4 ms·

It is not weird at all once you realise who Microsoft's management wants as its customers. The business people at MS really do not expect nor want customers to

It is not weird at all once you realise who Microsoft's management wants as its customers. The business people at MS really do not expect nor want customers to be fiddling around with technical stuff. They want customers to see MS as the one who can solve all problems. The business people at Microsoft prefer non-technical customers. Technically-minded customers are not the ideal customers for Microsoft. A great example is Mark Russinovich. They had to hire him to keep him quiet and under control. He had become a problem solver for too many technically-minded customers. In the mind of the Microsoft business person Clippy: "Yes." PowerToys: "Why?"

zaphar 6y ago
In 1995 this might have been a true statement. In 2020 Microsoft has seen the writing on the wall and realized that to stay at all relevant they need a seat at the table for cloud services. The only way to succeed at that is to win over the ultimate power user, developers. WSL{1,2}, Windows Terminal, SQL Server on Linux, too many intiatives to count all focused on catching up to the reality that webservices and infrastructure are built on Linux. Whether you believe they'll succeed or not they are most definitely trying.
- abraxas 6y ago
  Microsoft feels very schizophrenic at this point. On the one hand I think there exists a faction that wants to move more into the open ecosystem. On the other though there appears to be an entrenched faction that's hell bent on retaining as much proprietary status quo as they feel they can get away with. Thus the command line is still incompatible with any Unix shell, the SQL syntax subtly different to make it a pain for those coming from other databases, proprietary sockets, threads API's and so on. It's possible to make a Windows ecosystem interact with the rest of the world, it's just a big pain in the butt caused by an endless stream of small pains.
  - pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
    From what I know of the company's history some of those pains were intentional to thwart interoperability, created at the direction of Gates himself.
  - genr8 6y ago
    MS is so large, one hand doesn't know what any other division is doing, and their community interaction is horrible because they make more money when people are ill informed and just go with the flow. So even if 10% of the company is "new blood" and was pushing open source out the back door for the past 5 years, the upper management is just now catching on that "hey maybe they were right".
  - pie_flavor 6y ago
    You take for granted that it should be Windows conforming to Linux. Why shouldn't Linux implement Winsock and COM and have Linux-specific PowerShell cmdlets and so forth? Windows dominates the desktop market more than Linux dominates the server market, and one of those wants 'cross-platform software' more than the other.
  - munchbunny 6y ago
    That really depends on what you consider "rest of the world". A lot of companies, big ones, have their IT setups primarily on Windows. These are customers who make up a huge chunk of Microsoft's revenue. Linux is a small concern at best for them and is not the rest of the world. What you call "schizophrenic" to me is the reality that Windows has massive user segments of consumers, developers, servers, and enterprise IT, and they all want different things, so Microsoft ends up making something for each group. Linux doesn't have that problem because, for better or worse, it doesn't have much of a footprint for consumers and enterprise IT.
  - zaphar 6y ago
    Expecting a company as large and with as deep a history as Microsoft to change without looking schizophrenic while doing so is unrealistic. Microsoft is a supertanker. When it tries to do a 180 it makes really big circle and takes a really long time to do it.
jve 6y ago
Nonsense. Different products (from MS) are for different people. If it was true what you are telling, doubt they woild provide loads of diagnostic tools for windows, debugging tools, kernel symbols, performance tools, etc.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  Before they hired/silenced him, those tools were developed by Russinovich. Comparing the most important product(s) at MS with any other MS product/project and arguing they are somehow "equal" in the eyes of MS (because press releases, marketing) is a losing game.
  - jve 6y ago
    Kernel symbols are NOT published by Mark Russinovich. What would be the purpose to publish them other than aid debugging the kernel and making sense of what's happening under-the-hood? Debugging stuff and analyzing performance stuff doesn't make me feel like MS would like to hide internals.

zaphar 6y ago

In 1995 this might have been a true statement. In 2020 Microsoft has seen the writing on the wall and realized that to stay at all relevant they need a seat at the table for cloud services. The only way to succeed at that is to win over the ultimate power user, developers. WSL{1,2}, Windows Terminal, SQL Server on Linux, too many intiatives to count all focused on catching up to the reality that webservices and infrastructure are built on Linux. Whether you believe they'll succeed or not they are most definitely trying.

abraxas 6y ago
Microsoft feels very schizophrenic at this point. On the one hand I think there exists a faction that wants to move more into the open ecosystem. On the other though there appears to be an entrenched faction that's hell bent on retaining as much proprietary status quo as they feel they can get away with. Thus the command line is still incompatible with any Unix shell, the SQL syntax subtly different to make it a pain for those coming from other databases, proprietary sockets, threads API's and so on. It's possible to make a Windows ecosystem interact with the rest of the world, it's just a big pain in the butt caused by an endless stream of small pains.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  From what I know of the company's history some of those pains were intentional to thwart interoperability, created at the direction of Gates himself.
- genr8 6y ago
  MS is so large, one hand doesn't know what any other division is doing, and their community interaction is horrible because they make more money when people are ill informed and just go with the flow. So even if 10% of the company is "new blood" and was pushing open source out the back door for the past 5 years, the upper management is just now catching on that "hey maybe they were right".
- pie_flavor 6y ago
  You take for granted that it should be Windows conforming to Linux. Why shouldn't Linux implement Winsock and COM and have Linux-specific PowerShell cmdlets and so forth? Windows dominates the desktop market more than Linux dominates the server market, and one of those wants 'cross-platform software' more than the other.
- munchbunny 6y ago
  That really depends on what you consider "rest of the world". A lot of companies, big ones, have their IT setups primarily on Windows. These are customers who make up a huge chunk of Microsoft's revenue. Linux is a small concern at best for them and is not the rest of the world. What you call "schizophrenic" to me is the reality that Windows has massive user segments of consumers, developers, servers, and enterprise IT, and they all want different things, so Microsoft ends up making something for each group. Linux doesn't have that problem because, for better or worse, it doesn't have much of a footprint for consumers and enterprise IT.
- zaphar 6y ago
  Expecting a company as large and with as deep a history as Microsoft to change without looking schizophrenic while doing so is unrealistic. Microsoft is a supertanker. When it tries to do a 180 it makes really big circle and takes a really long time to do it.

jve 6y ago

Nonsense. Different products (from MS) are for different people. If it was true what you are telling, doubt they woild provide loads of diagnostic tools for windows, debugging tools, kernel symbols, performance tools, etc.

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
Before they hired/silenced him, those tools were developed by Russinovich. Comparing the most important product(s) at MS with any other MS product/project and arguing they are somehow "equal" in the eyes of MS (because press releases, marketing) is a losing game.
- jve 6y ago
  Kernel symbols are NOT published by Mark Russinovich. What would be the purpose to publish them other than aid debugging the kernel and making sense of what's happening under-the-hood? Debugging stuff and analyzing performance stuff doesn't make me feel like MS would like to hide internals.