[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.