9 ms·

There is a large group of people on the internet who never let the Microsoft of the 90s go. How does every single one of their business decisions get linked to

by ctvo 11y ago

There is a large group of people on the internet who never let the Microsoft of the 90s go. How does every single one of their business decisions get linked to some nefarious goal? The author doesn't even know what it could be, BUT DON'T FORGET! This company tried to patent everything decades ago! Don't forget they're not bringing bash to Windows out of the goodness in their hearts!

ohnomrbill 11y ago
I like your approach sometimes. When dealing with people, I find it best to take positive changes in behavior at face value. I'm sure people could hang their past behavior over their head and treat them as though nothing has changed, but that seems sociopathic. Judging people more harshly based on past behavior is a pretty good way to keep yourself from harm, though. If it weren't unfair to others I would consider doing it. With companies, I have no need to weigh their positive behavior more heavily. No one's feelings are at risk of being hurt; no friendships are on the line. If a company burns me with bad practices, it's safe and prudent to hold their mistakes against them. It should take a very long time for companies to build back goodwill, once lost.
- bryanrasmussen 11y ago
  well the thing is - Microsoft isn't a person, it's a company - as a general rule it is reasonable to assume that companies don't do anything out of the goodness of their hearts, when you also have a good deal of bad behavior in the past ( and 20 years ago can be the recent past for a company) it might make sense to keep an increase sense of skepticism.
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    Twenty years ago isn't "recent history" for anything in the tech industry. People who were at Microsoft back when they were "really evil" in the 90s have since WORKED AT GOOGLE (or any number of other companies you might be a fan of), and even left Google, since then. Very few people who made decisions you may be holding over them today, actually work at Microsoft today. You can legitimately hold a decision against a person for a long time... they're still the same person, more than likely. But a company is an amalgamation of it's employees. And employees come and go.
    - sametmax 11y ago
      In companies, this is not as important as the general policy and vision of the group. The entity is an autonomous system greater than its parts.
    - bryanrasmussen 11y ago
      I'm not a fan of any company. But a company is an amalgamation of its employees, and employees when they come in absorb the company culture ( that's why everyone says the culture is important) and that's why you don't change the company culture unless a significant number of high level employees all leave at once. and my second point is - Steve Ballmer left in 2014.
  - ohnomrbill 11y ago
    That's exactly my point. With people, assume they can change for the better; with companies, judge them primarily by their bad actions.
mikegerwitz 11y ago
Here's an example: http://techrights.org/2016/03/10/charm-offensives-distract/ http://techrights.org/2016/03/10/charm-offensives-distract/
- Voloskaya 11y ago
  So, Microsoft signed two deals related to Android/Linux with two companies, the content of those deals are undisclosed. That's pretty much all the facts we have, and this article is trying to tell us that this is an unequivocal proof of MS racketeering the open source community, seriously? Did I miss something?
  - fit2rule 11y ago
    How you think you're buying Android, but you're actually still paying for bits of Windows. That's not fun for a lot of people.
  - toolz 11y ago
    Are you suggesting MS has legitimate claims to IP used in android? Patent trolling isn't something new to MS, so why would anyone reasonably assume MS isn't patent trolling in the absence of all the facts when we have plenty of information and historical data to make reasonable presumptions?
    - scholia 11y ago
      > Are you suggesting MS has legitimate claims to IP used in android? Are you suggesting that MS has no legitimate claims to IP used in android? It seems to me that companies wouldn't do thee deals if there was no case to answer. It's not as though (for example) Samsung was a stranger to court action, and it's a much bigger company than Microsoft. It's also a fact that Microsoft pioneered Unix on PCs in the early 1980s, and that Xenix was the most popular Unix of its day.... "Long before Linus Torvalds was able to write anything useful in C, there was a version of Unix from Microsoft called XENIX that was based on the seventh edition and BSD 4.1 with some interesting enhancements (multiple virtual consoles accessible via Alt-F1, Alt-F2,... Alt-F10 -- later inherited by Linux, record-locking facilities for database programming, etc) and an amazing level of PC friendliness that Linus will try emulate much later by essentially replicating all major design decisions that Microsoft put into XENIX for PC but using an independent codebase." http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/Finland_period/xenix_microsoft_shortlived_love_affair_with_unix.shtml http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/Finland_period/x...
gear54rus 11y ago
That abomination of a system called win10 came out just a few years ago, not in 90s. Is spying on everyone and constantly sending telemetry even when disabled (to the extent people actually wrote a tool to go to every corner and forcefully disable it and even then it didn't work) not nefarious? What are you even talking about here, they haven't changed a slightest bit. Maybe I want to have updates that cannot be disabled? No, I want my machine to do what I want, not what MS wants. Maybe I want to know that pic browsing app can't run without UAC (win8, looking at you)? I don't either, I just want to launch it. They are still pounding that close-minded philosophy just like before. Their reputation is well-deserved. I'm patiently awaiting another move in EEE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish) direction from them, this time with our last bastion - Linux.
- speeder 11y ago
  I came from the gamedev side of things. In there Microsoft now is perfectly still the 90s Microsoft. From my point of view, the Linux on Win10 is a strategic move to incentive people use Windows as their sole desktop (since with this move many people won't have any reason whatsoever to use Linux at all). I tried to convince lots of people on the Linux community that they need to react... of course, not blocking Microsoft (that would be silly, and unfree), but by fixing stuff that people wants fixed for years: Audio, driver support in general, ease of use, not having to edit text config files, and so on... But instead I got EXTREMELY negative reactions, some people even told me they are against AMDGPU driver efforts because it would make Linux more accessible to stupid people that will need help.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    What do you think of the Steam work on this? IMO they're doing it as a means of keeping their options open against the day when Microsoft decides not to allow a third-party app store on Windows and cuts off their air supply.
    - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
ascotan 11y ago
You forgot to use the $ in micro$oft. I'm waiting for the proprietary extensions to the bash shell that requires you to license your software because it was created with windows bash. MSVCRT.dll ftw
- e40 11y ago
  I know this is touch-in-cheek, but my understanding is the subsystems are completely separate and can't talk with each other, so that means no msvcrt.dll.
MoreTuple 11y ago
Parts of Microsoft haven't let the 90s go, why should we?
vhab 11y ago
There seems to be a lot of conspiracy theories going on, on what I personally believe to be a really straight forward and logical reaction. From my perspective, "Bash on Windows" is a reaction to the wide adoption of OSX for development (In particularly web development seemed to have a mass migration). For obligatory anecdote: I'm a longtime and loyal Windows user. Windows has been my primary development platform even though parts or all of our stack ran on some flavor of -nix. I've always encouraged my team to do the same, primary motivated by the better UX on Windows. But, like many in the past few years, I jumped the OSX bandwagon and moved the entire department over. This wasn't a fun transition, and came with many pains. But ultimately it was a necessary transition as the tools we needed just weren't supported on Windows. Development became more complex, tooling became mandatory at every stage of development and only OSX offered us a reasonable balance between a -nix-like environment that ran the tools with decent UX. Microsoft's move to bring Bash to Windows will likely motivate me to migrate back in due time. While some may be spinning conspiracy theories, I'm personally just really glad Microsoft is moving in this direction.
- larrik 11y ago
  You talk like developing on Linux means doing everything in the command line. *nix UX is nothing to be ashamed of, and I personally prefer it over Windows and OS X (especially OS X).
  - swsieber 11y ago
    Personally, the reason I like OS X over a random linux distribution is the sane keyboard shortcut defaults - CMD+C and CMD+V just work everywhere, as well as things like CMD+W. Well, almost everywhere. And CTRL+F is still a little wonky depending on the app you're in.
    - pessimizer 11y ago
      Where on Linux do Ctrl-c, v, and x not work? I haven't had a problem with them anywhere in a decade. I have largely stuck to Gnome2, MATE, and XFCE, though.
bad_user 11y ago
Last time I checked Microsoft was threatening Android phone makers with patents, many of those being related to Linux itself, collecting billions in patent royalties, being in essence a patents troll for the whole mobile industry. From where I'm standing, this seems no different than the Microsoft that funded the SCO lawsuit or that has spread FUD about Linux and open-source for years. So do tell me, how did Microsoft change?
- jefurii 11y ago
  Maybe part of this deal is MS agreeing not to patent-troll Canonical?
SEJeff 11y ago
And yet they still extort companies with their secret Android "patents". Perhaps people will treat them differently when they start acting like it. Nadella is getting there, but still has a lot of work ahead of him before hardcore Linux people (like myself) really trust the motives.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  There's almost nothing "secret" about how Microsoft handles patents (you know about it, so do I). What'd be really interesting is actually seeing what Google does with patents. While I've got no paper to prove it, Samsung changed directions in Google's favor massively when Samsung agreed to a long-term patent sharing agreement with them. (Previously, Samsung had been looking more and more like they were going to fork or leave Android entirely.) I suspect some patent hijinks happened there, and you and I just don't know the details. You want to talk about secret, ask Google for a copy of the secret contracts every Android OEM is bound to.
  - SEJeff 11y ago
    Ummmm the list of patents they assert Android violates are secret, hence the term "secret".
    - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
      The list of 310 patents Microsoft's asserted Android violates has been available for... almost two years now. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/chinese-govt-reveals-microsofts-secret-list-of-android-killer-patents/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/chinese-govt-reve... Hardly secret anymore. Meanwhile, the last copy of one of Google's secret contracts we have is five years old.
amelius 11y ago
> There is a large group of people on the internet who never let the Microsoft of the 90s go. Those people should have a look at research.microsoft.com, and compare their (public) research output to that of companies like Apple or even Google.
fucking_tragedy 11y ago
I am holding them to the same standard I would any other business. Very few play nice when there is a motive to milk customers for a larger profit each quarter. We've seen how "Don't be evil" worked out. They are a public traded company. They are beholden to shareholders not consumers, their customers or myself. It is profitable to entice users into your ecosystem and trap them there. Apple, Google and Microsoft all do it. I do have to ask, though: After being slighted for years, why should they be given an immediate pass because of very recent events that make nerds happy?
forkandwait 11y ago
When I first read your comment, I though you meant there is a large population who still think it is the Microsoft 90s when it comes to technology. Oh wait, I work for state government... (SQL Server is the BEST! Outlook is the BEST! Everything can be done in Excel! Visual Source Safe is the BEST! Oh wait, TFS with a SQL Server back end is the BEST! )
SunShiranui 11y ago
Mm? I don't see how one could think Microsoft has become any less nefarious than the past. Windows 10 is the prime example of this. If anything, I'm getting more worried.
jrcii 11y ago
Their recent overtures toward open source are heartening, and for me did start to overcome the reputation of the old Microsoft. I was disappointed that they squandered that good will with the Windows 10 telemetry debacle.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  Yeah, unfortunately I feel like in their rush to catch up to other modern tech companies, they picked up a few of other companies' bad habits. Insisting on constant telemetry feels like it's plucked from the Google playbook, and I really hope Microsoft changes their stance on it at some point.
toomanythings2 11y ago
Microsoft was also fined $2 billion dollars by the EU in 2004 for anti-trust violations so it's not just the 1990s. In addition, Microsoft was under US Federal oversight until 2011, but then had it extended another two years for failure to comply with the original court order. So let's not forget that.
- scholia 11y ago
  The EU fined Microsoft for bundling the Windows Media Player, and forced it provide a version of Windows without the Media Player. Nobody bought it, so apart from providing the EU with some cash, it was completely irrelevant. It was also characteristic of anti-trust suits in general. They are much less about whether you committed a crime, and more about whether what you did can be redefined as a crime many years later. The DoJ supervision was extended over the readability of Microsoft's enforced documentation of communications protocols, which it was ordered to rewrite. In her ruling, Kollar-Kotelly blamed Microsoft. "Although the technical documentation project is complex and novel, it is clear, at least to the Court, that Microsoft is culpable for this inexcusable delay," she wrote. But she also wrote that the company had been "overwhelmingly cooperative" in the years after the antitrust settlement, and that this latest extension should not be viewed as a sanction. http://www.pcworld.com/article/142004/article.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/142004/article.html
emehrkay 11y ago
Common theme: build an empire by whatever means necessary, "why you bringing up old shit?" when asked about it

by ctvo 11y ago

ohnomrbill 11y ago

I like your approach sometimes. When dealing with people, I find it best to take positive changes in behavior at face value. I'm sure people could hang their past behavior over their head and treat them as though nothing has changed, but that seems sociopathic. Judging people more harshly based on past behavior is a pretty good way to keep yourself from harm, though. If it weren't unfair to others I would consider doing it. With companies, I have no need to weigh their positive behavior more heavily. No one's feelings are at risk of being hurt; no friendships are on the line. If a company burns me with bad practices, it's safe and prudent to hold their mistakes against them. It should take a very long time for companies to build back goodwill, once lost.

bryanrasmussen 11y ago
well the thing is - Microsoft isn't a person, it's a company - as a general rule it is reasonable to assume that companies don't do anything out of the goodness of their hearts, when you also have a good deal of bad behavior in the past ( and 20 years ago can be the recent past for a company) it might make sense to keep an increase sense of skepticism.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  Twenty years ago isn't "recent history" for anything in the tech industry. People who were at Microsoft back when they were "really evil" in the 90s have since WORKED AT GOOGLE (or any number of other companies you might be a fan of), and even left Google, since then. Very few people who made decisions you may be holding over them today, actually work at Microsoft today. You can legitimately hold a decision against a person for a long time... they're still the same person, more than likely. But a company is an amalgamation of it's employees. And employees come and go.
  - sametmax 11y ago
    In companies, this is not as important as the general policy and vision of the group. The entity is an autonomous system greater than its parts.
  - bryanrasmussen 11y ago
    I'm not a fan of any company. But a company is an amalgamation of its employees, and employees when they come in absorb the company culture ( that's why everyone says the culture is important) and that's why you don't change the company culture unless a significant number of high level employees all leave at once. and my second point is - Steve Ballmer left in 2014.
- ohnomrbill 11y ago
  That's exactly my point. With people, assume they can change for the better; with companies, judge them primarily by their bad actions.

mikegerwitz 11y ago

Here's an example: http://techrights.org/2016/03/10/charm-offensives-distract/ http://techrights.org/2016/03/10/charm-offensives-distract/

Voloskaya 11y ago
So, Microsoft signed two deals related to Android/Linux with two companies, the content of those deals are undisclosed. That's pretty much all the facts we have, and this article is trying to tell us that this is an unequivocal proof of MS racketeering the open source community, seriously? Did I miss something?
- fit2rule 11y ago
  How you think you're buying Android, but you're actually still paying for bits of Windows. That's not fun for a lot of people.
- toolz 11y ago
  Are you suggesting MS has legitimate claims to IP used in android? Patent trolling isn't something new to MS, so why would anyone reasonably assume MS isn't patent trolling in the absence of all the facts when we have plenty of information and historical data to make reasonable presumptions?
  - scholia 11y ago
    > Are you suggesting MS has legitimate claims to IP used in android? Are you suggesting that MS has no legitimate claims to IP used in android? It seems to me that companies wouldn't do thee deals if there was no case to answer. It's not as though (for example) Samsung was a stranger to court action, and it's a much bigger company than Microsoft. It's also a fact that Microsoft pioneered Unix on PCs in the early 1980s, and that Xenix was the most popular Unix of its day.... "Long before Linus Torvalds was able to write anything useful in C, there was a version of Unix from Microsoft called XENIX that was based on the seventh edition and BSD 4.1 with some interesting enhancements (multiple virtual consoles accessible via Alt-F1, Alt-F2,... Alt-F10 -- later inherited by Linux, record-locking facilities for database programming, etc) and an amazing level of PC friendliness that Linus will try emulate much later by essentially replicating all major design decisions that Microsoft put into XENIX for PC but using an independent codebase." http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/Finland_period/xenix_microsoft_shortlived_love_affair_with_unix.shtml http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Torvalds/Finland_period/x...

gear54rus 11y ago

That abomination of a system called win10 came out just a few years ago, not in 90s. Is spying on everyone and constantly sending telemetry even when disabled (to the extent people actually wrote a tool to go to every corner and forcefully disable it and even then it didn't work) not nefarious? What are you even talking about here, they haven't changed a slightest bit. Maybe I want to have updates that cannot be disabled? No, I want my machine to do what I want, not what MS wants. Maybe I want to know that pic browsing app can't run without UAC (win8, looking at you)? I don't either, I just want to launch it. They are still pounding that close-minded philosophy just like before. Their reputation is well-deserved. I'm patiently awaiting another move in EEE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish) direction from them, this time with our last bastion - Linux.

speeder 11y ago
I came from the gamedev side of things. In there Microsoft now is perfectly still the 90s Microsoft. From my point of view, the Linux on Win10 is a strategic move to incentive people use Windows as their sole desktop (since with this move many people won't have any reason whatsoever to use Linux at all). I tried to convince lots of people on the Linux community that they need to react... of course, not blocking Microsoft (that would be silly, and unfree), but by fixing stuff that people wants fixed for years: Audio, driver support in general, ease of use, not having to edit text config files, and so on... But instead I got EXTREMELY negative reactions, some people even told me they are against AMDGPU driver efforts because it would make Linux more accessible to stupid people that will need help.
- pjc50 11y ago
  What do you think of the Steam work on this? IMO they're doing it as a means of keeping their options open against the day when Microsoft decides not to allow a third-party app store on Windows and cuts off their air supply.
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago

ascotan 11y ago

You forgot to use the $ in micro$oft. I'm waiting for the proprietary extensions to the bash shell that requires you to license your software because it was created with windows bash. MSVCRT.dll ftw

e40 11y ago
I know this is touch-in-cheek, but my understanding is the subsystems are completely separate and can't talk with each other, so that means no msvcrt.dll.

MoreTuple 11y ago

Parts of Microsoft haven't let the 90s go, why should we?

vhab 11y ago

There seems to be a lot of conspiracy theories going on, on what I personally believe to be a really straight forward and logical reaction. From my perspective, "Bash on Windows" is a reaction to the wide adoption of OSX for development (In particularly web development seemed to have a mass migration). For obligatory anecdote: I'm a longtime and loyal Windows user. Windows has been my primary development platform even though parts or all of our stack ran on some flavor of -nix. I've always encouraged my team to do the same, primary motivated by the better UX on Windows. But, like many in the past few years, I jumped the OSX bandwagon and moved the entire department over. This wasn't a fun transition, and came with many pains. But ultimately it was a necessary transition as the tools we needed just weren't supported on Windows. Development became more complex, tooling became mandatory at every stage of development and only OSX offered us a reasonable balance between a -nix-like environment that ran the tools with decent UX. Microsoft's move to bring Bash to Windows will likely motivate me to migrate back in due time. While some may be spinning conspiracy theories, I'm personally just really glad Microsoft is moving in this direction.

larrik 11y ago
You talk like developing on Linux means doing everything in the command line. *nix UX is nothing to be ashamed of, and I personally prefer it over Windows and OS X (especially OS X).
- swsieber 11y ago
  Personally, the reason I like OS X over a random linux distribution is the sane keyboard shortcut defaults - CMD+C and CMD+V just work everywhere, as well as things like CMD+W. Well, almost everywhere. And CTRL+F is still a little wonky depending on the app you're in.
  - pessimizer 11y ago
    Where on Linux do Ctrl-c, v, and x not work? I haven't had a problem with them anywhere in a decade. I have largely stuck to Gnome2, MATE, and XFCE, though.

bad_user 11y ago

Last time I checked Microsoft was threatening Android phone makers with patents, many of those being related to Linux itself, collecting billions in patent royalties, being in essence a patents troll for the whole mobile industry. From where I'm standing, this seems no different than the Microsoft that funded the SCO lawsuit or that has spread FUD about Linux and open-source for years. So do tell me, how did Microsoft change?

jefurii 11y ago
Maybe part of this deal is MS agreeing not to patent-troll Canonical?

SEJeff 11y ago

And yet they still extort companies with their secret Android "patents". Perhaps people will treat them differently when they start acting like it. Nadella is getting there, but still has a lot of work ahead of him before hardcore Linux people (like myself) really trust the motives.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
There's almost nothing "secret" about how Microsoft handles patents (you know about it, so do I). What'd be really interesting is actually seeing what Google does with patents. While I've got no paper to prove it, Samsung changed directions in Google's favor massively when Samsung agreed to a long-term patent sharing agreement with them. (Previously, Samsung had been looking more and more like they were going to fork or leave Android entirely.) I suspect some patent hijinks happened there, and you and I just don't know the details. You want to talk about secret, ask Google for a copy of the secret contracts every Android OEM is bound to.
- SEJeff 11y ago
  Ummmm the list of patents they assert Android violates are secret, hence the term "secret".
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    The list of 310 patents Microsoft's asserted Android violates has been available for... almost two years now. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/chinese-govt-reveals-microsofts-secret-list-of-android-killer-patents/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/chinese-govt-reve... Hardly secret anymore. Meanwhile, the last copy of one of Google's secret contracts we have is five years old.

amelius 11y ago

> There is a large group of people on the internet who never let the Microsoft of the 90s go. Those people should have a look at research.microsoft.com, and compare their (public) research output to that of companies like Apple or even Google.

fucking_tragedy 11y ago

I am holding them to the same standard I would any other business. Very few play nice when there is a motive to milk customers for a larger profit each quarter. We've seen how "Don't be evil" worked out. They are a public traded company. They are beholden to shareholders not consumers, their customers or myself. It is profitable to entice users into your ecosystem and trap them there. Apple, Google and Microsoft all do it. I do have to ask, though: After being slighted for years, why should they be given an immediate pass because of very recent events that make nerds happy?

forkandwait 11y ago

When I first read your comment, I though you meant there is a large population who still think it is the Microsoft 90s when it comes to technology. Oh wait, I work for state government... (SQL Server is the BEST! Outlook is the BEST! Everything can be done in Excel! Visual Source Safe is the BEST! Oh wait, TFS with a SQL Server back end is the BEST! )

SunShiranui 11y ago

Mm? I don't see how one could think Microsoft has become any less nefarious than the past. Windows 10 is the prime example of this. If anything, I'm getting more worried.

jrcii 11y ago

Their recent overtures toward open source are heartening, and for me did start to overcome the reputation of the old Microsoft. I was disappointed that they squandered that good will with the Windows 10 telemetry debacle.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
Yeah, unfortunately I feel like in their rush to catch up to other modern tech companies, they picked up a few of other companies' bad habits. Insisting on constant telemetry feels like it's plucked from the Google playbook, and I really hope Microsoft changes their stance on it at some point.

toomanythings2 11y ago

Microsoft was also fined $2 billion dollars by the EU in 2004 for anti-trust violations so it's not just the 1990s. In addition, Microsoft was under US Federal oversight until 2011, but then had it extended another two years for failure to comply with the original court order. So let's not forget that.

scholia 11y ago
The EU fined Microsoft for bundling the Windows Media Player, and forced it provide a version of Windows without the Media Player. Nobody bought it, so apart from providing the EU with some cash, it was completely irrelevant. It was also characteristic of anti-trust suits in general. They are much less about whether you committed a crime, and more about whether what you did can be redefined as a crime many years later. The DoJ supervision was extended over the readability of Microsoft's enforced documentation of communications protocols, which it was ordered to rewrite. In her ruling, Kollar-Kotelly blamed Microsoft. "Although the technical documentation project is complex and novel, it is clear, at least to the Court, that Microsoft is culpable for this inexcusable delay," she wrote. But she also wrote that the company had been "overwhelmingly cooperative" in the years after the antitrust settlement, and that this latest extension should not be viewed as a sanction. http://www.pcworld.com/article/142004/article.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/142004/article.html

emehrkay 11y ago

Common theme: build an empire by whatever means necessary, "why you bringing up old shit?" when asked about it