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> MS’s great work with VS Code Yeah, there are effectively two Microsofts. The dev/tooling MS is awesome. VS Code is great, .NET is unsexy but very solid, thei

• romwell 5y ago
  >One of the saddest things I've ever seen is how they decided to put ads on the Solitaire app. That's why I still run the Windows 3.11 Solitaire. Yay backwards compatibility, it sill works on Win 10 :D
  • coldacid 5y ago
    You too? Thank goodness for winevdm on Windows!
    • romwell 5y ago
      Yup! And the original deck design by Susan Kare is still the best one ever.
• crrrw40 5y ago
  So true, i totally agree with the UX degradation point.
• diggan 5y ago
  > Yeah, there are effectively two Microsofts. The dev/tooling MS is awesome. VS Code is great, .NET is unsexy but very solid, their recent efforts on Python are commendable, I've also heard good things about Azure. The same goes for lots of organizations, which makes it really hard to vote with your attention, time and money. Facebook is another example. Yes, React was really cool when it launched, and great innovation comes from the Facebook engineering team. But is it worth supporting their engineering team when at large, the organization seems to contribute more bad to world than good? I'm torn myself and not sure what to think anymore. Same applies to Microsoft. I really want to like the new Microsoft, but it's hard to just forget the past and see past issues like this, and it makes my view on the rest of their tooling to be less favorable.
  • ebawho44 5y ago
    How does using react support facebook though?
    • nanis 5y ago
      By providing Facebook with a "reserve army of developers trained in and willing to use the framework they use to build their stuff".
      • kreeben 5y ago
        Does it still hold true, that by using React or any other tech that comes out of Facebook, you relinquish your right to sue them?
        • __s 5y ago
          No, it's since become MIT https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/f320ef88f51fbdc5aba38bdf07108678a84f7339/LICENSE https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/f320ef88f51fbdc5aba38...
    • ethagnawl 5y ago
      At the very least, it results in people filing bug reports and feature requests which may in turn result in their products being more reliable, faster, etc. I don't know what their policy on accepting code contributions from third parties is, but the prospective value of those contributions should speak for itself.
  • skeeter2020 5y ago
    The React team is like 7 people; I'm not sure that qualifies as a seperate organization within Facebook, since the rest of their 1000's of developers are just using React like everyone else. While I do run windows at home you can easily enjoy the developer-centric Microsoft without enaging with the consumer side.
    • 5y ago
• esics6A 5y ago
  This is true and Microsoft is known to be a company that has many product groups that are often in direct conflict with each other. Cloud Services is the "cool" Microsoft and their cloud services are now the biggest profit center for them. They have Azure, developer tools and contribute a huge amount to the overall open-source world. The majority of their customers run Linux workloads and things like Kubernetes. Cloud folks at Microsoft don't care if you run Linux or MacOS as long as you run your web apps on Azure that's all they care about and they try to make it as easy as possible. These are the guys that developed Microsoft's first internal Linux distribution. Satya Nadella comes from the Cloud/Azure part of the business. That's why Microsoft has been doing some really innovative and smart choices lately under his leadership. The Windows group are the luddites at Microsoft. Instead of open-sourcing Windows and treating it as open technology something the Cloud group would love they still jealously guard it as proprietary. They only put WSL (Windows Subystem Linux) because the Cloud group wanted it. Windows group is living in the 1990's and still thinks you can make money on a desktop operating system. They put ads and use dark patterns because they're desperate to show that Windows can still make money. Their CEO is now one of the Cloud guys and for them that sucks.
  • flyinghamster 5y ago
    Maybe I'm overly paranoid (but considering Microsoft's behavior over the past twenty years, it would be in character), I can't help but think that WSL is a stalking horse for forbidding Linux from bare metal booting on consumer PCs. Revoke the Linux distro UEFI keys for "reasons" and there you have it.
    • pigbearpig 5y ago
      Yeah, I think you're being overly paranoid.
    • vbezhenar 5y ago
      Those fears will be reasonable when most computers will not allow disabling Secure boot. Right now that's not the case for x86.
• squarefoot 5y ago
  > Yeah, there are effectively two Microsofts. Nope, there's only one Microsoft, and it's clever enough to know that they had to learn to wear the Jazz hat when dealing with the oldies and the Punk Rock one with the youngsters.
• tsm 5y ago
  On every Windows computer I ever had, from 3 to XP, none of whose hardware was great even by the standards of the day, Solitaire opened instantly and was maximally responsive and crisply animated. They changed things in Vista, I think, which slowed it down by was basically fine. But the new one ("Microsoft Solitaire Collection") takes forever to open, requires multiple clicks to get a game going, lags, has ads, and is such a dumpster fire that one of the few joys I had in using my parents' computer when visiting them is now gone.
  • stonemetal12 5y ago
    In 3, mine sweeper and solitaire where added to teach people how to use a mouse. Ads, slow loading and what not would have gotten in the way of doing their jobs. Once computers (especially windows) became ubiquitous they had to pay for themselves since user training wasn't picking up the bill anymore .
  • flatiron 5y ago
    https://archive.org/details/ms_solitaire_windows_xp https://archive.org/details/ms_solitaire_windows_xp
  • raxxorrax 5y ago
    Yeah, but that solitaire didn't even cloud. Would probably be faster if any other programs actually used their newer APIs. I really think burning people with WPF and introducing their shitty store was what many devs drove away. Wasn't really a C# (good language and good APIs in my opinion) guy for too long, but around the time Windows 8 was released, I left for greener pastures and didn't look back very often.
  • starik36 5y ago
    I think you might be just remembering the good times and forgetting the bad. When I first upgraded my box to XP, things weren't very snappy. Even Notepad took a second to open. The OS definitely required more RAM and CPU power than its predecessors. Despite this horrible injustice, you still visit your parents, right? :)
    • 5y ago
• sundaeofshock 5y ago
  Just finished a major deployment and learned that Azure is a clown show. It has incomplete documentation, automation is a joke, and it has a horrible IaC implementation. They also use security to up-sell; secure versions of various services are only available in higher cost tiers. We are paying thousands/month in azure; the equivalent deployment in AWS would be a fraction of the cost. Azure is a total ripoff and I will never use it again.
  • dotancohen 5y ago
    You're going to have to be more specific than that. I'm firmly in the AWS camp but I've heard nothing but praise for Azure from people I trust.
    • ixfo 5y ago
      Not OP but it very much depends on which bit of Azure you're using. Some bits are very polished and work great, some are a dumpster fire.
  • 0des 5y ago
    I noticed some parts of this as well. I just finished AZ104 and 80% of it amounts to "here is how you and your role-based subordinates can spend more money on these product offerings"
• coliveira 5y ago
  No, there is just one MS. They try to do nice things for developers because they need mindshare. A developer chained to .NET and VS Code is a fantastic asset for them. But their goal is always to extinguish outside competition.
• WithinReason 5y ago
  So this organizational chart is accurate? https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
• franga2000 5y ago
  I was truly starting to believe MS had changed seeing their work with vscode, but they have let me down even there. All of their recent work has been locking it down more and more - all of the remote development extensions are closed-source, so is live share and most shockingly, their new Python language server.
• flightless 5y ago
  There are more like 50 different Microsofts, one for each major product. My theory is that there are still some old Ballmer loyalists left over running some of these products. Dark UX is not what Satya wants.
  • prepend 5y ago
    > Dark UX is not what Satya wants. And yet here we are. I think it’s more likely that Satya wants a perception that he doesn’t want Dark UX and then use it everywhere. Windows and azure is full of this stuff and it doesn’t make sense that people are secretly going against the CEO’s vision and direction. I don’t expect CEO micromanagement, but if Satya wanted a positive user experience seriously, then the solitaire PM wouldn’t have added ads or at least would have removed them after the backlash. I think Microsoft has really improved (eg, WSL, vscode, GitHub) but think it’s just PR about how great everything is supposed to be. It’s like the Amazon ads that show happy workers getting degrees and stuff. I’m glad those things are happening but it’s just PR.
• mathattack 5y ago
  This is actually a feature of MSFT, and not a bug. (I’m not a MSFT apologist, and have had my issues with them too) They could have kept on the Ballmer path and been a Windows and Office company forever, milking the existing base. That path would have likely turned them into IBM. Less relevance, less R and D, and tons of share buybacks. Instead they bet the farm on emerging computing models. They pulled their money and top talent from the legacy products, and moved them into the new world. So the newer stuff is improving (Azure isn’t AWS but it’s a credible #2) and the old products lag. That’s just a result of the priority decision. They had the courage to starve their cash cow.
• camgunz 5y ago
  I mostly agree with you, but I'd point out that I think we apply different standards to cloud products than we do desktop products. Cloud lock-in is huge, and we're very OK with it--I think as engineers we respect the complexity of tackling it. Desktop lock-in super irritates us, but it's not really different. Lock-in exists both on the desktop and in the cloud (and all kinds of other places in tech) because that's what the business incentives are. It's a race to the bottom and no company can resist it and still have shareholders. We need regulation to make them knock it off.
  • kodah 5y ago
    Regulation may help, but companies can blame themselves for cloud lock-in, not shareholders, engineers, or complexity. Prior to being a SWE or SRE-SE I worked in Network Engineering. Seeing how most companies ran their DCs and treated the devs that were required to use them was illuminating. Everything was a "service desk" staffed with generally ticket handlers. It took ages for them to get things done, and you were almost always hunting for the person on the desk that just "got things done". I worked nights and my engineering line would get clear day-time-appropriate requests at nights because the most qualified engineers were in school and ended up on the night shift. Compute scheduling was no different. You now have APIs for both of these jobs. My point being that the real innovation that made developers turn to the cloud was APIs. All these "availability zones" didn't exist in most company DCs, usually someone had a lever to throw to switch DCs at best, and even then they really weren't used. Downtime was expected. Those very same APIs could've been made by a coalition of those small and medium companies using the same technique Google used with Kubernetes: open source. By the time such a project started, it was already too late, and public clouds had built what they'd built. Not having open hardware also contributed to the problem, but again, nothing a coalition couldn't overcome.
• HeavyStorm 5y ago
  > unsexy Not trying to start a flame war, but I'm triggered. Dotnet is probably the most polished, most modern language out there, and I have no idea what would you call sexy... Maybe all quirks with javascript or the mess that python is with special functions and the like?
  • qsort 5y ago
    > Not trying to start a flame war, but I'm triggered. Please untrigger yourself :) I probably used the wrong word, but I agree. What I meant is that the entire .NET platform is very solid even though it doesn't get a lot of mindshare. Wasn't meant as a putdown of C#.
    • tomnipotent 5y ago
      > it doesn't get a lot of mindshare It's a non-trivial percentage of the ~25M professional programmers in the world. It has plenty of mindshare, just not within the communities that feed the HN userbase.
• lostgame 5y ago
  …there are…ADS in fucking Solitaire?! If there was a last straw to me ever using Windows again - I think that info was all I needed. That’s my final nail in the coffin. It might sound dramatic - but it literally - - clearly - shows that there is no intention on providing value to customers with their software anymore, whatsoever. It’s only going to get worse from here, and I for one am glad I already bailed. …damn, but really? That hurts my childhood a bit. I have distinct memories of Solitaire from the 3.11 days. :( Damn. :(
• stevage 5y ago
  You didn't mention WSL. I recently switched to windows from 10 years developing on MacOS and am blown away by how well it works.