[tegeek]

For me, as a developer, Microsoft is a company with deep roots in compilers and operating systems. All of the business empire started from these two foundations. Since its inception till today, Microsoft has been producing some global products every decade. And then making these products unbeatable in the global marketes. Be it Windows, Office, Exchange, Developer tools & Compilers, Web Servers, XBox, Azure, Teams etc. You just name it and Microsoft is right there in almost every field with profitable products. A lot of people don't like the traditional Microsoft products but all of the products just work and are being used for tens of millions of customers around the globe every day. Any Software company with ability to create profitable products every decade is a killer company. That is the secret souce Microsoft has.

As a developer just imagine about a company which gives you a developer tool to make a web application, using the company's provided compiler, which then can be deployed on a company's provided webserver and can store some data on company's provided database which is running on company's provided operating system.

The company also happens to provide end-to-end tools for running a company of a 5 people to a company of 500,000 people.

This is Microsoft.

[ta1356547]

Then there's other ethical developers. This is a company with a deeply scummy past, who did everything to throttle competition when they had the upper hand.

They might be trying to change their image lately, still a hotbed of scumbags who learned from the best.

[ChuckNorris89]

>This is a company with a deeply scummy past, who did everything to throttle competition when they had the upper hand.

This applies to literally any billion/trillion dollar big tech company ever, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Dell, Facebook even Apple and Google. They all abuse their market dominance at the expense of their competitors when they get there. It's literally the M.O. of any major corporation.

Microsoft was just the first major successful big tech software company to make it there.

[RockyMcNuts]

in their most powerful days, they didn't dictate what software could run on their OS and tax developers 30% of their revenue to allow their software to run.

[WJW]

Is there anything Microsoft could do to gain your forgiveness or do you just plan on hating them forever?

[nelblu]

> A lot of people don't like the traditional Microsoft products but all of the products just work and are being used for tens of millions of customers around the globe every day.

I have never spent a dime buying a MS product (directly) but they definitely don't "just work" based on my experience with my work computer. Windows is awfully slow, Office and Teams are sometimes just unusable because they take so much memory on my machine and keep freezing randomly. I do agree that MS used to be the company where products just worked (windows 95, 98, office 2003 and prior, hotmail etc.), but these days pretty much all MS products are awful.

[halo37253]

If your PC is slow, and and running out of memory for apps. It may be time for an upgrade.

Your Core2Duo machine is a little old now there buddy.

You have windows 95 as a OS that just "worked"

Windows 7 was the first Windows OS that "Just Worked"

[netizen-936824]

People say the same thing about apple products, but both Microsoft and Apple products never 'just work' for 90% of what I'm trying to do, and if they do the process is convoluted and unintuitive from my experience

[wvh]

> This is Microsoft.

This is not freedom. As a non-technical client that just wants to make a spreadsheet and share it with the rest of the corporation, that perhaps doesn't have to matter (as long as you can afford the ecosystem). But from a technical perspective, you give away the ability to learn from and develop your own software, to compete and innovate, to combine different parts and come up with something better.

As a developer, I don't understand why a developer would side with a company like Microsoft, unless your product ties deeply into their ecosystem and you are very optimistic about your relationship and the future.

[shp0ngle]

If you want freedom, you are free to use Linux.

Good luck getting wifi and graphic card to work.