[iimblack]

How do you separate the good from the bad? What do you do when Microsoft changes the good things into bad things?

My take is that Microsoft consistently makes bad things and makes "good" things into "bad" things; so, I don't have much expectation or faith that anything that I currently think is "good" will stay that way.

[graemep]

Services are bad - that is what the first part of the story is about.

However I do not think it is different for any online service. Any American company would have to cut off services to an individual (or organisation) subject to sanctions (the main example given). The same might apply to other countries for various reasons. There are various reasons a service might fail, or cut off a particular customer (lots of reasons, lots of examples in previous HN discussion).

What has changed is that the typical MS customer is a lot more dependent on MS services - MS 365, Python in Excel ONLY works in the cloud, people used hosted email instead of their own Exchange installation...... That means MS cutting off a customer would mean all their IT would cease working. They can just shut down any organisation with that level of dependency if they are ordered to, or decide to, do so.

[mrweasel]

> How do you separate the good from the bad?

Developer tools and enterprise stuff good (mostly). Consumer products bad.

[herbst]

For whom? Microsoft?

I don't know which of their developer tools I would consider good. Or less worse than the competition

[mrweasel]

I consider C# / .NET to be one of the best options for application development.

Many would consider both VSCode and Visual Code pretty good. There might be better alternatives, but generally I'd say they are more good then bad. Github is also a good product. Maybe not exactly a develop tool, but Power BI is also fairly good.

Borderline developer / enterprise solution: SQLServer is great to work with. Maybe not the best relational database server, but it's every bit as capable as MariaDB and I'd prefer it over Oracle.

[Lio]

Github was a great service well before Microsoft bought it.

The best thing about Microsoft’s stewardship has been that they haven’t fucked that up.

[herbst]

Before Microsoft bought it you could still search it / codesbases without making an account. Alone for that additional pain I would argue they instantly made it worse.

[queenkjuul]

Only from personal experience: people in the Microsoft ecosystem absolutely love visual studio, and hate the idea of migrating

[tiahura]

MS office is 30 years ahead of open office.

[blibble]

did you get those the wrong way round?

office 95 (without the ribbon) is more usable than office 365 (with the ribbon)

[tiahura]

no. the ribbon is fully customizable with greater functionality than traditional menu.

[blibble]

> the ribbon is fully customizable

so was the one in office 95

> with greater functionality than traditional menu

you click a button and something happens?

except now the button isn't in a consistent place

a usability regression

[tiahura]

Wrong about "inconsistent", the ribbon follows predictable patterns. Home tab always has basic formatting, Insert always has objects/media, etc. What changed is intelligent positioning based on context.

Office 95's menus were consistent in the worst way - consistently buried everything under nested submenus. Finding mail merge meant File→Tools→Mail Merge→Options→Setup. Now it's Mailings tab, right there.