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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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Is it just me or is Microsoft really crushing it lately?

Yes, the stock keeps rising

But lots of companies have rising stocks.

I feel like Microsoft, in the past year or so, has been really positioning themselves as the foremost technology company in the world. Their developer relationships have to be at an all-time high. With GitHub and VSCode to go along their cloud business, their hardware, their operating system, their browser, etc.

They're a diversified professional networking company with their acquisition of LinkedIn, and GitHub only added to this position.

Microsoft seems well-liked, executing well, and well-positioned in many important tech sectors. I'm fairly blown away at the progress.

Thoughts?

Latest comments (71)

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mshambharkar profile image
Mahindra Shambharkar

Agreed , Microsoft is playing 'safe' and as a .net developer it bugs me.
.net ecosystem which was first targeted for huge businesses,has higly invested in Microsoft only ecosystem. Today .net ecosystem is distributed between supporting legacy products and creating new microservices, this is where I see issue, going forward only one standard i.e. .Net 5 is expected, that will create so much blunder because .net framework apps will become somewhat legacy. Some might say you will have to adapt and move to newer technologies and patterns, but we should remember there are still some businesses running on COBOL making billions, it is a huge investment in migrating to newer standards if changes are breaking and time consuming.

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jwp profile image
John Peters

Stock wise yes but platform wise no. Their own development environment is so fractured that it appears to be a omen "Move to the cloud, desktop is dead". I'd rather develop desktop using Electron than to jump on MSFT train again. MSFT throws their own developers under the bus, often.

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jwp profile image
John Peters

Oh yes, if Electron doesn't work for me Angular and React do. In a sense I'm done with MSFT platforms, thanks to MSFT.

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zkat profile image
Kat MarchΓ‘n

Bless πŸ™πŸΌ

There's a lot of good people in here now and I feel like I'm in genuinely good company.

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sebbdk profile image
Sebastian Vargr

Buying a bunch of popular platforms have that kind of effect.
Most of their in-house made stuff still sucks balls last i checked.

vscode caught me be surprise tho, so i am more tentative to cut them some slack these days.

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pencillr profile image
Richard Lenkovits

I think especially after what facebook and Google pulled of lately, they became the good guys. Vscode, integrating linux, new terminal...

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david_j_eddy profile image
David J Eddy

5 years ago it was 'M$ the big bad corporate ugly'. As you observed the have done a 180* and now reaping the rewards. Honestly 8 do t know who the executive board is but whoever they have, should stay as long as possible.

Like it or not, even Linux owes credit to the recent MS about face.

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jcoelho profile image
JosΓ© Coelho

I’ve recently read an article that Microsoft’s vision is shifting towards developers, they’re trying to get developers back on their side.

I’m quite impressed with a lot of things they’re doing. From GitHub aquisition to the enormous success of VSCode. And now looking forward to the release of the new Windows terminal and the embeded linux kernel on Windows 10.

I think we could be looking at a new era for devs where linux is no longer the obvious choice

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tarialfaro profile image
Tari R. Alfaro

Honestly, I can't say anything else but that I have been impressed with Microsoft. Their new CEO understands the importance of open-source.

I still see a lot of hate towards Microsoft, Windows OS in particular. It's mostly the Linux neckbeards on 4chan that are still hating on Microsoft.

Sure, everyone makes mistakes. But Microsoft's new CEO did a 180 degree turn.

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bewitchingme profile image
RPC

The tech industry seems to have a short-term memory. Microsoft and their practices seem to have taken a back-burner to recent publicity. People want to believe this company can change, but I try to read between the lines.

I've been running Linux on the desktop for 20 years and reboot into Windows to play games only. I've built software on Windows, Linux and Mac and the latter two are the only ones I've used in the past eight years for development.

Microsoft is a very convincing trap; if you think you can't live without Windows it behooves you to try running Linux or Mac for a year and then try to return to the hegemony that is MS Windows. Fifteen years ago the idea of MS supporting anything related to Open Source was laughable; Ballmer equated it to communism.

As the web evolved further and further away from MS and into UNIX/Linux, MS then changes its tune and wants in? If you can't lead, poison the waters?

You're all being had in my opinion.

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Indospace.io

Hats off to the CEO for finally getting it together!

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marthaelax profile image
AngeiΝ₯Ν₯Ν₯Ν₯Ν₯Ν₯Ν₯Ν₯Ν₯Ν₯Ν₯Ν₯Ν₯Ν₯

It's amazing how Microsoft went from being one of the most hated companies from the perspective of developers working on Open Source projects to become one that released VSCode, bought Github and integrated part of Ubuntu with Windows.

To be honest, I won't be surprised if Windows become Open Source in a few years in the future.

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jrwren profile image
Jay R. Wren

There is no denying the stock performance.

Counterpoints to the MSFT love fest:

  • Ads in the start menu in the out of the box Windows 10 experience?
  • A recent Windows 10 update which deleted users files.
  • Donated lots of patents, but not the super important FAT filesystem one that they used to sue Garmin and many others over the years.
  • Open-sourcing .NET and now even including Windows Forms and WPF sounds so nice, only its about 8yrs too late.
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phtn profile image
phtn458

Even with that, I think they're still under valued. They're Developer visions are visionary.

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kayis profile image
K

But do they?

While they are doing much better than Google with their cloud offerings, they're still magnitudes worse than AWS.

TypeScript and VSCode are pretty good, but what else?

They included a Linux shell, which seems like they lost the faith in PowerShell.

They want to switch to Chromium, because Edge didn't cut it, despite them hiring many great JS devs.

They are even investing in React-Native, despite having bought Xamarin some years ago...

I'm not sure where they are want to go right now...

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mshambharkar profile image
Mahindra Shambharkar

Azure - definitely I didn't like it at first experience, but after understanding their targeted audience I get it - big corporation, that is the answer. AWS for new startups, prototyping .Azure for integrating already invested Microsoft infrastructure to the cloud.

Microsoft is playing safe- supporting open source projects and when it gains some momentum include it in their business model- Entity Framework, Xamarin ,Mono - sponsored by Microsoft in same time .Net core was launched

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conectado profile image
Conectado

Never forget: "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" Microsoft is still Microsoft.