7 ms·

I'm an MSDN subscriber, write C# all day and am sitting in front of Win8.1, writing this in IE11 with a Lumia 640 next to me. They are still utter bastards and

• nileshtrivedi 11y ago
  Don't forget corruption of ISO over OOXML standards.
• harkyns_castle 11y ago
  Personally, I'll never forgive them for their practices. They deliberately stifled competition, shafted developers, abused their position, and rubbed it in our faces. There's no coming back from that, and I'll gladly educate newcomers to IT on their ways. Let them die. The new CEO could be the second coming, you can't fix that cancerous attitude that is entrenched. They deserve to become obsolete, at the very least.
  • debacle 11y ago
    Corporations are ships of Theseus.
  • blumkvist 11y ago
    >Let them die. I wouldn't hold my breath.
    • criddell 11y ago
      Microsoft isn't going to die, but their enormous influence has eroded nicely. They're a mature, profitable, mostly boring company and I'm okay with that. XBox is pretty hip, but the reset of the company is about as interesting to the general public as Oracle, Cisco, or IBM.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      • blumkvist 11y ago
        sigh
      • WorldWideWayne 11y ago
        Microsoft is as hip and alive as Google is. Google is a boring info-utility to most people. The Xbox is absolutely more cool than anything Google has in their pocket, including Android and self driving car experiments.
        • criddell 11y ago
          > Microsoft is as hip and alive as Google is. I would probably agree with that. From a technology point of view, there are things I love about each company. Microsoft's Azure is pretty neat as is Google's Compute Engine. None of that matters to most people though.
  • yread 11y ago
    > cancerous attitude seriously?
    • hga 11y ago
      Seriously. Microsoft has an unmatched record of screwing pretty much everyone who did business with them, and otherwise abusing their position in the market. Worse than IBM when IBM was in their position.
      • outworlder 11y ago
        Are you sure you didn't mean "Oracle"? As far as I know, Microsoft deals with their business partners fairly. They don't try to negotiate a deal directly with a big customer and bypass their partners, for instance.
        • hga 11y ago
          I'm talking more about "peers" than what I think you're referring to as "partners". E.g. 3Com as I cite elsewhere, Verizon WRT to the Kin, the company they licensed the start of Internet Explorer from (expected royalty payments never materialized when the gave it away for free), the examples go on and on and on. But I suppose with Balmer the salesman in charge in between Gates and Nadella they'd avoid sales channel betrayals like that.
          • ascagnel_ 11y ago
            With regards to the Kin, I think Verizon shafted MS on that one. The device was good for it's time (something with photos and music targeted at teens that didn't have a full web connection), but Verizon forced you to buy a full $30/mo web plan to use those features (this was back when the web options were $30/mo unlimited plans or no web connection at all). If there was a cheaper connection just for the Kin, it would've done reasonably well as a replacement for the Sidekick.
            • hga 11y ago
  • detaro 11y ago
    Sadly, if you use such rules there are not many big tech companies left that haven't done such things...
    • jinst8gmi 11y ago
      And continue to do such things... e.g. milking Android handset manufacturers using patents.
    • verbin217 11y ago
      I agree. The world needs more granular incentives.
    • sounds 11y ago
      False equivalence fallacy. You can wish Microsoft would die, and still use an iPhone. In fact, much of Apple's success can be attributed to Microsoft fumbling the mobile revolution. In other words, people who use Apple may be doing so directly because of how much worse Microsoft was -- due to Microsoft spending their limited resources on zero-sum tactics like shafting their developer ecosystem. Compete or die. (Microsoft seems to act like they have a third alternative, monopolize. They're still immensely profitable so it's understandable that their shareholders are comfortable with their current course.)
      • y4mi 11y ago
        sure, it just makes you an hypocrit.
        • sounds 11y ago
          I personally don't use any iThings. y4mi, do you have concrete examples of what Microsoft has done that has significantly improved end users' ability to run Free Software?
  • Infinitesimus 11y ago
    Out of curiosity, is it fair to assume you use hardware and software by a source you consider more ethical then? (your classification above rules out Apple and Google as well since they've both done less-than-stellar things )
    • harkyns_castle 11y ago
      I basically do my best yes, whilst having to earn a living in my chosen field. FreeBSD and Linux where I can advocate them. Part of my current contract is migrating a customer away from SQL Server to Postgres, and it feels good. Automating powershell on aws instances doesn't feel so good, but it's temporary pain.
      • WorldWideWayne 11y ago
        Do you speak badly of Apple and Google whenever possible though? Forget about tech corporations - do you speak out against other non-tech corporations as much as Microsoft or is your hatred especially reserved for them? What kind of computer hardware do you run? Typically, if someone hates Microsoft, they love either Apple or Google. That's been my experience at least.
    • baldfat 11y ago
      This is my ehtical chart Apple (Worst Offender but also helped Open Source at times) Microsoft M$ (Middle of the road with it always depending on who you spoke with at the company) Google (Most powerful of the three in terms of control over people's lives if they wanted it, but I seriously think they stumble ethically not on purpose. I believe they try to follow, "Don't be evil" as a whole)
      • _dominic 11y ago
        Google is way beyond "Don't be evil", just look at the google+ forced integration.
        • hga 11y ago
  • Spooks 11y ago
    A lot of the people that were there when practices were at their worse are no longer there. I don't think I would be able to use any form of technology if I was to hold a grudge for every large company that performed some sort of bad practice, with slave labor to privacy issues. Luckily people that perform these bad practices will eventually get ousted and replaced, that's when I proceed with caution.
  • SCHiM 11y ago
    I don't think that's a fair position to take, fair to yourself that is. The company then is not the same as it is now. Enough time has passed since then and now that it's safe to assume that all the people in important positions have been partly replaced, and I'm sure the majority of those who remain are now in different situations than they were back then. I think it's wrong to withhold fair consideration for MS products (specifically) just because they did something you think is wrong years ago.
  • ladzoppelin 11y ago
    But its attitudes like this that drive people toward Ms. Everybody can see that other companies are doing the exact same thing. For example there is actual proof of Apple conspiring to keeping developer's wages low.
  • anon4 11y ago
    You can't forgive a corporation. Corporations aren't people, they have no conscience, no morals and no ethics. The entire concept of forgiving them, or being angry at them or whatever doesn't make sense. It's like forgiving a lion for eating your brother and thinking it won't eat you. It's a lion. It will eat you when it gets hungry. That is its nature.
• traverseda 11y ago
  So why are you programming in microsoft culture?
  • togusa 11y ago
    Good question. Thanks to them, I paid mortgage off in under a decade. No other reason.
    • pmelendez 11y ago
      Are you an independent developer? or working in a software shop? I am curious about your experience because I am trying (or just starting) to do independent things and your feedback sounds like a nice story to hear.
      • togusa 11y ago
        I'm a contractor/independent currently contracted to a financial company and a telecoms company concurrently. I have about 18 years' experience in total and have been on the contract market for 12 years. The things that matter when you're starting to work independently (which I screwed up I will add) are building contacts and getting out of the agency system as soon as possible. Also I'm a bad accountant but YMMV if that interests you. If you can, don't work on their site; remote work is far nicer.
        • pmelendez 11y ago
          That sounds great! Thanks for sharing it :) > are building contacts and getting out of the agency system as soon as possible. I know, but how do you do that? Right now I am working for home and remotely collaborating with a friend in a product, but the VC path is also hard :(
          • togusa 11y ago
            I'd go for a few agency jobs for a 2-6 month stint, be nice to people and spend your time working with them not alongside them and gain some reputation. After a couple of positions, return work is usually possible. Then general staff turnover in tech companies will propagate your reputation as well. The first 2 years is the most difficult. I'm going to add this as well: never work hard. Work out how not to work hard. Life is about what you do when you're not working for me at least.
• pmelendez 11y ago
  That's fair, I am also like that. However, what you describe is the common practice of pretty much every north-american corporation. My motto is to be with an eye open not matter who is the actor
  • togusa 11y ago
    Couldn't agree more. I'm not saying Google or Apple for example are any better here. Even RedHat who I also deal with have their problems.
• pweissbrod 11y ago
  So I suppose google or apple is more appealing to your ethical tastes? At least the OP was willing to admit his distaste was based on a personal bias while you're trying to establish microsoft is somehow morally bankrupt in comparison to its competitors. Youre hating the players when you should be hating the game!
  • togusa 11y ago
    Perhaps ironically I responded to your question before you wrote it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10352361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10352361 I have no hatred for anyone. Just you need to intimately know who you pays your bills at the end of the day.
• novaleaf 11y ago
  I went all in on XNA, and got very, very burned. It taught me a great lesson though: don't be locked into any vendor. I'm very happy about the .NET and Typescript developments as of late, and use Typescript for my web coding. But only because if Microsoft abandons it right now, I can continue on in plain JavaScript.
  • DrShephard 11y ago
    Have you looked into MonoGame (http://www.monogame.net/ http://www.monogame.net/)? It is basically a fully open source re-implementation of the XNA framework with support for almost every major platform (iOS, Android, Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, OS X, Linux, etc.)
    • novaleaf 11y ago
      Yes, MonoGame is good, but at the time I was trying to salvage my XNA team+IP monogame was 2d only. (I think it can do 3d now?) we ended up moving to Unity but this technical roadblock plus some market related ones ultimately led me to abandon gamedev.
• exelius 11y ago
  All this is true; but Nadella has driven real change at the company that was long overdue. I had been a frequent critic of Ballmer's management of the company, and I like a lot of the things that Nadella has been doing. Ballmer had an attitude that Microsoft needed to dominate every industry they participated in or they would take their toys and go home. That mindset doesn't work in today's technology world, where markets overlap and shift rapidly. Nadella can't change the culture of the company overnight, but he has pushed through a bunch of great changes to their product strategy -- especially in the consumer space. I mean, Office 2016 finally has a consistent interface on OS X, Windows and Android/iOS. And Microsoft has an enterprise sales partnership with Apple! That would never have happened under Ballmer -- Microsoft is essentially letting Apple use its greatest asset (its partner sales channels) to push iPads so that Microsoft can sell Office and Exchange licenses. Nevermind that its channel partners were already selling their clients iPads anyway; Ballmer would have crammed Surface down the pipeline and wondered why sales numbers were sluggish. I think toward the end of his tenure, Ballmer started to see why the company was so dysfunctional: it was built for the cutthroat tech landscape of 1998, not the highly fractured-but-integrated market of 2015. His last major moves as CEO were to get rid of the most divisive senior executives to pave the way for a guy like Nadella who could be a peacemaker with the rest of the tech world. Ballmer tore down the silos about a year before putting Nadella in charge of rebuilding the company, which in hindsight was a great move. All this said, you're absolutely right about keeping one eye open: Nadella is pushing change from the top, but there are a lot of middle managers and junior executives who still do things the old way and will probably never change. You can't change the culture of a company overnight, and they will still continue to be evil in lots of small, subversive ways. If the market lets them get away with being shitty to their customers, they will do it.