Comment by jmward01

Microsoft is big, internally incoherent (even inimical, according to some accounts), and people responsible for VSCode and WSL are likely totally unrelated to people determining when and how to crack MS's crown jewel, the Office suite, in an attempt to squeeze out a few dollars more.

A lot of developers (and thereby most on HN, I guess) see Microsoft only from the perspective of a private consumer. From the perspective of a normal non-technical company though, Microsoft is this giant that has spread its products throughout your organisation like a cancer and you can never free yourself from it. For Microsoft's main business it's irrelevant if VSCode is mostly open source or not. That is why these gestures never meant anything in the first place.

It doesn't matter if some Microsoft trinkets are open sourced while AD is not and while you still can't connect your open source DNS and DHCP server to a Microsoft domain controller. Or have your open source email client be 100% compatible with the proprietary Exchange protocol.

They're open-sourcing things either because they get no value from them anymore, or just want more unpaid "community" labour.

I think Microsoft stopped being the "darling" in 1994 when they got sued by Stacker and had to pay $120 million for stealing their source code and using it in their own product.

> I remember when Microsoft was the new darling not many years ago, because of VS Code and WSL

I was genuinely puzzled by that, actually. I thought it quite obvious from the start that Nadella is no longer interested in Windows and other Microsoft software as products and will be moving them to thin cloud wrappers, but for some reason people were really optimistic about the "New Microsoft".

It's good legislation. I would love to see this extended to "Stop Killing Software" in general, with the same provisions.

This is much worse. The Crew was always framed as an 'always online' game, even if that was technically a farce. This would be more like if Bethesda rolled out an update to cripple Skyrim after releasing a new Elder Scrolls game to lackluster sales.

I think you should be allowed to stop supporting software or shut down your servers.

This is a rather strong analysis. And especially the point on behaviour change once market growth plateaus was new to me. Thanks!

I do want to nitpick on “unregulated free markets”. Because it’s almost an oxymoron. At least if one wants to rely on the theorems that prove free markets are best.

Those theorems assume a bit more than just a lack of regulation. They assume no information imbalance between parties. No ways outside of competition to keep out market entrants, and no collusion between market parties. All of those assumptions, in order to approach them in the real world, really require some strong regulation.

Hence I would argue that the problem isn’t just the growth curve flattening, but also a US (and EU) halt to Trust busting. Massive weakening of consumer protection agencies, and a general weakening of regulatory agencies by e.g. court cases.

It’s not just that we need stronger regulation because tech companies reached a point in their lifecycle where they wish to exploit more, as you so clearly argued. On top of that, regulatory power has been pulled back.

I did. SunOffice, then OpenOffice, then LibreOffice. It still isn't very good, though.

Most companies didn't, no.

Just because alternatives exist for some people some of the time does not mean Office is worthless, or that buying it isn't rational.

(Though buying it starts to look a lot less rational when things like this happen.)

[dead]

> but the trend in the last 1-2 decades is increasingly towards extracting value

It's rent-seeking in the economics textbook sense of the word. Actually quite straightforward once you understand and internalize that they want you to rent SAAS products forever with a monthly recurring bill into eternity. And then as the parent poster 'jmward' commented above, choose not to engage with it.

In the example of this specific product, Libreoffice is good enough. There's also a renewed European project for open source/self hosted office suite software.

> In the past, companies made their profits by providing value that induces a sale, but the trend in the last 1-2 decades is increasingly towards extracting value. The main difference being we are moving away from clearly defined transactions and companies view their customer base as a resource that they can trade increasing amounts of asymmetric, long-term exploitation for some pre-calculated probability of churn.

That's not an accident. In the last 1-2 decades, the largest generation in American history started retiring en masse. They didn't have enough children to replace them, because the birth rate peaked in 1965. This generation is now drawing off of retirement savings, the vast majority of which is backed by ownership in equities and bonds in publicly-traded companies.

When you don't have more people to provide value that includes a sale, like you say, and still have to increase value of equities and bonds every 90 days, you have to more intensely monetize each customer.

It's only going to get worse unless you bring a lot of people into the market as new potential customers, but you can only do so much of that without causing social disharmony.

Sadly that only works when all parties agree on the "clearly" part. They will lose, but only if you can endure years of squabbling in court and have unlimited funds for your legal team to prove that the aforementioned clearly really is clear. More likely they'll bleed you dry and force a settlement with an NDA bolt on. For a company like MS, pissing a few million down the drain on making life hell for litigants turns into a sound investment: no one looks at it and thinks "I want what they're having". This is where you would ideally have a government-backed consumer rights agency step in and take up the battle.

Yeah. But it seems unlikely that that's the caes here.

Bill Gates also deserves a criminal investigation into what he did on Pedo Island.