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Microsoft’s Very Good Day

newyorker.com

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Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#31

Post by ino »

mrmondo wrote: post #16

Clickbate marketing article name with little valuable substance. I tried Windows 10 in tablet mode and I found the whole experience to be disjointed. It felt out of touch with recent UX trends / advancements, the same old thing with a new skin and even more tiles. Everything I wanted to do took more 'clicks' that I was happy with and there's little-to-no consideration to power users. Am I the only one that doesn't se…

They are marketing really hard where the tech nerds and devs are, astroturfing comment sections and sponsored articles everywhere.

Things like Microsoft is changing and giving fuzzy feelings (really?), but the general audience is harder to get. I've seen huge billboards with surface 3 ads, special sections in stores, but I've never seen one in the wild.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#32

Post by kriro »

I kind of thought the headline referred to the fact that they did finally release a patch that makes connecting to Exchange servers via Outlook possible again in the latest OS X. [too snarky, maybe but it was a pretty hilarious situation where both Apple and Microsoft failed fairly hard for a (short) while]

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#33

Post by pjc50 »

codeulike wrote: post #19
delish wrote: post #14

I struggle with changing my perception of Microsoft. I still characterize them by their Halloween documents and efforts to destroy Netscape. I would recommend the Surface to friends or family, which is a recent change. But I would never use Microsoft products. And not just because I'd be giving up years of Linux folk-knowledge. Childishly, when I watch a youtube video of someone far more skilled than me programming i…

But what they did to destroy netscape (bundling a competing app with some other thing) is now a tactic so common that it is taken for granted. I guess what made it scary is that they really did have a strong monopoly and it looked like they might dominate forever. So its not so much the tactics that offend people, but how much power they had when wielding those tactics. Seems to me like every big tech firm now makes…

Oh, the tactics did offend people. And still do. But it was always a small number of people that cared about software freedom.

The Microsoft consent decree was about restricting browser choice by shipping their own browser as default and claiming it was unremovable. By contrast, today Apple idevices not only ship with a browser but ban all competing browsers (via the ban on run-time compilation effectively banning JIT compilers). Apple have total control over every application that is allowed to ship on the platform and take a 30% cut.

Google are responsible for Android, which is Free software to the absolute minimum they could get away with by law. It relies on millions of lines of GPL'd code, yet for most phones it's quite hard to get a rebuildable source tree that even includes all the kernel drivers, and if you do it may be prohibited from loading by a locked bootloader.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#34

Post by [deleted] »

troels wrote: post #29
codeulike wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what they did to destroy netscape (bundling a competing app with some other thing) is now a tactic so common that it is taken for granted. I guess what made it scary is that they really did have a strong monopoly and it looked like they might dominate forever. So its not so much the tactics that offend people, but how much power they had when wielding those tactics. Seems to me like every big tech firm now makes…

I think that's very true. It was also a different environment back then - people affected were a much more homogenous group, so it's not surprising that we as a group identified strongly against what MS did. That fosters strong feelings. That said, is this all just another EMBRACE from Nadella? ;)

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#35

Post by mtgx »

NotOscarWilde wrote: post #17
delish wrote: post #14

I struggle with changing my perception of Microsoft. I still characterize them by their Halloween documents and efforts to destroy Netscape. I would recommend the Surface to friends or family, which is a recent change. But I would never use Microsoft products. And not just because I'd be giving up years of Linux folk-knowledge. Childishly, when I watch a youtube video of someone far more skilled than me programming i…

To cool down some of the optimism in this comment section: Microsoft is still accepting cash for practically every Android phone made because of their patent threats, or did they change their ways in this regard as well? (I am genuinely curious whether this continues; I tried to google "microsoft android patent threats" but found only news articles from 2013/2014 about the practice.)

> did they change their ways in this regard as well?

Oh, they absolutely did. Now they also threaten companies with lawsuits unless they install their own apps on Android devices [1]. I didn't say it was for the better. How this doesn't immediately alarm the anti-trust bodies for using patents to force companies to buy its products is still a puzzle to me.

Microsoft loves the rigged patent game and it's exploiting every minute of it, while fighting hard to ensure it stays this way [2] and also doing its best to make the copyright system worse, as well [3].

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/2988525/android/microsoft-str...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/11/20...

[3] http://www.infoworld.com/article/2613305/patents/microsoft--...

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#36

Post by Touche »

andosa wrote: post #25
mrmondo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on your boat with this. I haven't seen any change that truly 'matters'. I have noticed them trying to increase their presence on technical and social media but the content really isn't anything of substance which leads me to feel that they're purely marketing moves.

Not sure I follow. In what sense are things like Surface Pro, Hololens, Surface book laptop, open source .NET etc. purely marketing moves?

They haven't been hits, yet.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#37

Post by 7952 »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #22
hliyan wrote: post #6

It's amazing to think that such a massive behemoth could change direction in so little time.

Not really. Microsoft has always had two sides, two forces constantly warring with each other internally. Microsoft is and always has been chock full of serious, 100% authentic "hackers". And those have driven the company as much as high level business decisions over the years. Microsoft has long been a proponent for things like open platforms (such as the original PC design) and has long tried to be a good citizen w…

For years the hackers/pundits were telling MS to adopt a more inviting buisness plan with free versions etc. It is possible that this approach could be detrimental even if they hace good products. It is ironic that as consumer Windows has become a more polished product they have removed the premium pricing in favour of app stores and subscriptions.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#38

Post by avar »

sz4kerto wrote: post #20
NotOscarWilde wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To cool down some of the optimism in this comment section: Microsoft is still accepting cash for practically every Android phone made because of their patent threats, or did they change their ways in this regard as well? (I am genuinely curious whether this continues; I tried to google "microsoft android patent threats" but found only news articles from 2013/2014 about the practice.)

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/google-and-micros... "Microsoft and Google are pleased to announce an agreement on patent issues. As part of the agreement, the companies will dismiss all pending patent infringement litigation between them, including cases related to Motorola Mobility. "

Those are just lawsuits between the two, wasn't the nature of the royalties for Android devices that they contacted OEMs and said "we have these patents, you better pay us or we'll sue you", and the OEMs paid up?

That's different than cancelling outstanding lawsuits.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#39

Post by iheartmemcache »

codeulike wrote: post #27
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #13

There's been lots of positive announcements from Microsoft recently, but I think I'll save the applause for when they can do those cool things and actually make money from it, not from extorting cash for patents, office document lock-in, and all their other "bad microsoft" stuff.

extorting cash for patents Standard practice among all the big players office document lock-in Standard practice among the players lucky enough to be able to do it (we now call it 'walled garden') ... My thesis is that all big tech firms now act as MS once did (or would if they could). But we're just used to it now.

On first read, I was going to ask to get a link to that thesis, thinking it was some Masters or PhD work. Every 10 years you're going to have the 'big-evil'. I'm with you 100% about it being standard practices in big companies, and 110% about users being complacent about accepting the walled garden.

Also re: patents- IBM has a huge patent portfolio. Very little of it is used to patent troll. Those boxed-office Texas shell LLP law-firms setup are nothing like what IBM is doing today (second only behind Red Hat in terms of core Linux kernel commits, IIRC[caveat: source was from a talk I attended in 2013 by one of the 3 upstream-controllers, including Linus]). "Evil 80s IBM" is now actually too stagnant to really exploit the consumer and barely breathing off of old banks and gov't systems that run System/36,360,38,390 on z/OS.

"Evil 90s MS" is now opening up basically everything for the consumer, minus the cash-cows (enterprises). MS Research funds tons of Haskell research, language development that gradually goes from PhD/post-doc work -> "obscure" languages like Haskell/F# -> C# (LINQ is effectively a monad). Python 3.5's new async/await is largely influenced by work Microsoft did (both in semantics and syntax). The CoreCLR is on Github. Inspect, modify, alter, run your F# code on a RS/6000 or 8 dollar ARM if you want to. Visual Studio Community Edition is free, a la the IntelliJ model. I argue they're now a net positive on the community. Just like IBM, they've realized the enterprise is where their money is, so charge for SQL Server licenses (which are really reasonably priced compared to Oracle), Sharepoint, Server, and Dynamics/Biztalk type stuff.

In the 80s it was IBM. In the 90s it was MS. Today, Apple performing so much walled-gardened anti-competitive practices (I can't install my legally purchased copy of OS X on my Intel machine? Really?) that it makes the MS DOJ trial look completely insignificant.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#40

Post by vegabook »

delish wrote: post #14

I struggle with changing my perception of Microsoft. I still characterize them by their Halloween documents and efforts to destroy Netscape. I would recommend the Surface to friends or family, which is a recent change. But I would never use Microsoft products. And not just because I'd be giving up years of Linux folk-knowledge. Childishly, when I watch a youtube video of someone far more skilled than me programming i…

I've taken a liking to a lot of what Microsoft is doing. I like the open source efforts, I like the RX libraries, the hardware looks great, to my mind the Metro interface is actually better than IOS/Android. I even like Windows 10.

Problem is I could never go back to the DOS command prompt. I only moved to the *nix prompt about 6-7 years ago, and I could never go back. I know I can do cygwin etc but that still feels like a layer on top of something else that is awful.

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