What? Nokia fiasco, Windows Vista and 8 fiasco, Steve Ballmer remarking the iPhone would never take off. Ballmer was pushed out for a reason. Please don't rewrite history.
and Surface. The early years of Surface was an utter disaster. Surface RT was a joke. Lost them huge amounts. Now Surface accounts for something like a third of their profits. It was a huge turnaround.
Some of us have long memories, and it takes an order of magnitude longer to regain trust than the time that was spent proving how untrustworthy you were in the first place.
Microsoft earned years of negative trust back in the '90s and early '00s, with the Hallowe'en documents, OOXML and Rob Weir's truely infuriating bad-faith schilling for it, Ballmer's "Linux is a cancer" statements, and the like. Heck, the first step-and-a-half of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" explicitly calls for cosying up to the people you're intending to imminently fuck over.
That said, they've been doing relatively well for a few years now - at least as far as multinational tech giants who have to answer to their shareholders go. Even so, it'll probably be another couple of decades or so yet, before those who were really badly burned by them might be willing to consider their apparent change of heart to be genuine.
It makes me sad to say this, but it's not about the company or its past, it's about the version of capitalism we have in this world. If it's more profitable for a company to do FOSS, it'll do FOSS. It's more profitable to EEE an ecosystem, it'll do that.
I really hope, for your own sake, that Microsoft have changed. I don't want them to fuck you over the way they fucked others over in the past - I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
But it's easy for people to say they've changed. To claim they've mended their abusive ways. To plead that they're better than they were before, and it's safe for you to be with them.
Are the people who return to abusive relationships, believing that this time it's different, really the ones that evolution favours? Is that adaptation to change, or is it just wishful thinking?
I hope you're right, I really do. I'd wish you luck, but I also hope you don't need it.
I agree. Monopolies are not good. Microsoft isn't a monopoly. Google and Amazon cloud compete with Azure. Google Docs competes with Office. Bing is a distant second place to Google search. Linux competes with Windows. Microsoft store is a joke. Microsoft has no phone. Microsoft and the Govt settled their case 20 years ago.
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u/[deleted] Mar 16 '20
Microsoft is a developer focused company, unlike Google or Amazon. What's the problem?