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Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

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Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm both wary of and hopeful about Microsoft and Google. "Trust but verify" and all that.

I’ve always found this phrase an oxymoron.

It's a punchline from a joke that Reagan told repeatedly around the time of US-USSR weapons treaties. It's supposed to be funny.

Something along the lines of: "Q: Can we trust these guys to uphold their side of the deal? A: Sure, trust but verify."

Edit: here it is, it's actually a funny Russian proverb that Reagan was repeating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine among our crowd but how many non technical people are using Linux?

Uhh. The entire world? The internet doesn't run on IIS.

> non-technical people

And you bring up internet infrastructure?

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#243

The new Microsoft is good and Nadella is awesome. The one product that really sucks from this Microsoft is Azure. I commented in a thread before Azure is the absolute worst cloud provider amongst the big three after we thoroughly evaluated all three. AWS is the best and GCP is next. But due to management pressure we had to go with Azure. Unfortunately the best product does not always win in the enterprise. (That is w…

Could you please go more in depth? What is so good about Amazon and what is wrong about Azure? Thank you!

The thing is that it seems to be the opposite when you're looking at it as a non-technical manager.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other way! Or 15 years before that, pro-MS and anti-IBM. IBM is still huge, but they've found a steady revenue stream doing enterprise stuff, so they're not creating (much) fresh evil. MS could have made steady profits writing decent desktop software (I'm not so sure now). They're both powerful but comfortable. Google is huge, an…

> Companies are a bit like religions. When they're small, they can't have much impact. When they're big and young, they can wreak havoc. If they make it to comfortable old age, they're peaceful and stable. The Catholic Church is huge, benign, and stable now, but 1000 years ago they were a bit more conquest-focused and violent, and 2000 years ago they were just a few harmless militants. That's a really bad analogy and…

Oops...

> My guess is that you're probably looking at it through the lens of living in United States.

Well, that is where I live, so that's the lens I have... My experience is that religions tend to settle down as they age. Catholics, while they may have firm belief, tend to keep it to themselves, and not to proselytize. It's more of a culture and ritual than a fervent cause. Protestants, especially Evangelicals, tend to be a bit more vocal. Mormons were killing people not so long ago[1] (though my Mormon friends never tried to convert me). Scientologists are just insane. Our older religions are, on average, more peaceful and benign.

I don't know where you live or grew up, so I can't guess at your experience with religion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_massacre

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#245

The new Microsoft is good and Nadella is awesome. The one product that really sucks from this Microsoft is Azure. I commented in a thread before Azure is the absolute worst cloud provider amongst the big three after we thoroughly evaluated all three. AWS is the best and GCP is next. But due to management pressure we had to go with Azure. Unfortunately the best product does not always win in the enterprise. (That is w…

I am curious to see your findings (if possible). We are betting big on Azure and have found it to be pretty compatible with our needs. However we may have some blind spots.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#246

Having read Nadella's book Hit Refresh as soon as it went on sale, Microsoft performance since then doesn't look surprising at all. Having listed what's wrong (with their product focus, company culture etc), and where they plan to head, its' almost like the book informs the reader where puck is going to be (from Satya's POV). It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other…

> It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other way! You should be pro-neither. Microsoft used to be against FOSS because they thought it would make them more money; Microsoft is currently friendlier to FOSS because they think it will make them more money. Does that make them bad people? No because all businesses are that way, even the vaunted "don't be evil" Google.

Even when Microsoft does FOSS, they do it in a way that has "proprietary" written all over it. I'm quite excited about writing C# on Linux, but slapping a MIT license on code you release is only half the deal.

Yesterday I decided to write some C# code on Linux. That's easy, I thought: VSCode and .NET Core can both be found in Arch's repos these days. I just have to set an environment variable and edit VSCode's settings to disable telemetry... But alas! It turns out that I need to install Microsoft's proprietary release of Visual Studio Code because the C# debugger is only licensed to work with Visual Studio Code

Here's the Github issue about it, providing a bit of context and a lot of useless discussion: https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/505

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#247

Nadellaissance doesn't work at all and its breaking my soul, fuck off pithy headlines. That said, the board has done well picking leadership, Satya's driven a lot of amazing cultural change, and business too.

True - one of the most egregious atrocities I've ever seen committed against English. I don't read Bloomberg in any case, but have no idea how I'd make myself read that article & maintain reasonable mental health regardless of the location.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#248
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@stupidcar we've reached the depth-limit, so I'm responding here. > In the case of "trust but verify", how does this trust manifest in a provable way? Good point. "provable" is the problem here since we don't know eachother, and frankly I can't prove you're trustworthy initially; that's why the question this addresses (namely "trust-or-misstrust?") arises in the first place. Assuming we don't have dossiers on everyon…

> we've reached the depth-limit, so I'm responding here. There isn't a depth limit.

> There isn't a depth limit.

Well looks like you're right, but the nonetheless the reply button wasn't there.

Did I sufficiently address your question?

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#249
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people don't pay for software maintenance, e.g. Windows 10 updates, what do you do? Ads, harvest data... Windows (likely) always could offer better privacy for a fee. You can buy a Windows computer incl. services at a price point you can only dream of Apple hardware. Facebook/Inst/Wapp and Google show that the majority of people go with 'Geiz ist geil' (cheap is cool), privacy be damned. Awareness doesn't necessar…

Linux seems to be doing just fine keeping software maintained without ads or harvesting data. This mindset is toxic and needs to die.

> This mindset is toxic and needs to die

A bit a more friendly reply would be appreciated.. What is toxic exactly?

Linux (the Ubuntu desktop which I use) might do fine, but it needs to be financed also, developers need a salary. (Some) people donate, there seem to be 'some arrangements with e.g. Amazon' and - I suppose - the main funds currently come from Canonical using server edition income.

Re: Microsoft, currently the most valuable company, is having a Nadellaissance

#250

Having read Nadella's book Hit Refresh as soon as it went on sale, Microsoft performance since then doesn't look surprising at all. Having listed what's wrong (with their product focus, company culture etc), and where they plan to head, its' almost like the book informs the reader where puck is going to be (from Satya's POV). It's funny that 15 years back I was so anti MS and pro Google and now I think it's the other…

Microsoft's hard turn for the best is a weird mirror image of Google's hard turn for the worst.

It almost makes me want to give Windows a try again (ha not really). But I'd try a "Microsoft Linux" desktop (which no longer sounds like a ridiculous concept), before I would try Chrome OS.

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