Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

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No, they are not.

The company has, and has always had, a winner-take-all, paranoid violent reaction to all possible competitors in any of the spaces it occupies. It has established and held a strong market position by defining for itself an exclusive platform, first through mandatory per-unit licensing (MS DOS/Windows 3x), later through its mutually leveraged dominance of the desktop OS / office suite space, which it has tried (with varying levels of success) to extend into servers and services largely through mail and calendar, directory, collaboration, and database (MS Exchange, MS Active Directory, Sharepoint, MS SQL Server) tools. Introduction of any of these within a business environment pretty much inevitably sticks a wedge in the door. Moreover, interaction between Microsoft and other tools is often weak and buggy, encouraging a Microsoft-only monoculture.

I've just addressed this in a recent thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4081701

As others have noted, Microsoft have a hell of a lot to live down. Not just in the F/OSS world, but in their mortally aggressive attitude toward all comers: DR DOS, Novell, WordPerfect, Lotus, Netscape, Sun, Linux, GPL, BeOS, and Google. Among others.

Currently, they are looking to quash competition on the x86 platform by locking down the UEFI bootloader:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/microsoft%E2%80%99s-take...

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/red-hat-linux-pa...

Many, myself included, see Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures as one more in a long succession of Microsoft-acting proxies fighting its battles on the patent front:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/05/30/intellectu...

"Looking cool" is the last and least thing they've got to do to atone.

(Edit: paranoid winner-take-all intro paragraph).

> "Looking cool" is the last and least thing they've got to do to atone.

Maybe to us, the 1% on HN.

But most people don't know or care much about Microsoft's tarnished past. Some have already forgotten.

I wholeheartedly agree with everything you're saying, but to me you seem to imply that this is a bad move or that it won't work. Unfortunately, I think for Joe consumer "Looking cool" might actually be enough to continue to buy in to the Microsoft jails.

"Joe consumer" doesn't really care about Git or Node.js. Looks like they are finally trying to catch attention of developers, and I don't see how this could be a bad thing.

Joe probably cares about Metro, though, which is a far more significant piece here.

And let's not kid ourselves; Microsoft is catching the attention of developers mainly in order to extract money from them once they lock in to the Microsoft ecosystem. It may or may not be a Bad Thing, but it's not doing any favors to the Node or Git communities that they'd like us to think they care about.

Well, you could always speculate about intentions, but supporting open source tools seems like a step in the right direction. The community usually benefits from more popularity, and open source licenses offer some level of protection from "embrace and extend".

Except Microsoft's modus operandi in the past was "embrace, extend and extinguish", which IS harmful to the community despite open licenses.

<i>Currently, they are looking to quash competition on the x86 platform by locking down the UEFI bootloader</i>

You misspelled ARM.

Do tell.

UEFI addresses ARM, but also x86, AMD64, and Itanium (for whatever that's worth): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Int...

Windows RT(for ARM) requires the bootloader to be locked like the iPad's is.

Windows 8 on x86 requires the UEFI on PC to provide an option to disable secure boot and allow a physically present user to add any signing keys of their choice. Windows 8 will happily boot on any hardware that does not support UEFI secure boot(most current PCs) and will also boot without any complaints if Secure Boot is disabled by the user.

Note: The above requirement is only to get the hardware Windows 8 certified. Microsoft is legally prohibited from requiring anything from the PC OEMs.

Why is there SO much confusion around this in these parts? I see these exact type of back and forth arguments and utter confusion in almost every discussion related to UEFI or secure boot .

Say what you will about the management. I've spent time with several of their product teams over the years. They've been doing a lot to embrace open platforms, reach out to OS communities, invest in real innovation, and generally not be dicks.

Senior-level folks may or may not see the light, but from what I've seen, the company is changing from the bottom up, with or without them.

Being aggressive is hardly a crime. Slamming them for past misdeeds will hardly encourage positive behavior in the future.

I think Microsoft is taking small steps in the right direction. Offering Linux on their Azure platform being the latest example.

Let's try encouraging that sort of thing, for a less "aggressive" future.

Being criminally aggressive is, in fact, a crime: http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm

And in the event you've been reading with the comprehension bit set to "off": disavowing their past, and repudiating current similar aggressive actions (IV and UEFI noted, others are out there), would be a big step.

Firing Ballmer would help. It's not sufficient (see above). It may not be necessary, though to my mind it is on the basis that people rarely fundamentally change, and a large part of Microsoft's corporate DNA is intrinsically linked to Gates (still Chairman[1]) and Ballmer.

Notes: 1. http://www.google.com/finance?q=msft

> people rarely fundamentally change

Perhaps you should stop beating them with a stick and offer a carrot? Just a thought.

http://jonathangifford.com/business-and-leadership/the-lonel...

It's not the full story of IBM's 1990s transition, but it touches on some key elements.

The change happened with a replacement at the top. Lou Gerstner. And no, in my list of people earning much intrinsic love from me, tobacco company execs don't score high.

Money quote, however: “I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game – it is the game.”

He had to change the culture. And he did.

There's a lot written on that subject. Makes for interesting reading.

I believe maratd was referring the present and future, whereas you're linking to things than happened well over a decade ago.

No, I'm not.

The astroturfing against Google has certainly been going on for the past decade. IV/Myhrvold is current. UEFI is current. A number of EU antitrust issues are current. Gaming the office market (no r/w tools available for Android) is current (and Google are now doing a Claytonesque disruptive innovation in that space as they did with Google Docs in the online space).

There's a whole side rant about the ills the Microsoft have spawned in malware, spam, spyware, etc., which despite several decades of protestation on the part of the company's apologist, have simply failed to materialize on other platforms to any vaguely similar fraction of a magnitude. My reasoned analysis is that the security issues are driven by engineering design decisions, and the engineering design decisions are driven by business and marketing objectives, which again are a conquer-at-all-costs, scorched-earth, mentality. My conclusion is that a world in which proprietary control of both operating systems and applications markets is held within a single corporate entity is fundamentally untenable, and that F/OSS si a very strong countervailing force (Apple presents an interesting side case that can also be explored). We've heard again and again "but it's better now", but ... it's not.

I could go on. I can't go on at length with specific references right now, but you've given me inspiration to do so, for which I give you thanks.

The point remains: the company has a fundamental attitude toward competition and exclusive markets. And the boy had cried "wolf" (or rather "but we're different now") far too often a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

But they haven't changed.

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