IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.
They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open. I probably have missed a few instances.
Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think google is less evil which speaks volumes.
The only side of ms that i have any love for is xbox but that is also waning with all the studio acquisitions.
MS fired thousands of gamedevs in the last few weeks, cancelled a lot of games, including games the execs liked to play the prototypes, cancelled publishing deals, and even closed entire studios, some of them literally successful that had just released profitable products.
There's no point to keep the IP of games that are shuttered.
Maybe the offer was made and a bunch didn't take it?
Debatable. Excel can't even open CSV files properly. You need to run the import wizard. But loads of people don't do this. They see a file on their desktop and double click it. Why can't double clicking a CSV file just open the import wizard!? (Because they want people to share xlsx files as a data format.)
It is the single biggest blocked against open computing.
If Microsoft were serious about open source like another poster claimed, they would let us run it on all platforms.
I'd argue the opposite: Powerpoint makes literacy decline.
"PowerPoint makes us stupid." – General James N. Mattis, USMC [source: https://paulgraham.com/quo.html ]
It's perhaps the single worst database in the world; with no type control, no relationship management, no data safety whatsoever to speak of (it even actively mangles your data), its interface is utter madness, and yet - it's the most used database in the world.
It's perhaps the single worst development and runtime environment in the world, obscuring code, making reasoning about code and relations between code almost impossible, using a very obscure macro language that even morphs between different computers, and yet - it's the most used development and runtime environment in the world.
It's perhaps the single worst protocol/data exchange format in the world, with dozens of intentionally obscure, undocumented versions, insane format with surprising limitation (did I mention it actively mangles your data? - it's worth repeating anyway), supremely inefficient, and yet - it's the most used protocol/data exchange format in the world.
I can't really think of anything in the computing world that has done as much damage as Excel.
The victors truly get to write history, don't they?
Ubuntu I didn’t use it for years, there are tons of other distributions that I prefer now but last time I checked, there was a removable default shortcut to amazon. That’s an awful symbol, if you ask me, to associate Ubuntu and its meaning to Amazon but it’s nothing when compared to Apple or Microsoft (dare I say Google) behaviors.
I looks like Ubuntu was created just in order to be able to dismiss Linux as "also advertise products". It's just a single distribution out of a hundred, and far from the best, so it's completely wrong of course. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300531.
My ranking from most evil to least would be:
1. Google
2. Meta
3. Microsoft
4. Amazon
5. Apple
6. Netflix
I never worked there and have no inside knowledge of what happened. Did they get taken over by MBAs who gained control of the company? Was it always evil and we were just misled the whole time? Something else?
I don't think so. Collecting data is a baseline for all those companies, you have to rank the evil they do with that data.
They use Cassandra and make cool series ever now and then, like Love Death Robots. :-)
Citation needed. Did you forget that Google owns YouTube among other things? They don't need to torrent training data when people voluntarily upload an endless stream of it to their platform.
As did Ubuntu.
>I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think google is less evil which speaks volumes.
Huh? The same google caught tracking your every move even if you opted out? The Google that seems to serve ads based on your conversations if anyone in the room has an Android phone? The Google that actively tries to kill any and all ad blockers?
They aren’t even close…
Try using VSCodium legally with the same functionality as VSCode; remote development, Python language server, C++ debugging, and so on.
People who think Microsoft is doing open source work for the good of their hearts are still in for a lesson in EEE.
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/docs/extens...
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/wiki/Microsoft-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
You can't use the MS extensions with VS Codium, you are forced to use VS Code.
> Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
They are a business. You seem to misunderstand that businesses cannot behave like charities.
Being a business implies being for-profit.
Nobody said open source had to be free as in free beer, it just had to be free as in freedom.
It's their prerogative to make the plugins marketplace to alternative editors or not. Servers cost money. It's a business.
Does Matt Mullenweg has to let WPEngine sap server resources? Arguably not; and this opinion comes from a guy (me) that strongly dislikes WordPress (and by extension: Matt and Automattic).
> I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open.
A lot of (mostly non-US) orgs used locked-down managed IT and VMs where IE was still the only allowed browser, until the IE 11 shutdown in 2022, which is recent.
And just for reciprocity, here's Indian Defense Review (5/2025) "These People Never Moved On: They’re Stuck 24 Years in the Past and Have to Use Windows XP" : "Thousands of workers across the US and Europe still depend on a system from 2001. From hospitals to railways, entire operations run on technology long considered obsolete."
https://indiandefencereview.com/these-people-never-moved-on-...
That's hardly Microsoft's fault, isn't it?
Regardless of who we each might consider to be responsible (and in what proportion), that fact is a fact. Agreed?
(and I've seen lots of end-of-life cycles in software and hardware, and gone through them as both user, customer and vendor)
On the one hand, longevity of a platform is nice and MS screwed up IE in so many ways.
On the other hand, at some time the business has to manage their software lifecycle - including the death of old systems - and you can't blame MS for that.
The only thing that helped was MS taking responsibility and killing IE. The problem I had was that IE was becoming an support burden on our tools, no customers were using IE but the internal staff was forced to.
They're lucky, I have to use Win11.
Imagine Google blocking Edge from using Chrome extensions.
Because we remember the evil Microsoft. Many young people still follow advice from the elders.
I get the point you're making, but it really seems like we haven't remembered. We've worked ourselves back into one juggernaut owning most of the web browser space and then collectively acted surprised when they started flexing their muscles. I encounter sites that only run in Chrome the same way I had sites that only ran in IE 6. It seems to me we're doomed to repeat history as long as that path is easier or more profitable.
What do you mean by this? I've traced code into the Windows OS to debug a problem by downloading the source.
.Net and a lot of other tooling and projects are on Github under BSD licensing, and that's pretty cool... almost everything they do outside Windows/Office works in Linux these days. I do think they should at LEAST get a version of office (offline) that works in Linux... even if it's a bastardized web version that runs in Electron.
Aside: I couldn't say how much I appreciate the work Valve has done to improve gaming on Linux, and have no expectations of ever moving back to Windows. MS seems to want to extract literally every cent of value out of every Windows user, and it sickens me.
That should be a good clue that it's not worth much to them anymore, and tjat they'd rather rely on random free labour from the "community" than their own developers.
They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
Which is a horribly bloated pig that only helps forced obsolescence of hardware. It should be a very disturbing sign that Microsoft itself doesn't seem to know how to do native code anymore, as they invented Win32 and Windows.
As for open sourcing software. Is it even possible for them to do something that you would view favorably here? To me it seems like remain closed and they'll get criticized but open up at least some of it and ... they get criticized?
As far as I'm concerned, regardless of other factors the more source code that's out in the open the better off everyone is.
That is some damnably faint praise re: Windows 11, and any experienced m$ users know exactly what’s meant by that.
They have no respect for the agency of their users. We're no different than cattle to them, an asset to be squeezed until no more money comes out of it.
That's not a cool guy thing
The open-source stuff is whatever, only a tiny part of the picture.
VS Code?
https://underjord.io/the-best-parts-of-visual-studio-code-ar...
> they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now
Windows has been going out of its way to be hostile to users for over a decade now.
It's so sad that this is all it takes for some of you lol. A collection of public relations code bases.
Simply releasing corporate projects under a permissive license is not what many people understand to be the fundament of "open source."
> to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open
What do you think their entire operating system is?
They aren't better people just bad people operating in an environment where better behavior is beneficial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Except that their macOS software still is non-parity with Windows for really no good reason other than anti-competitive. They’ve also had the opportunity to open-source Windows, but won’t go that far willingly, with the exception of those that did it without approval.
two things can be true at the same time. MS doing some open sourcing and being truly evil too in many other ways. why do you need to settle on one or the other?
Only if you have no soul or morals
You can make a product that pleases its users, or just cater to the interests of the ones with the buying decision, for enterprise users they are almost never the same. Microsoft, like Oracle, leans heavily on the second strategy. Their developer tools are often (not always) an exception to this principle. I think this is the true reason Microsoft is so disliked as a brand.
you mean shit software like Teams that crash the whole time?
