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?
Oldest comments (71)
I remember a few years ago we were laughing at "Microsoft ♥️ Linux", but now I'm pretty much waiting for them to release a version of Windows that is a Linux distro lol. I'm very impressed with where they got. Personally VSCode and Typescript are my absolute favorites now
And now we can run Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 10 with full Container support for Docker natively as well.
Agree with VSCode. I love it.
Docker support only on Windows Professional still though?
I wish they would! I'm split between being dev and IT, and dealing with Windows 10 is one of the worst things I do. Cortana, bloatware, settings changing/disappearing with each update--it's a nightmare. I oddly feel more stability as a JavaScript dev than a maintainer of Windows 10 machines.
They use to have a Unix distro, Xenix: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
Admittedly it's been like 30 years since the last release, so it's probably not ideal for a modern workload! 🤣
I think you are right. I really had Microsoft outside my bubble until VSCode. I was trying to use Atom and it was always an issue to fix before I could use it. Then came VSCode and man I love it. They have obviously bought Github and I had no idea about Linkedin. They seem to be setting themselves up for a cornering of the market somewhere. I mean if they started to charge for VSCode and Github integration package with LinkedIn as your profile hub what would you do?
Move towards open source (^ devloper trust) and Azure cloud (^ revenue) are major drivers I suppose. Nice strategic moves by MSFT.
Since Satya Nadella is the CEO of Microsoft I feel the company is more friendly with the world outside of Microsoft, I mean they want to be part of the tech community instead of have their own community and cover their piece of cake in a private bubble.
This is probably one of the biggest shift they did as a tech company. They obviously still have their own vertical bubbles but MS is so different from when I ran away from their ecosystem.
They embraced the chaos :D
Just saw this post
dev.to/nickytonline/microsoft-is-b...
Microsoft is a little hit-or-miss with me personally. VSCode, dotnet core, and TypeScript are all amazing open source technologies. They are high quality, cross platform technologies, and Microsoft has been excellent stewards of their open source communities. But I still feel like the Windows OS is user hostile. Invasive telemetry, bloatware, and OS level ads are a big turn off for me. I know I can spend time turning off that telemetry, I could uninstall all the annoying preinstalled games, and could ignore the ads that are creeping into more menus of the OS. But honestly that seems like a waste of time for an OS that still costs money. I expect this level of privacy breach from free Google services, but not from a paid Microsoft product.
All of that said, I think there's reason to be optimistic moving forward. Microsoft's open source projects show that it can be a good citizen, and if they ever release an open source OS, I'd be interested to try it.
True that, technically Windows 10 is much better than predecessors but all of that stuff in userland (in part due to OEM vendors) is pretty annoying.
I feel like change there, though, it's going to come last. Embracing open source and cloud computing is already a giant effort for a big company. Windows and Office are a big chunk of their revenue, they are not going to change overnight.
I've also heard Windows 10 is going to be the last major version for a long time. They've been updating it with huge service packs (editions they call them now?) with mixed success.
I'm honestly rooting for Azure and their open source efforts and I've seen many super talented developers being hired in the last few years, like Jessie Frazelle:
I'm not naive but I'm glad it's showing signs of improvement
Fully agree, Windows 10 is a hot mess. It makes me long for when I had an Android phone from Verizon full of bloatware. That was less bothersome than what the Windows team has put together. My gaming machine at home still runs Windows 8.1, and I don't think I'll ever upgrade it.
Mega shout out to all their developer advocates for being a large part of this -- they have so many incredible people on staff who have a big impact on the developer community.
Also, VSCode is the best.
Absolutely, and kudos to the high level strategists for recognizing how important the dev advocacy is team is.
I see a lot of companies that have dev advocates, but they don't seem to really empower them. I feel like Microsoft is hiring great people in this space and making the most of them.
If you ever get the chance to visit the Redmond campus during One Week I'd highly recommend it. The sheer scale and investment (both monetary and cultural) in the idea of empowering people to develop solutions is quite breath taking.
Spot on! Female Dev Advocates at Mircosoft are crushing it 'quietly'. Microsoft seems to be empowering female tech leaders much more than other tech Giants that I won't name but...ya know.
Every Co touts 'more women in tech' but only a few have put there money where their mouth is.
All thanks to Satya Nadella. He's the real MS MVP right now.
what a difference a good CEO makes, eh? :D
Not just you. As someone who swore off Windows during the Vista period for Linux (and never really looked back), I'm currently wearing a MS Hactoberfest t-shirt and―due to many of their hires over the past years―I've ended up following a lot of people who now work there (but didn't when I followed them).
Nothing got me to look back so hard as the Windows Subsystem for Linux. What a fascinating and great idea.
I think Satya Nadella has been an excellent steward of the company, and is positioning the company for the now, the new, and the future. And embracing being a participant at the table, rather than trying to own the table.
This is a big change from previous leadership.
I was one of the blue-badges impacted by Satya's changes when he took the helm. My development branch office* was shuttered, and everyone there hit by the layoff. Despite that turn, I harbor no ill-will towards Satya or Microsoft, and I applaud his stellar leadership.
* If you've run Expression Blend, Visual Studio, or Internet Explorer... you've probably used code I wrote. Hopefully not code that crashed. ;-)
Heh. I actually found Expression Blend rather promising. I'd almost forgotten about it! While I'm not a fan of .NET as a whole (I'll be reevaluating that with Core eventually), I never found any UI development platform that quite matched the experience of Expression Blend.
My biggest regret over Expression Blend is that it was not released in conjunction with WPF and XAML, at their introduction. My viewpoint is that if anyone has to create or edit any kind of XML (including XAML) by hand, the developers have failed them. (XAML, Ant, XSL-FO... any sort of XML.)
Barring some infrequent situations such as merging branches in source control, or figuring out a damaged XML file.
Related to Expression Blend was SketchFlow, for prototyping that was actually functioning and not merely mock-ups and wire diagrams. It was (is?) an incredible tool for UI designers to make functioning designs.
That was a separate team that created SketchFlow, and it leveraged the power of WPF. (WPF is one of the Microsoft technologies that is best-in-breed in that domain, in my not-so-humble opinion.)
Alas, it appears SketchFlow is a casualty of the changing times. :-(
I think .NET (and Mono) is pretty darn impressive technology. For example, I've had good experiences using Visual Studio for Macintosh (formerly known as Xamarin), and F# on Mono.
FYI: they just released WPF as open source with MIT license (today is full of news both from Microsoft and Google): blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/201...
Wow! I'm utterly shocked and pleased with this news!
I'm not shocked that Microsoft made it open source. I'm shocked that the developers were able to disentangle WPF from its tight coupling OS dependencies.