7 ms·

Yes same here. I’m really surprised by all the Microsoft hate as if we were still in the 80-90’s. MS is one of the biggest open source contributors nowadays. I

Yes same here. I’m really surprised by all the Microsoft hate as if we were still in the 80-90’s. MS is one of the biggest open source contributors nowadays. It's also really weird how people idealize GitHub. Did they forget GitHub was not a non-profit association, they were losing money, they deleted users repositories on their own, they had management issues, and people have been waiting some features for very long, specially open source maintainers? Also GitHub "forced" a lot of organizations to migrate somewhere else when they changed their pricing model[1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11673103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11673103

aldanor 8y ago
Remember Skype? That wasn’t in 80-90s...
- fosco 8y ago
  personally, I really like the performance of 'skype for business' but maybe I am in the minority there. all of the tools and integration with outlook is pretty smooth...
  - debaserab2 8y ago
    Skype and performance are two words that don't ever belong in the same sentence.
    - dest 8y ago
      You just gave a counter example ;)
    - 72deluxe 8y ago
      "Skype has performance issues" "Skype has abysmal performance" "Performance in not Skype's priority" I thought I would give some excellent examples of how to use "performance" with "Skype" - all of which are true!
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      It could have the word 'bad' somewhere in the middle.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Well, then you won't be glad to know it's going away: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/25/16360072/microsoft-teams-replacing-skype-for-business https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/25/16360072/microsoft-teams-...
  - hnzix 8y ago
    "Skype" for business isn't even Skype code. It's Lync with a sticker slapped over the top.
  - itworker7 8y ago
    but what if we don't use outlook - not everyone does. this is at the fundamental heart of the problem with Microsoft (Apple is just as guilty, btw). It is the "hey, we have a nice ecosystem - everyone should use it" viewpoint. As a developer and consultant - I will decide which tools are appropriate and best for the job at hand, not something dictated by corporate marketing. Skype has gotten much worse since Microsoft acquired them. Every time I start Skype I have to update it and its not as stable as it once was, especially on OSX
  - ponyfleisch 8y ago
    Skype for Business is really, really bad on MacOS. Half of the time i'm trying to use it, messages don't get sent with an error message. Sometimes they do get sent but i still get an error message. Skype on MacOS tends to get stuck in some loop that eats my CPU. So does MS Excel. MS Excel also had other, very annoying issues in the not so distant past. Sure, as a MacOS user i'm maybe not that important to MSFT, but the quality of some of their products is surprisingly low.
    - heyoni 8y ago
      The excel bit is likely because multi core support isn’t on Mac just yet. If you opt into their latest beta channel for updates, it gets way better.
      - ponyfleisch 8y ago
        No i had a different issue. I think it was after hard resets when excel goes "do you want me to restore the stuff i had open before?" I would ignore this for a while (since plenty of other apps would also start up again) and then wonder what is eating my CPU. Surprise surprise, it's an Excel message box.
c0smic 8y ago
And now Microsoft is going to solve all those problems? This'll be interesting to see how it plays out, but all of these issues are not confidence inspiring.
wpietri 8y ago
Once bitten, twice shy. Moreover, although I agree Microsoft is making efforts to change [1], pro-Microsoft partisans make it clear much of this is due to the new CEO. What one CEO does, another can undo. GitHub's bus factor is now 1. I would much rather have seen them go public. They were losing money, but not, last I saw, at a rate that was absurd for building a SaaS business. Is there some reason to think they couldn't have gotten into the black? And if so, is there some reason to think Microsoft will let them burn cash forever without getting anything valuable in return? Previously, GitHub's success depended on GitHub serving their customers and users. Now it depends on the notions of some guy in Seattle. Some guy whose job is, at least by market cap, 99% focused on other things. It's reasonable for customers to worry about that.
- j4eo 8y ago
  I think the biggest thing suggesting they couldn't have gotten into the black is the fact that they had been looking for a CEO for 10 months and still hadn't found someone. I'm not entirely sure why they couldn't find anyone, perhaps they were just being picky, but it certainly didn't look good.
  - wpietri 8y ago
    Or it could be that the board has been looking to sell the company for that period and nobody wanted to come on to be the CEO for 20 minutes before being replaced by somebody from the acquirer. Hard to say.
- deadbunny 8y ago
  You're acting as if the opensource initiative in MS of late is down to Nadella and nothing else. It's much more a case of market forces changing and an acceptance of opensource within corporations.
  - wpietri 8y ago
    That's certainly what I'm seeing from people. There are a ton of "it's fine because Nadella" comments out there. E.g.: https://twitter.com/kellabyte/status/1003660575690244096 https://twitter.com/kellabyte/status/1003660575690244096 If they are merely yielding to market forces, then that's not much of a comfort. Github was a leader in this, and Microsoft's customers have a strong bias toward followers and laggards.
kakwa_ 8y ago
Even with best intentions from both sides, acquisitions don't go well in a lot of cases. It's quite common to have the following scheme: 1) nothing significant happens for 1 to 2 years, the big company slowly integrates the smaller one. 2) historical dev/ops starts to be tired of the heaviness of the processes and all the politics going on in the big organization. After 3 to 4 years, they start leaving, and knowledge begins slowly to get lost. 3) new features are slower to be pushed in production, often with major regressions. 4) after 5 years the service is becoming more and more unstable and/or is not evolving anymore. 5) after 7 to 10 years, the product is killed-off or put in limbo.
- da_chicken 8y ago
  Yeah, but most of that happens whether or not your product is acquired or not. Acquisition may, and often does, accelerate the process, but almost every application eventually suffers from loss of focus, feature bloat, and changes within the industry. Those that don't tend to stagnate completely and get replaced when someone re-invents the wheel from the ground up with a few improvements. I mean, forget that happening to GitHub, that will probably happen to git in 10 years or so.
sdhgaiojfsa 8y ago
> MS is one of the biggest open source contributors nowadays. Really? For its size? It seems like Google, Apple, and Facebook are all much more productive in OSS. The only open source Microsoft product I'm aware of using is VS Code. To my understanding, they haven't open sourced Edge, their JS engine, their compiler, their word processors, or really anything else of note. I guess I can give them a little credit for .NET Core, but would that even have happened of Mono hadn't existed?
- will4274 8y ago
  > their JS engine https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore > their compiler Microsoft makes half a dozen compilers, for as many languages: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell The only one that I know of that is closed is C++. > anything else of note https://github.com/Microsoft/GVFS https://github.com/Microsoft/GVFS https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/16/microsoft-joins-the-linux-foundation/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/16/microsoft-joins-the-linux-...
  - StudentStuff 8y ago
    PowerShell is a pile of slightly incompatible versions, you end up with code targeting the oldest version you need (often version 2 for Windows 7).
  - sdhgaiojfsa 8y ago
    I stand corrected, thanks! I still have a sense that they are rather less proportionately open source than those other companies, but less so than before.
executesorder66 8y ago
> I’m really surprised by all the Microsoft hate as if we were still in the 80-90’s. You think the privacy nightmare of windows 10 happened in the 80's-90's?

aldanor 8y ago

Remember Skype? That wasn’t in 80-90s...

fosco 8y ago
personally, I really like the performance of 'skype for business' but maybe I am in the minority there. all of the tools and integration with outlook is pretty smooth...
- debaserab2 8y ago
  Skype and performance are two words that don't ever belong in the same sentence.
  - dest 8y ago
    You just gave a counter example ;)
  - 72deluxe 8y ago
    "Skype has performance issues" "Skype has abysmal performance" "Performance in not Skype's priority" I thought I would give some excellent examples of how to use "performance" with "Skype" - all of which are true!
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    It could have the word 'bad' somewhere in the middle.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Well, then you won't be glad to know it's going away: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/25/16360072/microsoft-teams-replacing-skype-for-business https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/25/16360072/microsoft-teams-...
- hnzix 8y ago
  "Skype" for business isn't even Skype code. It's Lync with a sticker slapped over the top.
- itworker7 8y ago
  but what if we don't use outlook - not everyone does. this is at the fundamental heart of the problem with Microsoft (Apple is just as guilty, btw). It is the "hey, we have a nice ecosystem - everyone should use it" viewpoint. As a developer and consultant - I will decide which tools are appropriate and best for the job at hand, not something dictated by corporate marketing. Skype has gotten much worse since Microsoft acquired them. Every time I start Skype I have to update it and its not as stable as it once was, especially on OSX
- ponyfleisch 8y ago
  Skype for Business is really, really bad on MacOS. Half of the time i'm trying to use it, messages don't get sent with an error message. Sometimes they do get sent but i still get an error message. Skype on MacOS tends to get stuck in some loop that eats my CPU. So does MS Excel. MS Excel also had other, very annoying issues in the not so distant past. Sure, as a MacOS user i'm maybe not that important to MSFT, but the quality of some of their products is surprisingly low.
  - heyoni 8y ago
    The excel bit is likely because multi core support isn’t on Mac just yet. If you opt into their latest beta channel for updates, it gets way better.
    - ponyfleisch 8y ago
      No i had a different issue. I think it was after hard resets when excel goes "do you want me to restore the stuff i had open before?" I would ignore this for a while (since plenty of other apps would also start up again) and then wonder what is eating my CPU. Surprise surprise, it's an Excel message box.

c0smic 8y ago

And now Microsoft is going to solve all those problems? This'll be interesting to see how it plays out, but all of these issues are not confidence inspiring.

wpietri 8y ago

Once bitten, twice shy. Moreover, although I agree Microsoft is making efforts to change [1], pro-Microsoft partisans make it clear much of this is due to the new CEO. What one CEO does, another can undo. GitHub's bus factor is now 1. I would much rather have seen them go public. They were losing money, but not, last I saw, at a rate that was absurd for building a SaaS business. Is there some reason to think they couldn't have gotten into the black? And if so, is there some reason to think Microsoft will let them burn cash forever without getting anything valuable in return? Previously, GitHub's success depended on GitHub serving their customers and users. Now it depends on the notions of some guy in Seattle. Some guy whose job is, at least by market cap, 99% focused on other things. It's reasonable for customers to worry about that.

j4eo 8y ago
I think the biggest thing suggesting they couldn't have gotten into the black is the fact that they had been looking for a CEO for 10 months and still hadn't found someone. I'm not entirely sure why they couldn't find anyone, perhaps they were just being picky, but it certainly didn't look good.
- wpietri 8y ago
  Or it could be that the board has been looking to sell the company for that period and nobody wanted to come on to be the CEO for 20 minutes before being replaced by somebody from the acquirer. Hard to say.
deadbunny 8y ago
You're acting as if the opensource initiative in MS of late is down to Nadella and nothing else. It's much more a case of market forces changing and an acceptance of opensource within corporations.
- wpietri 8y ago
  That's certainly what I'm seeing from people. There are a ton of "it's fine because Nadella" comments out there. E.g.: https://twitter.com/kellabyte/status/1003660575690244096 https://twitter.com/kellabyte/status/1003660575690244096 If they are merely yielding to market forces, then that's not much of a comfort. Github was a leader in this, and Microsoft's customers have a strong bias toward followers and laggards.

kakwa_ 8y ago

Even with best intentions from both sides, acquisitions don't go well in a lot of cases. It's quite common to have the following scheme: 1) nothing significant happens for 1 to 2 years, the big company slowly integrates the smaller one. 2) historical dev/ops starts to be tired of the heaviness of the processes and all the politics going on in the big organization. After 3 to 4 years, they start leaving, and knowledge begins slowly to get lost. 3) new features are slower to be pushed in production, often with major regressions. 4) after 5 years the service is becoming more and more unstable and/or is not evolving anymore. 5) after 7 to 10 years, the product is killed-off or put in limbo.

da_chicken 8y ago
Yeah, but most of that happens whether or not your product is acquired or not. Acquisition may, and often does, accelerate the process, but almost every application eventually suffers from loss of focus, feature bloat, and changes within the industry. Those that don't tend to stagnate completely and get replaced when someone re-invents the wheel from the ground up with a few improvements. I mean, forget that happening to GitHub, that will probably happen to git in 10 years or so.

sdhgaiojfsa 8y ago

> MS is one of the biggest open source contributors nowadays. Really? For its size? It seems like Google, Apple, and Facebook are all much more productive in OSS. The only open source Microsoft product I'm aware of using is VS Code. To my understanding, they haven't open sourced Edge, their JS engine, their compiler, their word processors, or really anything else of note. I guess I can give them a little credit for .NET Core, but would that even have happened of Mono hadn't existed?

will4274 8y ago
> their JS engine https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore > their compiler Microsoft makes half a dozen compilers, for as many languages: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell The only one that I know of that is closed is C++. > anything else of note https://github.com/Microsoft/GVFS https://github.com/Microsoft/GVFS https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/16/microsoft-joins-the-linux-foundation/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/16/microsoft-joins-the-linux-...
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  PowerShell is a pile of slightly incompatible versions, you end up with code targeting the oldest version you need (often version 2 for Windows 7).
- sdhgaiojfsa 8y ago
  I stand corrected, thanks! I still have a sense that they are rather less proportionately open source than those other companies, but less so than before.

executesorder66 8y ago

> I’m really surprised by all the Microsoft hate as if we were still in the 80-90’s. You think the privacy nightmare of windows 10 happened in the 80's-90's?