Comment by signal11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by signal11 | Hacker News Reader

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Not sure about Linux (and I have no inside info, just public sources), but around 2013-2014, the tech press was full of reports that Microsoft was making billions[1] from Android, by charging OEMs $5-15 per unit for patents Android allegedly violated.

This report[2] from October 2018 seems to indicate that Microsoft no longer does this:

> Ten to 15 years ago we were very focused on the competition between Linux and Windows,” says Microsoft’s chief IP counsel, Erich Andersen, in an interview with Yahoo Finance. “But today Microsoft is a very different company. With the rise of our Azure [cloud services] business, Microsoft has become one of the largest contributors to open source in the world. . . . We’re in a position where, as [CEO] Satya [Nadella] says, we love Linux. We love open source. That’s a big part of the future of our business.”

[1] https://google.com/search?q=microsoft+android+patent+fees

[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-may-relinquishing-b...

Anyone with first-hand knowledge care to comment?

> But today Microsoft is a very different company

Said the fox to the chickens. Come real close and let me tell you a story.

Pretty much the entire leadership from that era has cycled out. Ship of Theseus.

Is Microsoft still a 800lbs gorilla that does 800lbs gorilla things? Yes. But let's not pretend they employ the same strategies today that made them the bad guys at the turn of the millennium.

They were monsters for at least 20 years. It has been 6 since Ballmer left, and it takes a few years for an organization to start rebound from the personality of the previous boss.

6 years and a single CEO does not constitute a rebirth. When the next CEO is still doing the same thing, you can talk about what Microsoft is.

While you're stuck with your notions for the next 6 years or however long until you feel they need to behave, other people, including your competitors, get to enjoy the fruits of evaluating Microsoft for what it is now, not what it was.

Reminds me of when Visual Studio Code came out and some people denied themselves of what would end up being one of the best editors to come out in a while just because they refused to use something with such a Microsoft-ey name...

We are in a world where there are so many options there aren't enough hours in the day to keep up with them all. Do you know why we're in this world? We are in this world because Microsoft stumbled.

They aren't just a large company that people have an old grudge against. They're very specifically the people who kept us from having the option to not consider a particular company and still have any reasonable options at all.

I'm not even going to bother pointing out the dramatization here...

Because this is all tangential to the fact that in a world that now moves one financial quarter at a time, six years is a lifetime.

MS's direction has been consistent and it's been good. If you're waiting for another six years to let MS prove themselves, it's on you, but again, plenty of other people will reap the benefits of not doing so

> They were monsters for at least 20 years

Microsoft is a company run by people, and those people have changed (the "they" you mentioned). Gates & Balmer are now nothing more than shareholders (Gates stepped down from the board in March this year). Believe it or not, it's people that determine how a company is run and the people running Microsoft today are not the people that were running it in the 80s & 90s.

Large business units with billions in revenue take years to change direction, and we've seen that clearly happen under Nadella.

I read MiniMSFT while they were active in the 00's. The nastiness we saw continued layers down the chain of command. It wasn't just a despot at the wheel, everyone in the bus was singing road trip songs.

I will admit that it says something that Satya was able to survive inside of Microsoft during the worst parts of this, but I don't know if that says more about how amazing Satya is, or that the internal toxicity is over-reported. We all know multiple people who have reported horrible things about Amazon too, and yet there are still people who enjoy working there.

Everyone has their own version of the truth, but once bitten twice shy, and I've lost count of the bite marks. Have your truth, just keep it outside of arm's reach of my nose, thank you.

> I read MiniMSFT

And I'm sure it had zero benefit from exaggerating stories to increase readership. I've worked at companies that have been the ire of the press, and know first hand it's many degrees separated from reality.

> It wasn't just a despot at the wheel

Except it was. We've seen this consistently in leadership, including just recently WeWork, Uber and the U.S. government. When a nasty person is at top, it legitimizes nasty people everywhere else.

> We all know multiple people who have reported horrible things about Amazon too,

No, we don't actually know them. We read some news stories specifically centered around warehousing and distribution as Amazon grew from 34,000 employees in 2010 to over 1,000,000 in 2020.

The complaints about Amazon weren't all centered around warehousing and distribution. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...

The people that are the leaders there today chose to work for exactly that company. That says a lot about their ethics.

> That says a lot about their ethics

This is rhetoric. Microsoft wasn't committing genocide, it just abused capitalism.

I think you need to brush up on what ethics means. It goes a lot further than whether or not you're committing genocide, though, obviously if and when you do you are ethically and morally utterly bankrupt. But this is not a binary affair.

Taking jabs at people that took jobs at Microsoft because you have a grudge says more about you than them. Microsoft never did anything so horrible that someone should have their ethics called into question for working there. Such poor taste.

With all your comments in this thread I think you're protesting a bit much.

> But let's not pretend they employ the same strategies today that made them the bad guys at the turn of the millennium.

Yeah, but did they decide to stop shooting, or did they just run out of ammunition?

They chose a different gun, I think. If you told me in 2000 that, 20 years on, Microsoft would be the world #2 in cloud (or utility computing, a concept Sun really tried to popularize in the 90s) computing and IBM would be an also-ran, I’d have laughed at you.

(I guess the news that a bookseller was the world #1 in cloud computing would be even more of a shock.)

It's fair to wonder what is truly motivating Microsoft executives, but you can follow the money fairly easily.

In their quarterly earnings reports you can see that about 1/3 of their revenue is from "more personal computing."[0] We know that this category includes Windows licensing, devices (Surface, etc), gaming, and search. About $11 billion per quarter, on average.

They don't neatly break this down in their report, as far as I can see, but some other internet sleuths have made educated guesses based on things that are directly reported. As far as anyone can guess, Windows is no more than 10-15% of Microsoft revenue.

It seems fairly obvious to me that Windows is no longer the backbone of Microsoft. 10-15% still represents billions of dollars, but I think Microsoft would be perfectly content to replace all of that Windows revenue with O365 licenses or Azure billings.

[0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q1...

I agree, that despite it not being the future of the company, Windows and controlling the desktop is still a pretty bit contributor to the company's valuation. It would be pretty bad for MSFT if Windows was vaporized tomorrow.

But I think Microsoft is much less paranoid, simply because desktop is a much less attractive target. It's good owning it today, but why would any potential competitor go to war to establish a beachhead in a slowly dying market? Certainly the other big tech companies are much more potentially threatening to MS today. Nobody in 1999 could hit as hard as Google, Amazon, Apple or even Facebook could today.

But why would they even bother? Defending Windows is like Britain worrying about defending Gibraltar. It's still somewhat strategically important, but much less so than in the past. Because of that legacy, it's already defended way past the point of its value to any rational adversary.

> Windows is no more than 10-15% of Microsoft revenue.

Microsoft has more or less abolished Windows as a separate business unit.

https://www.ft.com/content/5bf8b952-3396-11e8-b5bf-23cb17fd1...

I can't speak to strategy or whether Microsoft is "nicer" now, but speaking to the day to day as a grunt in the organization: Linux is getting openly embraced. Depending on the context, open source and Linux based solutions are often considered viable choices.

The patent on FAT is well known and no secret. I believe the main thing that changed was the patents expired.

aiui it was VFAT.

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