[strix_varius]

> It's tiring how reactionary the average HN commentor/contributor can be.

On the contrary, HN is great because most users stick to the subject of discussions rather than devolving into ad-hominem attacks.

It's curious that your account was created exactly one minute after this post was posted, for precisely one insulting comment.

[nfinished]

I finally made an HN account just for this comment. Feel free to look up the username, it's not a throwaway.

[carapace]

You "finally" made an account to be counter-reactionary for MS? This improves the conversation how?

- - - -

MS has a long long history, any animosity they receive is well-earned. E.g.:

> "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE),[1] also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] that was used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

> The strategy and phrase "embrace and extend" were first described outside Microsoft in a 1996 article in The New York Times titled "Tomorrow, the World Wide Web! Microsoft, the PC King, Wants to Reign Over the Internet",[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

[arp242]

> 1996

It's now 2023; 27 years later.

Name a single thing Microsoft has EEE'd in the last 20 years. There isn't one. All the examples from the Wikipedia page are from the 90s or early 2000s at best (and most of those seem to be about lawsuits for things that happened a few years earlier). The only recent mention is about "Windows Subsystem for Linux", and those fears turned out to be entirely unwarranted.

Do I like Microsoft? Not especially; it's a large corporation that acts in its own self-interest in an a-moral way. But it's also no longer the Microsoft of the 90s. In fact, almost everything is different: leadership, employees, revenue stream, business model.

[carapace]

I recently bought a couple of cheap "college kid" laptops from the mall to use as dumb terminals. Before installing Linux on them I figured I'd play a round of my favorite old video game "Rome: Total War" (i got a Steam account just for that. Oddly the game won't play on Linux (although I'm sure I recall playing it through Wine back in the day, but maybe that's wrong?) so I figured I'd keep Windows on one of the laptops long enough to play through a round of the game.)

The laptop would not let me start to use it until I had activated Wi-Fi and connected a Microsoft account! It literally would not leave the init wizard until I had "phoned home" to the corporate cloud.

> Name a single thing Microsoft has EEE'd in the last 20 years.

See above.

- - - -

In reply to nfinished sib comment:

> "Ask HN: GitHub just added a feature I don't like to GitHub" is a conversation worth having?

So why are you?

[arp242]

The whole Windows activation story sucks; 100% agree on that. But it's not "EEE". I don't follow how it's even remotely similar.

Aside: I just have a Windows VM for testing, but I bypassed the account "requirement" for that by disconnecting from the internet when installing Windows.

[carapace]

> I don't follow how it's even remotely similar.

Well then I don't know what to tell you. From my POV as a "Free" software fanatic* it all seems "of a piece": VS Code is a Trojan Horse, GitHub is insidious, etc.

(* I'm one of those who sees the "Open Source" movement as a distraction from the main point of the "Free" software movement, although I have to admit that most people haven't heard of either of them, and of those who have, most can't or don't distinguish them.)

[nfinished]

"Ask HN: GitHub just added a feature I don't like to GitHub" is a conversation worth having?

[EnergyAmy]

I think the conversation of "Microsoft is currently in the Extend portion of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, what are your thoughts?" is worth having.

[micromacrofoot]

They're right though. HN users are generally only viewed favorably by other HN users, it's a community that is dominated by reactionary pedants. I say this realizing that I too am a reactionary pedant.

[arp242]

> HN is great because most users stick to the subject of discussions rather than devolving into ad-hominem attacks.

On at least three topics I've consistently found this to not be the case: Google, Microsoft, Cryptocurrency (also: Richard Stallman, suckless, but those come up less often).

I find that these threads often devolve pretty fast away from "the subject". I actually dislike all three of those things as well; I use none of their products save for GitHub and haven't for years. But that doesn't mean that everything these companies do is part of a sinister machiavellian plot to take over the world. And not everyone involved in crypto is a sociopathic scammer looking to steal your money, either, even though I think crypto overall is a net negative.

> It's curious that your account was created exactly one minute after this post was posted, for precisely one insulting comment.

I'm really not trying to "gotcha" here, but you're kind of proving my point with this remark.