It's such an interesting contrast, for both ends of Microsoft to have reversed so heavily. The core consumer product once fought for betterment and improvement. "Where do you want to go today" was the slogan, suggesting users the helm, piloting their Personal Computer wherever they may. Oh, and it was a complete vision, totalizing. Microsoft did not care at all about open source, webdev, Linux, or broader ecosystem outside their castle.
The extent to which Microsoft has become the inverse in a mere decade of time is mind-boggling. Core products seem to lack the internal political strength to resist becoming naggy, crappy ad-ware, pushing other people's not your own desires. Teams and Office are the new core focus, asking, Where does your company want to go today? Teams has boss-ware pro-harassment features like letting people re-raise notifications at you every 5 minutes. This is expressly hostile anti-personal computing, is deeply mechanized corporate processes applied to people. But in terms of open source, Linux, webdev, the broader world of development & making things happen, Microsoft has completely reversed course, embracing Linux in the data center, releasing vast amounts of their systems as open source, providing & sponsoring copious onramps & cross-platform integrations, doing everything they can to make themselves appealing as a broad partner to the rest of the world, rather than Castle Microsoft, Windowsland.
Another thing that really bothers me about Microsoft is all the logging they do. They don't care about privacy at all.
They send me emails about how I haven't done an @mention to enough colleagues on teams this week or that I should spend less time in meetings. Besides this being total nonsense due to not taking into account the type of job I have (of course different jobs have different balances of meetings etc), I also don't want them looking over my shoulder.
I can turn off the emails but not the logging itself. They proclaim that admins can't see what I do but as I was an admin I was actually able to see a lot more than they let on :( Sure some of it was anonimised (not all) but it's easy to filter by criteria narrow enough that that doesn't matter.
They seem convinced that they are helping us manage by data etc but they totally ignore the fact that many people frown on this practice. In fact some of it is illegal in the EU especially countries like Germany. Microsoft is clearly in the church of "Data driven everything" but they should not impose this on customers IMO.
> But in terms of open source, Linux, webdev, the broader world of development & making things happen, Microsoft has completely reversed course, embracing
Embracing is the first step in dominating. Don’t fall for it.
I think there is a danger, but hubris has gotten them way up shits creek & their relevance was rapidly moving to 0. Desktop platform is dying, mobile barely matters and they have no presence there... Microsoft started playing with others because pretending they were the unilateral giant that could dictate terms to the world landed them on a small shrinking pathetic island. So help them gods if they try that shit again.
That said, I 100% absolutely endorse caution. The past couple years of behaviors are no indicator Microsoft will stay a societally-positive technological force. The corruption & darkness & manipulation could play back in at any moment. Already, Microsoft creating very special terms of service for things like VSCode Remote Development Plugin, having extremely fantastically proprietary implementations for the incredibly useful/popular/fantastic LiveShare are harbingers of the old ways, indicators that Microsoft just wants to force the door open, not really engage & participate.
For now though, I still overall think they are doing good work, pariticpating/not domineering (with some caveats). They learned very very very personally what happens when you violate the core rule of software, the most important maxim, not couched as such but absolutely of key vitality to computing: "Create more value than you capture." -Tim O'Reilly. Of course, all organizations forget the/their past. And I quake thinking of how many people pretend they are using/learning Linux while never seeing systemd, freedesktop, the greater Linux project: WSL is amazing but a dark & tragic small death for the real open source, & it's cheered on & fanboyed endlessly for enabling the blessed ignorant. You are right. Adopter beware.
The extent to which Microsoft has become the inverse in a mere decade of time is mind-boggling. Core products seem to lack the internal political strength to resist becoming naggy, crappy ad-ware, pushing other people's not your own desires. Teams and Office are the new core focus, asking, Where does your company want to go today? Teams has boss-ware pro-harassment features like letting people re-raise notifications at you every 5 minutes. This is expressly hostile anti-personal computing, is deeply mechanized corporate processes applied to people. But in terms of open source, Linux, webdev, the broader world of development & making things happen, Microsoft has completely reversed course, embracing Linux in the data center, releasing vast amounts of their systems as open source, providing & sponsoring copious onramps & cross-platform integrations, doing everything they can to make themselves appealing as a broad partner to the rest of the world, rather than Castle Microsoft, Windowsland.