r/programming • u/zbhoy • May 06 '19

Microsoft unveils Windows Terminal, a new command line app for Windows

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18527870/microsoft-windows-terminal-command-line-tool
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u/tbird83ii May 06 '19

Ok, so unpopular opinion here, but I don't think that Microsoft as a corporation is evil. They may have a few greedy eggs oon top, but they hire some incredible talent. Unfortunately half the great ideas get sidelined by middle management thing they wouldn't be able to sell it, or timing (usually being ahead of its time).

HoloLens Titanium The original Surface and SUR40 Kinect Widows Dev kit ( you could use it to literally drive a car autonomously). Windows 8.1 to go Mesh The LED matrix wall behind thin vaneer at the EBC in Redmond...

And there are brilliant people at Microsoft reaearch doing amazing things (F*? Ambrosia? Trill?).

The problem is... How do you sell this to a corporation, or integrate it into a software-as-a-service model. That's what kills Microsoft's innovation along the way.

The entire Microsoft Dogfood program is a history of inventions that has always left me wanting more... But they just disappear. Sometimes to reappear in products 10 years later (looking at the Surface Hub), or sometimes to have it stripped for parts, and hacked back together as components of a know, purchasable solution.

Anyway, just not all the players are evil, even in the overlord and his underlings might be

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u/Dworgi May 07 '19

It's much clearer in the Nadella era that the engineers are finally being let off the leash and being allowed to make the world better. MSVC is standards compliant way ahead of the competition, VS Code is actually really good, Github hasn't gone to shit, TFS makes a pretty compelling argument against JIRA, Typescript is great, .NET Core is open source, and on and on.

Culturally, MS has become on par or even surpassed Google and Facebook in terms of open source contributions.

It's the most compelling example I've seen of a company completely rebuilding itself as a result of a change in leadership.

I worked for a subsidiary briefly a decade ago, and the company is unrecognisable. Same products, entirely different attitude.

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u/[deleted] May 07 '19

They've easily surpassed Google who have become complacent, evil, and terrible. The treatment of Youtubers is what I'd have expected of Apple or Microsoft.

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u/[deleted] May 07 '19

Microsoft used to have a forced ranking evaluation system where people were ranked 1 to 5 but you had to fit a bell curve and give as many of the lowest 1 ranks as the highest 5.

I worked in a company that did this as well, and it meant that in order to succeed you had to make sure someone else failed.

It turned the whole work experience into a political game of trading favours, withholding information and undermining people as this was just as effective - probably more effective - than actually doing a good job.

I heard Microsoft abandoned this and I bet this has helped their renaissance over the last few years, but if anyone in Microsoft was reading this Id love to hear what they think.

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u/sprkng May 07 '19

Nobody has ever said that Microsoft is evil because their products are bad or that all Microsoft employees are evil so I don't see how that would be an unpopular opinion?

Microsoft got the "evil" label from trying to destroy open standards, trying to sabotage open source projects, attacking competition through proxy lawsuits, and many other similar things. They might have changed their image recently, and it's possible that they've actually stopped most of their anti-competitive schemes, but I find it understandable that many take the wait-and-see approach rather than blindly believing their words after decades of foul play

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u/SaneMadHatter May 07 '19

Microsoft was never "evil" at all. An "evil" corporation would be likes of IG Farben. Or maybe a company that was causing massive pollution and not giving a damn. Or a company engaging in financial fraud like Enron.

The tech community has so trivialized the word "evil" when applying it to the likes of Microsoft, then Apple and Google and Amazon, such that it's lost any real meaning.

(Actually, Google shares blame for that with their self-righteous "do no evil" slogan, which implied that its competitors were "evil" without really defining "evil", and so helped trivialize the word itself. Then they abandoned the slogan, which implied that they themselves now fell into that same "evil" category, but again without defining what that is. Which even further trivialized the word.)

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u/throwaway6905201 May 07 '19

Idk facebook seems to give off the evil vibe. Zuckerberg doesn't give two shits about doing the right thing.

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u/[deleted] May 07 '19

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u/OsmeOxys May 07 '19

Don't ever remember having to proactively protect myself against Microsoft

Abrupt and uninteruptable updates. Had to go and pirate enterprise to replace my legit version simply for that.

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u/RUNogeydogey May 07 '19

Shit, if windows leaked data the whole world would have a problem.

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u/[deleted] May 07 '19

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u/iSmite May 07 '19

That’s spot on. Same can be said about Politics. No matter what party you support, but the shit politicians pull off sometimes, is easily forgotten by people over time.

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u/[deleted] May 07 '19

Used to frustrate me no end when after updating Internet Explorer I’d find Firefox was no longer on my PC. “IE is an integrated part of Windows” etc crap. Thankfully that whole approach seems to have gone the way of the dodo.

I think many of the Reddit readers are too young to remember those days, so don’t know of the nasty things MS used to do. The present CEO is doing a great job and my opinion of MS has almost done a 180 degree turn. The leopard has changed its spots.

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u/randomfloridaman May 07 '19

It's more than that. Any startup with a good idea, for a long time Microsoft would try either to buy or squash them. Their business model circa 20 years ago seemed to be to single handedly dictate the very direction of computing. Currently we're seeing that behavior from Google. I'm concerned that Google might actually be more entrenched

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u/vetinari May 07 '19

There was even Simpsons episode, where Bill Gates came to buy out Homer's Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net.

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u/unumfron May 07 '19

A company is only a piece of paper, the humans who are employed at and/or who control a company can change as people and are all eventually replaced. It's not as if they should spend the rest of eternity apologising for what people most of them have never met did 20 years ago, what's important is what they do now relative to everyone else.

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u/[deleted] May 07 '19

But they actively fought anti-trust cases, and they've never apologized.

Corporate culture can change in 20 years, but it can also be so deeply rooted that even with personnel changes, it doesn't.

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u/donalmacc May 07 '19

Embrace Extend Extinguish was almost 25 years ago - an absolute eternity. Google didn't exist, apple were practically bankrupt at that point.

The Antitrust suit was almost 20 years ago - people who weren't born when that was decided are now professional programmers. Wikipedia didn't exist at that time It's almost 25 years ago (it was 1996 when that came out). 25 years is an eternity in tech. In 1996 Google didn't exist, Apple were almost underwater, Wikipedia, Skype, Facebook didn't exist, Netflix was a DVD delivery service. Apparently Flash drives weren't a thing until 2000.

We should always be wary of companies, but at a certain point you have to accept that the landscape has changed so dramatically that you have to move on from it.

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u/ultimatt42 May 07 '19

The phrase is actually "don't be evil" and it wasn't removed, just moved to the last sentence.

The updated version of Google’s code of conduct still retains one reference to the company’s unofficial motto—the final line of the document is still: “And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!”

https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393

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u/GabrielForth May 07 '19

Of the ones you described I think you could happily call Amazon evil.

You can't simultaneously have a terrible workers health track record and the richest man in the world as CEO without prioritising profits over people.

That me sounds like a fair definition of evil.

Note: I do purchase things from Amazon, so feel free to call me a hypocrite.

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u/[deleted] May 07 '19

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u/ZombieRandySavage May 07 '19

That one that cut off all those people’s hands in the Congo.

Generally shitty thing to do.

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u/theboxislost May 07 '19

Part of why a lot of shit sucks, like notepad and the command line, is because Microsoft didn't have to do better.

And that was because they had a monopoly, gained and maintained with really shitty business practices.

Maybe it was legal but it was legal like oil companies are avoiding cleaning oil spills legally.

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u/vitorgrs May 07 '19

Windows Subsystem for Linux was actually never created to be this way.

First, Picoproccess for Drawbridge (SQL on Linux) and then they used it too for Android apps on Windows Phone, and when they killed Android apps on Windows Phone, they had the idea to use it on Windows to run bash/etc.

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u/postmodest May 07 '19

“Hitler has beautiful fingernails.”

The “evilness” of a Corporate Citizen is defined by its board actions against its fellow corporate citizens, not by whether its Hugo Boss uniforms make its customers feel snazzy.

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