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Comment by smitty1e | Hacker News Reader

> Maybe what we're seeing is not MS being awful, but executing a pretty normal open/premium type strategy

There is a difference of degree, if not kind.

It's one thing for a smaller vendor to offer an 80% solution for free, and 20% enterprise features where there is competition to protect the market and the users.

It's quite another for a monopoly-level player that, for example, owns GitHub, to flex and threaten the market.

I'd support some serious anti-trust looks at what's going on across all of BigTech. MisterSofty is not alone in needing a review.

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The software is still open source. If you want the premium feature for Hot Reload, then it’s like $13 a month for a license for Linux/Mac/Windows. Everything else is fully supported for free.

Again, what pisses people off is not that some features are premium but rather when features are promised to be free/open source, was working in the open source version but then pulled back to be a premium feature when Microsoft changed their mind.

While that’s true, since we are talking about trust… I can trust Microsoft’s intentions more than I can Googles or Facebooks.

Microsoft wants to make money by charging for features. Unlike Apple, they consider developers to be actual customers. So I trust them to take care of our needs, and trust that their only ultimate motive is to get us to willingly empty our wallets in order to be more productive at work.

They won’t steal our data to sell to political relations companies like Facebook, create walled gardens and charge us 30% to import goods to our own captive customers like Apple, or arbitrarily try to control what can and can’t be done on the internet like Google.

They will just charge money for features like a normal business.

How naive.

They own part of facebook, and they steal an incredible amount of data from Windows these days.

They have been trying to create a walled garden, with UWP and Microsoft Store. They have done poorly in the market but attempted a number of walled garden platforms.

Windows store is an attempt to charge 30% as Apple did.

They have tried in many ways to exert control on the internet, but have been outcompeted there by Google. One example of their control is SmartScan which scares users away from downloading programs they do not approve - a kind of walled garden. Many of their OSS plays are exerting significant control on users.

>> They won’t steal our data to sell to political relations companies like Facebook, create walled gardens and charge us 30% to import goods to our own captive customers like Apple, or arbitrarily try to control what can and can’t be done on the internet like Google.

I don't mean to unnecessarily defend Microsoft (they're a billion-dollar multinational organization and don't need my help).

It's just that if we want to say they're 'evil', I think they are so in different ways from FAANG. Could they do what Apple or Facebook do? Sure. But doing so would mean giving up their idnetity and becoming a pale version of their competitors.

Why would trust anything to any company? They are not entities that you can trust and then everything is fine. They are face-less entities that turns on a dime if it makes them profit, because that's how capitalism works.

Don't look for companies intentions, look for their actions, as that's the only thing that matters.

Well, I don’t mean trust as in human to human. It’s more trust in the sense of noticing a pattern, and having a hypothesis that it is nonrandom.

> They won’t steal our data

Windows Home or Pro have mandatory "telemetry", as do a lot of their applications. It's even in the .NET Core CLI tools and has to be explicitly disabled.

> to sell to political relations companies like Facebook,

They own LinkedIn.

> create walled gardens and charge us 30% to import goods to our own captive customers like Apple,

They tried with Windows S.

> or arbitrarily try to control what can and can’t be done on the internet like Google.

They certainly tried in the 90s until they were stopped by the government. They saw the web (and Java) as an existential threat.

If they haven't been as successful as some of they competitors in doing evil in particular areas, that's not for lack of trying.

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