Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#101

Post by xradionut » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 2:16 AM UTC

Here's the deal: Despite having some awesome tech and many talented employees, Microsoft as a corporation has a history of shitting on developers, smaller companies and independents. There's a history of threatening OSS, monopoly abuse, abandoning APIs, bad certs, crapware, gross mismanagement, ignoring constructive requests and a very bad case of Not Invented Here. And they do have an history of astro-turfing and aggressive social media promotion.

Disclosure: I've primarily worked as a MS stack developer and admin for over two decades. But I've also used a full spectrum of other technologies over the years, too. I've been agnostic and objective when it come to the industry, but I've eaten enough excuses from Redmond. There's good alternatives, I'm exploring more of them.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#102

Post by shearnie » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 2:17 AM UTC

dekz wrote: post #31

shearnie wrote: post #10

My startup friends and I here in Brisbane, Australia talk quite a bit about going to San Fran to "soak up the start-up vibe". I often joke about having the nerve to set up camp in a coffee shop there and whip out my Surface Pro, fire up visual studio, and sling some C# and see how quickly I'll get hated on. I do wonder, will that really happen? Honest question.

Well Brisbane is pretty Java/MS stack heavy. I haven't found many lean startups or bigger companies that don't use a heavy off the shelf stack.

You're right about that. My background is MS since I started getting a real job in the late 90's.

I'd like to be more hipsterish and start-up with open source, but with BizSpark and free Visual Studio and Azure and being able to build quickly just because of my familiarity with the MS stack it's very hard not to stay locked in to that ecosystem.

I'm writing this now inside Microsoft on George street who let's you use their offices for free surrounded by MS We all know suspiciously it's MS's evil lurings to try to appeal to the startup scene so we can keep giving $$$ to them after our freebies have expired. However I'm also sanguine that they may have a change in attitude with their open source contributions and startup initiatives and linux or node images on Azure they might be genuinely wanting to be more "open".

That's what I'm hoping for. I am not looking forward to being stung with a massive SQL licence bill.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#103

Post by 4hthth4 » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 2:18 AM UTC

imsofuture wrote: post #46

nikatwork wrote: post #16

I started my career working on VB apps, and ASP then ASP.NET websites, using a Windows dev box. After learning several OSS stacks, I have nothing but contempt for Microsoft technologies. I wouldn't say I hate MS - they are what they are - but I am certainly conditioned to be very suspicious of their offerings. I would never take a job working on a MS stack again, ever. I currently work for a large enterprise that use…

Same here. With the caveat that C# + F# are crazy awesome, not that I'm jumping at the bit to work with them again...

You could just use OCaml, of which it is an obvious copy. You wouldn't get the whole MS stack, for better or worse.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#104

Post by iamshs » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 2:19 AM UTC

magicalist wrote: post #94

iamshs wrote: post #40

In that particular thread, I was accused of being a shill and an astroturfer by 3 members. All of the accusers had karma greater than 1500, and atleast two of them were on HN since at least 2 years. Why? Because I posted the spec list of the tablet. And I do not have allegiance to any of the tech companies at all, except having used their products one time or another. MS hate is vicious on here. I remember recoiledsn…

I remember that recoiledsnake post and found it baseless then as well. Not only is a claim like that basically impossible to verify using the information we have, it's also a perfect case study of selection bias, since of course the thing that you care about jumping down the page is going to stand out to you, while the many many stories you either don't care about or don't notice sail up and down the page without rai…

I do not have qualitative data backing up my conjecture, but i do think MS stories/products tend to have a short life on frontpage. This maybe selective bias at play, but maybe in future I will scrape some data from hnrankings about this. Even though interpretation will still be flimsy. The reason behind flags will not be known and can be various. That particular thread ticked off flamewar detector though.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#105

Post by seanmcdirmid » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 2:19 AM UTC

FallDead wrote: post #33

I hate Microsoft because I would say that they probably do not utilize you to your full extent or that they must shelve alot of your projects, Microsoft does not appear to be innovating and or utilizing R and D properly, the next thing is just half assing everything they have built. If they could build things like how they built visio my god that company would be in a good place in my mind. Another reason I hate Micr…

Microsoft Research is a great place for a PhD to work! We get lots of freedom in our research, some of which goes on to make big contributions to not only our products, but to the field as a whole!

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#106

Post by jaggederest » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 2:19 AM UTC

mgraczyk wrote: post #98

jaggederest wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done some fun stuff with Mono and C# but it's significantly more clunky than just apt-get install

What does a virtual machine + language have to do with a package manager?

Installing mono was significantly more complicated than most vm/language packages on Ubuntu, and required commensurately more upkeep.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#107

Post by gbog » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 2:21 AM UTC

lessnonymous wrote: post #82

In this thread: People getting confused over what Hacker News is. We're not the OSDN. In fact we (as a collective group of users) are not related to the open source movement in any way. Why should MS's closed-source viewpoint matter to us? Are we not here to build businesses in the tech space? Sometimes the right tool to use is made by Microsoft. Sometimes it's open source.

Don't forget the "Hacker" in Hacker news: it is very natural, reasonable, expected and even necessary for Hackers to have a strong and marked preference towards open protocols, open source software, and to dislike monopolies, walls, closedness, blind rule abiding, etcetera.

A convoluted spirit might believe hackers like closed doors because they enjoy breaking in and would like more of them. But that is wrong, just as it is wrong to believe that physicians would love to have more deadly diseases to play with.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#108

Post by seanmcdirmid » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 2:22 AM UTC

magicalist wrote: post #99

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article definitely had enough upvotes to stay on the front page; it was definitely knocked two pages back for some reason, and someone admitted to flagging. My account is more than a year old, I have 3000+ karma, and I have a low number on Slashdot as well (and made the front page in 1998). The bias is real and documented. I posted my own original comment with no expectation but to express my pleasure, most peopl…

> The bias is real and documented as I mentioned above, this is not the case. While some Microsoft stories may be knocked down the page, you would have to measure what happens to every other kind of story to know if Microsoft stories are in any way special.

I meant, the bias was real and documented in this case. But as pg pointed out, the article got killed because a flamewar was detected: basically a bunch of Microsoft haters took a dump on the article...and its history.

In general, many MS articles make it through, and I didn't notice any overt Microsoft hate until last night (or this morning your guys time).

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#109

Post by 4hthth4 » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 2:22 AM UTC

rcirka wrote: post #71

nikatwork wrote: post #16

I started my career working on VB apps, and ASP then ASP.NET websites, using a Windows dev box. After learning several OSS stacks, I have nothing but contempt for Microsoft technologies. I wouldn't say I hate MS - they are what they are - but I am certainly conditioned to be very suspicious of their offerings. I would never take a job working on a MS stack again, ever. I currently work for a large enterprise that use…

In what ways is RoR superior to asp.net (besides the fact it is not microsoft?) RoR is still it it's relatively infancy, has security issues, is significantly slower, and good luck finding a good IDE. To the author's point, don't just hate, give some specific reasons why one technology is superior or inferior.

Rails is an actual MVC framework, ASP.NET was an over-complicated, leaky, fairly opaque abstraction for web programming. And it took years for MS to then come out with their own MVC framework.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#110

Post by nikatwork » Wed, Oct 23, 2013, 2:22 AM UTC

jabits wrote: post #89

nikatwork wrote: post #16

I started my career working on VB apps, and ASP then ASP.NET websites, using a Windows dev box. After learning several OSS stacks, I have nothing but contempt for Microsoft technologies. I wouldn't say I hate MS - they are what they are - but I am certainly conditioned to be very suspicious of their offerings. I would never take a job working on a MS stack again, ever. I currently work for a large enterprise that use…

''The devs love it and it makes me happy.'' Not all devs. Microsoft tools have contributed to a long, successful, and enjoyable career for me, and I have yet to find an IDE as nice as VS (any contemporary version). The MS toolsets have been mostly good to work with, a few warts not withstanding. What OSS tools and IDEs are making your devs so happy, and making their jobs better than say, VS 2012? (serious question)

• The biggest smile was moving them from VSS to GIT (+GHE)

• Replacing Windows servers with Redhat has opened up a wealth of automation opportunities

• RoR on the frontend has allowed a much faster development and deployment pipeline (ASP.NET and Java are still used for the high-ceremony stuff)

• Our monitoring and alerting is much more straightforward and comprehensive for the OSS components

• I am so tired of propping up sickly MS servers, the Redhat servers are rock solid straight out the gate

OTOH for large enterprise, Sharepoint and Office integration works very well, that's really the MS sweetspot. I'm also interested in their new ALM offering (TFS), I haven't seen an OSS equivalent as yet. However these are not dev stacks.

I'm not saying you can't do great stuff using MS tech - stackoverflow is proof of that. But I have extensive experience in both worlds, and I'll take OSS any day.