181–190 of 840 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't have to be astroturfing. Repeatedly exposing HN readers to the same news would be a good way to gradually increase positive opinion until a desirable threshold is reached ("the first positive top comment").
You'll have to walk me through your logic on that again. How is repeated exposure more likely to increase positive opinion?
I'm excited by this. I feel trapped between Google who will give everything away in exchange for spying on me, and Apple who will respect my privacy but shake me upside down with the most ridiculous vendor lock-in tactics. I'm glad someone as powerful as Microsoft can play the underdog role and provide a viable third alternative. Windows laptops that run Linux well enough for development. VS Code. I now develop on my…
I'm pretty strongly opposed to the petty naysayers and partisan Microsoft bashing, and I'm definitely firmly embedded in the Microsoft camp from a toolset perspective, but I'm very, very far away from holding the belief that Microsoft will for sure fix the bunch of little things that bother you. On the contrary, despite the near complete 180 in culture under Nadella, lack of attention to fine details, making things "just work", the "little things" in technology.....this is where Microsoft is still just......terrible.
This isn't to say everything is terrible, several teams actually have seemed to change in this respect. Power BI would be a fine example. But many, many more have changed very little, if at all. Skype, MS Office, SQL Server Management Studio (and the T-SQL language), and many others are either horrendously bad, or depressingly so much worse than they could be with some serious, well-intentioned and honest effort.
A lot of this could perhaps be excused by much of this being legacy code, but then you see brand new products, like the abomination that is Microsoft Teams, or consider that 90% the problems with Skype could be fixed with a rewrite of the UI. I continue to believe that much of the shortcomings wouldn't in fact be particularly hard or expensive to fix, and I think the investment would pay off handsomely for Microsoft in the long run. But I see no good reason to believe that there is any intention to fix any of it. I don't know if it's a blind spot in Nadella's vision, or some fundamental underlying principle (maybe it's not considered "strategic", which is probably technically correct), but I think I'm at the point where I've lost hope any of it will change.
What's my point? Microsoft, despite it's dramatic turnaround from a cultural perspective, still has plenty of flaws, with no good excuse. For user's sake, let's hope that these flaws aren't in areas that the future success of Github will rely upon.
I reported a bug in a Microsoft product earlier this year, one whose only effect was to complicate interop with a minor opensource competitor. They handled that fairly, promptly and well. Microsoft isn't the same company as ten and twenty years ago.
> Microsoft isn't the same company as ten and twenty years ago. It's not because you had one positive experience with one small part of MS that it means the whole company's culture has suddenly reversed to be philanthropic or something.
Yes, I think people should expect to move. Microsoft cannot be trusted. They make fine products, but they are definitely looking to make money from this acquisition. EDIT: This is to say that Github was not looking to squeeze their users. I have been squeezed by microsoft.
Who wouldn't?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have a company with deep pockets that can fund it as ongoing concern.
Going concerns are profitable. MS don't look to me like a company that wants to charitably support Github's userbase?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is reported that GH makes about $200M a year.
Right, but my understanding is they are not profitable (they were, but have been trying to work back toward profitability).
From a financial perspective, any purchasing company with enterprise sales / support experience is a great fit. Having MS backing GitHub suddenly makes it a feasible option for a lot of conservative enterprise customers.
The real story here is that nobody wants to host their own services and nobody wants to spend time/money even integrating various hosted solutions. The success of Atlassian and this acquisition confirms that people want to pay a flat monthly fee and get access to a bunch of highly integrated, quality services. The web continues to drive the creation of highly centralized platforms (Amazon, Facebook, Google) and it doesn't look like IT development market is going to be any different.