[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.

[netizen-936824]

Maybe companies shouldn't be that big then?

[jb1991]

Welcome to Europe.

[ChuckNorris89]

VW, BP, Deutsche Bank, Airbus and especially LVMH and Nestle, would like to have a word with you.

You're making it sound like the lack of major European SW megacorps comes from some benevolent voluntary decision on our side, when the truth is that Europe is full of unscrupulous, corrupt and exploitative megacorps like the ones I listed above, except in SW, since we missed the SW bus entirely due to reasons I will go into detail below, and so the US dominates that field entirely.

Firstly, don't have the capacity to pump trillions of EUR into our stock market like the FED does and we also don't have the military capacity to invade any country that would threaten the EURO or our oil/energy markets.

But most importantly, the US is a single market with 300 million consumers with a high purchasing power, making scaling of SW products and services much easier than in a fragmented market with about 24 different languages and many more different cultures and differing regulations, with some EU member countries having conflicting interests on many important topics, making scaling of SW products across EU members a nightmare if you're not flush with cash. Which is why we're full of thousands of small local companies that don't have any international leverage.

And before anyone brings up ASML for the thousandth time as some silver bullet example for EU tech dominance, please note that ASML's golden goose, EUV, is a product of US Cymer wich ASML bough, and of Sandia labs research which ASML licensed, so the US has veto rights on what ASML can do with the EUV tech and who they can sell it to (spoiler alert, not to China).

[Dracophoenix]

>But most importantly, the US is a single market with 300 million consumers with a high purchasing power, making scaling of SW products and services much easier than in a fragmented market with about 24 different languages and many more different cultures and differing regulations, with some EU member countries having conflicting interests on many important topics, making scaling of SW products across EU members a nightmare if you're not flush with cash. Which is why we're full of thousands of small local companies that don't have any international leverage.

And what stopped Japan from achieving what Europe couldn't?

[peanuty1]

>But most importantly, the US is a single market with 300 million consumers with a high purchasing power, making scaling of SW products and services much easier than in a fragmented market with about 24 different languages

Germany alone is a big and rich enough market to scale. Add the UK and France and you're very close to the US population.

[koffiezet]

SAP?

[jb1991]

> VW, Deutsche Bank, Airbus and especially LVMH, would like to have a word with you.

Sure, but we're talking about tech firms (this is an article about Microsoft's place in the tech world). All the FAANGs are American. Big tech is American.

edit: I see you edited your comment (many times) to align with this part of the discussion.

[netizen-936824]

Don't tempt me

[ChuckNorris89]

If you come to Europe can we please exchange jobs and wages? ;)

[pull_my_finger]

Well if everyone else is doing it, I guess that makes it OK...

[ChuckNorris89]

How did you come up with that conclusion from my statement?

I explained why I don't trust any major corporation richer than God, as they're all guilty of bad practices and why you shouldn't trust any of them either.

[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?

[GoblinSlayer]

They wouldn't even if they could, so the question is meaningless.

[rainmaking]

They would probably be willing to parade Steve Balmer through downtown Redmond and yell "shame" at him every few steps. I think I could totally start overlooking IE6 if they did that.

[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"

[ericmay]

One thing that may be worth considering is the quality of corporate laptops that are handed out versus, say, a top of the line custom-built PC.

Outside of any gaming rig I've built I've never used a good Windows computer for work. Not a "top of the line" laptop, not a virtual desktop client, nothing. Every single one has absolutely sucked.

[hbn]

They give non-developers at my work Surface devices, and those people have nothing but issues.

[ttybird2]

Core2Duo might be old but apparently MS also considers skylake i5s "old" as well.

It might be time to downgrade office instead.

[y4mi]

tbf, skylake is 14nm and 6 yrs old now. It is objectively old, though probably good enough for another 5+yrs.

[minusf]

you mean windows 7 sp2, right?

[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

[sporedro]

Honestly this is my experience as well, they “just work” till they just don’t work. Than getting either the Apple or Microsoft product to work is usually hours of time wasted.

I guess you could say the same about open source or systems like Linux where they also have their issues, but fixing those issues always seems to be a fraction of the time.

[white_dragon88]

Apple and Microsoft products aren’t even on the same dimension when it comes to poor design decisions, cruft, stability and performance. Microsoft fell behind a while ago.

[whatch]

And apple seems to be catching up

[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.