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...Microsoft in true Microsoft form of moving ever so slowly and doing it over a generation of people as not to spook them has been transitioning their customer
by onion2k 4y ago
...Microsoft in true Microsoft form of moving ever so slowly and doing it over a generation of people as not to spook them has been transitioning their customer base into consumers of services offered by Microsoft.
A company like Microsoft is changing the software industry by moving developers to a SaaS model, and articles like this suggest this is a terrible thing because we're losing control over what we do, they're is mining all our data, and locking us in to their platform.
There's an amusing irony that articles like this get posted to HN. This is the exact strategy that we would celebrate any HN startup for cleverly 'disrupting' any other industry - when someone launches a startup to make farming or shipping more efficient through killing off old paper based work flows, improving SaaS tools, giving customers insights through ML over millions of pieces of data, and also quietly sells those insights to boost revenue and locking customers in by making it hard to export their data, HN loves that. Do it in the software industry though and the comments are a lot less positive.
- eberkund 4y agoI guess because software developer types loving being the ones doing that to others but hate when they are the ones it is done to?
- llbeansandrice 4y agoAnti-competitive for me but not for thee
- xahrepap 4y agoTo be fair, I think it's a lot different to see a startup disrupt a market, than to see one of the biggest companies of all time do it. Anti-competitive behaviors from a behemoth are scary. From a startup? I mean... what can they do? Usually nothing. So it's kind of fun seeing the underdog make some noise!
- xwolfi 4y agoYou comingle HN and Ycombinator maybe? I dislike VCs and startup culture while I work in a 150yo bank ... I still like HN and shit on the model you described.
- onion2k 4y agoI dislike VCs and startup culture.. I suspect you are quite unusual in the demographics of HN readers then. while I work in a 150yo bank I'm British so I think 150 year old banks are quite new.
- xwolfi 4y agoAhahah you know how it goes, they split and they merge, and you need to draw the line somewhere. And I think HN is now near as ubiquitous as StackOverflow among programmers as a source of IT news or as a forums on stuff that concern us all. Why should we like venture capitalists ? The people I met who had to deal with them weren't too happy abt their deal with the devil, it's not like it always works out 's
- denimnerd42 4y agothe ones praising that kind of SaaS product are more likely to be the ones responding "Eh, whatever" in here. I would never want my company's business model to be reliant on a SaaS product.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nine_k 4y agoDo we even visit the same HN site? The HN crowd i'm used to loves open source, self-hosting, prefers privacy, frowns upon the prevalence of subscription-based SaaS, and yearns for the times when the internet was less laden with advertising and attempts to make a quick buck. Maybe you mistake HN for Y Combinator, the company that runs it? I'd say that Y Combinator is picky, relative to other VCs, and I don't remember hearing about any sleazy business they'd be backing, unlike, sadly, some other well-known VC companies. So I'm sort of at a loss.
- systemvoltage 4y agoA key distinction: We all want basic libraries, fundamental tools, the building blocks, dev frameworks; the construction materials of software to be free and open source. The SaaS-biz is orthogonal to that in that it is the end product created by aforementioned easy-to-access, robust and cheap tooling. The latter can be a great subscription based business, creating enormous value for the world. So the startup engine is getting healthier and HN's community takes are pretty much inline with that goal.
- georgia_peach 4y agoIn the software biz, where one day--Allah willing--we may find ourselves in direct/indirect competition with Microsoft, integrating one of their data probes into the heart of the business does not seem like the best move. VSCode! It has electrolytes!
- i_am_toaster 4y agoHN posters don’t unanimously agree on loving or hating anything. Stop trying to stir up drama.