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People keep mentioning how "Microsoft changed" due to VS Code, the Linux subsystem, .NET Core. I say that they are the same company, only with different cash c

People keep mentioning how "Microsoft changed" due to VS Code, the Linux subsystem, .NET Core. I say that they are the same company, only with different cash cows. Haven't they spied on Windows 10 users? Do they not engage in patents racketeering? Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype? "But Mom, some of the other companies are doing it too", well yeah, but some of us don't have double standards, in spite of what you'd think and that doesn't absolve them of anything ;-) Brilliant marketing campaign though. They needed it I guess, but it's getting obnoxious. --- That said I'm glad that after the acquisition GitHub will be led by Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Xamarin, which has some credibility. At least the news isn't all bad.

Iv 8y ago
Exactly. Microsoft ethos is still despicable.
pjmlp 8y ago
Nokia is pretty much alive. As for what Elop did, in case you missed the news, he only did what the Nokia board themselves asked him to do, and even gave him a bonus for achieving it.
- neves 8y ago
  What's is Nokia up to? I'd love to know they are doing interesting things.
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    Well, they just split up their Health division back into Withings. https://health.nokia.com/event/nokia-withings https://health.nokia.com/event/nokia-withings I only know that because I have one of their awesome scales (https://health.nokia.com/gr/en/scales https://health.nokia.com/gr/en/scales). I was shocked they were Nokia when I found out about them. They're absolutely awesome, highly recommend them.
  - coldacid 8y ago
    Networking hardware, mostly, especially cellular and POTS switching stuff.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    With the money from Microsoft's deal, they bought Siemens part from NSN, merging it back into Nokia. They got back many of the former mobile division employees via the partnership with HMD, currently having one of the best deals in Android devices. Ah and Bell Labs now belongs to Nokia.
- bitmapbrother 8y ago
  >As for what Elop did, in case you missed the news, he only did what the Nokia board themselves asked him to do Did that include having secret negotiations with Steve Ballmer that the board was unaware of? For a true accounting of what really happened you can find it all in Operation Elop. https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52c5 https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52...
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Thanks for the link, If the board hadn't had such bonus (24. The bonus brouhaha boils over) as Helsingin Sanomat discovered, the outcome would be much different. https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52c5 https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52... As someone that used to know the Espoo HQ from inside, Microsoft is not the one I blame.
Brakenshire 8y ago
> the same company, only with different cash cows. I think having different cash cows does change a company. If it's in their interest to be a good steward of VSCode, Typescript, Github etc then they're more likely to do it. I think consolidation is actually as much of an issue as which company it is, the more consolidated, arguably the less direct incentive for intercompatibility and open standards. That's more of an issue here because GitHub is not open-source, so unlike the other examples the developer base has nothing to fall back on. On privacy, that's never stopped anyone from using Angular or Kubernetes because of Google, or React because of Facebook, unfortunately behaviour towards developers seems to be judged separately from behaviour towards users.
- gingerlime 8y ago
  > On privacy, that's never stopped anyone from using Angular or Kubernetes because of Google, or React because of Facebook, unfortunately behaviour towards developers seems to be judged separately from behaviour towards users. That's not the same though. I host my (company private) code on Github. I can use React or Kubernetes without giving any access to Google or Facebook to my code.
johnnyfaehell 8y ago
Killed Nokia? Nokia is still alive. But it's not like it was doing well before Microsoft bought them.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
distances 8y ago
> Haven't they spied on Windows 10 users? Do they not engage in patents racketeering? Have they not killed Nokia or ruined Skype? I don't think one can say they killed Nokia. Nokia's phone business was basically doomed after Android gained traction, and Microsoft just helped the company to pivot by overpaying for that part of the business, while leaving Nokia with everything that actually was making money.
- SSLy 8y ago
  Nokia engineers wanted to move to Android, but the M̶S̶ ̶M̶o̶l̶e̶ then current CEO made a prikaz to go with Windows Phone.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    > prikaz diktat just for those wondering
  - distances 8y ago
    I think this was a better outcome for Nokia. They didn't make their own components like Samsung does, so they'd probably now be in a position similar to HTC and Sony. They would have faced years of painful, expensive downsizing instead of a (retrospectively) good payout that assumed the liabilities too.
  - Const-me 8y ago
    > Nokia engineers wanted to move to Android I don’t believe the engineers spent thousands man-years developing in-house Symbian, then significant time working on (mostly) in-house Maemo, then some day they said “screw that, let’s throw away everything we’ve developed and move to Android”.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - distances 8y ago
      Nokia had and released their own version of Android [0] which probably sped up the negotiations with Microsoft. Likely done by a completely different team vs. the Symbian people, though somone else probably knows more of those details. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X_platform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X_platform
Ntrails 8y ago
> Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype? They killed msn, skype was always a turd. Nokia was dead well before Microsoft got involved.
- gurkendoktor 8y ago
  I've worked in several offices around 2013 where people happily used Skype like IRC: everyone was in a list of ~10 channels and occasionally sent private messages to coworkers. Instead of building on this, Microsoft kept pushing its unpopular business chat app (Lync) and made sure that Skype was only useful for consumers (obnoxious birthday notifications, the "snapchat redesign" etc.) Skype could have beat Slack to the punch. Instead Microsoft lost both the business and the consumer market.
avinassh 8y ago
Microsoft hasn't changed at all. Here is one recent incident I read: https://twitter.com/jamiebuilds/status/1002696910266773505 https://twitter.com/jamiebuilds/status/1002696910266773505
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- andrew_ 8y ago
  No one should take that account as a credible source. Notorious for pot-stirring.
- stordoff 8y ago
  What exactly is Microsoft alleged to have done wrong here? It starts by saying "stole my code", but then discusses an MIT licensed piece of code. Furthermore, I'd see Microsoft's reply: > I'm not aware of any deliberate copying of the Lerna code, but let me dig into it now and call all the devs on the team to be sure. If there is, we should definitely give correct attribution, so I want to investigate. [...] I checked with the devs, and nobody's aware of any code coming from Lerna. If we inadvertently used something without credit, I really would like to know so that I can fix it. https://github.com/Microsoft/web-build-tools/issues/673 https://github.com/Microsoft/web-build-tools/issues/673
  - pritambaral 8y ago
    > It starts by saying "stole my code", but then discusses an MIT licensed piece of code Unrelated to the rest of the discussion, I just want to clarify that MIT License != 'Do Whatever You Want' License. MIT requires attribution and maintaining the copyright license on existing code. Yes, if you don't adhere to the license's terms when copying code, it is stealing.
    - stordoff 8y ago
      I know, which is why I wanted to clarify precisely what Microsoft is being accused of (I may have worded it poorly). The tone I was getting from OP (the Twitter discussion) was that the code taken was something Microsoft did not have any right to use in the way they did, not something that could be solved by attribution. "stole my code" may be strictly accurate (as if you don't follow the licence, you don't have a licence to use), but I feel like it doesn't clearly communicate the problem, especially with comments such as "If they are going to steal code without crediting the original author" which, to me, initially read as saying it's still stealing even if it was credited. To be clear, I'm not saying using MIT-licensed code without attribution is acceptable, but I feel that there is a qualitative difference between this and using code you couldn't use under any circumstances, or silently incorporating MIT code in a commercial product.
mkirklions 8y ago
Yep, I really dont understand why there are Microsoft fans. Like I understand if you bought an Xbox, but I dont understand if you are a programmer. Microsoft has always been a headache. Recently its been a tiny bit better, but they still are a for-profit company that needs to continue to make a profit. This was to make Microsoft money, nothing to 'help programmers'.
- evfanknitram 8y ago
  Because their developer tools are pretty good and finding jobs as a .NET developer is pretty easy?
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    That doesn't make them an ethical company. Oracle makes a pretty good database. Google makes a good search engine. All of those companies have serious ethical issues and I would not want any of them as the steward of the largest body of open source code on the planet. A federated or independent solution is the only way to go for infrastructure like this.
    - evfanknitram 8y ago
      I think you replied to the wrong thread? I replied to a poster who didn't understand why some people were fans of Microsoft.
  - pas 8y ago
    It's pretty easy for non .NET jobs too. Their developer tools are pretty good for their own platform (but JetBrains actually makes great cross platform tools, some of them are proper free and open source, VSCode is playing catch up). Their C++ stdlib implementation was sucking balls for decades. Their (the dev tools') scriptability was horrible. PowerShell is nice, but it came too late, and it was too server focused. C# is okay, MS has great teams and people, but they are still very much run by the bean counters.
    - 8y ago
jjuel 8y ago
Nokia was struggling long before Microsoft came along though. They saved it for a little bit, but there isn't much you can do with a company that got so far behind it's competitors. Samsung, HTC, Apple, Motorola, etc were all light years ahead of Nokia even before Microsoft got involved. Funny that the things you mention all happened under Steve Ballmer too...
- distances 8y ago
  Ahead in what sense? Apart from Apple and Google, everyone was behind. The fact that HTC and Motorola adopted Android didn't do much good for them in the end, and in hardware and market share Nokia still had the lead at that time.
  - kamaal 8y ago
    >>Ahead in what sense? Refusing to move on to Android? There was no real chance Symbian had in the post iPhone world. Nokia forgot its USP, which was basically durable rugged hardware. Instead they tried to compete with the iPhone in the software department, it didn't work out too well. Motorola is doing quite good with Android.
    - distances 8y ago
      > Nokia forgot its USP, which was basically durable rugged hardware. Instead they tried to compete with the iPhone in the software department, it didn't work out too well. You misremember things quite badly. Nokia was the clear leader in all phone segments, smartphones included. At the peak they sold just over 50% of all smartphones in the world. Of course they would try to hold on to that. They were better in software than their hardware competitors (Ericsson/RIM/etc), but of course that didn't amount to much when the field was upended by Google and Apple. > Motorola is doing quite good with Android. Motorola is now a Lenovo brand.
AsyncAwait 8y ago
Their license for the .NET Core debugger makes it so that only they can use it, JetBrains and others cannot, see [1], they haven't changed at all. 1 - https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2017/02/15/rider-eap-17-nuget-unit-testing-build-debugging https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2017/02/15/rider-eap-17-nu...
- Dayshine 8y ago
  My understanding is that the debugger is an adapted version of the closed source Visual Studio debugger. Visual Studio isn't open source, and is a paid for product. It takes time to break things out from inside a larger closed source project...
  - dmarlow 8y ago
    Some editions are, I suppose. For many things VS Community is free though.
    - slrz 8y ago
      I don't think any editions of Visual Studio are available as Open Source software. The Community thingie is gratis but doesn't come with source code. There's VSCode (is that OSS?) but that's not an edition of VS but rather a whole different product.
      - sulam 8y ago
        VSCode is absolutely OSS.
- efdee 8y ago
  Why would Microsoft give away their crown jewels to a competing IDE? They spent ages perfecting their debugger. It's not like JetBrains can't build their own debugger based on the ICorDebug interface (which is what Microsoft's implementation is also based on).
  - 8y ago
GuB-42 8y ago
Proprietary software used to be Microsoft's cash cow. That it is turning to different cash cows is actually a good thing for open source. Companies have to make money, and originally, Microsoft made money just by selling proprietary software licenses. In these conditions, open source is their enemy, and they have to fight it. Now they do a bit of spying, a bit of cloud, a bit of hardware, etc... which mean they can cut open source some slack and focus on other evils.
swebs 8y ago
And they're still pulling the same old tricks of vendor lock-in with DirectX. Microsoft's PR team likes to pretend they've changed since they gave a few concessions, but the reality is that they made those decisions solely because they were losing competitiveness. .Net core was because everybody was jumping ship to Linux due to the Kubernetes bandwagon. VS code was because the "Electron text editor" market was already filled with cross platform competitors.
mbesto 8y ago
> acquisition GitHub will be led by Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Xamarin, which has some credibility Credibility of what? He's a Microsoft employee, being paid by Microsoft, and has made a ton of money by selling his company to Microsoft. Follow the money and you'll find nothing but allegiance to Microsoft and it's corporate goals. For the record - I don't think MS is as nefarious as people here are insinuating, I'm just pointing out facts that people seem to overlook.
- nojvek 8y ago
  Funny story about him. He wanted to get a Job at Microsoft and wasn’t hired because he didn’t have the qualifications. Then he built Xamarin and made it a great C# open source tool to build apps. M$ really loved it and bought the company. Now he’s leading GitHub. That’s awesome. Microsoft does have a dark history, it’s also a huge company and Terry Meyerson (windows lead) was an aweful leader. Things definitely changed. Satya knows that they need the developer mindshare, and that means to go where the developers are. I hate windows as much as anyone, but a lot of their products are top notch. God I love vscode and Typescript. Just only use their OS products and you’ll be happy.
  - oaiey 8y ago
    The job part is not the story of Nat Friedman but Migual de Icaza.
    - markand 8y ago
      Not sure about the job part being about Miguel, but it's certainly not true about Nat. Nat interned at Microsoft in 97 and I was his manager. He did a great job and was well liked. I don't think he ever applied for a full time position after graduating as I would have heard about it. I think it's just that he wanted to do something Open Source based, rather than what Microsoft was doing at the time.
      - oaiey 8y ago
        Thanks for the insights! Miguel had Visa issues if I remember it right and could not get a job because of this.
shubhamjain 8y ago
Why not let things play out a little before predicting chaos? Github doesn't have the vendor lock-in that other companies have. It starts to go downhill? Just push your repo to another Git host. Yes, you'll need to figure out how to port some of your workflows, but it won't be an insurmountable pain.
- lordfoom 8y ago
  >Why not let things play out a little before predicting chaos? History.
  - drewmate 8y ago
    GP gave you a very good reason why this is different than historical Microsoft EEE[0]: > Github doesn't have the vendor lock-in that other companies have There's not much about Github that can't be easily replaced; it uses git at its core. Comments, issues, and wikis are convenient, but relatively simple to implement. The main value in Github is the de facto community status it has, which it earned by being an open community and good steward of open source projects. The worst MS could do here is shoot themselves in the foot and ruin that value (which they just purchased for 7.5B) by driving developers to other platforms (who will make it all too easy to switch). I think the M&A teams at MS must have seen this possiblity and have a different plan in mind for Github. Think dead simple (one-click) Azure deployments and integrations. And if you want (or need) that functionality for a different cloud provider, you'll just have to build it yourself on a different site. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
    - sixothree 8y ago
      It's not like anything about github is open source. Maybe that will change.
      - wooter 8y ago
        well, there was the atom editor. which now i fully expect msft to kill in favor of vs code. damn it.
sam0x17 8y ago
It isn't a good marketing campaign. This is just going to scare a ton of projects off of GitHub. I also imagine a ton of private companies (e.g. Google, Apple) are going to be moving their repos elsewhere if they are already hosted on GitHub for fear of Microsoft looking at their private code, which they WILL do.
- sabujp 8y ago
  companies that get acquired are probably required to move their private repos off of github. open source projects in the process of open sourcing or using a private repo as a staging area for the open source code are ok
StreamBright 8y ago
I am much more unhappy about the quality of their operating system. They had decades to turn it into a user friendly simple system like macos is, and failed every single time. It is outrageous that I have to delete half of the operating system to get something barely useable and the first thing when you run windows update is to put back the games and other crapware that I do not need on my devices. Is there any hope that Windows UX gets once something good or should I just give up hoping?
- wilsonnb 8y ago
  > It is outrageous that I have to delete half of the operating system to get something barely useable Seriously? Windows 10 is a perfectly usable OS out of the box. I can open up the included web browser and go to whatever website I want. I can install Office, Visual Studio, a Linux subsystem, VLC, a VNC client, VirtualBox, Chrome, Firefox, and every other piece of software I need without any hassle. Yes, there is something called "Bubble Witch 3 Saga" in my start menu that I did not install. I understand why people are upset about things like that even if I don't care. Windows 10 has plenty of flaws that are worth pointing out, but using ridiculous hyperbole doesn't add to the conversation in a productive way.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    > Windows 10 is a perfectly usable OS out of the box. There's a large gap between 'usable' and 'good'. They destroyed the consistency of their interface (combined desktop/mobile anyone), and added a lot of cruft that literally nobody who's used Win 7 needs.
    - wilsonnb 8y ago
      Yes there is. I have no problem with people saying Windows 10 isn't good, even if I personally think it's good. The "goodness" of an operating system is pretty subjective. I do have a problem with people calling it barely usable, which is a much more objective (and incorrect) statement.
    - hinkley 8y ago
shmerl 8y ago
MS claimed APIs are copyrightable. MS strongly pushes lock-in in markets where they have strong presence. It shows they haven't changed enough to trust them with anything.
- Someone1234 8y ago
  > MS claimed APIs are copyrightable. When was that? Oracle famously has, but I haven't read Microsoft's version of the same.
  - shmerl 8y ago
    At the same time as Oracle. See https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-teaming-up-with-oracle-against-google-in-java-case/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-teaming-up-with-orac... So MS contributed to the abysmal court decision.
fsloth 8y ago
"Haven't they killed Nokia" No, Microsoft did an incredible service to all Nokia shareholders by buying the sorry handset business which had already failed in the market at that point. You can blame Microsoft for not resurrecting a dead carcass but that's another thing entirely. Nokia is doing quite fine manufacturing telecoms infrastructure.
manigandham 8y ago
These are giant companies with 1000s of employees and more politics than small countries... it doesn’t work to just generalize it all together. The developer side of Microsoft has definitely changed for the better over the last several years. And even if github fails, so what? It’s the most easily replaceable part of the stack.
- bad_user 8y ago
  You haven’t been using GitHub for open source then. The best part of GitHub is the social part and that’s not currently replaceable. Also good luck migrating issues and their history of comments and PRs.
  - jupp0r 8y ago
    There is precedent for these transitions working out fine (Sourceforge, Google Code)
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Issues and comments can already be migrated, github has a simple API and all the other services have import tools. It's not hard. The social part is not that big of a deal, its just because everybody happens to already have a login. Other than that, what's the big social hook? You can have the same exact discussions on the other source code sites, all of which have more features too.
pc86 8y ago
It's a nitpick, but they didn't ruin Skype, they branded Lync (which is a mountain of hot garbage) as Skype.
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  Not mutually exclusive.
madeofpalk 8y ago
> Haven't they killed Nokia To be fair, Nokia was already dead when Microsoft bought them. MS just pulled the plug.
pvg 8y ago
Haven't they spied on Windows 10 users? Do they not engage in patents racketeering? Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype? This is small compared potatoes to the sort of thing Microsoft used to pull before. Microsoft spent years in the courts and narrowly avoided some very drastic government intervention and regulation on both sides of the Atlantic. That doesn't happen because someone might not like the new Skype UI or really misses flip phones.
youdontknowtho 8y ago
Why should I care that they "killed" Nokia. (It still sells products, by the way.) Nokia, isn't a person. It's another corporation. Patents racketeering...this is literally only going to be fixed with legislation. I'm all for it. There is no such thing as a corporation that won't chase every dollar that it can. That's what they do. Want to stop patent BS? Remove the incentives through legislation.
test6554 8y ago
Some people get offended when for-profit companies turn out to be not neighborly or friendly or human beings. I like to look at it from the perspective that they are a for-profit public company and are legally required to maximize shareholder value, and they have every right to do so. Therefore, any plans I make regarding GitHub will not rely on them being friendly and kind-spirited in any way. If they turn out to be great, I'll just be pleasantly surprised.
- LukaD 8y ago
  If that works out good for you, great. I know that GitHub has every right to do what they think is necessary to maximize shareholder value. But I don't have to agree with their decisions. I don't trust Microsoft for pretty much exactly the reasons the parent listed.
dangerboysteve 8y ago
Large Public companies don't change overnight for risk of shareholder revolt. As a Microsoft skeptic, I'll give them the opportunity to change.
- hinkley 8y ago
  That’s fine, at first blush at least, as long as they stay out of my way. But their MO is to buy up companies people like or love and run them into the ground, then replace them with a Me Too product that is just enough different that getting out is challenging. To the rest of us that’s indistinguishable from destroying the competition and reducing options. And here they are buying a company people like, having recently killed off others. This tiger has the same stripes. When it eats your remaining arm, try to remember people told you so.
Delmania 8y ago
> Haven't they spied on Windows 10 users? How is it spying when they present you with a full screen detailing data collection with the option to turn it off, and have several blog posts providing details. > Do they not engage in patents racketeering? It's not much of an excuse, but all tech companies do this. > Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype? Didn't they give Windows Mobile one hell of a run? Like they tried for a decade and finally admitted defeat? And Skype, I don't know. I use it in a daily basis. It doesn't seem to be that bad.
- zodPod 8y ago
  I'm really not sure here but I was under the impression that they had started doing the full screen detailing data collection thing after they had gotten caught doing it without it?
  - Someone1234 8y ago
    They made it clearer and easier to review and change, but data collection was always toggle-able in Windows 10. A lot of people just hit "Express Setup" and then were surprised when the defaults were full collection. The Privacy Panel in the new Settings applet for example has always existed.
    - gmueckl 8y ago
      It was not toggle-able. You could only opt out of an ill-defined subset of an ill defined set of collected data, including, but not limited to all user inputs performed on that system. You would know as much if you had read the material published by MS on this. Only with the recent update do they offer a tool with which to inspect at least part of the actual data sent to MS. There is however no proof that the data shown in that tool is complete (even though I believe that they truely intend to show everything - despite their traditionally pushy methods, they are not Facebook).
- lawnchair_larry 8y ago
  You actually can’t turn it off, and they still refuse to publish the complete list of what is collected. You need an enterprise version to disable as much as they will let you, and even then, they still force quite a bit of collection.
tw04 8y ago
>Haven't they spied on Windows 10 users? Literally every for-profit desktop OS vendor has "spied on users" by the definition you're trying to use. Including OSX and Ubuntu. >Do they not engage in patents racketeering? So Google boxes Microsoft out of the phone market by refusing to support any of their services on Windows Phone. And Microsoft is the bad guy for leveraging their patents against vendors selling Android phones? Satya Nadella would be looking for a new job if he weren't leveraging their patent portfolio. End of story. >Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype? See comment above. Nokia is dead because they couldn't get a handful of table-stakes apps. Primarily because of google. Skype... well that was just fumbling the ball, but it wasn't for no-reason. The way Skype was originally architected wasn't going to scale. That was by no means nefarious in nature though. Github has no fundamental flaws that I've seen that they would require them making significant changes.
- bitmapbrother 8y ago
  I didn't know patent racketeering was a fair response to not supporting an OS with a worldwide marketshare of less than 2%.
  - tw04 8y ago
    Not supporting? You mean actively blocking? Google actively blocked windows phones devices from accessing YouTube. And on what planet do you live that licensing out patents that are legitimate patents, for a fee, is racketeering? Talk about Torchlighting....
    - bitmapbrother 8y ago
      You must be referring to the time Microsoft reversed engineered YouTube API's and blocked ads in their unauthorized YouTube app. They had no right to reverse engineer proprietary API's, they had no right to block ads from being played and they had no right to create an app for an IP they didn't own. >And on what planet do you live that licensing out patents that are legitimate patents, for a fee, is racketeering? You should look into the Microsoft vs Barnes and Noble case[1] as well as review their detailed patent racketeering practices at Groklaw. Additionally, the Chinese government made Microsoft expose all of their patents that they wouldn't allow companies they were shaking down to see and, well, they were full of old, obsolete and prior art ridden patents - be sure to look those up too. [1]http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=2011111122291296 http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20111111222912...
sydd 8y ago
> Haven't they killed Nokia? There wasn't much to kill, when they bought it Nokia was still clinging to Symbian and was in a freefall. They tried everything to get Windows Phone running, but were too late to the show. Also Google refused to make any kind of apps to their platform, effectively sabotaging it. > ruined Skype? Its still pretty popular. It was crap 5 years ago, but now its on par with the other big messaging apps.
- bitmapbrother 8y ago
  >There wasn't much to kill, when they bought it Nokia was still clinging to Symbian and was in a freefall. Who knows what would have happened to Nokia's Device division without Microsoft's involvement, but one thing is certain - Windows Phone exclusivity solidified their demise. At least Nokia got 7 billion for their troubles, though. >They tried everything to get Windows Phone running, but were too late to the show. Also Google refused to make any kind of apps to their platform, effectively sabotaging it. There's a difference between trying everything and being incompetent and constantly rebooting your platform and expecting a different outcome. As for Google sabotaging their platform - Microsoft was already doing a good job of it so they didn't need help from Google. Also, Google did have a couple of apps on their platform I believe, but let's not try and blame another company for the demise of their OS when they were ultimately responsible.
kamaal 8y ago
>>Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype? To be really frank Nokia killed itself in the after math of the iPhone. But that was long time coming. When a company which wasn't even your prime competitor an year or two back, out innovates you to the graveyard, you really were setting yourself up for something like this for a while. And yes, WhatsApp did the same to Skype.
72deluxe 8y ago
Skype was terrible before they got it. Had to make the config XML file on Windows readonly and remove the obnoxious advert placeholders. Skype 7 still works alright with these removed (although uses mind-bogglingly high amounts of RAM). The Metro version no longer supports copy/paste formatting properly (no timestamps), destroys {code} annotations, does not show alerts properly, does not actually send messages you type into the Windows 10 popup alerts, does not auto scroll to the bottom of a message list, does not let you set your status to AWAY. The web.skype.com also has broken copy/paste but is better than the absymal Metro version. The iPad version is probably the most usable (but not tried copy/paste on it) and the Android one is mostly alright when it lets you log in, although still a bit clunky and non-responsive (blatantly a web app in a native wrapper). I run OOSU10.exe on all my Windows 10 instances to turn off the spyware and run PiHole at home to try and limit the insane amounts of data leakage from all my devices (TV, iPads, Android phones sending buckets of telemetry home, Windows PC and Macs) - it's insane. Interesting to see this purchase though, but I wanted to say that Skype is getting worse and worse - bring back MSN Messenger which had more features than modern Skype!

Iv 8y ago

Exactly. Microsoft ethos is still despicable.

pjmlp 8y ago

Nokia is pretty much alive. As for what Elop did, in case you missed the news, he only did what the Nokia board themselves asked him to do, and even gave him a bonus for achieving it.

neves 8y ago
What's is Nokia up to? I'd love to know they are doing interesting things.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  Well, they just split up their Health division back into Withings. https://health.nokia.com/event/nokia-withings https://health.nokia.com/event/nokia-withings I only know that because I have one of their awesome scales (https://health.nokia.com/gr/en/scales https://health.nokia.com/gr/en/scales). I was shocked they were Nokia when I found out about them. They're absolutely awesome, highly recommend them.
- coldacid 8y ago
  Networking hardware, mostly, especially cellular and POTS switching stuff.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  With the money from Microsoft's deal, they bought Siemens part from NSN, merging it back into Nokia. They got back many of the former mobile division employees via the partnership with HMD, currently having one of the best deals in Android devices. Ah and Bell Labs now belongs to Nokia.
bitmapbrother 8y ago
>As for what Elop did, in case you missed the news, he only did what the Nokia board themselves asked him to do Did that include having secret negotiations with Steve Ballmer that the board was unaware of? For a true accounting of what really happened you can find it all in Operation Elop. https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52c5 https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52...
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Thanks for the link, If the board hadn't had such bonus (24. The bonus brouhaha boils over) as Helsingin Sanomat discovered, the outcome would be much different. https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52c5 https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52... As someone that used to know the Espoo HQ from inside, Microsoft is not the one I blame.

Brakenshire 8y ago

> the same company, only with different cash cows. I think having different cash cows does change a company. If it's in their interest to be a good steward of VSCode, Typescript, Github etc then they're more likely to do it. I think consolidation is actually as much of an issue as which company it is, the more consolidated, arguably the less direct incentive for intercompatibility and open standards. That's more of an issue here because GitHub is not open-source, so unlike the other examples the developer base has nothing to fall back on. On privacy, that's never stopped anyone from using Angular or Kubernetes because of Google, or React because of Facebook, unfortunately behaviour towards developers seems to be judged separately from behaviour towards users.

gingerlime 8y ago
> On privacy, that's never stopped anyone from using Angular or Kubernetes because of Google, or React because of Facebook, unfortunately behaviour towards developers seems to be judged separately from behaviour towards users. That's not the same though. I host my (company private) code on Github. I can use React or Kubernetes without giving any access to Google or Facebook to my code.

johnnyfaehell 8y ago

Killed Nokia? Nokia is still alive. But it's not like it was doing well before Microsoft bought them.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

distances 8y ago

> Haven't they spied on Windows 10 users? Do they not engage in patents racketeering? Have they not killed Nokia or ruined Skype? I don't think one can say they killed Nokia. Nokia's phone business was basically doomed after Android gained traction, and Microsoft just helped the company to pivot by overpaying for that part of the business, while leaving Nokia with everything that actually was making money.

SSLy 8y ago
Nokia engineers wanted to move to Android, but the M̶S̶ ̶M̶o̶l̶e̶ then current CEO made a prikaz to go with Windows Phone.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  > prikaz diktat just for those wondering
- distances 8y ago
  I think this was a better outcome for Nokia. They didn't make their own components like Samsung does, so they'd probably now be in a position similar to HTC and Sony. They would have faced years of painful, expensive downsizing instead of a (retrospectively) good payout that assumed the liabilities too.
- Const-me 8y ago
  > Nokia engineers wanted to move to Android I don’t believe the engineers spent thousands man-years developing in-house Symbian, then significant time working on (mostly) in-house Maemo, then some day they said “screw that, let’s throw away everything we’ve developed and move to Android”.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - distances 8y ago
    Nokia had and released their own version of Android [0] which probably sped up the negotiations with Microsoft. Likely done by a completely different team vs. the Symbian people, though somone else probably knows more of those details. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X_platform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_X_platform

Ntrails 8y ago

> Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype? They killed msn, skype was always a turd. Nokia was dead well before Microsoft got involved.

gurkendoktor 8y ago
I've worked in several offices around 2013 where people happily used Skype like IRC: everyone was in a list of ~10 channels and occasionally sent private messages to coworkers. Instead of building on this, Microsoft kept pushing its unpopular business chat app (Lync) and made sure that Skype was only useful for consumers (obnoxious birthday notifications, the "snapchat redesign" etc.) Skype could have beat Slack to the punch. Instead Microsoft lost both the business and the consumer market.

avinassh 8y ago

Microsoft hasn't changed at all. Here is one recent incident I read: https://twitter.com/jamiebuilds/status/1002696910266773505 https://twitter.com/jamiebuilds/status/1002696910266773505

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
andrew_ 8y ago
No one should take that account as a credible source. Notorious for pot-stirring.
stordoff 8y ago
What exactly is Microsoft alleged to have done wrong here? It starts by saying "stole my code", but then discusses an MIT licensed piece of code. Furthermore, I'd see Microsoft's reply: > I'm not aware of any deliberate copying of the Lerna code, but let me dig into it now and call all the devs on the team to be sure. If there is, we should definitely give correct attribution, so I want to investigate. [...] I checked with the devs, and nobody's aware of any code coming from Lerna. If we inadvertently used something without credit, I really would like to know so that I can fix it. https://github.com/Microsoft/web-build-tools/issues/673 https://github.com/Microsoft/web-build-tools/issues/673
- pritambaral 8y ago
  > It starts by saying "stole my code", but then discusses an MIT licensed piece of code Unrelated to the rest of the discussion, I just want to clarify that MIT License != 'Do Whatever You Want' License. MIT requires attribution and maintaining the copyright license on existing code. Yes, if you don't adhere to the license's terms when copying code, it is stealing.
  - stordoff 8y ago
    I know, which is why I wanted to clarify precisely what Microsoft is being accused of (I may have worded it poorly). The tone I was getting from OP (the Twitter discussion) was that the code taken was something Microsoft did not have any right to use in the way they did, not something that could be solved by attribution. "stole my code" may be strictly accurate (as if you don't follow the licence, you don't have a licence to use), but I feel like it doesn't clearly communicate the problem, especially with comments such as "If they are going to steal code without crediting the original author" which, to me, initially read as saying it's still stealing even if it was credited. To be clear, I'm not saying using MIT-licensed code without attribution is acceptable, but I feel that there is a qualitative difference between this and using code you couldn't use under any circumstances, or silently incorporating MIT code in a commercial product.

mkirklions 8y ago

Yep, I really dont understand why there are Microsoft fans. Like I understand if you bought an Xbox, but I dont understand if you are a programmer. Microsoft has always been a headache. Recently its been a tiny bit better, but they still are a for-profit company that needs to continue to make a profit. This was to make Microsoft money, nothing to 'help programmers'.

evfanknitram 8y ago
Because their developer tools are pretty good and finding jobs as a .NET developer is pretty easy?
- jacquesm 8y ago
  That doesn't make them an ethical company. Oracle makes a pretty good database. Google makes a good search engine. All of those companies have serious ethical issues and I would not want any of them as the steward of the largest body of open source code on the planet. A federated or independent solution is the only way to go for infrastructure like this.
  - evfanknitram 8y ago
    I think you replied to the wrong thread? I replied to a poster who didn't understand why some people were fans of Microsoft.
- pas 8y ago
  It's pretty easy for non .NET jobs too. Their developer tools are pretty good for their own platform (but JetBrains actually makes great cross platform tools, some of them are proper free and open source, VSCode is playing catch up). Their C++ stdlib implementation was sucking balls for decades. Their (the dev tools') scriptability was horrible. PowerShell is nice, but it came too late, and it was too server focused. C# is okay, MS has great teams and people, but they are still very much run by the bean counters.
  - 8y ago

jjuel 8y ago

Nokia was struggling long before Microsoft came along though. They saved it for a little bit, but there isn't much you can do with a company that got so far behind it's competitors. Samsung, HTC, Apple, Motorola, etc were all light years ahead of Nokia even before Microsoft got involved. Funny that the things you mention all happened under Steve Ballmer too...

distances 8y ago
Ahead in what sense? Apart from Apple and Google, everyone was behind. The fact that HTC and Motorola adopted Android didn't do much good for them in the end, and in hardware and market share Nokia still had the lead at that time.
- kamaal 8y ago
  >>Ahead in what sense? Refusing to move on to Android? There was no real chance Symbian had in the post iPhone world. Nokia forgot its USP, which was basically durable rugged hardware. Instead they tried to compete with the iPhone in the software department, it didn't work out too well. Motorola is doing quite good with Android.
  - distances 8y ago
    > Nokia forgot its USP, which was basically durable rugged hardware. Instead they tried to compete with the iPhone in the software department, it didn't work out too well. You misremember things quite badly. Nokia was the clear leader in all phone segments, smartphones included. At the peak they sold just over 50% of all smartphones in the world. Of course they would try to hold on to that. They were better in software than their hardware competitors (Ericsson/RIM/etc), but of course that didn't amount to much when the field was upended by Google and Apple. > Motorola is doing quite good with Android. Motorola is now a Lenovo brand.

AsyncAwait 8y ago

Their license for the .NET Core debugger makes it so that only they can use it, JetBrains and others cannot, see [1], they haven't changed at all. 1 - https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2017/02/15/rider-eap-17-nuget-unit-testing-build-debugging https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2017/02/15/rider-eap-17-nu...

Dayshine 8y ago
My understanding is that the debugger is an adapted version of the closed source Visual Studio debugger. Visual Studio isn't open source, and is a paid for product. It takes time to break things out from inside a larger closed source project...
- dmarlow 8y ago
  Some editions are, I suppose. For many things VS Community is free though.
  - slrz 8y ago
    I don't think any editions of Visual Studio are available as Open Source software. The Community thingie is gratis but doesn't come with source code. There's VSCode (is that OSS?) but that's not an edition of VS but rather a whole different product.
    - sulam 8y ago
      VSCode is absolutely OSS.
efdee 8y ago
Why would Microsoft give away their crown jewels to a competing IDE? They spent ages perfecting their debugger. It's not like JetBrains can't build their own debugger based on the ICorDebug interface (which is what Microsoft's implementation is also based on).
- 8y ago

GuB-42 8y ago

Proprietary software used to be Microsoft's cash cow. That it is turning to different cash cows is actually a good thing for open source. Companies have to make money, and originally, Microsoft made money just by selling proprietary software licenses. In these conditions, open source is their enemy, and they have to fight it. Now they do a bit of spying, a bit of cloud, a bit of hardware, etc... which mean they can cut open source some slack and focus on other evils.

swebs 8y ago

And they're still pulling the same old tricks of vendor lock-in with DirectX. Microsoft's PR team likes to pretend they've changed since they gave a few concessions, but the reality is that they made those decisions solely because they were losing competitiveness. .Net core was because everybody was jumping ship to Linux due to the Kubernetes bandwagon. VS code was because the "Electron text editor" market was already filled with cross platform competitors.

mbesto 8y ago

> acquisition GitHub will be led by Nat Friedman, the former CEO of Xamarin, which has some credibility Credibility of what? He's a Microsoft employee, being paid by Microsoft, and has made a ton of money by selling his company to Microsoft. Follow the money and you'll find nothing but allegiance to Microsoft and it's corporate goals. For the record - I don't think MS is as nefarious as people here are insinuating, I'm just pointing out facts that people seem to overlook.

nojvek 8y ago
Funny story about him. He wanted to get a Job at Microsoft and wasn’t hired because he didn’t have the qualifications. Then he built Xamarin and made it a great C# open source tool to build apps. M$ really loved it and bought the company. Now he’s leading GitHub. That’s awesome. Microsoft does have a dark history, it’s also a huge company and Terry Meyerson (windows lead) was an aweful leader. Things definitely changed. Satya knows that they need the developer mindshare, and that means to go where the developers are. I hate windows as much as anyone, but a lot of their products are top notch. God I love vscode and Typescript. Just only use their OS products and you’ll be happy.
- oaiey 8y ago
  The job part is not the story of Nat Friedman but Migual de Icaza.
  - markand 8y ago
    Not sure about the job part being about Miguel, but it's certainly not true about Nat. Nat interned at Microsoft in 97 and I was his manager. He did a great job and was well liked. I don't think he ever applied for a full time position after graduating as I would have heard about it. I think it's just that he wanted to do something Open Source based, rather than what Microsoft was doing at the time.
    - oaiey 8y ago
      Thanks for the insights! Miguel had Visa issues if I remember it right and could not get a job because of this.

shubhamjain 8y ago

Why not let things play out a little before predicting chaos? Github doesn't have the vendor lock-in that other companies have. It starts to go downhill? Just push your repo to another Git host. Yes, you'll need to figure out how to port some of your workflows, but it won't be an insurmountable pain.

lordfoom 8y ago
>Why not let things play out a little before predicting chaos? History.
- drewmate 8y ago
  GP gave you a very good reason why this is different than historical Microsoft EEE[0]: > Github doesn't have the vendor lock-in that other companies have There's not much about Github that can't be easily replaced; it uses git at its core. Comments, issues, and wikis are convenient, but relatively simple to implement. The main value in Github is the de facto community status it has, which it earned by being an open community and good steward of open source projects. The worst MS could do here is shoot themselves in the foot and ruin that value (which they just purchased for 7.5B) by driving developers to other platforms (who will make it all too easy to switch). I think the M&A teams at MS must have seen this possiblity and have a different plan in mind for Github. Think dead simple (one-click) Azure deployments and integrations. And if you want (or need) that functionality for a different cloud provider, you'll just have to build it yourself on a different site. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
  - sixothree 8y ago
    It's not like anything about github is open source. Maybe that will change.
    - wooter 8y ago
      well, there was the atom editor. which now i fully expect msft to kill in favor of vs code. damn it.

sam0x17 8y ago

It isn't a good marketing campaign. This is just going to scare a ton of projects off of GitHub. I also imagine a ton of private companies (e.g. Google, Apple) are going to be moving their repos elsewhere if they are already hosted on GitHub for fear of Microsoft looking at their private code, which they WILL do.

sabujp 8y ago
companies that get acquired are probably required to move their private repos off of github. open source projects in the process of open sourcing or using a private repo as a staging area for the open source code are ok

StreamBright 8y ago

I am much more unhappy about the quality of their operating system. They had decades to turn it into a user friendly simple system like macos is, and failed every single time. It is outrageous that I have to delete half of the operating system to get something barely useable and the first thing when you run windows update is to put back the games and other crapware that I do not need on my devices. Is there any hope that Windows UX gets once something good or should I just give up hoping?

wilsonnb 8y ago
> It is outrageous that I have to delete half of the operating system to get something barely useable Seriously? Windows 10 is a perfectly usable OS out of the box. I can open up the included web browser and go to whatever website I want. I can install Office, Visual Studio, a Linux subsystem, VLC, a VNC client, VirtualBox, Chrome, Firefox, and every other piece of software I need without any hassle. Yes, there is something called "Bubble Witch 3 Saga" in my start menu that I did not install. I understand why people are upset about things like that even if I don't care. Windows 10 has plenty of flaws that are worth pointing out, but using ridiculous hyperbole doesn't add to the conversation in a productive way.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  > Windows 10 is a perfectly usable OS out of the box. There's a large gap between 'usable' and 'good'. They destroyed the consistency of their interface (combined desktop/mobile anyone), and added a lot of cruft that literally nobody who's used Win 7 needs.
  - wilsonnb 8y ago
    Yes there is. I have no problem with people saying Windows 10 isn't good, even if I personally think it's good. The "goodness" of an operating system is pretty subjective. I do have a problem with people calling it barely usable, which is a much more objective (and incorrect) statement.
  - hinkley 8y ago

shmerl 8y ago

MS claimed APIs are copyrightable. MS strongly pushes lock-in in markets where they have strong presence. It shows they haven't changed enough to trust them with anything.

Someone1234 8y ago
> MS claimed APIs are copyrightable. When was that? Oracle famously has, but I haven't read Microsoft's version of the same.
- shmerl 8y ago
  At the same time as Oracle. See https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-teaming-up-with-oracle-against-google-in-java-case/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-teaming-up-with-orac... So MS contributed to the abysmal court decision.

fsloth 8y ago

"Haven't they killed Nokia" No, Microsoft did an incredible service to all Nokia shareholders by buying the sorry handset business which had already failed in the market at that point. You can blame Microsoft for not resurrecting a dead carcass but that's another thing entirely. Nokia is doing quite fine manufacturing telecoms infrastructure.

manigandham 8y ago

These are giant companies with 1000s of employees and more politics than small countries... it doesn’t work to just generalize it all together. The developer side of Microsoft has definitely changed for the better over the last several years. And even if github fails, so what? It’s the most easily replaceable part of the stack.

bad_user 8y ago
You haven’t been using GitHub for open source then. The best part of GitHub is the social part and that’s not currently replaceable. Also good luck migrating issues and their history of comments and PRs.
- jupp0r 8y ago
  There is precedent for these transitions working out fine (Sourceforge, Google Code)
- manigandham 8y ago
  Issues and comments can already be migrated, github has a simple API and all the other services have import tools. It's not hard. The social part is not that big of a deal, its just because everybody happens to already have a login. Other than that, what's the big social hook? You can have the same exact discussions on the other source code sites, all of which have more features too.

pc86 8y ago

It's a nitpick, but they didn't ruin Skype, they branded Lync (which is a mountain of hot garbage) as Skype.

Piskvorrr 8y ago
Not mutually exclusive.

madeofpalk 8y ago

> Haven't they killed Nokia To be fair, Nokia was already dead when Microsoft bought them. MS just pulled the plug.

pvg 8y ago

Haven't they spied on Windows 10 users? Do they not engage in patents racketeering? Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype? This is small compared potatoes to the sort of thing Microsoft used to pull before. Microsoft spent years in the courts and narrowly avoided some very drastic government intervention and regulation on both sides of the Atlantic. That doesn't happen because someone might not like the new Skype UI or really misses flip phones.

youdontknowtho 8y ago

Why should I care that they "killed" Nokia. (It still sells products, by the way.) Nokia, isn't a person. It's another corporation. Patents racketeering...this is literally only going to be fixed with legislation. I'm all for it. There is no such thing as a corporation that won't chase every dollar that it can. That's what they do. Want to stop patent BS? Remove the incentives through legislation.

test6554 8y ago

Some people get offended when for-profit companies turn out to be not neighborly or friendly or human beings. I like to look at it from the perspective that they are a for-profit public company and are legally required to maximize shareholder value, and they have every right to do so. Therefore, any plans I make regarding GitHub will not rely on them being friendly and kind-spirited in any way. If they turn out to be great, I'll just be pleasantly surprised.

LukaD 8y ago
If that works out good for you, great. I know that GitHub has every right to do what they think is necessary to maximize shareholder value. But I don't have to agree with their decisions. I don't trust Microsoft for pretty much exactly the reasons the parent listed.

dangerboysteve 8y ago

Large Public companies don't change overnight for risk of shareholder revolt. As a Microsoft skeptic, I'll give them the opportunity to change.

hinkley 8y ago
That’s fine, at first blush at least, as long as they stay out of my way. But their MO is to buy up companies people like or love and run them into the ground, then replace them with a Me Too product that is just enough different that getting out is challenging. To the rest of us that’s indistinguishable from destroying the competition and reducing options. And here they are buying a company people like, having recently killed off others. This tiger has the same stripes. When it eats your remaining arm, try to remember people told you so.

Delmania 8y ago

> Haven't they spied on Windows 10 users? How is it spying when they present you with a full screen detailing data collection with the option to turn it off, and have several blog posts providing details. > Do they not engage in patents racketeering? It's not much of an excuse, but all tech companies do this. > Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype? Didn't they give Windows Mobile one hell of a run? Like they tried for a decade and finally admitted defeat? And Skype, I don't know. I use it in a daily basis. It doesn't seem to be that bad.

zodPod 8y ago
I'm really not sure here but I was under the impression that they had started doing the full screen detailing data collection thing after they had gotten caught doing it without it?
- Someone1234 8y ago
  They made it clearer and easier to review and change, but data collection was always toggle-able in Windows 10. A lot of people just hit "Express Setup" and then were surprised when the defaults were full collection. The Privacy Panel in the new Settings applet for example has always existed.
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    It was not toggle-able. You could only opt out of an ill-defined subset of an ill defined set of collected data, including, but not limited to all user inputs performed on that system. You would know as much if you had read the material published by MS on this. Only with the recent update do they offer a tool with which to inspect at least part of the actual data sent to MS. There is however no proof that the data shown in that tool is complete (even though I believe that they truely intend to show everything - despite their traditionally pushy methods, they are not Facebook).
lawnchair_larry 8y ago
You actually can’t turn it off, and they still refuse to publish the complete list of what is collected. You need an enterprise version to disable as much as they will let you, and even then, they still force quite a bit of collection.

tw04 8y ago

>Haven't they spied on Windows 10 users? Literally every for-profit desktop OS vendor has "spied on users" by the definition you're trying to use. Including OSX and Ubuntu. >Do they not engage in patents racketeering? So Google boxes Microsoft out of the phone market by refusing to support any of their services on Windows Phone. And Microsoft is the bad guy for leveraging their patents against vendors selling Android phones? Satya Nadella would be looking for a new job if he weren't leveraging their patent portfolio. End of story. >Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype? See comment above. Nokia is dead because they couldn't get a handful of table-stakes apps. Primarily because of google. Skype... well that was just fumbling the ball, but it wasn't for no-reason. The way Skype was originally architected wasn't going to scale. That was by no means nefarious in nature though. Github has no fundamental flaws that I've seen that they would require them making significant changes.

bitmapbrother 8y ago
I didn't know patent racketeering was a fair response to not supporting an OS with a worldwide marketshare of less than 2%.
- tw04 8y ago
  Not supporting? You mean actively blocking? Google actively blocked windows phones devices from accessing YouTube. And on what planet do you live that licensing out patents that are legitimate patents, for a fee, is racketeering? Talk about Torchlighting....
  - bitmapbrother 8y ago
    You must be referring to the time Microsoft reversed engineered YouTube API's and blocked ads in their unauthorized YouTube app. They had no right to reverse engineer proprietary API's, they had no right to block ads from being played and they had no right to create an app for an IP they didn't own. >And on what planet do you live that licensing out patents that are legitimate patents, for a fee, is racketeering? You should look into the Microsoft vs Barnes and Noble case[1] as well as review their detailed patent racketeering practices at Groklaw. Additionally, the Chinese government made Microsoft expose all of their patents that they wouldn't allow companies they were shaking down to see and, well, they were full of old, obsolete and prior art ridden patents - be sure to look those up too. [1]http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=2011111122291296 http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20111111222912...

sydd 8y ago

> Haven't they killed Nokia? There wasn't much to kill, when they bought it Nokia was still clinging to Symbian and was in a freefall. They tried everything to get Windows Phone running, but were too late to the show. Also Google refused to make any kind of apps to their platform, effectively sabotaging it. > ruined Skype? Its still pretty popular. It was crap 5 years ago, but now its on par with the other big messaging apps.

bitmapbrother 8y ago
>There wasn't much to kill, when they bought it Nokia was still clinging to Symbian and was in a freefall. Who knows what would have happened to Nokia's Device division without Microsoft's involvement, but one thing is certain - Windows Phone exclusivity solidified their demise. At least Nokia got 7 billion for their troubles, though. >They tried everything to get Windows Phone running, but were too late to the show. Also Google refused to make any kind of apps to their platform, effectively sabotaging it. There's a difference between trying everything and being incompetent and constantly rebooting your platform and expecting a different outcome. As for Google sabotaging their platform - Microsoft was already doing a good job of it so they didn't need help from Google. Also, Google did have a couple of apps on their platform I believe, but let's not try and blame another company for the demise of their OS when they were ultimately responsible.

kamaal 8y ago

>>Haven't they killed Nokia and ruined Skype? To be really frank Nokia killed itself in the after math of the iPhone. But that was long time coming. When a company which wasn't even your prime competitor an year or two back, out innovates you to the graveyard, you really were setting yourself up for something like this for a while. And yes, WhatsApp did the same to Skype.

72deluxe 8y ago

Skype was terrible before they got it. Had to make the config XML file on Windows readonly and remove the obnoxious advert placeholders. Skype 7 still works alright with these removed (although uses mind-bogglingly high amounts of RAM). The Metro version no longer supports copy/paste formatting properly (no timestamps), destroys {code} annotations, does not show alerts properly, does not actually send messages you type into the Windows 10 popup alerts, does not auto scroll to the bottom of a message list, does not let you set your status to AWAY. The web.skype.com also has broken copy/paste but is better than the absymal Metro version. The iPad version is probably the most usable (but not tried copy/paste on it) and the Android one is mostly alright when it lets you log in, although still a bit clunky and non-responsive (blatantly a web app in a native wrapper). I run OOSU10.exe on all my Windows 10 instances to turn off the spyware and run PiHole at home to try and limit the insane amounts of data leakage from all my devices (TV, iPads, Android phones sending buckets of telemetry home, Windows PC and Macs) - it's insane. Interesting to see this purchase though, but I wanted to say that Skype is getting worse and worse - bring back MSN Messenger which had more features than modern Skype!