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by plnk22 4144 days ago
The writing was on the wall for MS's dev platform since open source dominates startups and the cloud. Nobody builds the next facebook or twitter using MS tools and Windows. If anything the rise of open source and linux put MS in a position where open sourcing their tools was the only option left to them to stay relevant. Making a show of 'loving' Linux was done in an attempt to give themselves a chance of getting a slice of the huge cloud computing market for hosting Linux. Make no mistake, Linux has put MS in a very uncomfortable position.
3 comments
wlesieutre 4144 days ago
The Azure giveaway for startups is nice, but I don't think the cloud is MS's main goal here. It's about PR and company perception. They need to lure developers back to the ecosystem so that their app store can stop being an empty wasteland. That's why they're giving out VS, that's why they're giving free updates to Windows 10, and that's why they're trying to improve their image in the developer community. Without developers writing good software for Windows, people are going to keep hating the OS.

The other thing the store brings is a centralized source for reputable software downloads. The malware-infested download.com and its ilk are a huge issue for your average Windows user. Putting downloads in one place, making them sortable by popularity and ratings, and making it easy to pay for things would make a huge difference for the user experience. There was a bit of an uproar when Apple did it in OS X, but now it's an expected feature.

It's funny how Windows used to be the OS that had all the 3rd party software written for it. Now for any given task OS X tends to have one or two really great options, and Windows tends to have a pile of 50 abandoned weekend projects and open source UI trainwrecks but nothing you'd actually enjoy using.

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michael_h 4144 days ago
> Nobody builds the next facebook or twitter using MS tools and Windows

Well, then again: http://nickcraver.com/blog/2013/11/22/what-it-takes-to-run-s...

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timrichard 4143 days ago
Yeah, but I'd love to see how long it would function if they took away open source tools like Redis and HAProxy.
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pconner 4144 days ago
Stack Overflow (and its offshoots) was (is?) very MS-centric, but it's clearly in the minority.
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aceperry 4143 days ago
???

Why would stack overflow focus on MS when MS has their own forums and developer resources? I have to admit, I don't look for MS things on stack, but everything else I have questions about I'll look there. In fact, most searches for MS related questions are found on sites other than stack.

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bramgg 4143 days ago
pconner is talking about how Stack Overflow is hosted on Windows (and maybe uses other Microsoft products, I wouldn't know).
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aceperry 4142 days ago
I had no idea that "MS-centric" meant your site is hosted on Windows. Thank you for clarifying that.

IOW, WTF ???

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pconner 4142 days ago
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/what-was-stack-overflo...

I think there might also be a codinghorror blog post that details why they picked .net, but I'm having a hard time finding it.

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bramgg 4142 days ago
> Thank you for clarifying that.

No problem, it's wrong that your comment was downvoted. Even with my upvote it's still grey.

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