3 ms·

Using their products, you can so easily taste how Microsoft is trying to become an "ecosystem", a "lifestyle brand", a "platform", and so on, and to use their O

Using their products, you can so easily taste how Microsoft is trying to become an "ecosystem", a "lifestyle brand", a "platform", and so on, and to use their OS as the relentless foot in the door for getting there. I think the irony of that statement is from Windows 3.1 and on Windows (25-ish years) was already THE defacto PC platform. I was a pretty big MS fanboy for a long time (and make my living with .NET and their developer tools). But MS's quixotic fetishization of their app store to me looks like dousing the legacy (no pun intended) of their platform with gasoline and lighting it on fire. Edit: format tweak

m_fayer 9y ago
They don't want to be just a PC platform anymore. They're looking at Apple's high-end lifestyle brand and trying to get in on some of that. I wish they'd be happy with the organic brand they're building around XBox and Minecraft and all that, but kids and education just don't have the same money or cachet as the upper middle class and up consumer. And I'm no fanboy but boy am I a fan of .NET. So far it seems like that part of MS is well defended from this grossness, I only hope that holds up. Excuse the rant.
- gcb0 9y ago
  they are going all wrong at that. people dont buy apple because of the walled garden or spyware or iphoto bugs that expose your pictures. they buy apple despite all that. if microsoft can produce better and more innovative hardware, which they already did with the surface line, they could have kept windows xp model of online isolation and not only got the people that want the flashy hardware but also the people that want to actively avoid the online tie-in. instead they are doing the worst they could. you cant even use oneNote with your surface pen, I kid you not, without login in to a live.com account! and minesweeper is a 100mb app that you have to download from the store, and it have in-app purchases.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    FWIW, the new Microsoft games are actively maintained with new content and features on a regular basis, whereas the classic Minesweeper/Solitaire EXEs (which you can easily copy onto a Windows 10 PC) weren't modified beyond bugfixes for somewhere around a decade and a half. Microsoft Jigsaw is perhaps my grandma's favorite thing ever, and the $20 yearly cost for premium (ad-free) is well-worth it to her.
    - blibble 9y ago
      > FWIW, the new Microsoft games are actively maintained with new content and features on a regular basis, whereas the classic Minesweeper/Solitaire EXEs (which you can easily copy onto a Windows 10 PC) weren't modified beyond bugfixes for somewhere around a decade and a half. it's not a good thing as they're using the opportunity to infest these programs with ads Solitaire on Windows now has ads, and don't get me started on the new calculator
      - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
        ...What do you have against the new calculator? I use it really heavily and am a fan. I have to do some stuff with hex, so I drop into some of the additional modes from time to time even. There's no ads in the new calculator for sure. Adding ads is definitely an irritation, but my point is, they are funding a supported, maintained product with Solitaire. It's more than just Solitaire now. It currently has five different games, not including features like daily challenges and the like. It gets updated reasonably regularly.
thomastjeffery 9y ago
Indented text in HN is monospace and respects newlines (no word wrapping). This makes it unreadable on mobile unless the lines are very short. The generally preferred way to quote on HN is to begin the line with a > and wrap the quote with * if desired. It's an issue that comes up too often that HN needs to fix, but here we are.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  The reason HN does indented text that way is for code. People on HN post code snippets as a fairly regular thing, and having code snippets word wrap (or eat white space) is really confusing. The problem isn't that HN does that with leading space. The problem is that people use leading space for quotations, which isn't what it's for.
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    The problem is that there is no markup for quotes, so people try to fill the void with an indent, which gives the most obvious difference to text.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

m_fayer 9y ago

They don't want to be just a PC platform anymore. They're looking at Apple's high-end lifestyle brand and trying to get in on some of that. I wish they'd be happy with the organic brand they're building around XBox and Minecraft and all that, but kids and education just don't have the same money or cachet as the upper middle class and up consumer. And I'm no fanboy but boy am I a fan of .NET. So far it seems like that part of MS is well defended from this grossness, I only hope that holds up. Excuse the rant.

gcb0 9y ago
they are going all wrong at that. people dont buy apple because of the walled garden or spyware or iphoto bugs that expose your pictures. they buy apple despite all that. if microsoft can produce better and more innovative hardware, which they already did with the surface line, they could have kept windows xp model of online isolation and not only got the people that want the flashy hardware but also the people that want to actively avoid the online tie-in. instead they are doing the worst they could. you cant even use oneNote with your surface pen, I kid you not, without login in to a live.com account! and minesweeper is a 100mb app that you have to download from the store, and it have in-app purchases.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  FWIW, the new Microsoft games are actively maintained with new content and features on a regular basis, whereas the classic Minesweeper/Solitaire EXEs (which you can easily copy onto a Windows 10 PC) weren't modified beyond bugfixes for somewhere around a decade and a half. Microsoft Jigsaw is perhaps my grandma's favorite thing ever, and the $20 yearly cost for premium (ad-free) is well-worth it to her.
  - blibble 9y ago
    > FWIW, the new Microsoft games are actively maintained with new content and features on a regular basis, whereas the classic Minesweeper/Solitaire EXEs (which you can easily copy onto a Windows 10 PC) weren't modified beyond bugfixes for somewhere around a decade and a half. it's not a good thing as they're using the opportunity to infest these programs with ads Solitaire on Windows now has ads, and don't get me started on the new calculator
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      ...What do you have against the new calculator? I use it really heavily and am a fan. I have to do some stuff with hex, so I drop into some of the additional modes from time to time even. There's no ads in the new calculator for sure. Adding ads is definitely an irritation, but my point is, they are funding a supported, maintained product with Solitaire. It's more than just Solitaire now. It currently has five different games, not including features like daily challenges and the like. It gets updated reasonably regularly.

thomastjeffery 9y ago

Indented text in HN is monospace and respects newlines (no word wrapping). This makes it unreadable on mobile unless the lines are very short. The generally preferred way to quote on HN is to begin the line with a > and wrap the quote with * if desired. It's an issue that comes up too often that HN needs to fix, but here we are.

AnimalMuppet 9y ago
The reason HN does indented text that way is for code. People on HN post code snippets as a fairly regular thing, and having code snippets word wrap (or eat white space) is really confusing. The problem isn't that HN does that with leading space. The problem is that people use leading space for quotations, which isn't what it's for.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  The problem is that there is no markup for quotes, so people try to fill the void with an indent, which gives the most obvious difference to text.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]