[riffraff]

Not OP, but I do.

The '90s/00s era of people hating on M$ and picturing them as the Borg had left room to the 10s/20s of MS being "friendly" and releasing open source and free things (typescript, vs code, core.net, wsl, work on python etc) and not completely screwing up acquisitions like GitHub or Mojang.

Windows became adware, and office became some crappy online thing, but _microsoft_ had became nicer and gained goodwill.

This seems to have started evaporating in the last year or so.

[coliveira]

Only people without any sense of reality believed this. Being exploitative is a core feature of MS, since its foundation. It's like believing a serpent won't bite you. They're in the middle of the embrace, extend and extinguish cycle for open source technologies.

[pjmlp]

Yep, that is more of less the point I was making.

[owebmaster]

They didn't become cool, some people just let themselves get fooled by what they were offering for free.

[anthk]

Windows was already adware with WIndows 98. Active Desktop anyone?