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On the whole this does not affect my perception of Microsoft. In fact it probably tilts it in their favor. They were able to conduct a thorough investigation an
by jtchang 6y ago
On the whole this does not affect my perception of Microsoft. In fact it probably tilts it in their favor. They were able to conduct a thorough investigation and figure out the attackers had access to the source. The reality is that while it makes future attacks easier it has already been taken into account for a large majority of risk assessments.
People trash Microsoft a lot but some of the people there are the best in their respective fields.
- superfrank 6y agoDo people still trash Microsoft? Maybe it's just because I'm in Seattle, but I feel like their reputation has really turned a corner in the past year or two. There's still a lot of cruft from who they used to be, but I feel like most people I know echo the sentiment that Satya has been a revolution. Things like them embracing Linux, acquiring and not ruining NPM and Github, contributing to open source projects, and all the work they've done with Dotnet Core seem to really have bought them a lot of goodwill, at least with the people I know.
- wizzwizz4 6y ago> Things like them embracing Linux Have you seen the WSL2 DirectX support?[0] They're extending it, too! [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23241040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23241040
- oblio 6y agoThey'll extinguish desktop Linux any day now!
- phendrenad2 6y agoIt's funny because Linux did just that to Unix. Embrace (new OS that does everything Unix does, and free!), extend (Linux has features not found in classic Unixes), extinguish (Linux is now the de facto standard, so anyone who wants to use Unix is laughed at). Microsoft gets mocked for embrace/extend/extinguish, but really, it means just do a better job than the competition. Embrace: "do what others are doing", extend: "do a better job at it, have more features than the competition", extinguish: "sell customers on those features and improvements". How anyone could be against competition, simply because it's framed in a cheesy phrase, is beyond me.
- Dylan16807 6y agoYou can compete without working to convert an ecosystem from standardized to proprietary. If that happens it becomes much harder for anyone else to compete, and the end result is reduced competition.
- oblio 6y agoThat's what most companies do, though. "Differentiate your product." "Let's build an IP portfolio." "We don't want to be the dumb pipe." "Build a moat around the product." "Don't let yourself be commoditized." Etc. All that coded or not so coded business language says the same thing: make it proprietary/uncopyable and make money off of it.
- Dylan16807 6y agoIt's much less of an issue if you make your own new thing be proprietary. It causes problems when you co-opt an existing market. It really causes problems when you're devoting external resources to conquering the market and once you do so you stop caring very much about improving any more.
- dialamac 6y agoCommercial Unix extinguished themselves without much help from Microsoft. The Halloween documents were about Linux after all (over 20 years ago!).. the commercial Unix players have only themselves to blame. Unless we’re going to blame all the mistakes of DEC, HP and IBM on Microsoft. Like geez.... even if that’s true then frankly Microsoft deserved to win.
- TheRealDunkirk 6y agoCommercial Unix suffered from a lack of vision. They could have made version to run on x86, but they basically conceded to the low end to Linux. They were too busy making money from selling super-expensive RISC-based machines. Solaris had a good version, which I used for a time, while I was running a data center full of Sparc equipment. All the user space stuff was happening in Linux-land. Solaris x86 had a nice repo for various packages, but there was always something you wanted that wasn't there. It got really close, though. If one of the bigs would have gotten serious about packaging up, say, Debian's userland stuff, they could have put a serious dent in Red Hat, and maybe things would have played out differently.
- webmobdev 6y agoYes, people still thrash Microsoft because many of their business practises and products are thrashy, even if it needn't be. Windows is a great example - forced updates, forced ads, forced data-ming and spying, stupid UI changes etc. all make an otherwise decent OS a real pain to use and a must-avoid for the privacy conscious. These are easy to fix for a company like MS, but they do not.
- tester756 6y ago> forced updates I don't understand whinning about that when you have bilions of people using your OS, so shitton of people who are newbies at computers then you want to help them to stay as secure as possible. "at best(worst?)" this thing is "not nicest", but it's totally reasonable. you have reasonable control over updates on non-home versions, imo.
- cm2187 6y agoI think he meant frequent and unpredictable forced reboots. But the updates are also a disaster. Microsoft trying to shoves their shitty apps down our throat every time, resetting the default applications regularly.
- justapassenger 6y agoEspecially, as Windows updates, given basically infinite combination of hardware (often broken) and software (broken even more often) are super rock solid.
- cubano 6y agoSo true. I just yesterday, on a lark, took a win10 SSD from a new Dell and stuck it in a 10 year old HP, and within about a minute it booted much to my surprise. It didn't even need to connect to the internet.
- btgeekboy 6y agoFor quite a while, Windows was the holdout. MacOS wouldn't even flinch if you moved it to another machine; Linux might have needed a little help finding its root volume or NIC but would otherwise be happy. Windows, however, would fall over with a BSOD.
- lalalandland 6y agoWhile Windows 10 i pretty good and stable system, the bundled programs that are default for photos etc are truly awful. In corporate environments it's often hard or impossible to install 3rd party programs, so when the default bundled software suck, it is frustrating to deal with...
- fortran77 6y agoThey do on Hacker News! People here seem oblivious to the fact that Microsoft is right behind Apple in valuation.
- tdhz77 6y agoWhat does this valuation matter?
- hollerith 6y agoThere is some correlation between selling good products and valuation. Intel's valuation for example went down 25% in 2020 in contrast to the NASDAQ US Composite index (of which Intel is a part) which went up over 40%.
- Daho0n 6y agoWho decides it is a good product? Seems to me it is rather "selling a lot". Lots of people do not think Apple make good products and prefer Dell or Huawei etc. That doesn't change the valuation of Apple.
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- jjcon 6y agoCould be my neck of the woods too but where I am Microsoft has the best reputation among the Major tech companies (not a privacy nightmare, great research division, has started supporting open source, remains fairly apolitical)
- Spooky23 6y agoMicrosoft is like the government... everyone has a relationship with them, and those experiences vary from high trust / strategic down to a sort of taxman. If your work is such that scaling to bazillions of servers or other artifacts isn’t an issue, Microsoft is a smart choice. If you are building Facebook, it is a dumb choice.
- oblio 6y agoI think using their dev tools is a solid choice. Using their OS or their DB... not so much, primarily due to licensing.
- trinix912 6y agoI only wish more of those tools would be cross platform. I know it's not happening, but it'd be nice if I could develop WPF stuff right on my macbook without a VM.
- hu3 6y agoSame. At least now there's a promise of cross-platform UI in the form of https://github.com/dotnet/maui https://github.com/dotnet/maui
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- to11mtm 6y ago> Using their OS or their DB... not so much, primarily due to licensing. The state of SQL Server's MVCC suppot is arguably enough to preclude use even before we talk about licensing. I never thought I would miss Oracle until I learned about NOLOCK and the cost of enabling MVCC in SQL Server.
- coliveira 6y agoThey are doing this to survive, not because they love open source and Linux. MS is still every ounce of the company they were in the 90s, they just saw the writing on the wall and decided to play for the new generation of developers. I don't trust them any better.
- hu3 6y agoWe're fortunate that Microsoft shareholders think catering to developers is good for business. Not every megacorp thinks so. I mean, take a look at Swift's documentation and tell me with a straight face that Apple cares about developers.
- katbyte 6y agoMicrosoft is a very large company with many different internal orgs, your experience will vary greatly from one to the other (or product to product)
- yuhong 6y agoI wrote about CompatTelRunner partly because Billy O'Neal (@malwareminigun) was complaining about it on Twitter. Fun trivia: there are a lot of source path strings in the code of both CompatTelRunner and Appraiser. There are "enterprise mode" and "indicator generation mode" in Appraiser as well that MS don't document and you can easily find out that they exist by using these strings.
- cat199 6y ago> acquiring and not ruining NPM and Github a little early to come to this conclusion, one way or another, I think
- boxmonster 6y agoA lot of people don't update their opinions because it takes work. I know because I've made it habit of checking my assumptions and I still forget. For example, people still trash PHP and post a "A Fractal of Bad Design" when PHP 8 is now on par with any other language and not an amateur minefield. Some things get better, some things get worse. It's best to check in once in awhile. Microsoft is much better than it was 20 years ago.
- webmobdev 6y agoGood point and maybe true for PHP, but not for Microsoft or its products. They've continued to "update" their bad practices too, and it's not just old criticisms that are rehashed again against them. And no, to me Microsoft is actually worse than before as they have turned Windows into a spyware. The forced updates (not just security updates) make it even worse.
- michaelmrose 6y agoDevelopers opinions don't seem to have changed that much https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-languages-dreaded https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-mo... Maybe they are all wrong. Maybe PHP still sucks just less.
- boxmonster 6y agoThat's because there's a ton of legacy PHP code to deal with. I shudder to think about it.
- to11mtm 6y ago> and all the work they've done with Dotnet Core seem to really have bought them a lot of goodwill, at least with the people I know. Microsoft has done some good things with .NET Core, but they still don't have a very friendly OSS or partner strategy. AppGet is a pretty good example; there was an existing Open source solution that filled a need, and Microsoft decided to create their own replacement, not bothering to give any credit (until there was an internet ruckus) to the original despite the very striking similarities and relative level of obviousness that they were at bare minimum 'inspired' by the tool; after all, they interviewed him for a role and even warned him the day before it came out... [0] Octopus is another example. I -hate- TFS Release pipelines. Octopus Deploy was (until they ruined their pricing model) a far superior product overall. You can really tell the way TFS Release pipelines were done, they tried to 'checkbox-copy' Octopus Deploy's features without making it too much like Octopus to be obvious. But the checkbox-copy strategy is inferior in many ways. In Octo you can have a stage that runs in all environments (but certain steps on/off per env) and configure server groups that way. In TFS Release, You have to have to 'copy' the steps for every stage. It's like their data model is missing a 1-many relationship or two somewhere. And the impacts in the case of their behavior has a second-order effect; I am curious whether TFS Release eating into Octopus's market share was a factor in their price hikes a couple years ago; in that regard, I can't blame them if that's the case. [0] - https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22 https://medium.com/@keivan/the-day-appget-died-e9a5c96c8b22
- sneak 6y agoBrands can turn money into goodwill, given enough money, time, and skill. I don't think this is some fundamental shift in Microsoft or its values: simply a shift in their market positioning and brand value/identity. Their products are still proprietary spyware, designed to get as many people locked into the Windows (or now Azure) licensing ecosystem as possible. Even the best parts of VS Code, often cited as one of their best new releases, are either spyware or proprietary. Windows remains a tire fire. GitHub and NPM are prime examples of this concept that one can turn money into goodwill. I assume money also changed hands for the first-class support that Docker has for windows.
- toyg 6y ago> Do people still trash Microsoft? Microsoft is a big company. Some things it does will always be trashy - like fighting tooth and nails to keep Linux desktops and truly-open formats out of European public-service procurement. That's still going on, 20 years and 2 CEOs later, and will probably never stop, because screw public interest when there is so much money on the line! But sure, in some areas they behave better now. They had no choice, after losing a whole generation of developers and seeing their cash-cows (Windows, Office, and AD/Exchange) under siege from SaaS insurgents. I've still to see something where their efforts are not fundamentally tied to their immediate self-interest, though.
- mrmonkeyman 6y agoThe best people are always where the money is, not the morals. Wall street, defense, giant megacorps. I will trash them for it. It has nothing to do with being "competent".
- rcurry 6y agoSo true. There’s this funny line in one of Paul Graham’s essays where he says something like “making the wrong technology decision can doom your business - like choosing Windows in the 90s” I got such a kick out of that because I worked for CyberTrader in the 90s; we built our whole platform around Windows and wiped the floor with our competitors. We ended up the top day trading company in the US and were acquired by Charles Schwab for just shy of $500m. But at the time, you pit Windows NT with IOCP against anything else and it was game over in the low latency trading space.
- nikanj 6y agoReading the old NT debugging blogs and Raymond Chan’s stuff was very eye-opening. Microsoft has incredibly talented engineers ready to help Solve Problems, not just toss you the source code and wish you luck.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tenebrisalietum 6y agoCool, maybe they'll solve the problem of Teams freezing up constantly someday.
- webmobdev 6y agoDoesn't mean they don't deserve the criticism or thrash directed at them for their products or business practices.
- ByteJockey 6y agoMy problems with microsoft really aren't around their security practices (these days). It's more around the ads in the start menu, the telemetry they send, and their tendency to reset my telemetry settings around updates. I don't feel like I'm in full control when I'm using a computer running windows. Which, y'know, is probably fine for 95% of computer users, they want more of an appliance than a general computing experience.
- webmobdev 6y ago> I don't feel like I'm in full control when I'm using a computer running windows. Yes, they've started imitating macOs / ios and have even gone beyond what Apple does in blatantly turning Windows OS into a spyware.
- Daho0n 6y agoRunning an .exe in Windows on a slow internet connection doesn't slow down Windows,so they are not there yet.
- lukegb 6y agoIt does if it has to go through the Windows Defender check. Enough that sometimes I end up launching the same thing multiple times because I get gaslit into assuming I haven't launched it.
- samstave 6y ago>>> They were able to conduct a thorough investigation Prove that.
- dmtroyer 6y agoI mean, true they detected this but you don't know what you don't know...
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoThis does not change my perception of Microsoft either.