[griffordson]

Gotta say those machinations were much less troubling than the multiple times they pulled the rug out from developers during the '90s. Anyone who survived the '90s who didn't internalize those lessons deserves what they got, but I do fear there is a generation which doesn't appreciate just how lucky they are to be able to build an entire career dependent only on OSS platforms.

[Someone1234]

> Gotta say those machinations were much less troubling than the multiple times they pulled the rug out from developers during the '90s

Not sure what this is a reference to. Microsoft STILL supports running VB6/COM/C++/etc from the 1990s today. Only Visual J++ disappeared, but a court of law required that. I'd go so far as to claim that their success is in no small part because their backwards compatibility game is top notch.

IE6 was a nightmare, but that wasn't "pulling the rug" rather just being lazy and not developing the browser at all (because it competed with their proprietary platform -- Win32). Once Microsoft deploys something and developers start using it, typically they support it "forever" (even IE compatibility modes remain to support IE5/6 code).

[tracker1]

While I really appreciate their efforts on backwards compatibility support, they also have/had a horrible track record of supporting anything outside windows for more than 2 versions then dropping it entirely.

[tracker1]

I remember... I still have very little trust for anything MS comes up with or buys that supports something other than Windows, or in the case of Office, MacOS. Every single application they have for non-windows hasn't made it two releases after. .Net Core at least seems to be holding strong, and I do appreciate it.

I tend to prefer software that works everywhere I do. I use Windows, Linux and Mac on a daily basis. Though haven't done desktop Linux in close to a decade at this point (next desktop will likely change that).

On the flip side, I actually appreciate that MS has done a number of apps with web and electron focus. VS Code shows you can do a well performing editor in a browser, I almost didn't even try it after atom and brackets. That it's on all three, I really appreciate. WTF the Teams app isn't available on Linux irks me to no end. The Azure SQL Studio is also progressing nicely. I also happen to like the relative ease of using Azure's services, but it's more than I'm going to pay on hobby projects.

[dickeytk]

You mean like how much my knowledge of BackboneJS is paying off in 2019?

[tracker1]

or Prototype... ;-)