Not really. A company is not one monolithic entity with a single will. Far more plausible than "it was all a trick" is that for a time, people were in charge who really were trying to improve things, and now, those people have been replaced with others who are willing to burn it all down.
Before 2010 or so, “serious” internet developers wouldn’t touch Microsoft stuff — Microsoft was for office memos and poorly structured spreadsheets and that was it.
So yeah, Azure being a real option at the highest levels of internet-scale operations is a turnaround from where they were.
That’s not an accurate take. Microsoft has had a monopoly on the PC desktop OS. Anyone writing applications for users was targeting Windows and using Microsoft. To call most of these developers “not serious” is quite and overstatement. This includes all PC game developers, DAW, CAD, Adobe…?
Azure expanded the Microsoft franchise, and provides another prong to their whole integration story just like cloud AD services and online Office 365 provide another way to stay integrated into their ecosystem.
Yeah, they needed to work on their image somewhat, but their image never negatively impacted them
> Anyone writing applications for users was targeting Windows and using Microsoft.
Developers as users, sure. MSFT was common. Developers as responsible for infrastructure, MSFT anything was considered a huge risk and unreliable in the 90s.
Granted, my memory retains only a general narrative...I remember a shift by 2002ish when I started to see windows servers as perfectly fine machines for closet/under-the-table infra you didn't care too much about anyway. By 2004 they were moving out of the closet, so to speak. Then those machines became more important because more was being done with them and were considered "just as good" as any other OS. Developers that had experience, with their MSFT certs in hand, were cheaper too. It was a slow progression to eat into the corporate marketshare. By 2006 virtual machines were ubiquitous and you could run MSFT virtualized. Many companies do that by default today for workspace controls. I have never and would never choose to use MSFT products (including Azure) for business critical infra. MSFT acquiring Github was great for them, and the death of it for me. I'm probably an old outlier, but I 'member.
Right, those are all desktop applications. Microsoft has long owned that market.
I said “internet developers” meaning web sites, servers, apps, etc. Microsoft’s early offerings in that space, plus all the pain they inflicted with Internet Explorer, is what took years to overcome.
As an MS dev at the time: MS missed The Web and Mobile, thinking Office would be enough. Everything since is catchup.
On the one hand MS was a web pioneer — asynchronous web calls and ActiveX technologies that were surprisingly capable — but these were peripheral to their main goals.
Instead of MS extending their unified development platform outwards, something .Net promised to enable, effectively the opposite happened. .Net chased Java, but Java was being pushed out by Ruby on Rails. .Net web starts chasing RoR, but then Node is getting cool. .Net Web starts chasing Node and that effort splits .Net into uhhhhh ‘Framework’ uhhh ‘standard’ (ie Old-and-working), and .Net Core (what a container based web stack VM needs to look like).
The problem at that point, IMO/IME, is that Node is JavaScript, and those awesome server-side geniuses dump too-easy tooling while recreating every problem of every stack ever (ie LeftPad, loosely goosey versioning, and NPM being a crypto hackers wet dream). The .Net that started as Enterprise Server Stuff is now kinda sorta ‘Whatever’ about versioning, stability, roadmaps, and platform planning. Everything from DataAccess to GUI was churned needlessly for almost a decade, and everyone using that platform looks and feels like an a-hole because huge swaths of MS tech is abandonware resulting in perpetual rewrites of recent-term work and silos of competence.
No one can explain what framework to use to write a basic windows application anymore… Office uses React, and Windows does too… the fat cats who made MS into M$ knew better than that, the M$ who chased cloud growth and cut staff for stock price has never cared.
They went from demonizing open source software to buying GitHub, releasing their own open source software (including VSCode), and hosting Linux on Azure. Huge changes! But of course it ends up being another Embrace and Extend move by the masters of that tactic
Hackernews used to experience a collective paroxysm of joy every time a new Visual Studio Code dropped. There definitely was a pervasive belief that the Nadella era ushered in a cuddly new Microsoft.
I remember a time, way back, around 2010 maybe?, where Microsoft was referred to as "M$" in this place and generally perceived as an evil corporation o.O
Most likely more a difference of venue. I saw lots of that on Slashdot. Less of it on Digg or Reddit. Virtually none of it here, but it seems to be making a resurgence in the form of "Macroslop" and related epithets
Both things can be true. VSCode did help us get to the point where I can use it on Linux, MacOS, or Windows and have a lot interoperability. It's the typical cycle. All it takes is a couple people to get their hands on managing the code to turn anything into garbage.
This was later—into their We U+2764 Open Source era. M$ and stuff dates from like the mid-late 90s. In the late 2010s was when they started publicly acknowledging that open source exists, acquiring GitHub, and releasing things like .NET Core and Visual Studio Code, and a lot of people in the open source camp did a "pointing soyjaks" and forgot that the Halloween Documents existed and that EEEing open source was already in their playbook.
I think it's true though. They don't care about Windows anymore, that's plain as day. Most of their software is now cross-platform. Who cares about Windows if you are selling Azure instead and people can run Linux on that?
Not everyone bought it, but they campaigned hard...and now see it was all just a dog and pony show. The hold-outs were right...
Not really. A company is not one monolithic entity with a single will. Far more plausible than "it was all a trick" is that for a time, people were in charge who really were trying to improve things, and now, those people have been replaced with others who are willing to burn it all down.
Before 2010 or so, “serious” internet developers wouldn’t touch Microsoft stuff — Microsoft was for office memos and poorly structured spreadsheets and that was it.
So yeah, Azure being a real option at the highest levels of internet-scale operations is a turnaround from where they were.
That’s not an accurate take. Microsoft has had a monopoly on the PC desktop OS. Anyone writing applications for users was targeting Windows and using Microsoft. To call most of these developers “not serious” is quite and overstatement. This includes all PC game developers, DAW, CAD, Adobe…?
Azure expanded the Microsoft franchise, and provides another prong to their whole integration story just like cloud AD services and online Office 365 provide another way to stay integrated into their ecosystem.
Yeah, they needed to work on their image somewhat, but their image never negatively impacted them
> Anyone writing applications for users was targeting Windows and using Microsoft.
Developers as users, sure. MSFT was common. Developers as responsible for infrastructure, MSFT anything was considered a huge risk and unreliable in the 90s.
Granted, my memory retains only a general narrative...I remember a shift by 2002ish when I started to see windows servers as perfectly fine machines for closet/under-the-table infra you didn't care too much about anyway. By 2004 they were moving out of the closet, so to speak. Then those machines became more important because more was being done with them and were considered "just as good" as any other OS. Developers that had experience, with their MSFT certs in hand, were cheaper too. It was a slow progression to eat into the corporate marketshare. By 2006 virtual machines were ubiquitous and you could run MSFT virtualized. Many companies do that by default today for workspace controls. I have never and would never choose to use MSFT products (including Azure) for business critical infra. MSFT acquiring Github was great for them, and the death of it for me. I'm probably an old outlier, but I 'member.
> PC game developers, DAW, CAD, Adobe
Right, those are all desktop applications. Microsoft has long owned that market.
I said “internet developers” meaning web sites, servers, apps, etc. Microsoft’s early offerings in that space, plus all the pain they inflicted with Internet Explorer, is what took years to overcome.
As an MS dev at the time: MS missed The Web and Mobile, thinking Office would be enough. Everything since is catchup.
On the one hand MS was a web pioneer — asynchronous web calls and ActiveX technologies that were surprisingly capable — but these were peripheral to their main goals.
Instead of MS extending their unified development platform outwards, something .Net promised to enable, effectively the opposite happened. .Net chased Java, but Java was being pushed out by Ruby on Rails. .Net web starts chasing RoR, but then Node is getting cool. .Net Web starts chasing Node and that effort splits .Net into uhhhhh ‘Framework’ uhhh ‘standard’ (ie Old-and-working), and .Net Core (what a container based web stack VM needs to look like).
The problem at that point, IMO/IME, is that Node is JavaScript, and those awesome server-side geniuses dump too-easy tooling while recreating every problem of every stack ever (ie LeftPad, loosely goosey versioning, and NPM being a crypto hackers wet dream). The .Net that started as Enterprise Server Stuff is now kinda sorta ‘Whatever’ about versioning, stability, roadmaps, and platform planning. Everything from DataAccess to GUI was churned needlessly for almost a decade, and everyone using that platform looks and feels like an a-hole because huge swaths of MS tech is abandonware resulting in perpetual rewrites of recent-term work and silos of competence.
No one can explain what framework to use to write a basic windows application anymore… Office uses React, and Windows does too… the fat cats who made MS into M$ knew better than that, the M$ who chased cloud growth and cut staff for stock price has never cared.
They went from demonizing open source software to buying GitHub, releasing their own open source software (including VSCode), and hosting Linux on Azure. Huge changes! But of course it ends up being another Embrace and Extend move by the masters of that tactic
Hackernews used to experience a collective paroxysm of joy every time a new Visual Studio Code dropped. There definitely was a pervasive belief that the Nadella era ushered in a cuddly new Microsoft.
I remember a time, way back, around 2010 maybe?, where Microsoft was referred to as "M$" in this place and generally perceived as an evil corporation o.O
Most likely more a difference of venue. I saw lots of that on Slashdot. Less of it on Digg or Reddit. Virtually none of it here, but it seems to be making a resurgence in the form of "Macroslop" and related epithets
Lol, yep! That actually goes way back before 2010. It probably started in the early 90's, at least
Yup, and windows was generally called 'mustdie' back then.
Both things can be true. VSCode did help us get to the point where I can use it on Linux, MacOS, or Windows and have a lot interoperability. It's the typical cycle. All it takes is a couple people to get their hands on managing the code to turn anything into garbage.
This was later—into their We U+2764 Open Source era. M$ and stuff dates from like the mid-late 90s. In the late 2010s was when they started publicly acknowledging that open source exists, acquiring GitHub, and releasing things like .NET Core and Visual Studio Code, and a lot of people in the open source camp did a "pointing soyjaks" and forgot that the Halloween Documents existed and that EEEing open source was already in their playbook.
[dead]
Remember “Microsoft <3 Linux”
I tried my hardest to block that out of my memory. Everyone knew their fingers were crossed behind their backs.
I think it's true though. They don't care about Windows anymore, that's plain as day. Most of their software is now cross-platform. Who cares about Windows if you are selling Azure instead and people can run Linux on that?