Google and Apple need some other party to keep them sharp, it might as well be MS.
- Netscape
- SCO
And many others besides.
Companies have reputations just like people do (that's why we call them 'incorporated') and just like you can lose your trust in a person you can lose your trust in a corporation.
This is not about Microsoft just doing 'stupid stuff sometimes' it is about institutionalized criminal behavior sanctioned at the highest level of one of the largest software companies in the world. Your silly linked blog post by a Microsoft employee tries to wipe all that under the carpet. For the record, I'm not exactly 25, used to be a MS developer and user and have decided that their ethics are not fit for my taste, feel free to disagree.
EDIT: In fact, I prefer the old-guard companies like MS and Oracle to Google's and Facebook's new guard. The old guard is easy to figure out: they're out for profit. The new guard is a lot tricker: sure they're out for profit, too, but usually in a roundabout way that involves subterfuge, baiting people with "free" stuff, spying on their customers and their acquaintances, and various propaganda made to convince people they're working in their best interest.
http://euobserver.com/political/125868
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2466540/software/munich-...
And on and on.
Would you use a google product? They are double-faced went in come to net neutrality, only putting their weight on points that promote their own benefit. They also buy up tons of extremely innovative start-ups, then suffocate them under the weight of their glacial bureaucracy and pedantic squabbling.
I could go on all day.
As for Google, that's the hard one to avoid. Adsense/Adwords is easy, youtube is hard (plenty of video content is only available on youtube), google search is still better than duckduckgo (and I'm really sorry about that, but I'm rooting for Gabriel to achieve parity some day even if that's an uphill battle), and I use Google docs for a few spreadsheets that I need to be able to access remotely.
My mail is on my own server, web stuff is classical 'LAMP', I don't use webkit, don't use V8 and I don't think I have an instance of CUPS here that is actually configured to do real work but it's possible that I'm missing a machine clever enough to auto-configue.
Other hardware is Dell, Synology (which has CUPS on board but it's not in use) and a variety of smaller fry.
It's really not all that hard to keep the big companies out of your life, one of these days I'll find a way to get rid of google completely. The most frequently used closed source product I have is Varicad (but they have a nasty little gotcha that I recently found out about so they're on the way out) and another is adobe acrobat reader (the linux version). Oh, and the Nvidia binary drivers for the graphics card in this box.
With NVIDIA drivers you probably have at least some LLVM compiled components (or will have, once their transition has been completed in future generations), but I give you that one. As a GPGPU developer for example, you probably soon can't get around LLVM anymore and I expect its influence to grow in the Linux world, as it has become the default choice to build new OSS compiler / language projects around.
I'm using DDG myself btw. - Google is the main one I'd like to get away from, but as you wrote it's very hard. At least DDG with "g!" prefix makes me anonymous to them.
What I still find very hard to replace is Skype and/or Hangout - I'm not aware of an OSS solution that works on all platforms and that I can easily set up with all kinds of peers (including non computer literate). Even Hangout is way too complicated, even for aged computer scientists I've found. And I'm really using all of it - VoIP, video conferencing, Skype-Out, screen sharing, messaging. This is the main thing I'd like to replace since we're handing out so much control to this tool.
Also, do you only use older CUPS versions because Apple pays its development for a while now?
http://www.eversheds.com/global/en/what/articles/index.page?...
Of course that has absolutely nothing to do with Muenchen switching back to MS.
2. Regarding the 2nd link - MS has no control over IV's business, unless you have evidence otherwise. And that too, it's "unclean" only to the extent that you believe patents are evil, which is unfortunately an all-too-common view around here.
3. Regarding the 3rd link - see 1.
Sure, but it really depends on what and how much. Microsoft made their fortune by being ethically bankrupt and breaking the law. If the Mafia decided to reform today and go legit, it would be a long hard slough before anybody would actually trust them. And if they kept extortion as a side business, it would make it very hard to believe anything they have to say, regardless of the amount of money they give to charity.
I don't want it to be an optimal business strategy to be evil to maximise growth, and then become nice once evil no longer pays off. Holding a grudge longer than might seem strictly logical is my way of pushing in that direction :-).
Microsoft was the first to release a free browser included with the OS. That killed Netscape's business of selling browsers on a CD for $40, and Netscape was understandably upset.
It now seems clear that an OS needs a browser included, at least so you can read documentation and download the browser of your choice.
Absolutely. I dislike tied sales, I dislike having to buy a Microsoft operating system with my hardware just as much as I dislike getting IE (or chrome or any other browser) forcefully rammed down my throat when I buy an operating system.
I'm pretty sure you can guess what browser I'm using to type this comment.
> It now seems clear that an OS needs a browser included
Does it?
I see the browser as an application, not as part of the OS. And I feel that as a user of an operating system you should have a choice what browser you run and what browser gets installed on top of the OS after that has finished installing. All these cross-layer links are good for nothing.
Yes.
You say you want choice, but if you didn't have a browser how would you download the browser of your choice? Osmosis? Or, more importantly how would your average user download their browser?
Every OS since then (OSS or not) has shipped with a browser and has made it the default for any API rendering that needs to occur (e.g. Ubuntu, Android, OS X, Windows, iOS, Firefox OS, etc).
Netscape's business model would have held the internet back significantly. If Microsoft was forced to provide IE on a CD and sell that CD for $40 then frankly it could have held the internet back at least five years.
> Netscape's business model would have held the internet back significantly. If Microsoft was forced to provide IE on a CD and sell that CD for $40 then frankly it could have held the internet back at least five years.
You can't make statements like that. This is the reality we live in, there is no undo/redo/replay so we only have data about this reality. What would or could have happened if things had not gone the way they did is immaterial, for all you know we'd have moved faster rather than slower. We just do not know. What we do know is that Microsoft engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior, and that they continued this for quite a while after they were already convicted using their lobbying power to get-out-of-jail free.
People were downloading files long before browsers were commonplace.
And all three heavyweight gorilla IT companies could support FF/Opera with a clean conscience by donating (just like google does already, points for them).
But there (still!) are plenty of people who start with an empty distro and gradually build up, and installing a browser happens just like any other package installation: through the package manager.
When I ask them "can you imagine any OS delivered today without that bundled in?" they change the subject.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft
Yes, there are people that probably would have preferred Peter Tattam's company to be bought by MS. (It was shareware, see thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282875). But it definitely wasn't an obligation.
Very few would argue that an OS has to have a browser to be functional. Just like very few would argue that all networking should be done in a user space process not part of the operating system.
This whole argument is kind of silly anyways since it's leaving out intent, which is a very important contextual part of evaluating the action of a person or entity. Seeing emails showing MS trying to deliberately get web developers hooked on a "more standards-compliant" IE and then locking those same devs in is a much different thing than MS honestly wanting people to have a decent default software base to go with Windows, even if both strategies end up in practice with "IE 4 preinstalled".
It was a nightmare of coupling, and it's one of the reasons that IE was so hard to get rid of in the enterprise.
Yes, it's become clear that a web browser should be bundled in the OS, and even as I said at the time, when I was a teenager, you need a shitty web browser to download a good one, or at least it's a big help.
What Microsoft did, and is admitted in a book, is to leverage the Windows monopoly to strengthen the Office monopoly, which had impact on every educational institution, law firm, local, state, and national legislature and locked up a ton of public domain work in a file format that only an expensive program that doesn't run on all computers can read.
Eventually that was steamrolled over by Congress demanding an open format, though interoperability is still pretty piss poor.
Of course, all of the DOJ's resources to show Microsoft who's boss were wasted on a silly fight over whether you can bundle a web browser. If you read Ben Horowitz' "The hard thing about hard things", it's not even the browser that sunk Netscape, it's IIS - their bread and butter was the server.
In light of the fact that our phones and televisions now ship with web browsers, and likely most of us are not paying for web servers, it seems clear that Netscape's business model was not going to last.
So yeah, fuck Microsoft.
As the government wrote in a trial brief:
"In short, Microsoft feared and sought to impede the development of network effects that cross-platform technology like Netscape Navigator and Java might enjoy and use to challenge Microsoft's monopoly. Another internal Microsoft document indicates that the plan was not simply to blunt Java/browser cross-platform momentum, but to destroy the cross-platform threat entirely, with the 'Strategic Objective' described as to 'Kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market.'"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine#...
This is the strategy an MS exec described as "embrace, extend, extinguish":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
The "embrace" part is particularly gross. IIRC, the court found that Microsoft deliberately misled developers to make them think that apps developed with MS-JVM would work cross-platform, when really it was designed to prevent that. They lied to developers to trick us into wasting our time, to destroy cross-platform technologies that threatened their monopoly.
Want to make it practical? There are thousands of us here who have each spent hundreds of hours struggling with IE compatibility when we could have been building cool stuff. We're building the future as fast as we can, but you and I and Bill Gates will all get to see less of that future before we die, because Microsoft set out to break the web and it took a whole lot of time to fix it.
Of course that was going on 20 years ago now. Microsoft probably has interns now who were born after IE came out. I realized recently that I'm not mad about this stuff anymore. But it's not a history we should forget or repeat.
This is the issue that pisses me off more than anything. There must be hundreds of man-years of development effort wasted on stupid things Microsoft did. Not because they didn't know better, that's forgivable, but they did to screw over the competition. It goes back to MS-DOS intentionally trying to screw over DR-DOS and continues up to now with document format standards.
This is exactly how Windows is sold through OEMs, and like Windows, the effect is that the consumer gets the software "for free" (since it is included in the total price of the computer). So: Netscape and IE would have both come with every new computer.
Microsoft told OEMs that, in effect, they could not buy Windows if they intended to install Netscape on it. That is illegal tying, and is what killed Netscape, as it cut off a major potential source of new revenue.
But since corporations tend to assume a lot of the traits of the people that run them and are given significant subsets of the rights normally afforded to real-life human beings the line between corporate identities and persons can blur to the point where we are allowed to ascribe (some) personal traits to corporations.
"The modern joint-stock corporation has many sources in medieval Europe. First among these was corporate law itself. Although the era is commonly referred to as "feudalism," for the hierarchy of individually owned "fiefs" of land and control of serfs as fixtures of that land, large amounts of wealth in Europe were actually controlled by corporate entities. Chief among these were church lands, the corporate entities being dioceses, religious orders and the Roman Church itself. These entities controlled a substantial fraction of the land in Western Europe. Furthermore cities (with varying degrees of political independence), merchant guilds, craft guilds, and many charitable entities (such as hospitals) were legal "corporations," i.e. artificial and perpetual legal persons under law. Some basic issues in corporate law (for example, when are officers individually liable for acts of the corporation, and when the corporation is liable for acts of its agents) had already been solved in canon law and urban law long before the joint-stock corporation."
and more on the "Origins of the Joint-Stock Company"
Welcome to American corporate culture :)
You have to keep in mind that Microsoft had a monopoly for a very long time. While their actions may, in your world view, be "criminal", as a corporation Microsoft was acting completely rationally. As a public corporation, they have an obligation to maximize value for shareholders. You also have to keep in mind the historical context: back then, there was no such thing as "social responsibility".
I keep hearing that but I don't actually believe that is true.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-m...
My post was merely trying to indicate that what Microsoft did in a monopoly position is not in any way unique or special. Every monopoly will behave in this manner, because corporations are rational actors.
I wish for a world where this utterly dishonest lame duck trope stops appearing as frequently as it does.
At least since after I went through puberty (I'm not that young!) Microsoft has been acting pretty damn chill.
I guess my main complaint is that people yell at us for sins that were committed by, quite literally, a previous generation.
among other things.
So, if all choices are bad choices, what are you left with?
We all were. Computers have changed life for all of us. But computers aren't what they could have been...
Microsoft's version of computers is a pale and sickly thing, it's engineered for--that is, optimized for--profit rather than productivity.
Some people use computers to save lives, right? How many more lives might have been saved over the past couple of decades if MS hadn't held features--ideas! concepts!--back again and again to enforce planned obsolescence? How many times did they obfuscate a communication protocol to maintain market dominance?
I appreciate that some current MS employees aren't responsible for what happened before they were hired on.
I hope you appreciate the magnitude of those past sins. There are reasons people yell!
I think you have it backwards. It's the new vision of computers (walled gardens, all the interesting logic hidden away in data centers, content consumption appliances instead of real computers) that is pale and sickly.
> How many more lives might have been saved over the past couple of decades if MS hadn't held features--ideas! concepts!--back again and again to enforce planned obsolescence?
Please enlighten me on the ideas! concepts! Microsoft held back again and again that were not available on free software systems?
If you want to talk about Microsoft's "past sins", I believe data trumps anecdotes: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=269498
If you have any solid data (rather than oft-repeated anecdotes) that MS inhibited innovation on a large scale, I'd like to see it.
People certainly yell for reasons, but those reasons are often very poorly informed.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/
> I think you have it backwards. It's the new vision of computers (walled gardens, all the interesting logic hidden away in data centers, content consumption appliances instead of real computers) that is pale and sickly.
Yes, these new trends are worrisome. But it's not the first time!
I firmly believe that we'd all be better off if THIS guy had been the one to introduce computers to the common man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMzojQFyMo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOf4EMN6-XA
To this day, Microsoft is putting computers in schools--but not LOGO, not free software, not unix, not lisp, not crates of disposable m68ks and bread boards... Nope, they are putting products in front of new generations eyeballs.
Data can trump anecdotes, and it should when a culture believes they are doing the right thing but things are still going poorly and nobody understands why--at those times, by all means, collect some data and analyze it!
But when "everybody knows" we're doing something wrong, and things are going poorly, then for the love of god use some common sense and stop doing it!
The whole planet got 0wned by MS before many of us here were born--certainly before most of us were competent. So this is what we've got, this is where we are.
Big picture: Where do we go from here? Immediate situation: don't become part of a new generation of MS fanboys. We don't need that.
As for the Halloween documents, come on, 1) you're going to cite ESR, really? and 2) that boils down to "they said something bad about my religion / OS of choice". Marketing strategy commonly involves belittling your competitors. I laughed along at the Mac vs PC ads, even though I knew most of them were simply hyperbole.
> But when "everybody knows" we're doing something wrong, and things are going poorly, then for the love of god use some common sense and stop doing it!
1) Just like "everyone knew" the earth is flat?
2) "Everyone knows" Microsoft is "doing something wrong" only if you don't step out of the HN / Silicon Valley bubble. You and PG and thousands others might think MS is "irrelevant" and "dead" and "evil" and "produces crappy software", but it's trivially disproved by noting that it has consistently been in the top-5 brands worldwide by many different rankings (google it) for many years.
We may not need MS fanboys, but we sure has hell don't need MS haters who base their beliefs on incorrect information.
1b and 2b) I think you've made my point. So are we going to tell the rest of the world, or let them dangle?
Are you joking? I'll just give you one example: IE 6 and its complete disregard for open standards, end-user security and its lack of change put the web in stasis for years. At first, it didn't make much difference that we had Firefox because developers still made their pages only compatible with Microsoft's non-compliant browser, which was understandable as most people used it. Since IE lost ground the web has become a much more open and welcoming space for experimentation and advancement of its technologies. And that's undeniable.
2. Note also that vendor prefixes always were and are still a thing, so it's not just IE that had "non-compliant" features. Adding non-compliant features and then working them into the standards seems to be the natural way web technologies advance.
Especially with Opera in mind, I recall many new features being added to browsers regardless of IE's stagnation. Sure, they were not widely used because the then-dominant IE didn't have them, but that didn't prevent Opera and Firefox from adding them. So, unless you conflate "experimentation and advancement" with "widespread adoption", I would disagree that IE held back experimentation and advancement of web technologies.
1. It's not just that the held back. It's not even primarily that they held back. It is that they taught countless CEOs that Excel was the state of the art way to think.
I don't believe that the best tools are widgets. I believe that the best tools are programming environments. When I really need to get some facts straight, I turn to my trusty shell and unix family of processing tools. When my boss has the same need, she turns to Excel. WTF? Sure, you can do some reasoning with that tool... "But for BETTER reasoning, upgrade to Excel 95!"
2. Even if some old ideas were never completely lost, they were unknown to most people. If it hadn't been for some crotchety old neck beards, we wouldn't be having this conversation... And some of them had to completely dedicate their lives to preserving the idea that computers are not a product, they are a gift to humanity.
Locking down computers using UEFI Secure Boot and taking control away from the owners of the machine.
Sabotaging the office document standard process at ISO.
Corruption in cases where governments explored switching to alternative operating systems.
Supporting software patents.
All these happened within last 5 years (and continue to happen).
huh? I'm not MS lover but can you prove this ?
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&js=y&prev...
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&js=y&prev...
Microsoft requires that x86 UEFI machines be unlockable by end users.
In comparison, Apple has locked down various aspects of their desktop machines for years.
Software patents, including Stacker's, are far more destructive to innovation than anything Microsoft could ever do on its own.
SCO, well... OK, there's no way to spin that as anything but evil.
If you are referring to Microsoft's bundling of IE, that did not kill Netscape. It just buried the rotting corpse.
Before IE was bundled with Windows, it was sold in stores as a boxed product, right next to Netscape's boxed product. Going head to head in retail software stores (Egghead, CompUSA), IE massively outsold Netscape. This is what killed Netscape.
The reason IE outsold Netscape at retail was simple--it was a much better browser. Netscape introduced a lot of proprietary tags, which Microsoft included in IE. Microsoft also introduced proprietary tags, which Netscape often ignored. For the end user, the result was simple: IE correctly rendered more pages than Netscape. It was also better on resource usage, if I remember correctly, which was a much bigger deal then than it is now.
You thought you had forgotten about something? How does that work.
When someone comes into town and shoots your pappy, it's not something you forget or forgive easily. The burden is on Microsoft to prove that they're not the same company as they were back then, not on the people they wronged to get over it.
So no, at this point it is on the Microsoft haters to get over it. And if you can't get over it, then just ignore it. As someone who works partially in the Windows world and thus is interested in Microsoft news, I'm tired of Microsoft news being flagged off the front page constantly. I'm tired of seeing something about Windows and the comments being filled with people hating on Windows 8 for bullshit rather than good discussion about the article. I'm tired of seeing great news like this and have people say "yeah but in 1994 they...". That was 20 years ago. Fucking get over it. Microsoft sure has.
If Microsoft is still doing things wrong, it's completely overshadowed by their detractors constantly shutting down legitimate discussions with their insane rambling about the past.
Some stuff from 2014, maybe that will help you to see that Microsoft has definitely not 'gotten over it':
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8596869
And that's just a very limited list.
I'm not sure Best Buy reflects that poorly on Microsoft.
>"They reportedly have raised over $5.5 billion from many large companies including Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, Google, Yahoo, American Express, Adobe, SAP, Nvidia, and eBay, plus investment firms such as Stanford, Hewlett Foundation, Mayo Clinic, and Charles River Ventures."
Again, doesn't reflect that poorly on Microsoft.
>Munich reverses course, may ditch Linux for Microsoft
Is a software sales company supposed to not sell software? That's what they do. How does that reflect poorly on them?
You're hating a corporation for doing what corporations do, and hating a tech company for things tech companies do. Like I said, it's time to get over it or just shut the hell up and ignore it. I understand that your religion tells you to hate Microsoft. But some of us don't subscribe to that line of thinking, and you're ruining it for the rest of us by controlling conversations and shutting down discussions.
Best buy didn't enter into it, you probably did not fully read the link. This was about Romania, not about the USA.
> Again, doesn't reflect that poorly on Microsoft.
It does, because IV is best described as a patent troll in a nice suit.
> Is a software sales company supposed to not sell software? That's what they do. How does that reflect poorly on them?
Because they struck a deal to relocate their headquarters to Munich if and only if the government would ditch linux.
I don't have any religion, I'm just against companies that engage in illegal acts. That 'some of us don't subscribe to that line of thinking' is a pity, I'm not shutting anybody down, nor am I controlling the conversation. In fact, I'm happy that MS open sourced this code.
Also, name a player that isn't equally or more abusive? If you mention Apple, Google, or Amazon, I'm going to disagree.
That's fine by me. I think they should really wise up and start to play nice. If IBM could do it then Microsoft can too.
> Also, name a player that isn't equally or more abusive?
Why, does that excuse them?
> If you mention Apple, Google, or Amazon, I'm going to disagree.
I would agree with that myself, so I won't be naming those.
When a behavior gets institutionalized, it is likely to repeat more often than not. It requires exceptional evidence and time before for trust to be regained.
A person rises up in a typical institution by following and embracing its institutional patterns. When they have their back to the wall how unlikely are they to fall back on their old patterns, heck they neednt even have their back on the wall. Now if someone gets get screwed over by them, no ones more to blame than themselves. As they say, "fool me once ..."
It is entirely possible that someone else does similar damage to your business in an unethical way, but if one goes to a repeat offender and gets treated that way, the shame is on him / her.
And that's fine. I just don't want to hear about it. You're mad. We get it. You don't have to like them, all we ask is that you stop bringing it up in every thread. See also: bringing up Google Reader in every Google thread or bringing up the NSA in every thread about cloud providers. We know bad things happened. But you're still dragging the thread off-topic.
... and therefore people should curtail their speech ? stop talking about relevant things that transpired ? May be you are a tad shaky on the concept, lets burn all the existing history books and those about to be written.
> They've had exceptional evidence and time
That is your opinion. The way it works is that you dont get to decide for someone else who has lost the trust whether MS has done enough, its the prerogative of the person who has lost the trust. The waiter at a restaurant chews on the serving and says this food is perfectly fine and you must push it down your throat isnt a very solid defense of the food. The buck stops at the desk of the restaurant patron.
And who said 'hate' ? That seems like your construct. Its a question of choice, should one buy into the MS ecosystem or not. Every person makes his / her own choice. I for one am now more willing to invest time in learning F#, but quite queasy about being dependent on that ecosystem financially.
> But you're still dragging the thread off-topic.
Oh really ? what exactly was off-topic in the thread and why. As I said, perhaps you are a little slow on the concepts.
> the bad stuff they did 20 years ago
False, and this has been amply demonstrated on this thread. But the time is not relevant. What is the relevant is the confidence / assurance that it wont happen again and the wisdom or the lack of patronizing a repeat offender. Why did those bad things happen, and why wont those things happen again. Whoever wants to use their products need answers that satisfy them. Different consumers will have different standards.
Perhaps it is good teachable moment for corporations. Deliberate and repeat actions can continue to affect them long after. If those in charge were so concerned, they perhaps should have thought it through. After all you make the bed you lie in.
A parting thought, those bad shit, they were far from an impetuous one off.
Thing is, I treat companies like I treat people. Legally speaking, isn't that what they want, in the US anyway? So if you violate my trust, it's goodbye until I see serious amends being made.
However I must say that with this move I'm finally ready to forgive Microsoft. I've always seen .NET as a platform created for achieving lock-in with Windows, the ECMA standard (while better than Java's JCP, which is a farce) I've seen as an attempt to paint a turd and Mono, while a wonderful effort, I've never seen as good enough. Open-sourcing .NET is a wonderful move, because now we've got a credible alternative to the JVM and this move couldn't come with better timing, given the dickish moves by Sun/Oracle against Apache Harmony and Android's Dalvik / ART.
And don't get me wrong, compared to other people I do not have double standards in this regard. I've been a Google fanboy for years, but my eyes are wide open now and I'm making moves to escape their lock-in ;-)
I would say this is a really bad strategy. According to unwritten HN rules, I should now start explaining why I think there are differences between a company and a person, and why they should be treated differently thereof.
But I won't. :)
How else can you get companies to listen to your needs? And my needs as a developer and a user are simple - I need my privacy, an open web and a healthy open-source ecosystem. And I'll vote with my wallet and I'll bitch against any company that has a problem with that - and I'll also encourage alternatives that cater to my needs.
The world would be a much better place if all people behaved like this IMHO - oh, so are the shareholders a company's top priority? Not my problem.
That concept is fantastically distopian. The concept "voting with your wallet" is practically abject propaganda. We have a word for this already and it's not "voting:" it's "purchasing" or "bribery."
>How else can you get companies to listen to your needs?
With words. The very thing you are using right here.
Well that didn't take much.
Upgrading IExplorer to something that can be called a modern browser and helping to estinguish IExplorer 6 is another event. Replacing Balmer was another event. Partnering with Xamarin (instead of crushing them with patents) was another event. Releasing Office Mobile for Android and iOS was another event. Etc...
As to why they are doing this, I don't really care as long as they are aligned with my needs. Plus I'm allowed to change my mind, depending on my mood :-)
Now saying that, I think that an Open Source .NET stack is a wonderful thing! I like C# a lot.
Your link just drops me at the front page of his blog. Searching for it through Google leads to a result, but clicking on that link also takes me to the front page. Is there a mirror?
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SoH4dHM...
On the Google search result next to the url is a tiny dropdown arrow. You can click that arrow and select Cached.
That is not true. Microsoft was convicted because they told 3rd party computer manufacturers that they could not purchase Windows if they intended to install any additional browsers. Not only is that illegal, but it demonstrably harmed innovation in web browsers for years.
I don't believe Microsoft killed my pappy, and I use MS software every single day. But I also don't believe in minimizing or misrepresenting the facts of the past.
He has so completely missed the deadly point that he's accidentally echoed it in his own post: Tons of people feel that Microsoft killed their Pappy.
Nadella's actions tell me one thing: the free software movement has threatened their bottom line.
This is not the time to back down, it's not the time to forgive and forget.
This is the time to review the Halloween Documents!
So they are being very aggressive in the cloud and mobile area which is understandable. But where does this leave .NET, visual studio etc? Those are no longer the tools with which megacorps make their intranets, or where Photoshop and Call Of Duty is made. Cloud and mobile is about scale. They want thousands of cloud apps and mobile apps to be made. They can give their tools away and make money on tablets and azure. Azure runs Linux!
So making the tools free is a natural step in becoming a service company. Making them cross platform is natural since Microsoft now sells cross platform services.
No one thinks Microsoft isn't only concerned with their bottom line. It's not a charity. But that's not to say this is some kind of greedy trap. It's probably a good move for both devs and microsoft.
>But where does this leave .NET, visual studio etc? Those are no longer the tools with >which megacorps make their intranets, or where Photoshop and Call Of Duty is made
.NET was never the tool where Photoshop and Call of Duty was made, but a significant amount of mobile apps and games nowadays are made using Xamarin and Unity, tools that run on top of Mono, a cross-platform implementation of .NET. If anything the Microsoft announcement brings Mono and .NET closer together. And I think you will find that a significant (if not majority) proportion of megacorps do run their intranets on SharePoint. SharePoint is and has been customisable using .NET libraries and tools.
VS will of course still be used by megacorps to make those huge apps, and ms will still charge them for it.
The free VS + open .NET just means single devs and startups have fewer reasons left to pick e.g node, jvm or Python as their platform. unlike before, these small players are very interesting since one of them is making the next minecraft and will host it on Azure.
How many of the "non-criminal new microsoft generation" do you see there? My guesstimate: 33%
This is partly what inspired me to write a wishlist for Satya in the first place.
I met a bunch of the IE folks at CES 2012, and I honestly believe their trying to be better web citizens. They are still slower than I'd like, but IE isn't quite terrible anymore. I have friends who work at various browser vendors, and I don't sense any lingering ill-will towards IE.
That said, I certainly understand why some people are slow to get excited about Microsoft. You don't have to be middle-aged to have personally experienced the bad side of Microsoft.
I admit that IE was shit and it did cost a lot of time. But how about we get over it? They admitied that IE was shitty and now they are doing much better.
There are products from other company that used to be shit, now they are better and people dont still hate on that.
Also, dont think im a idialist who does not remember the past, I was optimizing for IE6 not all that long ago.
I seem to remember they even tried to make obsolete the Win32 API. Their strongest asset.
They started opensource within Microsoft under Ballmer, so he deserves some respect to. But i'm sure Nadella is making more room for improvement and betting more "all-in"
I just know some people at Microsoft use *nix tools all the time, Asp.Net MVC took over some awesome RoR features, they integrated NodeJS, LocalDB is the alternative for SQLLite and etc...
Microsoft does everything it can to integrate good features and they won't go away anytime soon. They also have the best compatibility in any programming language i know (with .Net) to be a safe bet for businesses...
Hell, even VB6 still works (any Windows Server and a RDP connection) and that has been released in 1998 => 16 years ago!
There's no way they decided to release the source and have it ready within 9 months.
You must really, really dislike Microsoft.
I wish more people were open to admit things like that. It would greatly reduce the time I've spent the last few months arguing over products and technologies with people who keep the fact that they don't hate the product's quality directly but indirectly, given that it was made by a company they don't support anymore.
> I'll never switch back to MS for what they've done in the past...
I know people have their pet peeves, but IMO, opinions are better based on empiricism and data are than in infinitely repeated anecdotes:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=269498
(Spoiler: it follows Betteridge's law. Disclaimer: it was published in 2001, so it does not account for any shenanigans post-2000.)
I'm not sure what they've done to receive such hatred. They are just a technology company and are trying to sell the product.
Hatred?
I simply decide not to buy into a certain company's products and services because I recall some misdeeds from the past and that's equal to hatred?
As for what they have done, I thought Microsofts history was chronicled enough that it doesn't need repetition, especially not on a website for 'hackers'.
But if you need pointers, you can go visit groklaw.net (if it is still up) to read about SCO and Linux, you can read up on the Stacker case and you can try to figure out why Microsoft ended up in court over IE and a long list of other not so nice things they did in the past.
Stacker: 20 years ago. IE Antitrust: 10 years ago. SCO: 10 years ago.
The last ruling in the SCO case was a mere 4 years ago.
I mean no disrespect, but what's the bad stuff being done my Microsoft today?
Abusing their patent portfolio directly, ditto through proxies, continued attempts to subvert open standards, bribery to use Microsoft software in various third world countries (and in Romania too, and Germany for that matter) and many others besides but those alone would be enough to not make me go back to using their development platform.
http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2014/08/my-wishlist-for-satya.h...
It also includes things MS has done in the past that is not too late to fix.
Locking down computers using UEFI Secure Boot and taking control away from the owners of the machine.
Sabotaging the office document standard process at ISO.
Corruption in cases where governments explored switching to alternative operating systems.
Working against software patent reforms.
All these happened within last 5 years (and continue to happen).
Was that a scummy trick? Or just a dumb move?
If you reword things enough, nothing makes sense. For example:
"I don't see why Stalin receives such hatred. He was just a politician, and tried to stay in power so he could keep following his vision."
But since you brought it up: who knows? How can anyone measure how many people were put out of business and killed themselves because of the ruthless tactics of huge corporations? How many people have wasted how many hours paying for their inferior products, or trying to make them work, and to how many human lifespans does that add up? It's impossible to claim any company "killed X people" that way, but to think the net effect is somehow clean and unbloody is also naive. To put it crassly, some people didn't take to the boardrooms because that is more humane, but because it's more effective, because robbing and killing people is inefficient. Doesn't it make it as bad as Stalin, but since Stalin isn't the baseline for how bad something has to be to be unacceptable, that is irrelevant.
Also, imagine a world where Linus Torvalds had done something else, and a bunch of other factors had worked out slightly differently; as far as open source goes, Microsoft DID try to kill it, they spread as much FUD as they could, they handed out their products to schools and universities for fear of them breaking free, and only now when they still lost they are starting to play nice. So as far as software and software freedom is concerned, Microsoft did kill plenty.
And now imagine repelling the Conquistadores; not because they reconsidered, but because even giving it their best shot, they could not kill enough to totally submit everyone like they originally planned, and had to regroup or be wiped out themselves. And now I am supposed to be grateful and let bygones be bygones? No. Others can do that, but I can't respect them for it, at best despite of it. And you know what, I don't like Apple either. So I'm the position of loving computers and programming, but none of the big players, anymore. And I don't have to chose a side, I can find them all lacking. Because they are not to be compared to each other, but to the behaviour of intelligent humans with dignity, and the vision of an actual information age that empowers and liberates people, instead of just seeking to capture them, so they can be fed any old uninspired BS that is made shiny and big with all the capital leeched off the masses. This doesn't change in a few years or decades, or without fines or even prison sentences, for that matter. I'm not buying it for one second.
They're just trying some desperate measures to stay relevant. You already know MS is institutionally evil.
I wish Microsoft the very best but I want no part of it and I'm totally free in making that decision based on their past behavior. Microsoft has had their chance with me, I probably developed as much or more code for the windows platform as I did for other platforms but right now I would consider myself pretty silly if I switched back to MS just because they may have changed their ways and deserve another chance. Those are not lightly made decisions, there is a huge amount of time and effort invested and I already switched once because of their behavior.
That said there is enough going on in the present that makes me wonder just how much they have really changed, they're still dragging their heels post judgement in several court cases where they have been ordered to start cooperating and have pulled a substantial number of annoying tricks in the recent past.
Never mind the 'microsoft tax' (which I paid on this machine even though it never ran MS software for even a single cycle) and so on. So yes, it makes perfect sense.