[apatters]

So what do you call it when Google adds great UX, advanced sorting and searching etc. to email, and then slowly starts making it harder to send email to Gmail accounts from non-Gmail accounts? (All in the name of eliminating spam, of course.)

Or when Facebook Messenger supports XMPP up until the point where their user base is big enough and they don't have to care about interop anymore?

Welcome to Software Business 101, everyone plays nice with the standards/alternatives/competition until they don't have to anymore. I never understood why Microsoft gets extra flak for this in 2016 - maybe they were particularly good at it 20 years ago, but every big player will play hardball if they get a chance.

The answer is to avoid single vendor lock-in under all circumstances, but Microsoft is hardly on a trajectory to become the single vendor for Ruby or any other Linux-first tech at the moment (ha!).

[sjellis]

Microsoft are still doing it. The company that I work for didn't just pay for Office subscriptions because we wanted Office for Mac (and I didn't want to get it on subscription either, but the pricing strategy is designed to penalize you if you don't). We actually have access to three different Office-like products already (iWork, LibreOffice, Google Apps). None of them can yet 100% support Microsoft's "standard" file formats.

[chme]

s/Software Business 101/Business 101/

FIFY

And that is why I prefer to be a developer instead of a manager.

IMO everyone should get flak for these kind of monopoly building business practices.

[berntb]

Companies with this behaviour regarding my work tools lower my personal life quality.

It might be Software Business 101 now, but when enough executives note that it makes you hated after a number of years, the course content might change...

(For example, what makes me vary about this case is: I expect the Linux subsystem under Windows to start working worse and worse, sometime in the future.)