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Comment by edpichler

9 years ago

This is very good, with this I learned that it's never too late to a company change. A very slow and large company like MS took decades to make this change, but they did well. And, they do that not because they are "good guys", but because this is the strategy to make them grow on their business. They are thinking on themselves.

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edpichler

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amelius  9 years ago

Um, Microsoft has also been a steady producer of academic research papers.

Just as an example: http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html

(Scroll to the bottom, and see that MS is #1, ahead of e.g. MIT, which is #3 on the list, and far ahead of Google which is #17 on the list)

  • lake99  9 years ago

    Not to mention, they employ many stalwarts of CS, like Simon Peyton Jones and Leslie Lamport.

    • rajeemcariazo  9 years ago

      David DeWitt, Michael Freedman, Jim Gray, Anders Hejlsberg, Butler Lampson are all Microsoft Technical Fellows

testgiveme123  9 years ago

> A very slow and large company like MS took decades to make this change, but they did well.

From the outside imo it feels like it took ages for them to start this change, but actually doing it once they first started open-sourcing things seems to have been an incredibly quick switch, over just a couple of years. Has there been loads of progress on this in the background that's just only become visible now?

  • pm90  9 years ago

    I suspect that most of their code was probably version controlled in Git anyway, so it wouldn't take that much effort to simply upload it to Github. What really delays stuff is probably the approval process, which for some companies can be really slow.

    • cobalt  9 years ago

      I'd imagine most of their code was in TFS. However I'm sure they used a tool to move things over. None of these have the full history of the project

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  • edpichler  9 years ago

    They started this move almost a decade ago, gradually, and just recently the accumulated effort got so relevant, that is evident even for an outsider like me, that they changed their strategy, that is why it seems now it's "visible".

    "How I can notice this change of strategy?" may you ask, It's because they always said things like this, per example, that Linux was not good because something open source could never be better than a closed and proprietary system with a company protecting their code.

FT_intern  9 years ago

It's because they're bleeding engineers like crazy. Anyone with offers from Google, FB and MSFT would choose Google or FB 99/100 times