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?
Top 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
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.
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?
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! 🤣
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.
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
I do want to say that mega trillion dollar tech companies are not exactly what the world needs per se.
It really seems like Microsoft is safely going to be among the most valuable companies in the world. This is reason enough to hope competition brings them down a peg.
My hope is that Microsoft raises the level of competition and serves the tech community well, as opposed to leveraging their position to exploit customers and maximize profits. But this is not exactly what capitalistic public companies are known for in the long run, so I just hope for the best.
Yeah, this is going to be tricky in the future
It's funny. I though that Microsoft has always been the most valuable software company in the world.
Microsoft was the first company to sell software. They have been earning by everything... Hardware, software, game consoles, embedded systems, real time control systems, health devices, education, sat tech, doc, training... Almost all the branches.
It has many technologies that are dead, but they have earn money with every thing.
Google is one challenger, Facebook also...
How do you define the value of a company?
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.
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.
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.
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
I used to really not like MS - to the point where I was looking to jump ship to developing in other areas (PHP or front-end).
For me, the game changers were Visual Studio Code + .NET Core.
Being able to use my .NET expertise to build lightweight apps on linux is fantastic.
I know. I'm loving getting stuck into Linux and Containers. Having a blast with Core.
.NET Core seems like a huge move for keeping .NET devs excited. What's your sense on whether new devs are being attracted towards that environment?
Same as James below. The barometer of. NET Core success I think is how the community is contributing to to the dotnet corefx and coreclr projects. The PR contributions is staggering. There was alot of talk about this at Connect yesterday.
I think .NET Core strengh is it can rev quickly now. Full fat. NET was intrinsically tied to Windows and VS updates. Core changes quickly which is great.
I've been seeing a lot of developers who have a little bit of experience with JavaScript and Python under their belts becoming interested in getting started with .NET Core.
It's just so much more accessible then .NET Framework was...
There is a bigger learning curve with .NET Core vs. let's say JS though.
You are getting started immediately with a framework (ASP .NET Core for example, which is the .NET Core web framework).
So it's like learning JS but also Express and all the other plugins that you need to build a complete app at the same time.
But there's the rub - you get everything you need in one shot. No need to figure out whether you want Express or some other JS web framework etc.
I think .NET, in general, is viewed as a mature platform for building secure and "solid" production web apps. It's just that it's never been that easy to get started with.
I think MS is making great strides to overcome the view that .NET is just for really big and convoluted enterprise apps.
As a side note that is relevant, this is why I've been building an open source project Coravel. It's directly addressing this issue of "how easy can I just get up-and-running with a production quality .NET Core app?"
It does look like future .NET Core features are targeting bigger players and micro-service scenarios, whereas Coravel is trying to appeal to the indie devs who just want to build one simple yet solid production app quickly.
Another smart thing Microsoft has done, though, is the investment in TypeScript. It was perfectly timed to react (no pun intended) to the rise of JavaScript fatigue and anyone with a bit of TypeScript experience will have a much softer landing in C# than someone coming from PHP, for example.
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?
All thanks to Satya Nadella. He's the real MS MVP right now.
what a difference a good CEO makes, eh? :D
Today just got better. Microsoft are open sourcing WinForms and WPF!
I can't answer for others but I can answer for myself: I switched to a Mac 12 years ago when Windows wasn't any good and I was fed up with Linux on my Dell. I wanted an easy desktop OS where I could develop as well. OSX was the perfect choice and I was never happier. My first Mac lasted 4 years and I sold it to an acquaintance, my latest Mac has lasted 5/6 years (the one in between was stolen) and it's still going which makes it a worth investement (I also bought it refurbished from the Apple Store :D). The few times I have had to interact with Windows 10 I hated it (but I admit it's also because I haven't used Windows daily in a decade).
I don't know what will happen next because in my opinion Mac prices have gone up and the quality has gone down but my experience so far with Macs as computers has been stellar. I would probably have a different opinion if I had a post 2015 Mac? I don't know.
I've had to change the original HDD for a SDD and add 8 more gigs to this computer but I'm determined to see how far I can go with it (basically until developers will keep shaving off resources from their apps or until my habits change).
So, this is my "why I'm using a Mac". Maybe in the future I'll change, who knows.
Yeah, agreed. That's why I switched from Mac OS X to Windows 10 about a month ago. I don't want to pay Apple tax for a locked in operating system on dated, underpowered hardware. Other than that I found Mac OS X to be a joy to use
that's the annoying part. Love the operating system but the hardware is more and more overpriced.
Seriously speaking: Apple has a rocky relationship with Intel. I feel like their ultimate goal is to have in house ARM based CPUs so they can severe the tie with Intel for good.
It'll take a few years unfortunately
Things are going great for Microsoft, and it wasn't inevitable. If they stuck to their guns and kept .NET closed-source on Windows and kept their heads out of the cloud then things would be very different for them right now.
There is no denying the stock performance.
Counterpoints to the MSFT love fest:
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...
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