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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Let me introduce you to Steve Ballmer, the CEO before the current one, Satya Nadella:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_...

He was CEO of Microsoft until 2014, that is, 6 years ago.

Microsoft changed strategies because they tried everything they possible could to counter open source and Linux and lost. Now they are forced to play nice.

Being forced to be nice is not the same as being nice out of altruism.

If at any moment becoming jerks gives them more shareholder value they will become jerks again.

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They _lost_?

They have a 1.36 trillion USD Market cap (today). That's more than Apple's 1.29 trillion USD Market cap. It's hilarious how people on hacker news live in this bubble where Microsoft has faded away into irrelevance.

And they're also very good. I'm running Windows 10 right now on a dual-monitor, dual NVidia GPU, dual Xeon system and everything "just works."

Saying they "lost" in this context means they got to a point where it was clear capitulation to open source was the obvious play.

> dual-monitor, dual NVidia GPU

Not exactly thanks to Microsoft.

To their credit, stability of such a setup might be facilitated by Windows' fine display driver model (WDDM).

You can't do it on a Mac (unless you want to run two non-supported graphics cards sharing 4 lanes on a Thunderbold/USB-C connector instead of each having their own x16 PCIe connection)

As if you could not do that on another OS.

You can use Nvidia GPUs in SLI mode in Linux and BSD too. I am using an Nvidia GPU right now and I am not using Windows, and "everything just works" too, no terminals involved. Are you implying that it's not possible to do this outside Windows?

How much of that market capitalization comes from running a de-facto monopoly of office suites for decades? As a consumer, it's hard to see how corporations like Microsoft push governments around the world to buy licenses in bulk because there are no alternatives.

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