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Comment by ryanSrich | Hacker News Reader

I guess I'm old enough to only ever know this side of MSFT. I see them getting positive reviews (for various different products) here on HN. But stories like yours is what I think of when I hear the word Microsoft thrown around at work. It's a company to be avoided at all costs.

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Same here. Microsoft acts like an ex that wants you to believe they’ve changed but you always regret trusting them. Windows still has a lot of crap and actually gotten worse in a few ways (like the spyware and ads).

Windows is basically a glorified games console UI for me now but thanks to my actual consoles and VM-able games I don’t really miss Windows at all.

I had not used anything by Microsoft for 10 years ago until they bought GitHub. Fuck.

> Microsoft acts like an ex that wants you to believe they’ve changed but you always regret trusting them

This is the most apt analogy I've yet seen. I went "back" to Microsoft in the mid 2010s right around the time they started gaining a reputation for sucking less. Big mistake. But at least it gave me enough perspective to realize that the competing non-microsoft products and OSes (even the FOSS ones!) really aren't lacking as much as you'd expect.

Microsoft OSS stuff is generally good, VSCode, .NET Core and that ecosystem. The enterprise stuff (SFB, Sharepoint, AD, etc.) is a pile of garbage I wouldn't touch unless my life depended on it.

^that If you told me that MSFT championing OSS space ten years ago, I would have assumed that you were trolling.

With the acquisition of Github and NPM, MSFT might just be the new ally of the open source movement.

Acquiring everything doesn't make it an ally, merely an owner or dictator of policy.

Buying things up means monetising them aggressively (after all, that is what acquisition is for). This is the opposite of what an ally would do, it is an impending sign of corporate oppression. Give it a few years.

Oh, yes, Share point, the worst nightmare when I worked in a big corp years ago. I wonder if there are really some sort of experts that understand how does it supposed to work?

There is a reason it is called "Scarepoint," even internally.

I remember the first time I was shown a SharePoint

"This is what we use to keep track all purchase orders! It's GRRREEEAT!"

Neat, so it's a big Excel spreadsheet we all use at the same time? I can get into—hang on, some of this stuff doesn't have a da—should I worry about—are 'Michel' and 'Michell' the same—what about 'Msh', and why are her rows purple?

"Old, all old. If someone from lab needs something, they will tell you."

But I still gotta—

"Everything in the SharePoint."

Sharepoint has tortured people 17 years and still it sucks. I had unfortunate privilege back in 2003 to be involved to many "intranet" projects to customize the Sharepoint to customers needs. That was horrible from the technical point of view.

By enough marketing power you can sell almost anything.

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