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Microsoft, Rebooted, Emerges as a Tech Leader

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Re: Microsoft, Rebooted, Emerges as a Tech Leader

#271

Post by tigershark »

blakeyrat wrote: post #265
Pigo wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer there's been so many times that I've gotten tired of MS solutions, and get excited about new emerging platforms elsewhere. Then I smirk when MS incorporates that new platform's ideology. Then I'm pleasantly surprised when it turns out to be cool, and often surpassing the original. I've heard some devs claim they cherry pick from other people's work, and others that they work hard to remain progressive…

I have different priorities than you. In terms of IDE quality, debugger quality, flexibility (ability to use actual threads if you want them!), performance... in my opinion .NET Core is already so far ahead of Node.JS it's embarrassing for them. The only thing I might stack in Node.JS' favor is their NPM package manager. Maybe. Possibly.

Are you seriously saying that NuGet/paket are worse than a flawed package manager that even managed to cause a JavaScript global outage when a padding package was retired? What are your problems with NuGet and paket?

Re: Microsoft, Rebooted, Emerges as a Tech Leader

#272

Post by manigandham »

Pigo wrote: post #137
marricks wrote: post #15

I was going to rag on this article for touting the the same non-specific garbage we've seen the past couple days like, "more mac users switching to surface than ever!" without any hard numbers, did is go from 20 to 25? But this article is actually pretty interesting. It focuses on how Satya Nadella has respected the leaders of Companies he's bought out and invited them to key meetings. Using their insight not only fo…

As a developer there's been so many times that I've gotten tired of MS solutions, and get excited about new emerging platforms elsewhere. Then I smirk when MS incorporates that new platform's ideology. Then I'm pleasantly surprised when it turns out to be cool, and often surpassing the original. I've heard some devs claim they cherry pick from other people's work, and others that they work hard to remain progressive…

> I don't know if .NET Core will catch up with Node, probably not

What exactly does it need to catch up to? C#/.NET already vastly exceed anything in Node in performance, features and flexibility.

Re: Microsoft, Rebooted, Emerges as a Tech Leader

#273

Post by michaelmrose »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #143
michaelmrose wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sco scam was in 2003 and the recent move towards arm devices that use treacherous computing to lock the user out of modifying their machine was recently who cares about 1995.

This whole thread is about EEE, which is a concept coined in 1995 and my reply was addressing >what are the odds that the company's executive-level culture has changed? So, quite relevant.

The point is that they have been user and competitive marketplace hostile far more recently than 1995.

Re: Microsoft, Rebooted, Emerges as a Tech Leader

#274

Post by KirinDave »

jandrese wrote: post #238
yummyfajitas wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My windows machine does not display them, and I don't remember even being asked.

IIRC the wording wasn't "let us display ads", it was cloaked in some deceptive language.

I don't remember the exact wording, but it was something akin to, "Show Microsoft's images on my lockscreen" or somesuch similar.

It wasn't clear there might be ads there.

Re: Microsoft, Rebooted, Emerges as a Tech Leader

#275

Post by nojvek »

marricks wrote: post #15

I was going to rag on this article for touting the the same non-specific garbage we've seen the past couple days like, "more mac users switching to surface than ever!" without any hard numbers, did is go from 20 to 25? But this article is actually pretty interesting. It focuses on how Satya Nadella has respected the leaders of Companies he's bought out and invited them to key meetings. Using their insight not only fo…

I worked in MSFT in two different teams. In P.*BI the culture was quite toxic at times. The management can be very rough and political. Re-orgs every now and then. Biased promos. Plenty of people burnt out and left.

When I joined web diagnostics, it was a whole different experience. Nicest, smartest people I worked with. A different culture focused on building great products users love and helping people grow.

Microsoft is a great place to work with very interesting problems to solve if you're in the right team. If you are interviewing at MS, really ask about the team culture and dig deep into it.

Re: Microsoft, Rebooted, Emerges as a Tech Leader

#276

Post by nojvek »

morgante wrote: post #150
Camillo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are asking for open floor plans? Is there anything young people won't ruin?

I'm skeptical of the claim and suspect it might be (yet another) case of an older developer blaming young people for things. None of my friends (all in their 20s) prefer open offices.

I prefer open spaces. Mostly due to sunlight and the social interaction. It feels more collaborative.

Although I should say our whole team works 1-2 days from home. Different people, different days and we're very okay with that.

We also like to leave developers who have headphones alone and only talk to them over skype/slack.

Re: Microsoft, Rebooted, Emerges as a Tech Leader

#277

Post by quanticle »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #264
quanticle wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I credit Nadella for this, but none of this is due to some sort of newfound egalitarianism or philanthropy. It's just business. So, how does that make the outcome any worse? RedHat isn't contributing to the Linux kernel out of a sense of charity. IBM isn't contributing to OpenStack as a philanthropic endeavor. Facebook isn't improving PHP because it's a fun hobby project. They're all doing the things that they're doi…

No, they're not different from anyone else for having a profit motive, but Microsoft, on the other hand, had a very long stretch of using underhanded and illegal tactics to stifle competition. I would argue that they're STILL abusing their monopoly position on the desktop. THAT is what makes them different than the rest, and that, to me, is what tempers my attitude about these recent announcements. Another difference…

But you're never going to get Windows-forms-like applications on Windows

You absolutely will be able to get Windows-forms like applications. You just won't be using WinForms or WPF. Instead, you'll use Mono and its bindings to GTK or QT. This is exactly how it should be. WPF is an OS specific GUI library. Using WPF on Linux makes about as much sense as using Cocoa on Windows.

But, really, I think it's another example of my main point. Microsoft could have used some pre-existing open source project and built on top of that, but they chose to create another language for the future.

I think you're misremembering history. C# was created because Sun specifically cut Microsoft off from using Java. Microsoft had a project to write its own Java compiler. Sun took legal action to prevent Microsoft from doing so. And this was during the early 2000s. Python, Ruby, etc. were nowhere near mature enough to serve as the primary systems programming language for something like Windows.

Moreover, Microsoft gets a lot of criticism for making C#, but Google gets no criticism for making Go? Isn't that just slightly hypocritical?

Re: Microsoft, Rebooted, Emerges as a Tech Leader

#278

Post by untoreh »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #232
Pxtl wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the Windows terminal is an albatross since time immemorial. The problem was that the last attempt to rewrite it got vicious scope-creep and we ended up with powershell instead of just a non-stupid terminal.

Powershell is cool. I mean, what's wrong with it? It's the most un-windows-y part of windows. It's a modern shell, I wish bash was that nice to you (quick example: command option completion).

There are plugins for command option completions

Re: Microsoft, Rebooted, Emerges as a Tech Leader

#279

Post by dbg31415 »

strictnein wrote: post #109
dbg31415 wrote: post #62

At what point can we safely assume that Balmer was simply incompetent?

Balmer was good at what he did: making Microsoft lots of money. Balmer ran MS from 2000 to 2014. Here's what the profits for that time period (since 2002) looked like: https://www.statista.com/statistics/267808/net-income-of-mic... So not incompetent, just focused on something else.

Revenue isn't the issue. It's the sheer number of missed opportunities and bumbles during Balmer's tenure.

Search / Online Advertising... lost to Google. Google went from under $1B to $74B. Could have been Microsoft's. https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-gl...

Smart Phones... lost to Apple and Google. During Balmer's tenure Apple went form ~$1B in to ~$54B. Could have been Microsoft's. https://www.statista.com/statistics/267728/apples-net-income... And... what did they even get for a $7B investment in Nokia?

Cloud Services... lost to Amazon. AWS has grown to $10B -- with no end in sight to the growth there. Could have been Microsoft's. http://www.recode.net/2016/4/28/11586526/aws-cloud-revenue-g...

Online Office Tools... including email servers for SMBs... lost to Google. Despite having a near 100% share in office tools prior to the advent of Google Docs. The UX for their first generation of "flat office" made it damn near unusable. Personally I still think Office 365 is weak compared to Google Suite. $9B investment in Skype... only to have it be less interesting than Google Hangouts or Slack.

Microsoft Project / Project Central is all but irrelevant at this point. Lost out to Atlassian, GitHub, Trello, Asana... 200 other tools.

Windows 8...

So Windows 10 has been nice. Office 365 is getting there. Azure has been improving as well. It's clear someone lit a fire the last year or so to fix all the shit that was stagnant or fucked up during the last 15 years.

Re: Microsoft, Rebooted, Emerges as a Tech Leader

#280

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

benaadams wrote: post #270
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they're not different from anyone else for having a profit motive, but Microsoft, on the other hand, had a very long stretch of using underhanded and illegal tactics to stifle competition. I would argue that they're STILL abusing their monopoly position on the desktop. THAT is what makes them different than the rest, and that, to me, is what tempers my attitude about these recent announcements. Another difference…

> Does ASP.NET really stack up well against Rails or Node.js as a web application stack on Linux? Yes; have a look at the language column one this page: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r13&hw=...

I wasn't thinking about speed benchmarks. I was referring to the whole "ecosystem" of the work, from language to plugins to the editors commonly used to community activity around it, etc.
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