[echelon]

That's because the Microsoft of 2000 - 2014, the Ballmer era, was Microsoft-first. It didn't care about other platforms, it didn't care about the web, and it didn't care about open source. C# could be great, but it existed in a bubble.

Java kept growing and wound up everywhere. It played nice with Linux. Enterprise Mac developers didn't have trouble writing it with IntelliJ. It spread faster because it was open.

Satya Nadella fixed a lot of Microsoft's ills, but it was too late for C# to rise to prominence. It's now the Github / TypeScript / AI era, and Satya is killing it.

The one good thing to say about Ballmer is that he kicked off Azure. Microsoft grew from strength to strength after that.

[fuzztester]

>Satya Nadella fixed a lot of Microsoft's ills,

which ones?

[echelon]

So many.

Microsoft isn't thought of as evil anymore, but is open source and Linux friendly. GitHub, VScode, Typescript. Azure is booming, ...

But the big one: stock price.

[int_19h]

Funny you should mention open source and VSCode.

VSCode itself, for all the promotional materials about how it's open source, is officially "a distribution of the Code - OSS repository with Microsoft-specific customizations released under a traditional Microsoft product license".

But wait, you might say, it's just like Chrome vs Chromium - so long as we have the OSS edition, it's all good! But, unless you're writing JS or TS, you need extensions to do anything useful. Python is an extension. So is C#, and C++. And all of these are partially closed source - e.g. code completion for all three, or debugging for both C# and C++.

Worse yet, the licenses for those closed source parts specifically prohibit their installation and use in anything other than the official closed source VSCode distro. And this isn't just verbiage - there are actual runtime checks in all these products that block attempts to use them in VSCodium, Cursor etc.

The same goes for the official VSCode extension gallery / marketplace - you can't legally use it from anything other than the official VSCode. Enforcing that is trickier, but even here Microsoft managed to find a way to frustrate its users: it used to be possible to download a .vsix from the Marketplace, but that feature has been removed recently, precisely because people were using that in conjunction with Cursor etc.

Much open source, indeed.

[Squeeeez]

> Microsoft isn't thought of as evil anymore

Maybe you don't think of it like that, but please remember that, especially with some decisions made in the past months, more and more people are turning away from everything Microsoft.