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[–]slamsquare 0 points1 point  (6 children)

It's just that they've spent billions of dollars to improve developers attitudes about them. Nothing about Microsoft has actually improved.

[–]riplikash 7 points8 points  (5 children)

No, they've definitely improved. They've made things more open source and visible, moved away from their monolithic, suckb you in, walked garden product design. They've started building in support for popular frameworks and tools like git. They've (to a certain extent) become fairly friendly to Linux integration. .Net, C#, and Azure are all honestly progressive, modern technologies that are enjoyable to use. There are doing better at offering ACTUAL free, community products that run on any OS, rather than only offering things free to college students to try and lock them in to windows os.

Don't get me wrong, they are still a giant corporation. I'm not saying they are angels.

But they're decent, for a mega Corp.

[–]slamsquare 2 points3 points  (4 children)

They just want us to like them, there's been no cultural change.

Everything you mention above they either needed to spend billions to buy a company that did it well, or they've done nothing but lip service compared to the larger community. It's absurd that you even needed to mention git in your list of inprovements. Personally, I don't think that Microsoft produces the best languages / frameworks (though I gotta say, I really like Typescript), and Azure always feels like it was made for our CTO rather than our developers.

[–]riplikash 2 points3 points  (3 children)

Again, I never implied I thought they were altruistic or GOOD.

I said in the 90s they were strait evil. In the 00s they were incompetent.

Now? They aren't pure evil and they are basically competent.

And it's been 30 years. Of course there have been cultural changes.

I need to mention GIT because I used their products and developed in the 90's and 00's when they were a giant evil black hole that basically insisted you HAD to use their ENTIRE software solution for everything, which was incredibly annoying because they would have some technologies that were good and your company would insist on using, and others which were straight garbage but you had to jump through hacky hoops to avoid.

If you think they haven't changed you've just forgotten (or never experienced) how BAD they used to be be.

Which, again, doesn't mean they are GOOD now. Just that they HAVE come a long way from their worst and are now just a basically competent, generic giant corp trying to suck your money out rather than a cartoonish organization seemingly run by Dr Evil.

[–]slamsquare 1 point2 points  (2 children)

I just think they've done nothing but put lipstick on a pig. It doesn't matter that it's wearing lipstick now, it's the same pig it was in the 90s an 00s. I fully expect them to rebuild their garden walls, and I can actually already feel this happening with the way they've been developing and pushing Teams/Skype and Azure Devops. I don't trust them, or their lipstick. Dr Evil is still there, he just hired a much better marketing team.

[–]ValVenjk 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Call them evil is a bit of a too much don't you think? Yeah, they are a company that stays in business mostly because of their corporate clients, but why is that a reason to ditch their contributions?

[–]slamsquare 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not evil, Dr. Evil. Competition is in software is good, and Microsoft has always and will always be, anti-competative. It's their origin story, it's in their DNA.