[toyg]

It's Microsoft. Corporations of that size don't really have to worry about technical details that much - the competition can eat their lunch here and there and they'll still survive. They know they can crush any small fish any time.

I mean, look at this very thread: Slack effectively invented this "modern IRC" bullshit, but still, when MS decided they had to have an answer, they cloned it and effectively imposed it to millions of users, no matter how inferior a product it might have been - in just a few years. They can throw hundreds of millions in the fire and they'll still be okay. No need to rush for a few perf tickets...

[xtracto]

Moreover, teams target audience is not people in HN. My wife works for a huge transnational manufacturing company (like Foxconn) which not long ago migrated from Google cloud to all-things-Microsoft. I cannot imagine the amount of win for the SDR that won MS that account.

Now, teams allow IT drones to tick the 'online chat' checkbox, its (crappily) integrated with Office365 and basically does most of what the Financial, HR, Business, operations and Sales department need.

Nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft.

That's the target audience. And that audience only needs 'good enough ' software. And, being it IT, what better than computers that keep breaking, so that their job is guaranteed.

[Miiko]

> Moreover, teams target audience is not people in HN.

Yep. I believe, the key in Microsoft success was Bill Gates realizing a simple truth:

- Users of office software are not those who decide to buy it, that's their manager who are.

From the very beginning, Microsoft product had all boxes checked, were very easy to install and to do trivial things with them. Being convenient to do some real work? Very low on priority list.

[pjmlp]

I partially disagree, VB pre-NET and .NET tooling are only outperformed by Delphi, C++ Builder and Java.

Anything else doesn't really match being convenient to do some real work.

The UNIXy competition, with exception of Java, doesn't really get the "Developers" mantra.

[toyg]

The thing is that we're really talking about different types of developers.

One type of developer wants to get shit done as quickly and painlessly as possible, so they can clock out and do something else. That's the traditional MS crowd.

Another type of developer likes to mess with stuff "just because". For him (because it's a him), excessive complexity is a value, since it provides "rep" once mastered. This is the unixy crowd, trained by a lifetime messing with Linux just to boot up - that's also where I come from, before people accuse me of disparaging people. MS steered hard towards that crowd with Nadella because they had lost them for a generation. That didn't necessarily result in a productivity increase for the first crowd, or even in general.

The thing is that really the "developers" mantras for these two crowds, are very different.

[pjmlp]

I definitely don't miss tinkering with Autoexec.bat, config.sys or xmodeconfig/fvwmrc for that matter.

Thanks to OS X killing the market for desktop UNIX, Nadella realised that many developers don't really care about Linux, they are more than happy for whatever runs their POSIX toys, and since UNIX for better or worse won the cloud war, then it should be in the box.

The irony that OS X and a Linux based VM on Windows are the winners for running UNIX stuff on laptops.

[hackerfromthefu]

I agree, Delphi and C++ Builder alumni here!

However I find .NET to be the only really good things about modern Microsoft. Even Windows itself has so many anti-features these days that I pity the average user who can't lock it down.