[youdontknowtho]

I was actually surprised that there was only as much negative sentiment as there is. Microsoft could cure cancer and the post to HN would be mostly negative. It's tribal. It doesn't even matter what they do at this point.

That being said, you can see more and more people getting off the "Microsoft is evil" train. It's super slow and every bone headed thing that Microsoft does resets the needle for lots of people.

I've always been surprised how much sympathy a company like IBM or Intel gets on HN. They both sue people over patents. That both contribute to non-free software. They were early backers of Linux, though, and that is what people care about superficially.

[Piskvorrr]

To be honest, I was pretty neutral about MS, for a long time now, carefully optimistic even: IE8 was fair enough (when it was new), Win8 was kinda okay, Azure is great...and just when you think they're a normal company, they take out the old guns and start shoving (first GWX and then) WinX down people's throats, never mind any consent.

So, I'm very, very, very sorry that I can't hear their words over the noise of their actions; and in the light of this, I eye each new gift-bearing Redmondian with suspicion.

[jjjingleheimer]

to be fair, i cant say that i care if people are fair to a multinational corporation. whether linux fans are right or not they are still only doing whats best for their bottom line. should a company get a trophy for doing what its customers want?

[corysama]

I don't agree with the sentiment that doing something that benefits lots of people should be dismissed on the grounds that it was mutually beneficial.

[youdontknowtho]

that's a good point. its funny, though, that they have actually started doing a lot of things for PR purposes that i van only imagine that most of their customers couldn't really care less about.

for example, the majority of their money still comes from windows and office, but open source and hologram BS impress the most vocal anti-MS voices in the media.

my point, though, is that there are other companies that dont draw nearly as much ire that engage in the exact same practices. i think, that early antagonism between MS and Linux users has become a tribal signifier for some people. Microsoft people used to have the same kind of relationship with IBM. They also kept flogging that longer than it really made sense...just like linux and mac fans.

[edw]

HN is at times astonishingly driven by brogrammer conventional wisdom. Look at all of the "why I'm ditching the Mac because I totally need a laptop with 64GB of RAM" stories that got posted after the latest MacBook Pro got introduced. Amoung the "creative" in New York there's the phenomenon of "why I left NYC and moved to LA" stories that some people—specifically dumb people—think are somehow representative of the zeitgeist.

[jjjingleheimer]

yeah, microsoft fans used to think that IBM was literally the devil. turns out they were just another inept global company schlepping its way through history. "microsoft fans" isnt something that you hear that much anymore.

[floopidydoopidy]

This is just more of their embrace, extend, extinguish campaign. This is the extend part.

[youdontknowtho]

yep. you got it one, wiley coyote.