With Microsoft's improvements in how they do business and greatly improved understanding of open source I'm really starting to think more seriously about heading back into their technology realm for some years and see how it works out.
Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
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Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#2I've been flirting with it. I've been a Windows desktop user throughout, but the big appeal to using their platforms more is that Microsoft always makes it's "cloud services" features optional, rather than strongarming people into storing data on their servers.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#3When Windows 10 comes out I'll probably pull the trigger and get a Microsoft Surface for testing, but I don't think I'll ever leave OS X for Windows.
(to name a few) 1: Recently helped a friend install a new hard drive in a Lenovo Edge 15 only to find out the laptop has problems with Crucial SSDs (it brought back to many driver / hardware compatibility issues from my past jobs)
2: Features like Dashboard, Expose, Notifications have become real workflow time savers in OS X and I've never seen as good implementations in Windows.
3: I've never seen a PC laptop with a touchpad as good as on a Mac
4: the BSD / *nix base of OS X is to valuable to be without
5: Web development tools are just hands down better on OS X - Transmit, Sublime Text, color pickers, etc... theres just no equivalents on Windows.
6: Handoff in OS X with my iPhone is such a great convenience.
and to many more... I think Apple has lost they're way a bit and really need to focus on making OS X better; in recent years, iOS has received to much focus (IMO), but things are fine for now (so long as it doesn't get much worse)
And I can always throw Windows into a VM or bootcamp - it's much more difficult to put OS X into a VM on a PC.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#4When Windows 10 comes out I'll probably pull the trigger and get a Microsoft Surface for testing, but I don't think I'll ever leave OS X for Windows. (to name a few) 1: Recently helped a friend install a new hard drive in a Lenovo Edge 15 only to find out the laptop has problems with Crucial SSDs (it brought back to many driver / hardware compatibility issues from my past jobs) 2: Features like Dashboard, Expose, Not…
Regarding #6, what is different between OS X and Windows versions of Sublime?
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#5Last I checked, running a unix environment was still a difficult experience without running a VM. That's a deal breaker for a development platform.
Good games, though.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#6Many people have been burned by Microsoft's grandiose promises and biting the bullet early on. See Kinect, Surface RT adopters, Windows Phone 7 adopters (no WP8 update), Windows 8 adopters (with the promise of 100,000 apps in the first 90 days), HoloLens which I'm sure will disappoint many after they buy it and they see it's nothing like what Microsoft showed on stage, and so on.
The best advice is to wait a few years and see if Microsoft is really following through on its promises instead of just buying its hype.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#7I was playing around with a Surface Pro in a store a while back and genuinely loved it - I can imagine being very happy with a docking station at my desk that turns it into a full machine and just carrying it around as a tablet the rest of the time.
Two things hold me back. One is the lack of a POSIX console - I know that there are some possibilities to bring equivalent functionality to Windows, but I don't yet know enough about them to know if they're sufficient. The other much more significant issue is that testing on iOS devices is essential for my job, and something tells me Apple aren't about to release the iOS Simulator for Windows.
It's disappointing because when I switched from Windows to OS X (back in 2006 if I recall) it was a giant breath of fresh air - the OS felt so much simpler and cleaner than XP. But these days it's the reverse - every release of OS X feels messier and less reliable.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#8I built a PC -- my first in ~10 years -- because I want to follow what will be going on with Windows 10. I won't get rid of my Mac anytime soon, though, but I do agree with the sentiment that Apple has lost its way in parts. I don't feel the level of excitement for OS X as a couple of years back.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#9nope, cant say ill ever trust a corporation like Microsoft to do my thinking for me, i doubt theyll ever outlive their legacy for being the mcdonalds of software, and i really cant ever imagine software development being better in any Microsoft environment that it is in a linux environment.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else planning to head back to Microsoft?
#10Over the next year, I'll be switching to a 2015/2016 Surface Pro with windows 10 and a desktop tower dual booting win10 and ubuntu. If necessary, I'll continue to buy second hand Apple laptops for iOS development.