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Comment by uberman | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how much of the MS turnaround can be attributed to him, but if we take it at face value that the CEO is responsible for everything, then MS definitely has had a dramatic positive run following Nadella taking the reigns from Ballmer.

MS still lacks a industry leading 21st century consumer device and Nadella has not been able to change that but his bets on cloud computing, embracing of Linux and open source and the rise of VSCode are something to behold.

As an "older-school" dev, I am constantly amazed that I can open a linux prompt on windows or do VSCode work with a local gui on a remote computer or inside a docker container.

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> I am constantly amazed that I can open a linux prompt on windows

Similarly, I'm amazed that I can build truly cross-platform .NET apps using Microsoft's own open-source tools from the Linux command line. (Apparently .NET Core, which both adopted the MIT license, and ushered in true cross-platform support, was announced later in the year that Nadella took over. [1] Not sure whether he had anything to do with it.)

What an about-face from 2000-era Microsoft's embrace-extend-extinguish approach. Remember Visual J++? If you'd told me then I'd be willingly programming on a Microsoft toolchain 20 years later I would not have believed you.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET#History

You might think it's an about-face.

I suggest that it's actually just a better executed embrace.

WSL is amazing. I switched from Macs to thinkpads at my office and having the bells and whistles of windows MS office (lets admin macos office stinks) and vscode that opens and literally runs on Linux is amazing. No IT hassles about developers running Linux with support and VPNs and stuff. Just buy some more RAM and ship developers windows laptops has been great for the org and honestly the developers. We deploy and run on Linux and the weird quirks of macos has bit us in the past.

Apparently the Year of Linux on the Desktop has happened without anybody noticing or giving a point.

Someone wished for Linux to be a successful desktop OS on a monkey's paw.

Exactly. The best Linux Desktop distro is Windows.

Debatable as user requirements vary drastically. What might be perfect for one user might be wholly inappropriate for another.

> MS still lacks a industry leading 21st century consumer device

The XBox division doesn't count?

Successful but not perhaps not dominant.

That said, they have more market share vs Playstation than iOS has over Android.

I don't know any numbers but I would guess that Xbox is not close to being the market leader. Sony has that wrapped. Xbox is probably closer to Nintendo. They do, however, have a competitive platform which is important. Something they could never do with Windows Phone.

> Sony has that wrapped

Nintendo sold 4 Switches for every PS5 on the market.

Given the price stability and the hardware specs, probably also a higher profit per device.

Video game consoles are technically 20th century invention. Xbox is just a continuation of that legacy even if the brand started in 21st

Xbox also isn’t top dog among the big 3. They’ve really struggled to ship big exclusive system sellers (which is a bummer. I’m a big fan of a lot of Xbox IP), so they certainly aren’t “industry leading”. Doesn’t mean the exclusives they’ve shipped aren’t good. They certainly are, just that their is no Xbox answer to God of War or Last of Us

GamePass is one of the biggest success stories to come out of Xbox and is certainly the dominant game streaming service

It's hillarious how the public perception differs from reality on console sales.

Mario has everyone else smoked[1].

[1] A bit out of date but see https://www.statista.com/chart/26122/estimated-lifetime-sale... where in 2021 nintendo were selling more switches in Japan only (their 3rd biggest market) than the worldwide sales of both Xbox and PS5 combined.

> MS still lacks a industry leading 21st century consumer device

Is this a prerequisite to being a great technology company today? Or is this just one vector that some competitors choose to compete on? For example, would we say Apple isn’t a great technology company because it doesn’t have an industry leasing office suite like MS and Google?

Balmer said it best, 'Developers, developers, developers!'

And then Microsoft bought Github.

I feel like Google would have been a better fit for Github. But then it would be about due for cancellation about now...

Google would have killed GitHub as it doesn’t earn money. Google isn’t about developers, it’s about getting data and selling ads.

Microsoft needs people to build things on windows, on azure, on their APIs, etc.

Google literally had the GitHub competitor, Google Code, and GitHub was only formed because google neglected Code. Remember how Google would only support mercurial over git?

And of course, Google shut down Code a few years ago.

I have to remind myself while Google hires lots of programmers and does lots of programming, they don’t really need anyone else to program.

Microsoft needs developers.

You tell 'em, Steve...sweat-stained shirt and all...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxbJw8PrIkc

Ballmer may have screamed “Developers, developers, developers”, but what he actually meant was “Windows, Office, developers”.

Windows and Office came before everything. The big change Nadella brought to the table was completely eliminating Windows as a primary goal for the company, and reducing Office’s importance as well.

Best yet is VSCode into a docker container on a remote host. Feels like magic!

Emacs has been able to edit files transparently on remote hosts for longer than vscode has existed

While I agree with this technically and I have used vi(m) for years, there is something experientially quite different about being able to use a local gui with all the mouse support and ease of use of VSCode or Sublime compared to the chording of more traditional terminal editors.

I'm not knocking Emacs or Vim, they are powerful tools but to be able to show a typical first year student how to edit their code remotely using SSH/Container support in VSCode is comparatively dead simple. All the students I work with now use this strategy, much in the same way they prefer to use jupyter and pandas when they can.

Emacs had a GUI mode with mouse support since the 80s.

Yes. Now are you going to respond to the parent's actual content? Seamless remote editing with Emacs GUI is not a thing.

> Seamless remote editing with Emacs GUI is not a thing.

TRAMP has been a thing for a very long time: https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/

Grandparent already mentioned that remote editing has been an Emacs feature for a long long time so I thought that was already debunked.

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode

and FreeBSD Jails were a thing 15 years before Docker came and made things affordable for the masses.

and Olympic champion can jump for 5 meters, but bridges over creeks is nothing uncommon for masses.

and Emacs has been able to edit files transparently on remote hosts ...

Probably Emacs can learn [if they care to be dominating on the market] on technical possibility vs being simple and handy.

=====

And if we take VSCode Tunnel, things become even brighter for VScode for remote editing.

Remote editing on Emacs isn't a mere "technical possiblity." It's available out of the box, is no harder than working with local files, and crucially, doesn't require you to install anything on the remote host unlike VSCode.

Furthermore, Emacs still has the best tooling for remote development. They're worth using even if you use other software for text editing, like I do. Dired, the file viewer, makes working with both local and remote files easy and seamless. Org mode, which can be used like Jupyter notebooks, can run code blocks remotely using any language, and can even pass data between them.

It's nice if software professionals were more open towards software that they're unfamiliar with. Software can be useful even if it takes some effort to learn. Not every feature of some software is worthless just because it isn't a clone of a more popular alternative.

I have not found an answer on does it support dealing with containers on remote side, let's assume it does and pass this part.

One day I was not familiar with VSCode and I became familiar and many others as well. Just not Emacs. Assuming you are right and technically Emacs has all bells and whistles, it must be something else that not promoting it for being wide used.

And you skipped the part about VScode tunnels all along.

are you talking about tramp?

Well then, it must be really bad if with all those features and many years it did not manage to gain so many users.

Bad replies, to bad replies

>> MS still lacks a industry leading 21st century consumer device

Oh but they have brought 21st century advertising and bullshit to windows devices!

Just having Ballmer out had a positive effect. He wasn't a visionary, and Microsoft stagnated during his lead. It was like keeping only the bad side of Bill Gates.

> As an "older-school" dev

I assume this means "older-school Windows dev", as none of that is new in the UNIX world.

No I cut my teeth on Sun workstations.

The Network is the Computer!

:-)

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