The "Microsoft has changed" is a well coordinated marketing ploy, probably their biggest achievement of the last 10 years. And these days it's actually pretty h

The "Microsoft has changed" is a well coordinated marketing ploy, probably their biggest achievement of the last 10 years. And these days it's actually pretty hard to distinguish the shills from the fanboys that genuinely believe that they changed. There's something about computing that makes us want to cheer for these big companies as if they are sports teams, no matter how many times they screw us. But for the uninitiated the biggest problem for some time has been that Microsoft was and still is a big patents troll. They also continued fighting open standards such as the OpenDocument format, even under Satya Nadella. To their credit they did join the Open Invention Network, but it's still unclear what parts of a Linux OS are covered and what aren't. The FSF rightly asked for clarifications on whether the multimedia components are covered and to my knowledge there have been no clarifications thus far. But forget the years of trolling Android phone vendors with patents such as for the FAT filesystem, here's a story from 2017: http://techrights.org/2017/02/27/microsoft-novell-v2-via-azure/ http://techrights.org/2017/02/27/microsoft-novell-v2-via-azu... Also Windows 10 is a piece of spyware shit. Windows 10 has been intercepting Chrome and Firefox installations and harassing people into using Edge (and this has been my own experience): https://www.ghacks.net/2018/09/12/microsoft-intercepting-firefox-chrome-installation-on-windows-10/ https://www.ghacks.net/2018/09/12/microsoft-intercepting-fir... Microsoft is reportedly planning to make Edge indispensable: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/19/windows-10-microsoft-force-people-edge-browser-windows-mail-chrome-firefox https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/19/windows-1... Windows 10 has been displaying intrusive ads: https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/17/14956540/microsoft-windows-10-ads-taskbar-file-explorer https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/17/14956540/microsoft-window... Windows 10 has been blatantly disregarding user choice and privacy: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/windows-10-microsoft-blatantly-disregards-user-choice-and-privacy-deep-dive https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/windows-10-microsoft-b... Windows 10 collects everything you do: https://www.techworm.net/2014/10/microsofts-windows-10-permission-watch-every-move.html https://www.techworm.net/2014/10/microsofts-windows-10-permi... --- > "Investing in making Edge work like Chrome (more important to developers and consumers than your ideological quandries with Google owning the web will ever be)" That's incredibly naive. First of all they aren't "making Edge work like Chrome", that's an overstatement, the new Edge is going to be only a shell on top of Chromium and nothing more. Microsoft adopting Edge is either them throwing the glove and admitting that they can't develop a browser, or them pulling another embrace, extend and extinguish. After all, as we've established already, they don't really like that users have a choice when it comes to the browsers they use. This is important to mention, because even for the Chrome fans out there, Edge switching to Chromium provides the perfect opportunity to disallow alternatives on top of Windows. This is just a possibility mind you, when it is far more likely that Microsoft will simply place Edge on life support. In either case, whether they end up contributing to Chrome's ecosystem, or not, consumers lose for a myriad reasons. And heralding this move as something good is ignorance for the whole history of computing.