Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet it clearly violates our expectations of privacy. You don't think clicking a menu on a desktop app will send a report back to Microsoft HQ. There are many ways to improve software that do not involve analyzing unwitting users, like making it clearly opt-in.
If it were opt-in, I would absolutely opt-into it. I want the companies who make products I use/consume to succeed - that's why I never install ad-block. I watch tons of shows on YouTube and niche video sites, and I know the ads are what help these companies stay alive. While I know installing ad-block is still opt-out (not -in), it's still a choice of a click that I'm making. I want to support you, but I don't want…
Visual Studio Code is now open source
321–330 of 403 posts
Re: Visual Studio Code is now open source
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only losing market share and power has made Microsoft produce software with reasonable quality, flexibility, and interoperability. A lot of the credit for that goes to Apple's crazy climb in popularity. But at least some of it also goes to technologists involved in networking, the internet, and the web, many of whom decided never to deal with any Microsoft stuff ever again. If you knew the frustration of Microsoft's…
I remember it very differently. It's particularly interesting that you start with 1995, since that's the year of Bill Gates's "Tidal Wave" memo. A large chunk of MS suddenly devoted itself to getting Really Good At The Internet, and within a few months produced the best web browser on the market (IE 3, the first mainstream browser to implement CSS) and the best JVM (far faster than Sun's own at the time). IE continue…
The main problem with IE, regardless of how good it is, is that it is windows only. This was true of all of Microsoft's stuff (particularly crappy mac versions don't count) (I also wasn't a fan of Mac OS 9 ... but there was bsd and linux for a number of years by then...) They used their own formats, which were not publicly documented or even really designed. If you had to use any single Microsoft thing, you practically had to use it all. Samba and later OpenOffice changed the situation but were really a lot of reverse-engineering and bug-for-bug-compatibility work, and of course Microsoft kept moving the goalposts with new versions and new bugs.
The resentment comes from the lock-in. You had to pay a lot of money and deal with licenses (or pirate and deal with cracks) just to experiment. You had to deal with the surprisingly flaky file sharing and dhcp client etc. You had to deal with the fact that there wasn't a good terminal or shell, that the compiler was not trivial to download and install and invoke from a script, etc. If you have the freedom to choose the "convenience" of the Microsoft user-oriented products or not, it's not such a big deal that Microsoft everything sucked for networking related development. But if the lock-in gets you somehow, you really resent it.
EDIT: and I almost forgot! microsoft calling linux a "cancer", funding lawsuits over linux kernel code, trying to make it harder for linux to support ACPI based systems - more underhanded lock-in to their crap
Re: Visual Studio Code is now open source
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cross-platform aspect is very nice IMO. Being able to feel at home on all 3 major platforms is great!
That requires proprietary libraries your users can't install. MS, Apple and Android have no incentive to make your programs easily portable. They've gone to extreme lengths to make it hard.
Re: Visual Studio Code is now open source
#324Re: Visual Studio Code is now open source
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they keep it up with actions such as these, there's a good chance they'll stand to be rewarded for it. And -quickly enough- they'll go back to being the old MSFT we all knew and loathed from top to bottom, and these olive branches will vanish quicker than a pile of shaved ice on a summer day. For many of us, this isn't our first rodeo. :)
Why would they go back? That strategy seemed promising in the beginning but clearly it caused massive damage to their reputation and simply doesn't work in the long term.
Re: Visual Studio Code is now open source
#326Visual Studio Code does not yet support JSX, nor properly supports ES6, so it's currently unusable to modern Javascript devs. Which is a shame, because it has a lot of potential! I'll be watching this closely to see when it becomes usable in my workflow.
Re: Visual Studio Code is now open source
#327Re: Visual Studio Code is now open source
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would they go back? That strategy seemed promising in the beginning but clearly it caused massive damage to their reputation and simply doesn't work in the long term.
I think that strategy reaped them billions, and continues to do so (the Office franchise is still a money printing press).
It's abundantly clear that their slimeball strategies worked very well for them for at least twenty years. In the computing industry, twenty years is a very long time. :)
Re: Visual Studio Code is now open source
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember it very differently. It's particularly interesting that you start with 1995, since that's the year of Bill Gates's "Tidal Wave" memo. A large chunk of MS suddenly devoted itself to getting Really Good At The Internet, and within a few months produced the best web browser on the market (IE 3, the first mainstream browser to implement CSS) and the best JVM (far faster than Sun's own at the time). IE continue…
I'll admit I didn't really get started until 2000, and I'd also push the end-range to around 2009. And I did use the Mozilla Suite back then (pre Seamonkey naming). The main problem with IE, regardless of how good it is, is that it is windows only. This was true of all of Microsoft's stuff (particularly crappy mac versions don't count) (I also wasn't a fan of Mac OS 9 ... but there was bsd and linux for a number of y…
Re: Visual Studio Code is now open source
#330I usually use a minGW environment when I have to use a Windows box - which gives me GDB, GCC, ld etc. I've found it can be really frustrating to set up properly. I really miss Emacs. This sounds like it could be missing piece. How is its support for C/C++ ?