I wouldn't exactly use the word evil, but I do remember a time when desktop hardware and software were not so massively dominated by one or two companies. I could buy a 386 or 486 computer from any number of vendors, buy expansion cards (graphics, sound, MIDI etc.) from various other vendors, buy hard disks and optical drives from yet more vendors, and even buy DIMM memory modules from yet more vendors, and put it all together myself. Yes the machine would run DOS or Windows, but most software outside the Office suite came from various different vendors (remember Norton, Borland, Corel?)
Not blaming MS per se (much of my examples above are H/W), but the type of "consolidation" companies such as MS engaged in, killed a lot of small to medium computer hardware and software businesses.
Most Linux development is corporate now, WSL makes Linux easy to "use" without ever leaving Windows, and the lock-in-effect if you are using Office/Azure/Teams/BI/etc is almost perfect. You can't leave it, basically. Easier to start a new subsidiary from scratch using something else, than trying to migrate off the Total Microsoft Stack.
Office has a port to Mac that is perfectly fine. Teams has a port to both Mac and Linux. Azure is a cloud service, but most of its development tools that I've used had Mac clients. I don't know anything about BI so I can't speak to that.
Office even has a web version that generally works fine. I ran it on Brave browser in Linux last week. Teams browser also works fine, I use it to talk to my parents.
I wouldn't exactly use the word evil, but I do remember a time when desktop hardware and software were not so massively dominated by one or two companies. I could buy a 386 or 486 computer from any number of vendors, buy expansion cards (graphics, sound, MIDI etc.) from various other vendors, buy hard disks and optical drives from yet more vendors, and even buy DIMM memory modules from yet more vendors, and put it all together myself. Yes the machine would run DOS or Windows, but most software outside the Office suite came from various different vendors (remember Norton, Borland, Corel?)
Not blaming MS per se (much of my examples above are H/W), but the type of "consolidation" companies such as MS engaged in, killed a lot of small to medium computer hardware and software businesses.
I don't see how they're worse than Nvidia, Broadcom, or Intel. At least you can remove Windows from a computer.
Do they still do EEE? I'm not a huge fan of MS but I haven't really heard of any EEE stuff in quite awhile.
Most Linux development is corporate now, WSL makes Linux easy to "use" without ever leaving Windows, and the lock-in-effect if you are using Office/Azure/Teams/BI/etc is almost perfect. You can't leave it, basically. Easier to start a new subsidiary from scratch using something else, than trying to migrate off the Total Microsoft Stack.
Office has a port to Mac that is perfectly fine. Teams has a port to both Mac and Linux. Azure is a cloud service, but most of its development tools that I've used had Mac clients. I don't know anything about BI so I can't speak to that.
Office even has a web version that generally works fine. I ran it on Brave browser in Linux last week. Teams browser also works fine, I use it to talk to my parents.
I don't think your examples are good on this.
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