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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

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

biggest negative I would say is getting rid of the SDET role and moving them into Telemetry. It moved the onus of testing on Devs who've never done it before as part of their job and thusly very lacking. The bungled W10 recent releases can be directly tied back to this model. As PMs and Devs don't account for testing like they used to before shipping to customers. This may be fine and dandy short-term, but if you're…

> It moved the onus of testing on Devs who've never done it before as part of their job Could this explain some of the QA blunders like some Windows 10 users losing files after an upgrade? If so the move may turn out far more costly than any savings or telemetry gains.

I believe so, but again I'm just one person and not privy to all data.

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

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally, this was the biggest selling point of Windows Phone. It died, and so did the Security/privacy mindset.

If I'm interpreting you correctly, you're making two points, and neither of them are entirely correct: 1) Microsoft had telemetry in Windows Phone. 2) The security/privacy mindset hasn't died alongside Windows Phone. I think it's actually gotten stronger, GDPR has been the biggest forcing function. [disclosure: MS employee, but my employer wants me to state that this is my opinion, not that of Microsoft]

certainly in Azure; I've also seen very big efforts towards privacy as the direct result of GDPR. Windows, I'm much less confident.

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

#293
post #21

> There’s a bit of Silicon Valley cred, too, thanks to its acquisitions of LinkedIn, the professional social network, and GitHub, the software code repository. I would have thought open sourcing so much of it's framework, vscode, and typescript would have had a greater impact.

> I would have thought open sourcing so much of it's framework I have a pedantic correction here. Instead of open sourcing the .NET Framework they wrote a new opensource framework (named .NET core) that is very similar to their closed source framework. Microsoft is currently supporting and expanding both frameworks.

.NET Core is getting MASSIVE adoption in the large midwest city I work in. I expect .NET Framework to go on life support in a couple years.

The ability to build and run applications on Linux is something even old school .NET shops are excited about.

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

#294

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! 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 settin…

I am hopeful .NET/C# will support[1][2][3] *BSD operating systems soon.

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/labels/os-freebsd

[2] https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/labels/os-freebsd

[3] https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/labels/os-netbsd

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

#295
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big tech company harvesting extensive user data by default and saying it's ok because "Trust us, we don't do anything bad with it" is not a compelling argument these days. Even if it's true (and that's a big if), that says nothing about what Microsoft will do with the data tomorrow, or the next day.

It's on by default, but literally the first thing we ask you, actively, is about giving us feedback and let you turn it off right then. It's not remotely hidden. I totally understand, though about trust. We've been asking users for feedback for 20+ years, I hope we've shown ourselves to be good actors! Disclosure: I work at Azure on machine learning

@ThIronYuppie Let me say first of all that I really appreciate your sincerity and belief in the Goodness of the company that you work for. The issue is not insincerity, but:

* a lack of trust in corporations in today's economic and political climate and

* the skyrocketing growth of the online advertising business, which has made user data quite literally the gold mines of the digital age

The incentives today are very very well aligned for a corporation to sell user data. Even if a company may mostly be made of good people, without explicitly written contracts or declarations of any kind, a Company can change internal policies rather quickly. Maybe there will be a manager who sees the selling of that data as a way to boost profit and rise within the company. Maybe the company sells that division along with their data.

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

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odd, I'm seeing more and more people trying to find ways to escape Exchange, and not having it as a driver towards anything. Nobody likes being driven by artificial lock-ins.

What are some viable alternatives? OpenLDAP?

I don't think OpenLDAP is going to help you with setting up enterprise email services. Perhaps for authentication?

Alternatives for Exchange usually go in the direction of outsourcing (which ironically can mean: still Exchange, but not in the ball-and-chain on-prem way). Cloud options exist, but for people who for whatever reason require something to physically exist at a specific location (which is weird for email) commercial offerings are plenty (i.e. Zimbra, Zarafa, IBM's stuff, Red Hat's stuff, Oracle's Stuff).

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

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[disclosure, MS employee] With the absence of telemetry, how do you know Linux is doing just fine? (specifically in the desktop world, not server world). Microsoft has an interest in knowing how well Windows is doing, and Windows has lived in a world both with and without telemetry. It was way, way harder to gauge success prior to telemetry, and it was also much more frustrating for the user to communicate their prob…

What does telemetry have to do with the windows 10 start menu becoming a container for ads and not trivially removable partnered apps?

There's nothing wrong with transparent, privacy-respecting, and configurable telemetry, but what windows 10 does is none of those. Trying to describe it as something that's good for the users comes off a bit disingenuous.

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

#298
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want my data in the hands of my competitors. Amazon is either competing with or threatening to compete with a wide range of organizations.

Whether you are using Azure or AWS, if you’re concerned about your data, you should be encrypting it with customer managed keys. Netflix is AWS’s largest customer, even though it competes with Amazon Prime Video.

Netflix's video streams are delivered from devices installed at ISPs.

Their most valuable data: what is being watched, where, by whom, is hidden from Amazon.

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

#299
post #38

As an investor I bought few years ago MSFT stock. I did it as I saw two things: 1. azure 2. o365 1. because I knew what happened (and was happening) with AWS 2. because microsoft moved to subscription model Those two things, connected with third "secret" incredient: BIGGEST user base (corporate) which WILL use those two offerings = success. Satya is/may be great. I bought stock around 2014/2015 because of the above a…

Recurring payments scale well in good times. No one really knows what’s going to happen in a recession. I suspect it won’t be pretty. Revenues will probably contract just as well in the reverse direction and I suspect many customers will look to cut costs by eliminating monthly recurring expenses. Perhaps recurring revenue business will be more resilient. I can see a path for that as well. But no one really knows.

You can make the same argument for the old CDs-in-boxes model too. "If there's a recession, sales will go down".

The difference is that recurring payments vastly improve your cashflow situation. Instead of giant pulses every 3 years you have a smoother pipeline of cash coming in all the time. Even if that pipeline shrinks, it still flows.

It's far easier to plan for a 10% reduction that happens continuously than a 3 year plan with lots of "??$??" sprinkled throughout it. And far easier to recover from mistakes.

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

#300

> “I don’t know of any other software company in the history of technology that fell onto hard times and has recovered so well,” says Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix Inc. How about Apple?

Historically considered to be a hardware company.
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