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Comment by ethomson | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting. I had the exact opposite experience. I was part of a small startup that received exactly what you describe as "support, advice and endorsement" (like you, we did not receive funding) for developer tools.

We developed Java software using Eclipse. Most of our team used Linux or Mac OS, only one of our developers used Windows. We shipped software for HP-UX on HP-PA RISC and IBM mainframes. Our web site was written in Ruby on Rails and backed by PostgreSQL.

Microsoft liked this arrangement enough that they acquired us. (Full disclosure, I remain a Microsoft employee.)

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We must have been blessed with an asshole rep or two!

That would be difficult. Our positive experience was certainly a direct connection to the welcome nature of the product development team and the sales and evangelism teams. Without them, we would have had a much more difficult time making inroads into a sales channel.

I'm sorry about your experience and I really hope it's the exception and not the rule.

Which country? We were in the UK and is was the guys from Reading (partner support).

United States.

In my personal experience, the foreign subsidiary care about nothing except screwing as much licensing out of people as possible. I've dealt with a local MS that told people it was _illegal_ to use a non-regional copy of Windows inside the country. (So, technically, travelling with a laptop using US Windows wasn't allowed.) This was incorrect, they didn't care. In another country, the regional MS office was flat-out corrupt. I have a feeling the incentive structure for the other offices is very different, and the lack of R&D happening there skews the work environment.

I've met good individuals, just haven't seen good overall management. Then again, I'm not looking at total sales as my evaluation metric.

Thanks - that makes sense. That matches our experience exactly.

Out of curiosity, what was the name of your company?

Teamprise was the name of the company. (To be pedantic, it was not my company in that I was not a founder; I was an employee.)

I'm embarrassed to say that I'm not certain that I know the new name of the product. Microsoft product names can get a little, em, verbose when you start talking about small parts of bigger products that are also small parts of still bigger products. I think that the name, officially, is "Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Team Foundation Server Team Explorer Everywhere".

While the acquisition was better for the product (more resources!) and better for customers of it (it's free!), the new name is regrettable.

Right, it's the cross platform TFS Explorer (basically Source Control View in Visual Studio, but pulled out as an app)

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