Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO

> The world of Google and Apple (Samsung and FOSS aren't even a player) is a world of closed computing platforms

As a user of Omnirom and a donator to Replicant I don't understand how you come to this conclusion.

Agreed, the alternatives to google apps are not too good today, but that could relatively easily be changed. But if compared to windows phone. Really? How?

> where people can't control their own devices

If installing a different operating system with the tools from the official SDK is not controlling my own devices, what is?

Again, the proprietary drivers is a bad situation, but compared to windows phone, what exactly do they more openly?

> and can't and don't code for them.

All the tools required to build apks are open source. The eclipse android plugin was open source and android studio is open source. Enabling installing your own apps directly is natively built in and can literally be enabled in seconds. If you "can't and don't code for" android even if you want, then there is really nobody but yourself to blame.

> More languages? I don't think so. How many languages can you use to write apps for your iPhone or Android device?

As others have said, you may want to use android's gui toolkit, but other than that native applications can rather easily be wrapped. As it is linux, you may even run command line programs in any language you can compile for arm or compile an interpreter for directly.

> Objective C and Java respectively and that's about it.

Have you actually heard about xamarin'c c# for mobile devices? python + kivy? ...?

> With Google not only do you not control your apps/device

Well, I can compile the operating system myself and remove any apps I don't like in the process. I could also remove them from the device because I have root rights. There is literally nothing but the proprietary drivers and firmware I don't control, but again, how exactly does that get better with windows phone?

> even your data isn't under your control any more.

I use the google apps for convenience but you can use your android device without them perfectly fine. Install f-droid. Install only open source apps. Try doing this with windows phone?

> Yes, Microsoft's business practices weren't so great, but I don't agree the new world is much better.

With android being open source you can see the benefits directly: Other systems like Blackberry OS (or whatever it is called) or Sailfish OS can (rather) easily implement android's runtime and run almost all android apps natively. Compare this with what wine has to do?

> As a developer it actually feels worse.

It feels worse not to have proprietary microsoft specific tools that lock you into the microsoft ecosystem forever?

I've use VisualStudio every day for the past years. And honestly there are a lot ideas they could borrow from other tools like Eclipse.

Some examples that I personally feel are ways that C# in VS is lackluster compared to Java in Eclipse.

No proper automatic build. While the stuff in Eclipse is a bit too aggressive sometimes it's really one of those really cool features to have.

Errors, warnings, other tools like StyleCop don't show errors inline with the code. I mean, really? I have to scroll through the error list and click?

It also doesn't really seem to understand the code it's processing. I'd expect that when I'm working on Silverlight with C# that the premiere tool from Microsoft should be able to handle things like refactoring properties in C# where it would update automatically in XAML.

And this is not even mentioning the complete trainwreck that is MSDN. Perhaps you can understand it once you really get into it, but I find it extremely confusing the way it mixes different frameworks with similar but subtly different functionality. (Eg a lot of things in Windows Phone are similar, but not identical, to features in .Net and trying to find the "chain of classes" that are relevant to your code is not nearly easy enough.)

Some of these things are probably things you can fix with extensions like Reshaper. But in the end you'll pay hundreds of dollars to compete with something that is free in Eclipse.

He was cheerleading here. Boosting the morale of Microsoft employees by talking about how awesome they are and how their lives will improve under his tutelage.