4 ms·

> Microsoft no longer has the mental dominance among developers, or even a sufficiently significant minority of them, to be able to dictate an independently via

> Microsoft no longer has the mental dominance among developers, or even a sufficiently significant minority of them, to be able to dictate an independently viable culture; instead, they must appeal to the crowd to whom UNIX is the normal way of doing things. They don't among developers, but they do among system administrators. As far as I can tell, most corporations still run on the Microsoft stack (Windows/Exchange/Office/MS365), although there is some competition from Google.

jeroenhd 4y ago
This is true, and with MS Teams gaining popularity I think Microsoft has a significant "telecom" presence in the days of average users that cannot be ignored. However, unlike in the early 2000s, a lot of software works despite Windows rather than based on Windows. Microsoft's own software stack integrates with Windows directly most of the time, but if you need something Microsoft doesn't offer, the chances of that software using the specific MS APIs are significantly lower. Libraries like OpenSSL have replaced CryptoAPI in many places. Video decoding support is nice but why bother learning the MS API when you can just plug in FFMPEG. The Windows GUI API makes it possible to make incredibly fast, light-weight, and responsive applications, but why would you when Qt/Electron are right there? The .NET GUI ecosystem is the last developer space where I think Microsoft matters all that much, but even there they're losing the battle against team browsers-as-a-GUI-library. Had Microsoft won then Gmail would be running on Windows Server right now. Instead, Azure advertises support for Google's Kubernetes product when it comes to attracting customers. Between an entire generation growing up with Chromebooks, Apple's MDM slowly growing towards feature parity and Microsoft starting to move AD and other management features to the cloud, I don't know if the monopoly the MS stack holds over business will be around for all that long. With the way things developing, I think Excel (the world's most used programmable database that's not a database) will be the last standard MS will be able to use for staying relevant, and even LibreOffice is good enough to do most people's common Excel work these days.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > MS Teams gaining popularity The [mid sized, ~6000 employees] company I work for just switched last week to Teams from Slack. Teams sucks. The reason it is gaining popularity is that Microsoft basically makes it free for companies that are already using things like Office 365. Slack couldn't compete with that, and our IT folks don't care about the experience, they are being judged strictly on the dollars. Just add it to the very long list of reductions in quality of life we've been subjected to because productivity is difficult to quantify as dollars.
  - gumby 4y ago
    Microsoft’s customers are central IT, not the end users. This strategy is great and is why windows phone crushed apple’s attempt with that laughably keyboardless “i phone”. I expect the same level of success with Teams: users universally consider it shit, but they don’t pay the bill, do they?
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    I completely agree: Teams is bad. However, it's the best piece of software that does what it does. It's an unholy Office+Skype+MSN hybrid that integrates incredibly well with the systems many sysadmins already use. Chat seems to have been added as an afterthought with how many people report issues about notifications. GSuite has similar integration, but it's not as tight. It's also equally terrible at least, but in its own different ways. However, I'm not exactly optimistic about Slack either. The only good thing about it that I can name is that at least I can bridge it to Matrix easily. The frontends for Slack are so mediocre that I would consider running an internal XMPP/Matrix server before I would recommend Slack to anyone. I'd rather have Teams if I had to make a choice between the two.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      There are a couple things that Teams hurts my feelings on, coming recently from Slack. The biggest one, by far, is the terrible Outlook meeting handling. We had a Slack plugin that would reliably tell me about meetings before they started, give me a link to go directly to the zoom call, notify me instantly when I was invited to a new meeting and let me decide on the spot if I wanted to decline or accept. All within Slack. Great for portability. The other one is notifications. I'm on a Mac, and I have no idea why Teams can't make basic notifications work. Slack would do the red dot on the icon for non-urgent notifications, and then bounce the icon for DMs and mentions. Teams will make a noise, but the majority of the time it will not reliably even put a notification dot on the icon, much less bounce it. Pretty sure it's because I have two instances of Teams running on different computers, so it gets confused. I'm back to missing meetings sometimes, unfortunately, because Outlook has always been hit-or miss for me on meeting reminders. It does not help that I have a 49 inch screen so the little pop-up is way off to the right. When I'm focused, I can miss that for many minutes. And even when I do look in Teams for an Outlook meeting, it actually presents the URL for the zoom meeting as plain text, not clickable. Sigh. Such a terrible user experience. Slack has warts, too, but Teams feels like state of the art from about 10 years ago.
- miohtama 4y ago
  Microsoft is about to get slapped on bundling its Teams https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-european-union-antitrust-video-calls-software-giant/ https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-european-union-ant...

jeroenhd 4y ago

This is true, and with MS Teams gaining popularity I think Microsoft has a significant "telecom" presence in the days of average users that cannot be ignored. However, unlike in the early 2000s, a lot of software works despite Windows rather than based on Windows. Microsoft's own software stack integrates with Windows directly most of the time, but if you need something Microsoft doesn't offer, the chances of that software using the specific MS APIs are significantly lower. Libraries like OpenSSL have replaced CryptoAPI in many places. Video decoding support is nice but why bother learning the MS API when you can just plug in FFMPEG. The Windows GUI API makes it possible to make incredibly fast, light-weight, and responsive applications, but why would you when Qt/Electron are right there? The .NET GUI ecosystem is the last developer space where I think Microsoft matters all that much, but even there they're losing the battle against team browsers-as-a-GUI-library. Had Microsoft won then Gmail would be running on Windows Server right now. Instead, Azure advertises support for Google's Kubernetes product when it comes to attracting customers. Between an entire generation growing up with Chromebooks, Apple's MDM slowly growing towards feature parity and Microsoft starting to move AD and other management features to the cloud, I don't know if the monopoly the MS stack holds over business will be around for all that long. With the way things developing, I think Excel (the world's most used programmable database that's not a database) will be the last standard MS will be able to use for staying relevant, and even LibreOffice is good enough to do most people's common Excel work these days.

rootusrootus 4y ago
> MS Teams gaining popularity The [mid sized, ~6000 employees] company I work for just switched last week to Teams from Slack. Teams sucks. The reason it is gaining popularity is that Microsoft basically makes it free for companies that are already using things like Office 365. Slack couldn't compete with that, and our IT folks don't care about the experience, they are being judged strictly on the dollars. Just add it to the very long list of reductions in quality of life we've been subjected to because productivity is difficult to quantify as dollars.
- gumby 4y ago
  Microsoft’s customers are central IT, not the end users. This strategy is great and is why windows phone crushed apple’s attempt with that laughably keyboardless “i phone”. I expect the same level of success with Teams: users universally consider it shit, but they don’t pay the bill, do they?
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  I completely agree: Teams is bad. However, it's the best piece of software that does what it does. It's an unholy Office+Skype+MSN hybrid that integrates incredibly well with the systems many sysadmins already use. Chat seems to have been added as an afterthought with how many people report issues about notifications. GSuite has similar integration, but it's not as tight. It's also equally terrible at least, but in its own different ways. However, I'm not exactly optimistic about Slack either. The only good thing about it that I can name is that at least I can bridge it to Matrix easily. The frontends for Slack are so mediocre that I would consider running an internal XMPP/Matrix server before I would recommend Slack to anyone. I'd rather have Teams if I had to make a choice between the two.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    There are a couple things that Teams hurts my feelings on, coming recently from Slack. The biggest one, by far, is the terrible Outlook meeting handling. We had a Slack plugin that would reliably tell me about meetings before they started, give me a link to go directly to the zoom call, notify me instantly when I was invited to a new meeting and let me decide on the spot if I wanted to decline or accept. All within Slack. Great for portability. The other one is notifications. I'm on a Mac, and I have no idea why Teams can't make basic notifications work. Slack would do the red dot on the icon for non-urgent notifications, and then bounce the icon for DMs and mentions. Teams will make a noise, but the majority of the time it will not reliably even put a notification dot on the icon, much less bounce it. Pretty sure it's because I have two instances of Teams running on different computers, so it gets confused. I'm back to missing meetings sometimes, unfortunately, because Outlook has always been hit-or miss for me on meeting reminders. It does not help that I have a 49 inch screen so the little pop-up is way off to the right. When I'm focused, I can miss that for many minutes. And even when I do look in Teams for an Outlook meeting, it actually presents the URL for the zoom meeting as plain text, not clickable. Sigh. Such a terrible user experience. Slack has warts, too, but Teams feels like state of the art from about 10 years ago.
miohtama 4y ago
Microsoft is about to get slapped on bundling its Teams https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-european-union-antitrust-video-calls-software-giant/ https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-european-union-ant...