Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 556 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#211

Post by kstrauser »

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.

My coworkers and I in SF went to a coffee shop / workspace subsidized by a megabank today. Odd vibe, but everyone's nice and the coffee's cheap, so...

We saw a few people using Dells and other Windows laptops. No one hated on them, but they definitely drew odd looks - not of aggression, but of confusion. At worst, people would dismiss you as a banker who got lost and ended up in a tech neighborhood. You just don't see anyone here in startup-friendly places using Windows.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#212

Post by nivla »

joe_the_user wrote: post #188
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…

OK, I didn't accuse you but I did accuse another poster of being an MS shill. I'll admit I could have been more diplomatic. Still, as I recall, the person I accused was a professional "evangelist" (or something similar) for MS by their own admission writing an article about, what do you know, hatred of MS. And that's the thing. By the evangelist's own admission, MS is deeply hated in society at large. It's understand…

>The very recent imposition of the Metro/Windows 8 interface on a widely unwilling public is prima facie evidence of MS' continuing abuse of it's particular monopoly.

How is that in any way an evidence for abuse of monopoly? I have Windows 7 on my laptop and have no immediate plans to upgrade it to Windows 8. Unless they force it through automatic updates or cancel my Win 7 license, there is clearly no abuse. You can still vote with your wallet.. you know?

>A huge number of Windows users woke up without a Start Button.

Huh?

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#213

Post by Udo »

Obviously I can't speak for other people, but since you asked:

I'm an OS X user, and before that I was a Linux/Unix user. I'm not really familiar with Microsoft products (especially recent ones). When some cool new tech gets announced, I'm interested by default.

I have nothing against hearing about stuff from "foreign ecosystems", on the contrary. I was an active member on Channel 9 back in the Scobleizer days, and I loved hearing about the interesting things you guys had been working on.

I didn't catch the Nokia article today, but chances are it wouldn't have caught my eye even if it had been among the top ten on the front page. First, it's not actually interesting on a technical level. Second, a lot of us here on HN speculated what MS was doing when you positioned that trojan CEO at Nokia, and then of course it turned out to be true. Not that there is anything wrong with it per se, but I don't see how that dishonest-yet-obvious takeover puts MS in a position to offer anything interesting that it couldn't offer before. The Nokia name accomplishes very little in this case.

It's true that there can be some group hate on HN, however I don't see a lot of it projected at MS - at least not beyond the usual background noise. We as a community are way more hostile towards certain programming languages and startups. Sure, every Apple thread, every MS thread, every time something from 37signals comes up, there are disgruntled people. But enough to single out MS hatred specifically? I don't think so. Disinterest is the more likely culprit.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#214

Post by vondur »

Microsoft was/is a horrible company who abused it's monopoly position to crush other companies. They tried to co-opt the internet by having major sites only work in Internet Explorer. Most of the older tech crowd remembers them for this.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#215

Post by 4hthth4 »

groovy2shoes wrote: post #162
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don Syme has added some interesting features to F# like type providers, so I think it is OK to say that F# has transcended its OCaml roots to become an interesting language in its own right.

Not to mention the approach to OOP is rather different in F#. It's syntactically and culturally different. Most OCaml programmers I know avoid OOP for the most part, whereas it's embraced to some extent in F#. Seems like a sort of "functional first, but feel free to use objects as you see fit" philosophy in F# versus a "functional always, objects are a failed experiment" philosophy in OCaml. I don't mean to imply any…

> It's syntactically and culturally different.

Most people seem to think it's not syntactically very different: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/179492/f-changes-to-ocaml

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#216

Post by kstrauser »

graycat wrote: post #198

I'll ask a question, serious for me: Mostly you guys are way ahead of me in knowledge of current software tools, especially on Linux and 'open source software' (OSS -- I had to look up that one!). But I'm doing a startup the center of which is a Web site. If people like the site, a huge if, then it could grow to be a big thing around the world. Did I mention if people like the site? People might not like the site. Bu…

I've known people who made the same decision for many of the same reasons, and the universal experience I've heard was "it was all nice until we had to scale, and then it got expensive quickly". If your stack works for you, great! That's the important part! But if your traffic and income scaled by a factor of 100, would you be turning a profit or desperately looking for financing? You're the only one who can answer that, and it's something to consider.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#217

Post by joe_the_user »

nivla wrote: post #212
joe_the_user wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I didn't accuse you but I did accuse another poster of being an MS shill. I'll admit I could have been more diplomatic. Still, as I recall, the person I accused was a professional "evangelist" (or something similar) for MS by their own admission writing an article about, what do you know, hatred of MS. And that's the thing. By the evangelist's own admission, MS is deeply hated in society at large. It's understand…

>The very recent imposition of the Metro/Windows 8 interface on a widely unwilling public is prima facie evidence of MS' continuing abuse of it's particular monopoly. How is that in any way an evidence for abuse of monopoly? I have Windows 7 on my laptop and have no immediate plans to upgrade it to Windows 8. Unless they force it through automatic updates or cancel my Win 7 license, there is clearly no abuse. You can…

I think you are describing things from the point of view of the aware, tech-savy user. The average user buys stuff and things happen.

People bought laptops and the laptops weren't what they were expecting. There's a lot they could have done in the abstract. There's a lot less they were capable of doing in reality.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#218

Post by tracker1 »

4hthth4 wrote: post #120
tejaswiy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, any specific examples? I really like c# as a language. ASP.NET whilst not as new and shiny as Rails etc., it's still moving in the right direction with new additions like WebAPI. And VS is I think one of the best IDEs out there.

You could certainly provide specific examples. How exactly is VS so much better than anything else? I've used other things that worked just as well for me. And, what is "the right direction" - MS is always moving in some direction with new APIs or frameworks.

Intellisense for anything other than JS has worked far better and more consistently than IntelliJ or Eclipse. Setting up a project in Eclipse often seems like pulling teeth (with respect to tomcat, jake, etc). Most options in VS are available via the GUI or easier to install extensions.

I mostly use WebStorm, while having pretty shitty intellisense for JS itself, is a much better experience for node.js development. Second would probably be MS's Web Matrix, and I'm disappointed that MS chose not to include the, imho (with an addon) much better support for node.js into VS.

I'll say that for C# development, I really like ASP.Net MVC, I've used classic ASP in the past (both JScript and VBScript) and also used VB.Net with ASP.Net. I've used PHP in the past (hate it with a passion), as well as a dabble of Ruby (like some aspects, not as much with others). I'm warming up to CoffeeScript, and have also done a bit of Python (desktop UI) and currently toying with Go.

I'm not really tethered to MS by any means, I'm pushing for moving away from what little MS tech we're using in the product I work on. That said, VS is pretty damned good, and on a whole, I haven't used better.

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#219

Post by Locke1689 »

vinceguidry wrote: post #91
rcirka wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 initial release: 2004 ASP.NET initial release: 2002 I've heard nothing but good things about RubyMine, but few people use it because a good text editor is all you need to work with most dynamic languages. C# is practically unusable without Visual Studio. I've worked with both, give me Rails any day.

C# is practically unusable without Visual Studio.

Why?

Re: Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

#220

Post by CrankyPants »

fetbaffe wrote: post #174
jeswin wrote: post #163

I'll tell you the story of my friend Greg. Greg has been a believer in Microsoft. He went to all the Tech-Ed conferences, attended every MSDN event he could. Conferences are grand stages that leave an impression. He drank all the cool-aid that was served at these conferences. Things were really good early on, this was the last decade. The computing scene at that time revolved around Microsoft like the many moons of J…

Yes, because Apple always follow standards and have open implementations.

WebKit? ALAC?

On top of that, Apple's done more than any other single player (except perhaps Adobe!) to move the industry away from Flash, to open alternatives.

No, they don't always follow standards or always have open implementations, but their garden is arguably quite a bit less walled than the one in Redmond. Which makes your point a little confusing, at best.

Also related: http://www.apple.com/opensource/

Post reply on HN