[nimbius]

>It’s not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software.

Has anyone else shared this sentiment? If so Redmond needs to lean in hard.

this is an absolute killing blow for Microsoft if it gains real traction. You made developers your cornerstone eight years ago for nearly 8 billion dollars. you spent another 2bn on minecraft to clinch the deal with young developers and the code camp kids.

Youve lost the OS, and the server realm. Lose the developers, and youre on your way to becoming the Xerox of the 21st century.

[artyom]

> Youve lost the OS, and the server realm. Lose the developers, and youre on your way to becoming the Xerox of the 21st century.

This is a very HN take. MS is terrible or at best "second tier" on everything they do including gaming, they also lost the mobile race, they're very likely going to lose the AI race, but they'll still hold hostage of the vast swathes of average white collar workers with Office, people that don't care at all about technology as long as they have Word and Excel.

There's a reason why writing .docx was one of the first proper skills that Claude got.

[pxc]

> This is a very HN take.

It's something that Microsoft leadership themselves certainly seems to have believed at times. From "developers, developers, developers, developers!" to courting Linux-targeting webdevs with WSL to VSCode, they've done lots to court developers, sometimes explicitly professing it as a central part of their strategy.

I can't disagree with any of the rest, though. Microsoft's (anti-)competitive strategy has never been about excellence so much as positioning worse stuff to win in virtue of network effects and integrations.

[tardedmeme]

Microsoft even admits they lost gaming, because their objective is now to catch Windows up to SteamOS - which, to remind anyone, is a Linux distro that runs a Windows emulator: https://bsky.app/profile/brunodias.bsky.social/post/3mkniszk...

yes, Wine is an emulator

[kelnos]

> yes, Wine is an emulator

I think it's more accurate to say that Wine contains some components that are emulators, not that it is an emulator. Sure, it has to emulate the x86 MMU's segmentation behavior, because Linux doesn't set it up the same way. It has to emulate x86 interrupt & CPU exception delivery, because Windows delivers those to applications in a different way than Linux does. For some very old programs, it has to emulate I/O ports and some device behavior. I think GDI and DirectDraw require emulation of a framebuffer and palette hardware.

But the vast majority of Wine's code is not emulation; most of it is a clean-room reimplementation of the win32 APIs, a PE/COFF loader, Windows registry, etc. All of those parts are implementations of API contracts and binary format parsers, not emulation, in the same way that GNUstep is a reimplementation of NeXTSTEP/Cocoa, and not an emulator. (The main difference being that Wine can run Windows executables unmodified, whereas GNUstep expects you to recompile/relink from source. That is a sizeable difference, but not an emulator-sized difference.)

And yes, the computer science definition of "emulator" doesn't specify hardware: it's simply a system that reproduces the externally observable behavior of another system. But if we follow that definition too closely, then things that are clearly not emulators become emulators. Like musl and glibc are emulators of the C standard library (or of each other?), Android is an emulator of the Java virtual machine, and Mesa's software renderer is an emulator of OpenGL or a GPU (that latter bit is tempting, but it really isn't a GPU emulator). At this level, "emulator" just means "abstraction layer", which makes it pretty useless as a term if we take it that far.

So I think "WINE Is Not an Emulator" is true. It contains some bits that are absolutely emulators, but it is not, in its entirety, an emulator, and emulating isn't the function of the bulk of its code.

(I'm not trying to be pedantic here; this was actually a fun thought exercise about emulation in general and Wine in particular.)

[Avamander]

> but they'll still hold hostage of the vast swathes of average white collar workers with Office, people that don't care at all about technology as long as they have Word and Excel.

I can't wait for the anti-trust lawsuits. M365 and O365 are already super shady in terms of being able to migrate out or be interoperable with other solutions. "Accidental" roadblocks almost everywhere.

[artyom]

There won't be any.

I'm old enough to remember this happening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...

Basically, Microsoft furiously bribed their way into formally standardizing the utterly broken MS Office formats, so EU and potentially other regulators couldn't mandate them to be "interoperable" with existing standards (e.g. OpenDocument, based on OpenOffice, which was on its normal way to become standardized with no fast tracking and no bribing). They even called it "Office Open" to foster confusion.

They can do whatever they want and get away with it because a big part of their business model is, much like Oracle and SAP, based on bribing government bodies across the world.

[dewey]

Yes, but this time there’s the additional driving force of countries trying to become more self reliant and not get locked into US software giants (France and Germany for example). A long way to go, but it’s gaining more traction than the past half-assed attempts.

[LeCompteSftware]

FWIW I also think an underappreciated advantage is Windows Server (last I checked that was still rock-solid) and Active Directory. Lots of CIOs / CTOs would correctly veto a move off of these, absent a specific technical problem. This is really more of a "hard knocks" lesson than anything fundamental to operating system design or implementation, but: the two Linux shops I worked at got at least a little sloppy about the sudoers list, or got frustrated and gave too much access to a "shared" folder, etc etc, largely because the admins got fed up with all the Mother May-I-ing. It just seemed to inevitably turn into a mess; sometimes that mess is fun and even productive, sometimes it's actually unacceptable.

Even the research hospital I worked at had a proper SELinux setup on the Red Hat installations, but by-quantity most servers were CentOS and it was way more of a free-for-all than it should have been, e.g. I was the fed-up admin when I was really not qualified! I screwed up a lot. Not that big of a deal: this was research-related computing and deidentified data. All the clinical computing was Windows Server. That is not a coincidence, it is really a market difference.

As someone who hates Windows 11... I do like the core Windows kernel, and would much rather do IT on Windows machines than Linux machines. Windows NT is very fussy and a bit bloated, but a huge part of that is an admirable commitment to backwards compatibility; a lot of XP applications run fine on Windows 11, except DPI wonkiness. And Windows' driers advantage isn't just commercial support; the kernel is fundamentally leaner and faster than Linux at real-time IO, and better about cleanly isolating driver processes across privilege levels. Very broadly, compared to Linux I find administering Windows easier to navigate and harder to screw up, especially with handling user permissions. Surely part of this is what I grew up with, but there's also a values difference: a lot of Linux users like how low-friction it can be since the OS doesn't get in your way. I kind of like that Windows makes you turn an excessive number of disarming keys... even when I am frustrated by it.

It does make me quite sad that the only real general-use OS options are the apex of a 20th-century operating system family, Apple's version of that, and a truly 21st-century monolith-microkernel hybrid whose specific design is a mystery to public science.

[jabedude]

> and a truly 21st-century monolith-microkernel hybrid whose specific design is a mystery to public science

What is this a reference to? Fuchsia?

[jitl]

They're referring to the Windows kernel; see the preceding paragraph on the Windows kernel - the three general purpose OS families are Linux, macOS, Windows.

Personally I think not enough credit to macOS here; Apple's Mach/XNU has been microkernel flavored since the NeXT days and many subsystems run in userspace like Windows.

[wpm]

Last years Crowdstrike outage never hit any of the macOS computers with CS installed because on macOS the Crowdstrike agent runs entirely in userspace thanks to the Endpoint Security framework.

Really the security of macOS is probably the best of all of the desktop OSes, and as annoying as it can be.

[tardedmeme]

Can you think of any downsides to the approach of forcing secure boot on all users for security?

[raincole]

People have been saying that MS was becoming obsolete for at least two decades. And a few times, it did seem heading to obsoletion: first when Google Docs launched, and second when Windows Phone failed.

And yet we're where we are. MS is still one of the most important corporations. Perhaps the most important one if you only count enterprise usage.

[rafaelmn]

Is this even an issue these days ? I thought GSuite was good enough for most office work for a very long time now ?

[artyom]

I'd say that for the majority of old-school, established, non-tech organizations (oil, steel, manufacturing, governments, etc), it's not only an issue but it's the de-facto standard, along with Exchange, ActiveDirectory and all the nice things that come with it.

[nottorp]

> you spent another 2bn on minecraft to clinch the deal with young developers and the code camp kids

You think? They're still pushing the "native" Minecraft that isn't scriptable aren't they? And maintaining the fully moddable java MC against their will.

[botanrice]

I know there is a complicated history here as well but I personally find VS Code pretty satisfactory for my needs and really appreciate that it's free.

Not sure if that balances out the burning fire of hate I feel for Microsoft Office but it's something.

[lucascdotnet]

First time I've heard Redmond used as a metonym for Microsoft

[mkl]

20-25 years ago it was fairly common, and it never stopped, just faded gradually.

[Rapzid]

Nope. I think all this is mostly virtue signaling and a bit of "GitHub derangement syndrome" in the water.

People are ANGRY about the AI boom impact right now and "microslop" is trending harder than "M$" back in the day.

MH had a weird ass set of Tweets a month or so ago talking about GitHub needing disruption and how the UI was bad. Now it's "Not fun anymore".

I guess you die a hero or live long enough to be irrelevant and shouting at clouds like Stallman.

Work at a company on GH Enterprise. Outside those recent major incidents and a few spots here and there we haven't even noticed issues. It NEVER comes up on engineering or leadership meetings as an issue or risk. Not a single time has GitHubs issues come up as an agenda item. Yeah, YMMV but still...

[Capricorn2481]

> People are ANGRY about the AI boom impact right now and "microslop" is trending harder than "M$" back in the day.

The writer of this blog post is Mitchell Hashimoto, and he has posted positively about AI, so that doesn't track at all.

The reason people are talking about it is because the decline is rapid. That's worse than the raw downtime. There's a sense that it will be even worse in a year.

I'm not a fan of AI everywhere but I have 0 reason to think this is from AI usage at Microsoft. Still, we talk about the issues a lot. We used to do our project management in GitHub. For whatever reason, projects don't work anymore. You can add an issue to a project and it won't show up. So we moved that part off of GitHub. That's too bad, I liked linking to issues.

If this happens enough, the only thing left will be hosting code, and we'll look at each other and go "we can do this anywhere"

[Rapzid]

It's contagious negativity.

[Capricorn2481]

I didn't even know people were complaining about it until today, I was speaking to our company's personal issues with Github the last few months.

Do you have anything to contribute other than "everyone is irrational but me?"