because I've been exposed to it the last 5 years, but my first years I thought I would be caught dead before writing in a non-C style language (money convinced me otherwise :P ).

Many thanks.

> Modern computers (even desktop/laptop) are much more similar to those workstations than to DOS-era consumer PCs.

Absolutely. Current computers are totally unreal, off the tops of the charts, as you noted, well beyond what Sun, SGI, etc. were selling 10-15 years ago. But 10-15 years ago I was using x86 at much lower cost.

> There's the customizability side. You say that you're not in the business of tools, but if you're in the business of making something that almost inherently becomes the business of making tools, because existing tools never fit exactly to your needs. Every serious programmer I've known customizes their environment, and linux makes this easier.

Yes. So far my more important customization is some macros for my favorite text editor, a scripting language, and some utility programs.

You are correct about it being easier to automate command line software than GUI software, and I'm a big fan of text input for programs, especially because it's easier to automate the execution of such programs. I like text data that is easy to parse and have some simple parsing code I keep reusing.

I'm hoping that for automating system management Microsoft has some nice tools and APIs. Some of the Microsoft data centers, e.g., one near Chicago, seem to have acres of servers with just a few people and otherwise run by automation. So, apparently some good automation is doable.

> But you're right that most of the value in linux comes from using it on the server

I didn't try to say that, but I thought it and agree with it. Right: With a big server farm based on Windows, I will likely be sending Redmond big bucks monthly for licenses for Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio.

For more, once the monthly checks to Microsoft really add up, then it will be tempting to hire some programmers with backgrounds in Linux and OSS, refactor my Microsoft code onto Linux and OSS, and drop Microsoft.

Yes, for the intermediate term, I do have my eye on the Microsoft BizSpark program.

> I think this is a red herring. Pick a reasonably popular linux platform at random, or pick a hosting service and go with their default / what they recommend. The fact that you've got a choice shouldn't be a downside.

Well, it seemed to me to be a "downside" due to the risk of my ignorance having me pick a poor Linux distribution. But ...! Right! If some major hosting service and their high end customers are happy with some particular selection from Linux and OSS, then that and a little more investigation may be enough to let me make a solid decision.

> I won't say it doesn't happen, but my experience is that you've got a better chance of finding a high-quality, well-documented library with OSS

Wow. Microsoft's technical writing torques me off. E.g., there is the Microsoft program NTBACKUP for disk space backup and restore. It's cute at least in the sense that it can, apparently much like relational data base, get a consistent backup image of a system while it is running and the files are changing. Cute. And useful.

So, I did my backup/restore planning around NTBACKUP. Then when an install of a new version of SQL Server made my Windows XP boot partition sick and I needed to restore it, the restore wouldn't boot. Huge bummer. Hmm ...? Why? Well, there is an obscure option in NTBACKUP to save the system state. What the heck do they mean by system state? So, this is a classic example of undocumented, undefined, nearly meaningless techno-gibberish. They were talking about the options I had selected in Outlook? My screen size? What the heck?

Well, eventually I found mostly by accident from some other software that actually on the boot partition there is a lot of data called system state. Documented, described some place? Not that I could find. But if want the restored data to be bootable, that is, usable, then when save must must take the option to save system state. We're talking hidden chuck hole in the road here, folks.

So, I ran experiments, installing XP. doing backups and restores, and some days, maybe weeks, later accumulated a lot of experience and evidence and typed in a lot of notes and wrote some scripts and got my usage of NTBACKUP in good shape. Then I reinstalled everything else, set all the options for Outlook, etc., apparently none of that work easy to automate, and, exhausted, frustrated, angry, got back to work. Bummer. Huge, outrageous bummer. That's just one example of many.

> And IMO the official documentation for e.g. python or ruby is much clearer than MS'.

I'm surprised, but there's plenty of room for better VB.NET documentation.

> My experience is that the free support on the internet available for OSS is vastly superior to paid support.

I've heard such things, if only as rumors.

> VB.NET suffers somewhat from the poor reputation of previous variants; it is probably not as bad as all that.

I can believe that; I never used the previous versions. From all I can see, VB.NET is mostly just some VB type syntactic sugar to let people do simple if-then-else, do-while, call-return, try-catch, and some more, and make use of the .NET Framework and the CLR.

> Less structure makes it easier to start a program but harder to maintain and develop it - for a maintainable program you need a language that enforces separation between different layers and makes it very clear which parts of the program can and can't affect other parts of the program. Whereas in the early stages it's very convenient if you can just change everything from everywhere.

Yes. I'm very sensitive to scope of names, dynamic versus static descendancy, e.g., due to my long experience with IBM's PL/I.

There is some name scoping -- think of as semantic nesting -- in VB.NET, and so far I'm happy enough with it.

> At a meta level, you're presumably not going to be writing all the code for long (at least if it's successful), and it sounds like you're not a programming expert yourself.

My problem with being a "programming expert" is the documentation: It appears that in practice mostly people learn by experiments and experience instead of well written documentation, and to me that seems very wasteful. Some years ago much of the documentation was better written.

Actually I've done a lot in software and am familiar enough with what's in Knuth, Ullman, CLRS, Sedgwick, and more, but I am lacking experience with the worlds of Windows Server and Linux, the Microsoft .NET Framework and the CLR, OSS on Linux, relational data base installation, configuration, operations, and management, usage of IDEs, software project tools and management, server farm and network management and automation.

Actually, for the software I need for my Web site to go live, I'm about done. The core of that software stands to remain the core of my business for a long time.

But, right, for various purposes that now seem small or to be done manually, there will be a lot of software written, and I will need a good programming group.

> Hopefully you can at least see the value in using a language for which it is easy to hire skilled programmers; IMO VB.NET is not such a language, though you should of course use your own judgment.

I'm wondering: To me VB.NET seems so easy that, with some decent documentation, anyone should be able to pick it up quickly, and anyone with any experience in programming should be able to learn the language mostly just from a few example programs and a little cheat sheet on a few pages of paper.

My view is that learning VB.NET should be easier than getting good with a good text editor with a good macro language. Net, if a person is good at typing into a good text editor, then learning VB.NET should be fast, fun, and easy.

The challenges in writing significant Web site software are outside the language and in the APIs, e.g., the .NET Framework, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, also in the middle ware, e.g., IIS, SQL Server, and in some issues of system and network management, system security, etc. Heck, just getting a Web page to connect to SQL Server can be more work than learning half of VB.NET. Did I mention that I don't like SQL Server documentation? For those topics, I hope to have some good learning materials and quick courses. My view is that the actual content is not much beyond learning how to cook, say, pancakes, and the main difficulty is just some just horribly badly written documentation. Did I mention horribly badly written? Indeed, I intend to hire mostly bright, well motivated people with good learning abilities and high standards and maybe only small backgrounds in programming and then train them in the detailed technical topics.

I think you will struggle to hire good programmers willing to work in VB.NET. (For myself, I wouldn't take a job in anything short of scala or haskell. These aren't "easy" languages; in fact stereotypically they're "hard", but they allow me to write in a few lines something that would be dozens of repetitions of a pattern in a less powerful language. Programming in something else is boring and repetitive by comparison). You said before you were confident in the microsoft platform because of the large, busy websites using it; are any of those built on VB.NET?

>The challenges in writing significant Web site software are outside the language and in the APIs, e.g., the .NET Framework, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, also in the middle ware, e.g., IIS, SQL Server, and in some issues of system and network management, system security, etc.

Sounds like you think you don't really need much actual programming. Maybe the problem you're solving isn't really a technical one, and that's fine - in which case maybe you'll be fine with mediocre programmers and it would be a waste of money to hire top ones.

Well, best of luck either way.

> For myself, I wouldn't take a job in anything short of scala or haskell.

Amazing.

> You said before you were confident in the microsoft platform because of the large, busy websites using it; are any of those built on VB.NET?

That about has to be the case: What is usually mentioned is C#, but as far as I know what is doable in C# is always or nearly so also doable in VB.NET. C# supports Lambda expressions, and I'm not yet sure that VB.NET does. It may be easier to write efficient, polymorphic code in C# than VB.NET. And there may be some other differences. But assuming C# or VB.NET for the language, the rest about has to be ASP.NET (with or without model-view-controller, MVC), ADO.NET, SQL Server, IIS, the .NET Framework, JavaScript, maybe some server side GDI or GDI+ for manipulating images, etc.

Apparently the big deal for a big Web server farm built on the Microsoft platform is ASP.NET and IIS and the more advanced features of those two. E.g., I'm sure there are ways to cache Web pages, but I haven't gotten to them yet and likely won't before revenue if only because the more important pages have to be built one at a time and couldn't be cached; the Web pages that could be cached are so small that it's not worth the bother to set up page caching.

> Maybe the problem you're solving isn't really a technical one, and that's fine

The core of my site is quite technical as applied math, but the users will never see that. And the programming for the applied math I've already done and likely won't need to redo for a long time if ever.

The rest of the programming will be routine for a Web site or a business and, thus, for a language, well within the capabilities of VB.NET.

> Sounds like you think you don't really need much actual programming.

For the routine business programming, I don't know how much will be needed. But I did select SQL Server instead of some simpler no-SQL due to anticipating needing in time much of the power of a real relational database.

> maybe you'll be fine with mediocre programmers

I want bright people, but I'm not too impressed with "top" "programmers". If I had some really challenging software to write, say, for reliability, then I might prefer a bright pure math major to a bright computer science major. If the math major needs something tricky in computer science, then he could chat an afternoon with a computer science prof and find, say, what pages in, maybe, something by Sedgewick to read. Otherwise I'd hire bright, well motivated, people with an interest in computing from some majors other than math or computer science.

I might be missing something about Scala or Haskell, but so far what I see in nearly all production programming on Windows is a little 'glue' in a language like VB.NET connecting a lot of 'bricks' from the .NET Framework, ASP.NET, ..., T-SQL, etc. So the VB.NET is define a function, pass some arguments, define and allocate some storage inside the function, operate on the data via if-then-else, do-while, expressions, call-return, try-catch, use the APIs, and then return. I see no way to get around using the 'bricks', and the 'glue' code is so small that I see no great savings in having a better way to do it.

Thanks for your help.

I like Microsoft, they make good keyboards.

As a .NET developer, I can tell you there's some definite 'eww, you use microsoft' stigma here.

The funny bit is that they don't really know what they are bashing :). What kind of open-minded approach is that?

“I will never be a friend to the Roman people.”

— Hannibal

Microsoft made a costly mistake more than a decade ago. They decided to attack the internet with full force.

And they lost.

I can understand the Microsoft hate. The big question is, where is the Apple hate?

Microsoft makes shitty products that are not well designed or tested. Simple.

Can't wait for filtering technology that detects intelligence in comments. If intelligence found, display comment.

MS has made flops, but also products they've worked hard on and made good over time. All tech companies have shitty things happen in their product life. Even car manufacturers. First-gen Mitsubishi Outlander - not a great car. Avoid. 2nd gen Outlander and above (2006+), new engine, better design, better features... very good car.

I am probably the least biased person when it comes to technology - I love Apple's hardware and software, I hate Apple maps and iTunes, but I love Google Maps and I hate Google Search. I like Bing as my search engine - Bing is nice, I'll give Microsoft that.

Most other products, historically are crap. Microsoft always half-asses things and comes up with products that are irrelevant to the end user. Windows 8? I'd say it's a failure of epic proportions. Microsoft doesn't seem to care about the user experience - I always get a feeling that someone at Microsoft was thinking "Oh, we are getting stale, so we need to do something new - let's come up with this entirely new UI, but we're not really going to put any thought into how it is designed, and we are definitely not going to pay attention to detail".

In OS terms, Windows was always ages behind OS X and Linux IMO - but at least Windows 7 was "perfected", or as close to "perfected" as Microsoft can get. Ever since I switched to OS X, I have not used Windows willingly, and that's 3 years.

Sorry, I'm a little confused as to how you think Microsoft has historically made products that are "irrelevant to the end user", when Microsoft powers the majority of computing activity worldwide and has for more 20 years.

What it feels like you may instead be trying to say is "I don't like Windows 8 and think Linux/OS X are better", which is certainly a valid opinion statement. I wouldn't, however, labor under the misunderstanding that Microsoft doesn't care about users - hyperbole aside, do you actually think that of a company of about 100K people doesn't care about other people?

If you've ever worked on a big tech product, you know that agonizing amounts of attention are spent worrying about even the smallest details. Ultimately, that might mean that we don't always make the best possible decision, but I think it would be tough to say that Microsoft "half-assed" much.

It makes sense that you don't like the product; not everyone does. But it seems foolish to equate your dislike with a) it being objectively bad, b) it being half-assed, c) it being irrelevant (particularly when it plays a huge role in the world), or d) that the people creating it don't care about it or you. Indeed, d) is particularly important - isn't it grand that you live in a tech world where someone like me, who works at Microsoft, cares about your thoughts and feelings, even though you don't use Windows?

Microsoft (and many other companies) don't just care about the people who use our products...we also care about the people who don't.

The market share of Microsoft in the desktop computing business in no way represents any kind of quality. Nor does it in any way mean that your users like your product. If I look around me in any office, I see people constantly fighting their computers as a result of the worst user experience on the planet.

The main reason for Microsoft's market share is a historical one: They partnered with IBM in the 80s, then PCs (IBM compatibles) became the de facto standard.

Add to this the abuse to the progression of the Web that is Internet Explorer. As many of the HN readers are web developers, well, do the math.

That happened once to http://twittstrap.com. So again, to make it news "twittstrap is buying no kia, spokesman says we can't afforded", ;) have a nice day

because all the cool kids love Apple. Half of the front page yesterday was littered with Apple marketing post.

Being an Apple shill is a good thing here

I for one learned how to code with VBA - Hail MS!

They're just jealous of Bill Gates.

the wounds microsoft has inflicted over the last 20 years are not easily forgotten.

You reap what you sow.

I try to avoid Arstechnica whenever I can

Well...they are pretty evil, which has been fairly well documented over the years. Suing companies for using Linux patents they refuse to disclose? Yep, that is evil.

Oh, and sticking a UI designed for touch-screen tablets on ordinary desktops and laptops is just stoopid. They have become a Blackberry-esque laughing stock as far as making terrible business decisions and missing opportunities.

How does your wife think Nokia would be doing if they had released Android phones instead?

HN is (largely) composed of web developers.

HN dislikes Microsoft by default the same way Americans dislike government by default. Americans views of government are shaped by their experience with their local DMV, which leads to a conclusion of "government is a slow, inefficient, bureaucratic, unfriendly mess". Similarly, web developers opinions of Microsoft are shaped by their experiences with IE. And past versions of IE that they still need to support.

If Microsoft wants web developers to have ANY respect for them, they need to improve the interactions that web developers have with them. Today, I ran into a JS bug in IE9 that manifests itself 100% of the time when the debugger is closed, and 0% of the time when the debugger is open. Clearly, debugging this is... frustrating. And clearly will never be fixed (as it's an old browser version).

I always find it really hard to understand this behavior as well, as a self confessed geek I really enjoy using all technology Apple, Google, Microsoft etc. I really dont understand how people can be the cheer squad for a corporate company, because they are all profit driven every single one of them is inherently evil. So we should look at what they all do an have discourse on the actions. To me HN is becoming like the console condition PS4 vs XBOXONE, the companies want you to be like this, any sensible person with critical thinking can see that everything is flawed and innovation is everywhere.

Being a fan or enemy of a company is stupid, you are just playing into consumerism. I hope every tablet company has success because competition is good for me.

Usual reasons: monopoly practices, market manipulations, deceptive sales and marketing technology, crashes and viruses due to low-quality outsourced code, etc.

Why do you think it was MS hate rather than just boring as?

Apple has a cult following. As such it also might be boring but it's sometimes interesting to even non cult followers what the cult is up to.

I think a lot of the MS hate is due to what started with Stephen Elop becoming CEO of Nokia that came from MS and ended up with MS acquiring the company.

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