Microsoft's leadership and strategy has evolved under Nadella, at least enough to produce quality products like VSCode, and 'good enough' products like WSL.
I say this as someone who has historically been very anti-Microsoft, that used to do all my work in Linux. Modern Windows with VSCode, running WSL, is something the Microsoft of the IE6 era would never have produced.
I'm using Linux and/or BSD on all my private machines, but from an outsider's perspective Microsoft appears to have undergone some significant changes since Nadella took over. From what I know, if someone had suggested making the .Net runtime open source in, say, 2008, under Ballmer, they would have been treated like a heretic.
There's still plenty to complain about, it's gotten more nuanced.
Also, it's important to keep in mind that Microsoft - and surely many other companies of that size - are like a feudal system internally, with different teams/divisions doing things their own way, not necessarily playing nice with the others if it doesn't suit their own agenda.
MS under Nadella's leadership has grown on two fronts: more friendly to the open source world, while pushing for more advertisement and spyware on their most popular product.
At least Ballmer didn't try to milk me for my data.
Well, VSCode is a bad example. It's open source so if Microsoft decides to ditch it, it can be community maintained until people move to something else. Or another foundation can take over or another company can fork it. Come on, VSCode is a "lightweight" IDE ("lightweight" in terms of features, not in terms of resource demands) and it's one of the better ones.
I remember its first version and my first impression was "WTF". Nowadays it's pretty usable. IE of its era really wasn't. You can switch to anything else if you don't want to use VSCode. IE ... you either couldn't (on a company-issued computer) or you didn't know how (at home). Nadella's Microsoft is a far cry from Ballmer's.
I think IE's monopoly is an important component that cannot be ignored when doing comparisons. If Microsoft stopped updating VSCode, 90% is Open Source, and there are multiple good competitors already on the market. So there's minimal captive-ness with VSCode, whereas IE held the browser market captive in outmoded web tech for years, with no real escape for web developers and competitive browsers struggling to make headway.
Yeah people believe all kinds of things. Look how bad Google is, and how good is DDG compared to the big evil. A few years later: well, DDG also has evil traits. Now go, abandon ship and use Brave search. People still don't know jacksh*t at all about Brave, who they are, who they work for, what are their intentions. And this continues ad infinitum. Just follow some authetic looking figure's recommendations like a monkey.
GDPR: At least you have the means to hold a company accountable in the EU, without spending a shitton of money on lawyers. In the US it's like the wild west. Steal as much data as possible, without any repercussions whatsoever. Neutered congress and other amusing institutions add to the mix.
I think you are missing the point. You can have all the "accountability" you want, in practical terms, nothing has changed. Your data is still being taken and exploited, but now thanks to the bureaucracy we can no longer say that it is being "stolen".
It's akin to saying that assault is now okay because the people are being forced to sign consent forms before getting punched in the face.
They pretend to be brain dead, that's all. Look, we are brain dead, go topple us.
Btw. Imagine that your body turns off "feedback sensors" in your hand and you start to grab a glowing iron ingot and notice that your fingers and hand starts to turn into charcoal but you don't feel a thing. You do this repeatedly until you notice that your hand fell off and now can't lift the glass to drink water. How nice, how beautiful this don't criticise bullshit mantra is.
Go s* up even more to big tech, what could go wrong...
Well, fiat money has no backing whatsoever. A while ago the USD was backed by gold, nowadays it is backed by faith, just like any other fiat currency.
Let this sink in: crypto is money that is backed by energy. Finally a money that is backed by some tangible thing. The systems providing it might be suboptimal, but the basic premise, that this is finally backed by a universally accepted thing, energy, is absolutely perfect.
Just like coal is concentrated sunlight, crypto money is concentrated energy.
Unfortunately I think I'd still prefer to have the energy, rather than the imaginary internet tokens, because once again, at least the energy is...useful.
Its comforting to know the loudest critics refuse to face facts. That is actually how I predicted the run up to the last bull market - when the critics resorted to old or ignorant arguments. Have you heard of Chesterton's Fence?
> That is actually how I predicted the run up to the last bull market
That’s nice for you I guess?
> Have you heard of Chesterton's Fence?
I have, but this comes across as a slightly more sophisticated version of the fallback that’s often resorted to by defenders of crypto: if in doubt, claim that your opponents “simply don’t get it” or just proclaim “have fun being poor”. We understand crypto too, we’re just not convinced.
