Comment by flatline
8 years ago
I also spent years working with Microsoft’s proprietary technologies. The reality of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish was still alive and well as late as 2011 when I mostly stopped dealing with them. Since that time they have definitely taken a new direction, with increasing adoption of Linux in particular, but I have trouble belieiving the corporate DNA has been so thoroughly overwritten in the last few years that this does not spell the imminent demise of Github as the broadly useful plarform that we know it as today.
Their "corporate DNA" was established when the desktop was supreme and they could steer the direction of the industry based on thier Windows dominance.
Times are different, mobile is more important, cloud hosting is a real thing and technology changes. They had to evolve or die. Saying you can't trust MS in 2018 based on the way the world was years ago is like saying that Netflix could only ship DVDs to people's houses, Amazon can't be trusted to do cloud hosting because they only sell books, and that a minor niche computer maker should never be trusted to sell phones.
Ya, they can’t do the same tricks they did before. You do have to wonder what new tricks they might pull though.
“I can’t hurt you now, I have these handcuffs on” doesn’t mean you can full trust someone who hit you.
(All that aside, I have notice what does appear to be real cultural change at MS)
> Ya, they can’t do the same tricks they did before. You do have to wonder what new tricks they might pull though.
Exactly. Unless all the leaders who flourished under the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" regime have been fired, that attitude is still in their blood. And especially with leadership roles, I doubt that those people didn't manage to adapt and stay employed, because those are exactly the type who can adapt to appear to play nice. Whether in sheep's clothing or any other animal, I'm sure there are plenty of wolves still at MicroSoft.
TBC, I am not MicroSoft is evil, or that everyone working there is. They do world-class CompSci research, and I am a very happy Visual Studio, VSC and TypeScript user. But it's a company with thousands of people, and I doubt that they have completely reformed.
I would be disheartened by any major software firm buying github. The temptation is simply too great for any company with interests in software development to leverage their control over the world's largest open-source community to advantage their own products and services.
If there's one thing which is predictable about corporate behavior, it is that they will act in their own best interest. Publicly traded companies are legally required to do so.
Also equating trust with product offerings is a false equivalency here: saying Amazon can't be trusted as a hosting provider because they were known as an online retailer is a lot different than saying Microsoft cannot be trusted because they have a long track-record of anti-consumer and anti-developer behavior.
I guess it depends what side of Microsoft we get working with GitHub, whether it's the friendly outreach side alongside the .NET Foundation, or whether it's the internal software team that want to integrate GitHub into internal tooling and start moving their platform onto theirs.
My dream scenario is the former, where Microsoft provide leadership to a company that's still reeling from its own scandals, and use GitHub as a platform for promoting open-source, rather than as a way of mining their access to the open-source world to benefit their own tooling.
"Dream" is the right word here. The idea that a major software firm would buy the worlds largest repository of and community around open source software with the sole intention of "providing leadership" seems pretty unlikely.
It's along the same lines as saying an oil executive would make a good candidate as the EPA chief because they "understand pollution".
Microsoft is one of Linux Foundation biggest donors, which means they have leverage over them. They are invited to discuss new Linux developments, products, etc...
Is that bad? Do we not want Microsoft involved with Linux? They are the #2 cloud provider.
A lot of the sponsors of the Linux Foundation have tried very hard to make sure that Linux's copyleft is not enforced. VMWare is one recent example. They exerted their influence by defunding the Software Freedon Conservancy. I consider this a net negative.
On the other hand, most Linux devs do not want to ever take anyone to court for copyleft violations. While I agree that it's very reasonable to almost never take anyone to court for a copyleft violation, it still needs to be a weapon of last resort.
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Seems like a conflict of interest to me.
Except now they have billion dollar data centers they need your servers on and don't care if you use their software as long as they turn a profit from the hosting. Bill G is probably kicking himself for not renting servers decades ago.
"Decades"? Bandwidth requirements and difficulty of virtualization essentially precluded enterprise cloud hosting much more than one decade ago. Virtualization was essentially impractical or mainframe only until Intel added VT-x. Two decades ago most Internet users were on AOL dialup. And anyways, Azure is #2 behind AWS, so it's not like they're doing badly.
EC2 was released over a decade ago. And Microsoft could’ve done it way easier than Amazon.
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> Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
Hmmm... Windows Subsystem for Linux... the 1998 Microsoft-vs-Linux report... hmmmm.
While I'm currently picturing a pacman trying to eat a dot a bit bigger than it expected, I do wonder what kind of hilarity Microsoft have planned for, presumably, 5-10 years from now (I'd presume they're in the Embrace/Extend period if my conspiracy theory is right).
[Small edit: currently at -1; interesting | Edit 2: Now at -4! Anybody care to actually comment? I'm interested in why people disagree!]
In the interest of providing data, here is at least a single reply. Though I haven't voted, by my criteria your comment leans more to downvote than upvote. My reasons:
1. It adds little to nothing to the discussion. You raise two items with no commentary but "hmmmm", then offer a metaphor and an admitted conspiracy theory - neither of which you explain in depth nor draw interesting conclusions from.
2. There is inherent ridiculousness (almost to the point of trolling) in connecting a 20-year old report (1998) to a modern initiative, particularly considering the massive industry, technical, and organizational changes between those two events. Implying that one leads to another as part of a 30-year strategy to consume/extinguish Linux assumes a level of long-term planning and, frankly, managerial competency that is almost unheard of in today's public companies.
3. Assuming I can even understand your poorly constructed point, I still disagree with it (see #1 and #2) and, more importantly, think you fundamentally misunderstand the landscape in which Microsoft now competes. In a world increasingly accessed by mobile devices, MS has no mobile presence. In an OS landscape increasingly disintermediated by the browser, MS has little significant browser presence. They have oriented their entire organization around Azure (its biggest revenue growth area) and cross-platform applications deliverable in the browser and on 3rd party mobile OSes. They reorganized and, for the first time, no longer have a Windows division. Thinking they're in the middle of some Machiavellian scheme to take back an increasingly irrelevant OS dominance position by extinguishing Linux (and failing because Linux is too big?) completely misses the point that Linux's size wasn't the cause of Microsoft's inability to extinguish it, it was these other countervailing industry forces. And to imply that they've somehow failed also ignores the fact that MSFT's market capitalization has had a nearly identical growth to GOOG and AAPL over the past two years while they've made this transition.
As they say on Food Network, for those reasons we had to chop you.
3: I hugely appreciate you taking the time to reply. This is incredibly helpful, I now see the ridiculousness of my half-thought-through point.
2: The reason I connected current activity with long-ago activity was based on sentiments I read that Microsoft were still behaving in some of the ways they used to. But a 20 year stretch is kind of pushing it, particularly in the tech industry.
1: Fair point.
Thanks for the feedback.
[Update since edit period has expired: back at -1 again - adding this because I think it's interesting, also first edit was after about 20min, 2nd edit was after an hour, this edit is after ~2h | Update 2 after ~1hr; parent is at 2, this is at 0]
This, I was trying to think of the right way to state this. Looks like I’ll be looking for alternatives.
Tossing out Ballmer has greatly improved things, but it's hard still hard to ever trust them.
Maybe when Ballmer is dead and buried.
> Maybe when Ballmer is dead and buried.
That is totally uncalled for.
Wonder if this is a regional sort of thing? This reads like a pretty harmless colloquial saying to me, not anything inappropriate.
Lol. Balmer personally got involved with all M&A activities over $2m, which is why MS lost out on many deals... m&a and investing are themselves lifestyle business models because there are a very small number of people with the exceptional experience and good judgement about businesses and they have limited time to evaluate prospects. If VC and angel investing were scalable, it would be possible to have a few shops monopolize deals to a far greater degree and they would do tons of deals. But they can’t because of the support and other resources also provided from good VC shops.
The use of a common idiom is uncalled for? Over my dead body!
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