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Comment by derek_kanjus | Hacker News Reader

What bothers me about people bringing Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is how they never mention how all the big software companies do this. For example, how many nice JavaScript features are in Google Chrome that aren't anywhere close to real standards? But when anyone but Microsoft does it they're just pushing the industry forward, not out to stab you in the back.

Let's not call it Embrace, Extend, Extinguish until we see the Extend & Extinguish. Microsoft is a very different company than it used to be.

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I'm hopeful that this will lead towards greater unification and innovation, but I can see why people are more likely to bring up "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" when Microsoft does something compared to when other companies do. The difference is that Microsoft is the one who internally coined the term and used it to describe their strategies. It was a conscious and explicitly stated strategy rather than an unspoken side benefit.

You could certainly say that none of that matters and what we should care about is the actual actions that each company makes, but I can definitely see how people would read more intent into things like this when Microsoft does it compared to other companies.

The difference is, Chromium and V8 are open source. JScript and J/Direct were not.

Apple took KHTML and when it started to fail, forked it into WebKit. Google took WebKit and when it started to fail, forked it into Blink.

When IE6 started to fail, the whole industry suffered. (And is now suffering again as Apple refuses to allow any other rendering engine but their failing WebKit port on iOS.)

> Microsoft is a very different company than it used to be.

Based on what, exactly? That they opened part of .NET, except that it's only the web stack, and not the part everyone wants (WinForms)? That they released a reskinned version of the Atom editor? That they announced the release of a Linux version of SQL Server, except that it will be a simplified version, absent of the enterprise features? That they submitted C# to ECMA, as though this allowed anyone to port a realistic application to another platform, or that the world has any use for a closed-source language and compiler today? That they allow you to run Linux VM's in Azure, as though Azure could be competitive if they didn't?

Now this? I mean, sure, there are times I'm working in Visual Studio, and it would be convenient to use some shell commands like "cut" and "sort" without having to use Excel, but the implication of this announcement is that I'm going to do serious work with GNU tools under Windows? Like, I'm going to do Linux-type development work while being hamstrung by reboot every couple of days for the next someone-can-take-over-your-computer-by-looking-at-it-cross-eyed patch?

Maybe you haven't been in this business for 23 years, and haven't seen how many products Microsoft bought and spiked to make sure to keep their stranglehold on the ecosystem. (I'm still bitter about Groove.) Now Microsoft is on the precipice of being as irrelevant as the IBM they mocked 20 years ago, and these moves are only at attempt to extend their relevancy a little longer, but which don't actually mean anything.

You say Microsoft is different. If, by that, you mean that they're making a lot of moves that seem like desperate attempts to make people remember they exist in the post-PC era, then, yes, I agree. Until Microsoft releases Office and Exchange for Linux, they will never been seen as anything other than Gates'/Ballmer's Microsoft in my eyes. Office suites are hardly important any more, and lots of companies are just using Google apps instead of Exchange and AD, but that's the kind of move they'd have to make for me to take their "Microsoft Loves Linux" campaign seriously.

Windows Forms is just a wrapper around the GUI parts of the Windows API. Even if they do open it it won't help anyone port Windows Forms to anything else, since the real display logic is implemented in the huge legacy codebase that is user32.dll, gdi32.dll and so forth.

Now, I would be glad if they open source WPF, which is very well designed GUI framework that could be great for cross platform apps, but it seems like they've kinda abandoned the XAML front. Even releasing existing code to open source takes resources, and Microsoft is not charity.

I'd say the same thing about porting Microsoft Office to Linux. Microsoft has, in fact, released Office apps for Android, and they would definitely rush to release office for desktop Linux if it had a non-negligible number of users. Maybe next year - after all 2017 is poised to be the year of the Linux desktop!

So Yeah, I think Microsoft has really changed. Of course it's all because they're not the market leader anymore and they need to survive! Yes, they can no longer succeed just by making a buggier version of tech X and pimping it on MSDN Magazine and have flocks of developers run to implement their latest version of COM++. So what? It doesn't make it any less real.

You should be suspicious about Microsoft's motive as much as I'm suspicious about Google or Apple or any other large company. But bringing up Embrace, Extend and Extinguish every time Microsoft does something makes you sound only a little less anachronistic than writing their name with a dollar sign.

Well, I didn't bring up EEE, and I agree that I don't think it's technically feasible to make WinForms available on other platforms. To clarify, I was just addressing the misconception of the announcement.

The year of the Linux desktop is the year that "the desktop" no longer matters. With all the smartphones and tablets, and single-board computers making embedded products, we're juuuust about there. ;-)

>Office suites are hardly important any more

A solid majority of the people on the day side of the planet who are looking at a computer right now are looking at an Excel or Word document.

MS Office has 1.2 billion users [0] (and that probably doesn't include unlicensed users). That's pretty important.

[0] http://news.microsoft.com/bythenumbers/planet-office

Well, maybe I'm taking a longer view than that. You know what those 1.2B people staring at Word and Excel are USING them for? Ad-hoc content management systems and data query systems, which they, then, store in Windows file systems, and send to everyone and their brother all over the company in email, duplicating the storage. They're using those applications because no one has come along to write a dead-simple web app to automate what they're using them for, and make it much easier to work with and share the data.

Over half of my 25-year career has been involved with making applications to actually address the business need that people were working AROUND with Word and Excel. I can't complain; it's been a pretty good deal. I'm doing 2 side projects to replace Excel sheets with Rails apps right now. But with more and more "apps" on smartphones and web sites, on the low end, and gargantuan cloud apps like Evernote and Google apps, this space is going to continue to shrink.

The thing that probably won't die is friggin' PowerPoint. If I had a nickel for every slide I've had to look at...

What JS features are chrome exclusive other than maybe a few ES6 features nobody else has implemented yet?

By different you mean they stopped using patent trolls to bully competition and make money out of Linux based software ? You mean they started to implement open formats ? Or do you mean they started to change their PR team so that now, we got a different image of them ?

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