This isn't your father's Microsoft • Hacker News Board

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#11

Post by sz4kerto » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 5:23 AM UTC

joveian wrote: post #3

"Maybe the Microsoft strategy is to intro into the Linux/Java/LAMPish/open-source camp community, burnish their image, and hope they consider their commercial offerings." Try plugging a USB stick with an ext2 partition into Windows 10. At least in 1803, you get TWO dialog boxes asking you to format the partition, with the default being format! In between is another dialog box with just one button. This is the new Mic…

Are you sure that this dialog box comprehensively represents the whole company?

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#12

Post by jchw » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 5:23 AM UTC

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #5

While this isn’t your father’s Microsoft, this is your grandfather’s Microsoft. Before they started creating business applications and operating systems, Microsoft was in the business of programming tools. Their first software was Microsoft Basic. Microsoft Basic was available on pretty much every major personal computer platform. Thus in some sense this is Microsoft returning to its roots as a cross-platform program…

To be fair, Microsoft Basic practically was an operating system, in its day. It’s what many computers booted into, and sometimes the environment in which everything else was run from.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#13

Post by jdnenej » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 5:24 AM UTC

kgwxd wrote: post #9

My only real beef with the modern MS stack is the occasional forcing of telemetry and updates on certain products. If they would just quit doing that, without insane hoops to jump through, they'd gain a bunch more trust. I propose universal opt-out environment variables (e.g. OPT_OUT_ALL_TELEMETRY=1, OPT_OUT_ALL_AUTOMATIC_UPDATES=1) that all software, not just MS's, should pride themselves in respecting.

The hoops you have to jump through on azure data studio is rediculous. It has a popup saying it is tracking you but instead of asking or providing an opt out button it has a wiki page describing a config option you have to manually insert into a json file and restart the program before it will stop tracking you. By that point it has likely uploaded all of your data anyway.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#14

Post by CGamesPlay » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 5:32 AM UTC

Old_Thrashbarg wrote: post #10

The one thing that has persuaded me the most has been vscode. Until switching to that, I had assumed Microsoft incapable of producing something with excellent design/UX. Also it's open source. Opening Microsoft software every day on my Ubuntu machine and feeling grateful they made it has slowly chipped away at my anti-Microsoft stance.

Man, I have such fond memories of VC6. It was such a great debugging experience. And MSDN was absolutely the best documentation website I've used. I think Microsoft's developer tools have always been high quality.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#15

Post by kgwxd » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 5:32 AM UTC

mpnordland wrote: post #2

I'm not really considering it for my personal stuff, but since work is a Microsoft shop, I'm really pushing to get on .NET core. We're at a point where most of our Windows bound stuff is going away and we can start to shed a lot of weight if we can port what remains to .NET Core.

I'm lucky enough to be leading a brand new huge project in .NET Core 3 at work. I wouldn't consider it for personal stuff either, but I love that the Windows devs at work don't even need to know I'm doing my work on Linux. Something will probably come up eventually but, 4 months in, no one has brought it up.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#16

Post by mpiedrav » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 5:33 AM UTC

joveian wrote: post #3

"Maybe the Microsoft strategy is to intro into the Linux/Java/LAMPish/open-source camp community, burnish their image, and hope they consider their commercial offerings." Try plugging a USB stick with an ext2 partition into Windows 10. At least in 1803, you get TWO dialog boxes asking you to format the partition, with the default being format! In between is another dialog box with just one button. This is the new Mic…

Windows will always be Windows, and other systems will be second-class citizens to it.

The new Microsoft makes money well beyond Windows: billing running containers and Linux (or Windows) VMs, GB/month of Azure Storage, GB/month of outbound traffic, Visual Studio professional subscriptions, and so on.

It's a clever strategy. Managers usually won't care/understand about containers, runtime environments, Active Directory, APIs, libraries, etc., but developers/devops folks do. By addressing devs, Microsoft is getting quite a competitive edge (no pun intended) in the operational part of enterprises.

Microsoft salespeople already address managers in terms of solutions in manager-lingo (synergies, CapEx/OpEx, yada, yada).

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#17

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 5:34 AM UTC

Old_Thrashbarg wrote: post #10

The one thing that has persuaded me the most has been vscode. Until switching to that, I had assumed Microsoft incapable of producing something with excellent design/UX. Also it's open source. Opening Microsoft software every day on my Ubuntu machine and feeling grateful they made it has slowly chipped away at my anti-Microsoft stance.

[deleted]

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#18

Post by kerng » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 5:35 AM UTC

joveian wrote: post #3

"Maybe the Microsoft strategy is to intro into the Linux/Java/LAMPish/open-source camp community, burnish their image, and hope they consider their commercial offerings." Try plugging a USB stick with an ext2 partition into Windows 10. At least in 1803, you get TWO dialog boxes asking you to format the partition, with the default being format! In between is another dialog box with just one button. This is the new Mic…

To be fair, this seems not like a mainstream use case... and you can use WSL to read it if you really want to (which seems like an advanced use case anyway). Cross platform FAT32 is the standard and Microsoft made that open.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#19

Post by Tossrock » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 5:35 AM UTC

I think the pendulum has been swinging from Apple towards Microsoft for developer friendliness for some time now. This is definitely an active strategy on MS's part, and a huge misstep by Apple. Some key parts of the MS strategy:

- Embracing Linux. Beyond what's mentioned in the article, there's the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and the new Terminal app. Being able to run Ubuntu (or whichever distribution) natively on a windows machine, accessing the same file system, is huge for developers. The new Terminal app will make interacting with it even better.

- IDE dominance. Visual Studio (classic) combined with the .NET environment languages is very, very powerful. Visual Studio Code has taken web development by storm. A lot of what makes these two so powerful is Intellisense, which is extremely good at what it does. Compare this with XCode.

- Premium first party hardware. The Surface line of laptops / 2-in-1s / etc is at least as good as the recent Macbook Pros. They also innovated in an actually useful way (the detachable tablet on the Book), as compared to the developer-hostile "innovations" from Apple (replacing the escape key with a skinny phone, a universally reviled keyboard, etc)

I really have to give Nadella credit for the way this has all been orchestrated.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#20

Post by kgwxd » Sat, Nov 09, 2019, 5:36 AM UTC

jdnenej wrote: post #13

kgwxd wrote: post #9

My only real beef with the modern MS stack is the occasional forcing of telemetry and updates on certain products. If they would just quit doing that, without insane hoops to jump through, they'd gain a bunch more trust. I propose universal opt-out environment variables (e.g. OPT_OUT_ALL_TELEMETRY=1, OPT_OUT_ALL_AUTOMATIC_UPDATES=1) that all software, not just MS's, should pride themselves in respecting.

The hoops you have to jump through on azure data studio is rediculous. It has a popup saying it is tracking you but instead of asking or providing an opt out button it has a wiki page describing a config option you have to manually insert into a json file and restart the program before it will stop tracking you. By that point it has likely uploaded all of your data anyway.

Yeah, I just went through that a few weeks ago. It's really user-hostile. It's like they know exactly who cares about that kind of thing, hide it perfectly from the users that don't, and then do a bunch of stuff to piss off the people that do.