Comment by chriswwweb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chriswwweb | Hacker News Reader

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As far as I'm aware of, Microsoft is not even trying to put their own services forward. For example neither Github nor Azure are the defaults in VSCode. Go to the source control section and use what ever source control tool you want, VSCode does not even suggest you use Github. They also don't bundle extensions like LiveShare with VSCode, by including it into the VSCode installer they distribute on their own website.

This is why I disagree with your claim that Microsoft is giving away VSCode away for free to promote their own proprietary tools. You can shame Microsoft for trying to improve their image by making VSCode, Typescript, ... opensource. To me this is totally different from bundling your own Browser into an operating system to increase artificially your market share, you can't compare the two.

There is nothing bad about not blindly trusting a big corporation like Microsoft, but I dislike it when people are so desperate to blame Microsoft for mistakes it did in the past, that they write articles that are (deliberately?) misleading. In this case, by saying parts of VSCode are opensource when it is just some extensions. This is putting VSCode on a pedestal with Chrome, but the comparaison is all wrong, Chrome includes lots of proprietary parts, while chromium is the opensource variant you can build yourself, but for VSCode this is completely different as the version distributed on the Microsoft website doesn't include anything besides the opensource code from Github repository.

> but I dislike it when people are so desperate to blame Microsoft for mistakes it did in the past

I find it a bit weird when people anthropomorphize corporations and feel bad for/protective of them.

And let's be honest, we're not talking about "mistakes", we're talking about a decades-long strategy which was methodically executed to cultivate good will, and then take advantage of it to destroy competitors.

Conversely, I find it a bit weird when people anthropomorphize corporations as if they have personalities and traits that somehow live beyond an almost 100% turnover in staff and senior management changes.

The MS of today isn’t the MS of the 90s. That’s not to say they’re virtuous and wonderful today, just that banging on about the past doesn’t really feel relevant.

> I find it a bit weird when people anthropomorphize corporations as if they have personalities and traits that somehow live beyond an almost 100% turnover in staff and senior management changes.

Companies definitely have personalities and traits that last longer than their constituent members, that's what's called a culture. Just like a nation has defining features that will still be around when every single currently living member is dead, so have companies. In particular old, large ones.

That's not to say that they can't change, and Microsoft definitely has changed since the 90s, but the past is not irrelevant.

I've observed that people in my environment that used to not like Microsoft still don't today while they are completely oblivious to the conduct of Google, Facebook or Amazon at the same time.

I see it as reminder to frequently check whether my opinions on different things are still valid.

> 100% turnover in staff and senior management

So, I just checked https://news.microsoft.com/leadership/. The vast majority of the people there joined Microsoft in the 80s or 90s. Two or three in the early 2000, and one after 2010. For one person it was unclear when they joined.

So, an overwhelming majority of the senior management were perfectly happy to work for the "MS of the 90s". Therefore, it's hard to see that they'd be particularly uncomfortable with the ethics of the "MS of the 90s".

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