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by epolanski 736 days ago
Why wouldn't Microsoft be able to?

Anyway, while I see all of your points, none of the things I've read in the news make me excited. Recapping meetings or long emails or suggesting how to write are just...not major concerns to me at least.

6 comments

Why wouldn't Microsoft be able to?

Microsoft seems to have lost all internal cohesion and the ability to focus the entire company in one direction. It's just a collection of dozens of small fiefdoms only caring about hitting their own narrow KPIs with no overall strategic vision. Just look at the mess of competing interest that Windows 11 and Edge have turned into.

They can’t even get marketing on the same page, such that they counter-productively confuse the hell out of their customers who might be considering giving them more money.

Quick, what’s “copilot”?

Automates the tedious/boring parts of flying between regions in Microsoft Flight Simulator. On higher difficulty levels, can use voice recognition to accept tasks ("Copilot, we are losing fuel, find the nearest airport we can land at", "Copilot, what is the VFR frequency for the airport?", etc.) Sometimes misunderstands tasks and/or will give erroneous information, to increase fidelity to real-world situations.
+ Teams, which includes a feature to build entire apps... inside Teams.
Oh God, when my partner started exploring using Power Apps for Teams to build a platform for running a clinical study, I was intrigued... Then horrified as I tried to help her get it setup. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/teams/create-fi...
Maybe it's just my overly-cynical ass but when the parent comment said Teams+ lets you build apps inside Teams, I physically shuddered.
'We call it Apps for Teams Live 365+!'
The flip side, is that they would not have been able to execute so well with Azure etc if the Windows org had too much of a say about pushing Windows as the OS of choice everywhere. Winning in a brand new space, especially one that might be disruptive to other business units, sometimes necessitates letting the new org do its own thing.
"execute" and "well" in the same sentence when referring to Azure is a bit weird to see.
Only to the ignorant. Tens of billions of dollars a year are spent on the platform. Either all of those customers are misinformed about the capabilities of Azure or you are. I’m going to rely Occam’s Razor here.
Yeah, it's hard to believe that VSCode and Windows are products from the same company. Very different vibes.
Is VS Code the same as Visual Studio? Super confused.

Visual Studio Code, appears to be a code editor with support for C, C#, C++, Fortran, Go, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, Python, Rust, and Julia

Visual Studio, appears to be a code editor with support for 36 languages including C, C++, C++/CLI, Visual Basic .NET, C#, F#, JavaScript, TypeScript, XML, XSLT, HTML, and CSS.

Visual Studio Code, appears to be liked by almost every user and the favorite in a bunch of online polls.

Visual Studio, appears to be unusable junk, widely hated in almost every survey, and unable to even display its own error messages correctly in 2022.

Visual Studio Code is supposedly a "related product" according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio#Related_products

How are these related? They seem like Microsoft's internal fiefdoms again.

Definitely different things, I've used them both. Visual Studio is from before they went on their Microsoft <3 Open Source campaign. It has pricey licenses and is pretty much an ad for .net

It's a traditional windows application. .net/WPF I think. Configured via XML

VSCode is free, an electron app, has a plugin store with lots of niche language plugins. Configured via json.

Surely they're using VSCode to exert influence in their Microsofty way, but it feels much less like a prison.

VSCode still feels like a bit much to me (though of a monster than Visual Studio). I'm pretty happy with helix.

Cool. Thanks. Started in with the newest version of VS 2022 recently for C++, and then find out there's apparently something better in a different internal fiefdom that people actually like.
> Why wouldn't Microsoft be able to?

they are irrelevant on the mobile ecosystem, a place where almost all this features are most relevant and useful

I've heard Microsoft has gotten better, but I think this still rings true. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/int...
>suggesting how to write

As a(n amateur) fiction writer who pays too much for ProWritingAid each year, I'd love to see if this feature is any good for fiction. I take very, very few of PWA's AI-suggested rewrites, but they often help me see my own new version of a bit of prose.

"Anyone serious about software should be making their own hardware - Alan Kay" - Steve Jobs