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Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

Interesting take and I have to say I agree with it. Microsoft recent (1-2 years) moves have been pretty exciting and are coming to fruition. Google hasn't excited me in a while and the last few times they have the results have been less that stellar (Glass, Google Plus, Wear). It's great to see MS buy startups and keep them alive. Much more interesting to me than Google's purchase and kill strategy. e.g. MS bought Acompli, rebranded, and have a great mobile email solution. Google bought Sparrow (at the time the best mobile and desktop Gmail solution), killed it and didn't come out with anything better.

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Like buying nokia?

About the only thing I've seen that is remotely interesting is supporting docker in Azure.

Putting .NET Core on Github? Visual Studio free for small teams? Surface Pro? Office across all platforms, many of them completely free? Giving away Windows 10?

Maybe none of those are things you'd use, but to other people they're a pretty big deal.

The writing was on the wall for MS's dev platform since open source dominates startups and the cloud. Nobody builds the next facebook or twitter using MS tools and Windows. If anything the rise of open source and linux put MS in a position where open sourcing their tools was the only option left to them to stay relevant. Making a show of 'loving' Linux was done in an attempt to give themselves a chance of getting a slice of the huge cloud computing market for hosting Linux. Make no mistake, Linux has put MS in a very uncomfortable position.

The Azure giveaway for startups is nice, but I don't think the cloud is MS's main goal here. It's about PR and company perception. They need to lure developers back to the ecosystem so that their app store can stop being an empty wasteland. That's why they're giving out VS, that's why they're giving free updates to Windows 10, and that's why they're trying to improve their image in the developer community. Without developers writing good software for Windows, people are going to keep hating the OS.

The other thing the store brings is a centralized source for reputable software downloads. The malware-infested download.com and its ilk are a huge issue for your average Windows user. Putting downloads in one place, making them sortable by popularity and ratings, and making it easy to pay for things would make a huge difference for the user experience. There was a bit of an uproar when Apple did it in OS X, but now it's an expected feature.

It's funny how Windows used to be the OS that had all the 3rd party software written for it. Now for any given task OS X tends to have one or two really great options, and Windows tends to have a pile of 50 abandoned weekend projects and open source UI trainwrecks but nothing you'd actually enjoy using.

> Nobody builds the next facebook or twitter using MS tools and Windows

Well, then again: http://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/11/22/what-it-takes-to-run-s...

Yeah, but I'd love to see how long it would function if they took away open source tools like Redis and HAProxy.

Stack Overflow (and its offshoots) was (is?) very MS-centric, but it's clearly in the minority.

???

Why would stack overflow focus on MS when MS has their own forums and developer resources? I have to admit, I don't look for MS things on stack, but everything else I have questions about I'll look there. In fact, most searches for MS related questions are found on sites other than stack.

pconner is talking about how Stack Overflow is hosted on Windows (and maybe uses other Microsoft products, I wouldn't know).

I had no idea that "MS-centric" meant your site is hosted on Windows. Thank you for clarifying that.

IOW, WTF ???

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflo...

I think there might also be a codinghorror blog post that details why they picked .net, but I'm having a hard time finding it.

> Thank you for clarifying that.

No problem, it's wrong that your comment was downvoted. Even with my upvote it's still grey.

Have you used Inbox?

Yes. I actually like it - but most people I've talked to don't want to manage email that way. I eventually switched away myself due to lack of support for other email providers & unified inbox.

It really baffles me how bad the GMail app on iOS is. I was hoping that Inbox would be a step up, but like you said, I don't want my email managed that way.

I have a work Google apps account and a vanilla Gmail account and it is frusturating not having a unified inbox. And I keep getting "Network errors" with it (on two devices that I tried).

I recently dumped the GMail app for Outlook on iOS and it has just been phenomenal. I wish the search was a little better and I could see my GMail labels, but for now, it looks like I won't be going back.

At least you have a gmail app. I'm on windows phone, aka the platform that google shuns completely and utterly (to the point of taking apps out of the market when they buy a company that has a windows phone app). I used to do everything in google's ecosystem because they were OS agnostic, but now they just want to lock me into android and chromebook. Thanks but no thanks. Microsoft has been forced to get it, their stuff works great on all platforms.

"I used to do everything in google's ecosystem "

How does that work if you're using Windows phone?

"Microsoft has been forced to get it, their stuff works great on all platforms"

I can't get IE, VS, or much else from MS to work on linux. Until then, MS isn't really working on all platforms.

Inbox is this really cool thing that doesn't work for anyone. It's awesome for categorizing transactional emails, but misses the mark for person-to-person communication.

If you use one email address sole for transactions, and one for personal emails, Inbox is actually pretty awesome. I don't know many people who do this though.

Don't talk for "anyone".

Inbox is built by the Sparrow team.

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