This comment comes some 15 years late. Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
IE has been dead and buried for ages. Edge doesn't have even close to the same market share and is based on Chromium.
They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
I honestly don't remember when they tried to snare someone to use proprietary extensions to something open. I probably have missed a few instances.
Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
The fact you still only got bothered by studio acquisitions show you don't even noticed the studio closures...
MS fired thousands of gamedevs in the last few weeks, cancelled a lot of games, including games the execs liked to play the prototypes, cancelled publishing deals, and even closed entire studios, some of them literally successful that had just released profitable products.
For the last decade they acquire studios/IP’s, let them languish, then without warning strip them for parts. Make a successful game? Doesn’t matter, you’re all fired. Y’all want to make a game? Sure! We can even promote it! 12-18mo of no news after an announcement ah dang guys we were so hyped but we’re pulling the plug.
It is baffling how many studios they own and yet they have almost no exclusives/big cross platform hits developed for the Xbox this generation.
I don't think MS considered any of this. For example there were situations were they had a meeting giving green light one day, and cancelled the next.
Seemly what happened is that MS high-level decision makers, concluded that MS need a lot of cash for AI research, and decided to mass-close studios and cancel games with little verification, just go firing people until the cash liberated for AI is enough, doesn't matter if those people gave even greater revenue recently.
Amen. Also, forcing us to tie our local OS into their cloud nonsense is a travesty. Hearing that they will soon disallow updates to those of us that don't capitulate to their cloud-account ransom has kick-started my efforts in formally moving away from Windows. I'd rather lose most games than get a cloud account.
Excel single-handedly redeems Microsoft from being a pure drain on human existence, but I can’t see what the point of the company is beyond that. Enterprise something something maybe. And declining literacy makes Powerpoint unfortunately indispensable.
> Excel single-handedly redeems Microsoft from being a pure drain on human existence
Debatable. Excel can't even open CSV files properly. You need to run the import wizard. But loads of people don't do this. They see a file on their desktop and double click it. Why can't double clicking a CSV file just open the import wizard!? (Because they want people to share xlsx files as a data format.)
I assume most Americans don't run into the CSV hell that other countries do. In my current country, whether CSVs open as a comma-separated or semi-colon seperated document depends on whether the OS is set to use a , or a . for decimal numbers. It's absolutely annoying.
Right but the import wizard can fix things. They just don't make the double-click go through the import wizard - and people use 'open' or double-click their files. LibreOffice Calc opens the import wizard when you open a csv and it's fine.
For the life of me I cannot comprehend why they cannot let us choose the decimal separator independently from the locale. Or for fuck’s sake, just be smart about it. My desktop is for boring administrative tasks, of course I want it in my language. No, I don’t want to manually change settings in Word for every fucking document I create because ~none of them will be in English. But then why do I have to search-and-replace . with , or click 12 times through an inane bullshit wizard just to paste some data in Excel?
Respecting regional settings is so inconsistent among Office applications. The desktop ones usually get it, but online is a crapshoot. Whenever there's a date like 3/4/25 I get the play the fun guessing game of whether that's March or April.
For Project Online, the most reliable way I found to fix it was to manually edit the URL to replace en-US with en-AU, then bookmark that.
Depending on whether your OS uses a , or a . for decimal numbers changes how excel will parse a CSV file. Americans use a . for decimal numbers, so it will parse it as a CSV. Other countries use a , for decimal numbers, so it will parse it as a SSV (semi-colon separated) and everything will be in a single column.
To make matters worse, randomly, employees will have their OS using US or GB locales so that if you distribute a CSV, it will work for some employees, but not for others.
No. Excel changes the SEPERATOR when parsing depending on the locale settings. This means a CSV generated or saved with a decimal of . will not be able to be opened by one with a , and vice-versa. This is an Excel issue, as it doesn’t even try to determine or ask which separator to use. Hence why the comment above said you need to use the import wizard and not double click.
The syntax that MS Office uses to read/write a CSV is defined by the Regional Settings of your PC.
Open control-panel for regional settings, select "Advanced settings" button on the bottom
control.exe intl.cpl
If you don't know any of these problems, then all the people and systems you work with have a "." as decimal and "," as separator, and you are spared from the hell of MS Office being unable to overrule these OS-settings when treating a CSV
Honestly as this always was an obvious issue I usually just used ; and never got a complain. Obviously both . And , are used way to often not only for numbers. I am surprised this is problem enough (in 2025) that people emotionally discuss it.
> Honestly as this always was an obvious issue I usually just used ; and never got a complain.
Thing is, it is not about what you used, you are not able to control this from happening when your CSV should work for people in other countries. Whatever configuration you used which never got a complain, if your recipients also used Excel to work with those documents, they probably have the same regional setting on Windows for list/thousands/decimal separator.
If you use ";" as separator, i.e. Excel in UK, US, Japan, China, Korea will not be able to correctly open your CSV.
But even better: If you created this CSV on a France or Sweden regional setting, the thousands separator will be a whitespace ("1 000" instead "1,000" or "1.000"), so Excel in e.g. Italy will not detect those properly.
> I am surprised this is problem enough (in 2025) that people emotionally discuss it.
It is a (intentional) weakness of MS Office for those who work in an international environment, because Excel links itself to .csv files to hinder the experience, as it is neither able to properly detect them nor guide their users through a process to properly handle them.
CSV already solved this problem with quotes. Maybe not the most convenient solution for some users but that's no excuse for the Excel behavior of making up a different format depending on the locale.
Excel really doesn't care what users think. I mean, in biology, we've already had to change the names of genes to accommodate Excel's auto-date conversion routines. So, why would it care to have globally consistent CSV formats?
OMG--we had a worfklow where less-techy folks were supposed to edit a csv, then check it in to github, which would kick off a whole process automatically for them. I kid you not--anyone who edited the csv in Excel would eff the whole file up every single time! They just needed a text editor, which we told them to use, and the changes were literally simple, either editing an existing entry or adding a new entry. Nope, these college educated "IT" workers could not handle it! We ended up having to scrap the entire automation workflow because the employees were simply too dumb to use a text editor and github.
Maybe I’m just not understanding the nuances of what you were working on, but is it possible that there was something wrong with the solution if literally every person was screwing it up?
CSV is data only. Excel handles way more than that. XLSX is the preferred file format because it's compressed XML that can hold all kinds of things.
Also, CSVs seem to open just fine on my Excel. If it's not formatted with a standard delimiter or isn't handing quoted strings the proper way, sure maybe the data wizard is needed.
Excel is terrible in a lot of aspects, but CSVs seem to be something it handles as well as anything else in my experience.
Much like iOS/Android & the Web killed MSFTs stranglehold on OSes, google docs & markdown killed MSFT office's stranglehold on office. So many businesses are google doc shops, vast majority of schools are google docs, vast majority of casual document usage is google docs and google docs is open-enough with it's export formats.
Excel at this point is specialist software, like adobe photoshop. Everything else is 'good enough'.
Microsoft Office is probably still the largest player but a former large company I worked for absolutely used Google for 95% of purposes. I didn't even have a Microsoft Office license. It's very common. If we had to exchange docs with someone that didn't use Google, we'd export formats in some way including, often, to PDF.
Anecdata, 10k+ Eng department, it’s all GSuite. Office365 exists as well for external interop but I’ve never seen anyone reach for it due to preference since it existed.
Gsuite (including docs) is the norm at most companies I’ve worked at that have been founded since 2010, though the finance depts usually also had their own excel licenses.
That being said, excel itself is still more powerful than google sheets, but the collaborative nature of Gsuite beats the pants off of MS Office, online or native.
I'd say Word, even the web version is definitely more capable than Google Docs. I don't know that most people need it. I will say that interactive mode in gdocs is slightly better. I also like Outlook slightly better, though I do wish they'd slim it down a bit, it feels bloated.
My last decade has been a mix, some o365, some GDocs. I do wish there was something opened that was nearly as good as Visio myself, rather than renting it as an add-on. diagrams.net/draw.io is pretty good for some things, but Visio has a lot of features that aren't even close. I haven't tried the web version of Visio lately, last I had it was only halfway decent for read-only, but apparently most features now work. So next time I need it in mac/linux it should be an option.
> I'd say Word, even the web version is definitely more capable than Google Docs.
I reinstalled Wordpad. Wordpad is sufficient for most things (including opening and editing most simple word documents--though that may be because I created them myself with office 2007) and if I really need a word processor (styles, page layout, etc) then I also have LibreOffice. I didn't even consider an Office license when I rebuilt last.
It basically comes down to whether your sales arm demands native Teams and subsequent MSFT stack. Anyone deploying major production in GCP/GKE tends to go full Technical Partner with GOOG, google docs included.
FWIW Docs isn't bad, and slides is... useable, but sheets is a poor excel alternative.
I find Docs and Slides are fine and really preferable because they do a good job with 95%+ of the functionality you probably want without word art and stuff like that. Sheets is more stripped down relative to Excel but absent pivot tables and the like, most people don't need that.
That's being charitable to OSS office packages' UX.
Some wounds are self-inflicted, and open source has a well-known last-20%-polish problem that's especially painful in mass-user scenarios like office software.
OOo wasting the 00s with a circa-90s UI (and Oracle being assholes) is equally responsible for MS Office's continued popularity in enterprise.
Should I also change it on my mother's computer who doesn't speak English? We can also start distributing .bat files that change the system language along with our spreadsheets, for anyone who wants to open them. Maybe automate it with VBS, so it changes automatically when you open the spreadsheet. That's the solution.
The VBS should then also lock the spreadsheet to foreground while it's opened, because the global change may affect other apps, like Windows Calculator may swap the comma/thousand separator.
Will write a user story for that if you share the link /s
Interesting. I consider Excel the worst of Microsoft's misdeeds. Not that there's not an abundance to pick from, but Excel may very well top the list.
It's perhaps the single worst database in the world; with no type control, no relationship management, no data safety whatsoever to speak of (it even actively mangles your data), its interface is utter madness, and yet - it's the most used database in the world.
It's perhaps the single worst development and runtime environment in the world, obscuring code, making reasoning about code and relations between code almost impossible, using a very obscure macro language that even morphs between different computers, and yet - it's the most used development and runtime environment in the world.
It's perhaps the single worst protocol/data exchange format in the world, with dozens of intentionally obscure, undocumented versions, insane format with surprising limitation (did I mention it actively mangles your data? - it's worth repeating anyway), supremely inefficient, and yet - it's the most used protocol/data exchange format in the world.
I can't really think of anything in the computing world that has done as much damage as Excel.
What you fail to realize is that (nearly) everything you think of as a flaw here is a key feature.
Excel allows norm(al users)ies to scale Mt Impossible from the bottom where they don't care about types, or relationships, and don't want to (because it's too abstract). They want to solve a problem. So they start with simple data given meaning by physical space, and work up from there.
It's genius. It's computing for people that will never care about pointers.
> It's computing for people that will never care about pointers.
That's a bingo, although I'd phrase it even more glowingly as "It allows people to solve many common problems with computing, without knowing about pointers."
Everything you say is not wrong. But despite being so horrible, the business world still runs on excel. Finance, underwriting, accounting, engineering tools, fantasy football leagues… Excel is a highly used tool possibly the most used tool and enables many users who do not consider themselves programmers to be productive with their PCs. It’s timeless and hated by many for valid reasons, but its impact is vast.
But that's just path dependency. If Excel didn't exist, everything would run on something or somethings else. And it's not clear whether this timeline is better or worse than the average timeline in that respect.
Without a doubt, if Excel didn't exist, someone would have created it.
It's the lowest-barrier programmable logic, a coordinate-system where arithmetic can be applied to contents of any given coordinates.
And it likely would have grown into the same exact mess as Excel, with continuous expansion of the arithmetic part, as people kept reaching the limits of it but wouldn't go back and recreate everything in a DB...
I'm told there were better spreadsheet software back in the day, but that Excel basically won accounting/finance by allowing itself to be shareware (i.e. effectively free), in a similar way to how Microsoft has at times turned a blind eye to piracy of its other produce (e.g. Windows).
Not so much.. I mean if Word Perfect and Lotus 123 had a merger, then they would still be competitive as neither was really better than the MS Office counterparts, but as a combo they would have had more entrenchment to work from.
IBM buying Lotus and not Word Perfect was probably a mistake, had they really wanted to take it seriously... but they seemed more interested in Lotus Notes (think Outlook+Access in a self-hosted cloud environment), it was imho nasty af.
Not really. Once Windows came in, Excel was pretty much the best game in town. Lotus didn't really do a great job on Windows. There were some attempts at more integrated office suites but they didn't really take off. There were also some attempts at different spreadsheet models but people were probably too used to essentially the original Visicalc model. Not sure that Excel was anymore effectively shareware than any of its competitors.
> Excel is a highly used tool possibly the most used tool and enables many users who do not consider themselves programmers to be productive with their PCs.
What frustrates me the most about this is I've seen some insane excel wizardry from the accounting department at various jobs over the years that is effectively programming, and that if these people had put just as much effort into learning Python & using a database, they'd be better off and might actually make good developers. In my view, Excel ends up becoming sort of an artificial barrier to departments outside of IT being able to make business software.
Also a good point- but there is no python runtime on accounting and PMs computers. And it’s also a huge mess to try and support. Imagine some python code from 10 years ago, then juggling the versions, then god forbid any module dependencies. It’s simply not portable. Meanwhile the VBA written in 2000 is still working all contained in an excel Workbook.
I would dare to say that all business apps start as an Excel sheet (or Google Sheet) and after the usefulness of data collection and data arrangement/presentation is validated (often long after the usefulness is validated) they eventually become a full-fledged business web app.
And as a casual Excel user (to get data from CSV, remove some rows, move few things around, etc.) it isn't even great. You can't open two files with the same name because Excel seems to have some "global state" between windows; to the point where you might be hitting Control+Z to undo some changes, and it's undoing stuff on the other spreadsheet without you noticing.
Doing something as "simple" as a LEFT JOIN of data requires having two separate documents (or one, but saved on your system), open them in the Power Query editor (if it's the same document you do it twice, once per table) which creates two "queries", and then you can either use one to join against the other, or create a third one "joining" them. In the end, you get three new sheets on your docs: the original tables and the merged one.
Then there's the annoyances: if you use Excel in English (US at least), apparently you get a CSV separated by actual commas "," (ASCII 0x2C) but using it in Spanish (Spain) you get it separated by semicolons ";" because commas actually separate number decimals. Meaning whenever I build a program that parses/writes CSV, I need to consider the chance it's using semicolons and commas instead of commas and dots. Not that it's non-standard: CSV doesn't specify a delimiter, but you could stick to the same format everywhere, or give an option to customise, or create "Tab-Separated Values" (essentially CSV with tabs separating values).
Another one is formulae, that also change based on language, and their arguments separator also changes. In en_US you'd use `=SUBTOTAL(109,B2:B7)` while in Spanish it's `=SUBTOTALES(109;B2:B97` (plural instead of singular, and semicolon instead of comma). Meaning any guide, documentation or tutorial in English requires me having to "guess" how the function is translated, and manually changing commas to semicolons.
With all this, I mean to say: Excel isn't even that great for the "normal" user. Or perhaps I'm too "power user" for this and just lazy enough to bother with it instead of using "proper" tools like Python or R.
CSV literally stands for Comma Separated Values, so I don't know what you expect. For the most part, you should have (double)quotes around your values that contain commas and double the double-quotes for literal instances.
UTF-8 is now pretty much the defacto standard for the files, where as historically you'd have a number of different code pages, and/or UTF-16 (BE/LE with or without BOM) and a lot of other variances that were much harder to deal with.
Pretty much any software library for CSV handles these things for you. As for localization of input/language parameters, can't really speak to that aspect of things. And I'm not generally using multiple spreadsheets, etc... at most I'll have a database source connected to work against queried data.
Apple barely does it and only for their products. I agree with you that that’s already too much and too annoying but that’s an order of magnitude less than Microsoft who advertise their products pretty aggressively AND ALSO are advertising for whoever gave them money too.
Ubuntu I didn’t use it for years, there are tons of other distributions that I prefer now but last time I checked, there was a removable default shortcut to amazon. That’s an awful symbol, if you ask me, to associate Ubuntu and its meaning to Amazon but it’s nothing when compared to Apple or Microsoft (dare I say Google) behaviors.
Yes. And the debacle was so loud because it does not happen generally (I’d have to go back to the U2 album thing to find something comparable).
They nag too much about their services, though. I don’t fucking want Fitness whatever or News thing, I would like the OS to stop putting a red dot in my settings. But anyway that’s not as brain dead as what I’ve seen on Windows.
Not getting stuff pitched to you constantly by everyone is such an unending exercise of updating preferences, "unsubscribing", rejecting permissions requests, etc. It feels almost futile.
Not to mention the "ask again later..." option having replaced the flat out "no" option.
Even the people you'd imagine might be more sensible (eg Proton) email the crap out of you by default.
So when even the OS starts doing it, it's somewhat infuriating.
Yes, the most egregious of which being the setting app.
Its an OS setting app. Its the most fundamental bundled application in an operating system, second only to maybe the file manager or package manager. Is nothing sacred?
lol I was actually thinking of the setting app in my comment. I agree, it bugs me every time I pick up my phone.
It's gotten to the point where I resist looking at my iPhone because I'm going to have to take up my brain space with the unwanted notifications. I'm not sure what it is but on Android it's less pushy and I can clear all notifications with a single click. So most of the time my new iPhone sits in a drawer and I use my old Android as I go about my day.
Hmm, what notifications do you get from the Settings app? I don't recall ever getting any. And you can clear all notifications with a single tap on iOS.
When you open the app, the top half of the screen is dedicated to selling you their subscriptions. If you're already subscribed, you won't see it. It looks like a settings app. If you're not subscribed, you enter an ad hell and you can't make those notifications disappear until you at least view the ads.
I definitely appreciate the android interaction for notifications, in that I can long-press a notification and jump straight into settings to disable if I like.
News app is part of the OS image and littered with ads. I just got an ad in Settings for the month to month Applecare because mine is expiring. Took a few tries of declining to get the badge on Settings to go away.
There's also a couple places where Ubuntu advertises their commercial services in the OS, including in apt ("Get more security updates through Ubuntu Pro...") and in the default login message (promotions for Ubuntu Landscape, as well as various other products and services through motd-news).
Once ever. The default search returned results from Amazon and local files potentially leaking your search intended to find local files to Ubuntu who in turn claimed that it was ok because potentially intensely personal info that could be inferred from queries weren't personally attributable to you.
This was obviously not ok and it never happened again this was if I recall correctly around 2012.
Ah thanks. I did a quick search before posting and this article was listed as from 2019, but that was when it was last updated - it did just happen once in 2012.
> Don’t Apple and Ubuntu also advertise products in their OS also?
I looks like Ubuntu was created just in order to be able to dismiss Linux as "also advertise products". It's just a single distribution out of a hundred, and far from the best, so it's completely wrong of course. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300531.
Your comment warrants a post in its own right: let's rank FAANG/M by evilness. Personally I've always been way more afraid of Google, because Microsoft's evil is just old-school capitalism, which is blatant, brash, and harder to ignore than to identify. Google feels like they are quietly and surreptitiously trying to pull the strings of the online economy in their favor, voraciously consuming the world's data behind the scenes, presenting to consumers a tiny little sliver of this massive digital beast lurking under the hood. They're always 15 years ahead of policy, so they get away with theft, copyright infringement, monopoly, and more, on a scale that I don't think we even fully understand.
Ranking evil is hard, but I'd rank Amazon's control of global supply chains as more evil than at least Meta. While Meta got WhatsApp, which is big. (Escaping Facebook, Instagram etc is a lot simpler)
Enabling Cambridge Analytica[0] alone ranks Meta far worse than Amazon. Amazon has done nothing remotely close to necessitating abandoning their own brand AFAIK.
Project Nimbus is Amazon and Google together. Meta was early on the genocidal train, in e.g. Myanmar and Ethiopia, as well as adjacent to the 'regime change' obsession of usian elites.
Arguably they're all atrocious due to effects on environment and labour rights.
I think what's almost shocking about this is that Google seemed so great in the beginning. "Don't Be Evil" was even like an internal code of conduct slogan or something.
I never worked there and have no inside knowledge of what happened. Did they get taken over by MBAs who gained control of the company? Was it always evil and we were just misled the whole time? Something else?
They merged with DoubleClick¹, an advertising company. The combined company was about twice the size of the old google so it severely diluted their ranks with a huge cohort of the worst kinds of MBAs: Advertising & Marketing executives.
Nothing fundamentally changed. The only real difference is they hit that inevitable point for any business that they had to start making money. They weren't evil then and they aren't now. They're a business, and they are responding to market demand for free to consumer products paid for by advertisement. What nobody on HN wants to admit is that the vast majority of people would rather have that than pay for their software in dollars. People love to complain about the Google panopticon but aren't willing to grapple with the fact that it has tremendous benefits too.
They single-handedly dismantled a thriving browser ecosystem.
They pushed Real Name policies, used Google+ to stifle innovation, and then finished the job by shutting Google+ down.
You are making exactly the mistake I am pointing out in my comment. Outside of the HN bubble nobody cares at all about a "thriving browser ecosystem." They want a browser that works so well they don't have to think about it and Chrome has provided that. And this is where Google's dominance has a tangible benefit. The amount of resources that Google can apply to Chrome development is massive compared to what could be done in the highly competitive market that existed before it.
You can argue that maybe a highly competitive browser market would lead to more innovation, but I'm not sure that's the case. Could a highly fragmented market build something that is as good as Chrome? IDK, but my (moderate confidence) bet is no. Browsers are a pretty mature product at this point and I don't think that competition would produce enough competitive pressure to outweigh the massive resources of a dominant near monopoly.
Adobe would be far more evil if they weren't so bad at making software. I think their intentions and business practices are clearly equal to or more evil than Apple, they just don't have nearly the scale and market reach that Apple has.
Yes. Yes they do. Collecting data is most of the point of Google apps/services/devices.
Google then aggregate all that data in the cloud, whereas even if Apple do collect data it’s almost never sent to the cloud for cross-analysis, it’s almost always on-device and therefore private.
> they get away with theft, copyright infringement, monopoly, and more
Citation needed. Did you forget that Google owns YouTube among other things? They don't need to torrent training data when people voluntarily upload an endless stream of it to their platform.
> They put fing ads in an os among other atrocities.
As did Ubuntu.
>I put them behind meta on the evilness meter but i think google is less evil which speaks volumes.
Huh? The same google caught tracking your every move even if you opted out? The Google that seems to serve ads based on your conversations if anyone in the room has an Android phone? The Google that actively tries to kill any and all ad blockers?
Ads in the OS? That isn’t Microsoft’s idea, or even Apple’s (they have places they do it too). No, that was popularized by the mobile OS made by an ad company, Android.
Haven't installed an app in ages, but seeing an ad in a store isn't as bad as seeing an ad in my app launcher. And yes, windows puts ads in the start menu.
I was an insider user of Windows for close to a decade... the first time I saw an ad in the start menu search results, that's when I changed my default drive to Linux and have not looked back. I booted to windows on that system twice since (firmware updater). I don't have a Windows drive on my current desktop at all, and my personal laptop is a Macbook. My work laptop is Windows though, the down side is the environment is so locked down, I can't even run WSL or Docker.
I install apps all the time without seeing an ad, because 90% of the apps I use are installed from F-Droid.
The apps I install from F-Droid often help me block ads in my browser, so I see very few ads as I use my phone day to day.
Meanwhile, my understanding is that Apple's App Store has ads in it, but that's the only app store allowed. So it seems like maybe iOS is the one that "has ads in the operating system".
Look, there are lots of us using Android and not seeing any ads. So we want to speak up when folks blab on about ads on Android. In reality, iOS and Windows and Android all have ads in their marketplace.
So if you want to have a substantive discussion, it should be centered around the places in the OS where ads are present, whether competing products have ads in similar locations in their OS, and whether those ads can be avoided, both on Android and on other platforms.
My contention is that Android ads are overblown, and generally Android has ads in all the same ways iOS does, and not any more than that. There are of customized versions of Android that add various anti-features, but that's not what I'm focusing on here: I'm focusing on a user's ability to avoid advertising.
But I'm arguing in good faith, and putting in effort to focus on the substantive user experience. I get the feeling you're in this to win some semantic battle with low-effort replies, so I'm going to disengage.
I mean yes, technically, but really no that's clearly not what was being objected to. Finding adds in arbitrary interfaces seems dystopian to me. Whereas having a discreet "suggested" or "promoted" tab or bracket for software in the app store - the place I go to get software - doesn't bother me. There are certainly ways they could screw it up but they don't seem to have done so yet.
Also as it happens I don't even see those because I exclusively use FDroid at this point. So ironically I see no ads when using a device designed and sold by an advertising company and haven't for years.
Ubuntu lost the spot as the default recommendation to newbies since then. Ads weren't the only reason for that but they are hardly a good excuse for Microsoft's behavior.
Having gotten tired of subjecting windows users to a phishing campaign to trick them to use edge under the auspices of it being chrome, they're now moving on to obsoleting all windows machines without a TPM so they can cryptographically secure their right to use their users' need to authenticate as an opportunity to sell data about that user to the third party.
They have no respect for the agency of their users. We're no different than cattle to them, an asset to be squeezed until no more money comes out of it.
No, IE has not been dead and buried for ages. Not everyone's a US corporation.
A lot of (mostly non-US) orgs used locked-down managed IT and VMs where IE was still the only allowed browser, until the IE 11 shutdown in 2022, which is recent.
And just for reciprocity, here's Indian Defense Review (5/2025) "These People Never Moved On: They’re Stuck 24 Years in the Past and Have to Use Windows XP"
: "Thousands of workers across the US and Europe still depend on a system from 2001. From hospitals to railways, entire operations run on technology long considered obsolete."
> A lot of (mostly non-US) orgs used locked-down managed IT and VMs where IE was still the only allowed browser, until the IE 11 shutdown in 2022, which is recent.
Yeah, if you've done support in large MS corporate environments with MEM etc then you've come across crappy business apps that have crappy requirements stuck in the past.
On the one hand, longevity of a platform is nice and MS screwed up IE in so many ways.
On the other hand, at some time the business has to manage their software lifecycle - including the death of old systems - and you can't blame MS for that.
The problem was the Microsoft zealotry of technical people they invent non existent problems often repeated like a cargocult by MS consultants/partners. They loved IE as a default browser. This has nothing todo with the apps being hard to fix, because that turned out to be an actual easy technical problem and I did 10 internal apps.
The only thing that helped was MS taking responsibility and killing IE. The problem I had was that IE was becoming an support burden on our tools, no customers were using IE but the internal staff was forced to.
and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
That should be a good clue that it's not worth much to them anymore, and tjat they'd rather rely on random free labour from the "community" than their own developers.
They build more and more of their own UIs on Electron.
Which is a horribly bloated pig that only helps forced obsolescence of hardware. It should be a very disturbing sign that Microsoft itself doesn't seem to know how to do native code anymore, as they invented Win32 and Windows.
As for open sourcing software. Is it even possible for them to do something that you would view favorably here? To me it seems like remain closed and they'll get criticized but open up at least some of it and ... they get criticized?
As far as I'm concerned, regardless of other factors the more source code that's out in the open the better off everyone is.
> Because we remember the evil Microsoft. Many young people still follow advice from the elders.
I get the point you're making, but it really seems like we haven't remembered. We've worked ourselves back into one juggernaut owning most of the web browser space and then collectively acted surprised when they started flexing their muscles. I encounter sites that only run in Chrome the same way I had sites that only ran in IE 6. It seems to me we're doomed to repeat history as long as that path is easier or more profitable.
The Chrome situation is non-ideal but still nowhere as bad. True IE was Windows-only (Mac one doesn't really count), closed-source so no other browsers could act like it, also it sucked per se.
These are extensions. No one is preventing OSS communities from developing their own remote dev, Python, and C++ extensions. The VSCode extension API allows it. There are actually some efforts being made to do it.
But ... they literally did that here? I don't think it's malicious in this case. In fact I think they're giving away genuinely useful tools here with no obvious downsides to their use.
But I do think it qualifies.
Bit like the example of Martin Luther King being a criminal.
> Long story short: MS isn't a saint. They are a business. And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
They are a business. You seem to misunderstand that businesses cannot behave like charities.
Being a business implies being for-profit.
Nobody said open source had to be free as in free beer, it just had to be free as in freedom.
It's their prerogative to make the plugins marketplace to alternative editors or not. Servers cost money. It's a business.
Does Matt Mullenweg has to let WPEngine sap server resources? Arguably not; and this opinion comes from a guy (me) that strongly dislikes WordPress (and by extension: Matt and Automattic).
Businesses don't and shouldn't operate as charities, but Microsoft is the only big tech company that manages to be a negative in every way. The only thing they've ever innovated on is lock-in. Now exploring the frontier of how bad Windows can be without people leaving.
The open-source stuff is whatever, only a tiny part of the picture.
You should be aware that Microsoft's idea of open source is very much at odds with everything open source before Microsoft boldly slapped a "Microsft <3 open source" right and left.
They may have progressed beyond Ms-PL, but they have tried to coup and steal open source projects several times.
But, altho understandable, the simple fact that their primary products, Visual Studio, Office, Windows, and even worse: former versions of any of these, are simply not open source in any way precisely contradicts the expression of loving open source.
While I mostly agree, I will say they're leaps and bounds better than a couple decades ago. Windows now accounts for less than 10% of MS revenue, and definitely lacks in attention by all indications. Linux on Azure outweighs their Windows use by an increasingly wider margine, and a significant amount of the progress that has occurred on Windows has been to make Linux development easier.
.Net and a lot of other tooling and projects are on Github under BSD licensing, and that's pretty cool... almost everything they do outside Windows/Office works in Linux these days. I do think they should at LEAST get a version of office (offline) that works in Linux... even if it's a bastardized web version that runs in Electron.
Aside: I couldn't say how much I appreciate the work Valve has done to improve gaming on Linux, and have no expectations of ever moving back to Windows. MS seems to want to extract literally every cent of value out of every Windows user, and it sickens me.
No, it’s pretty clear. Some extensions are NOT open source. It’s not ambiguous, and there’s nothing wrong with that as long as these extensions don’t have superpowers (ie. access to unexposed VSCode APIs)
But they do. Microsoft extensions are the only ones whitelisted in the VS Code marketplace to request experimental ("proposed") APIs in their manifest. Remoting, notebooks and now Copilot have all been using experimental APIs, verboten to anyone else in the marketplace until they become stable a long time later.
They've "always" made decent hardware, as far as I recall. The original XBox is 23 years old, and in the 90s they made great joysticks and other controllers for PCs. And their mice and keyboards have always been good.
> And they have behaved relatively nice for so long that some young adults don't know any other side of MS now.
Except that their macOS software still is non-parity with Windows for really no good reason other than anti-competitive. They’ve also had the opportunity to open-source Windows, but won’t go that far willingly, with the exception of those that did it without approval.
> Microsoft runs the biggest org on github and has open sourced a lot of their own code under permissive licenses.
two things can be true at the same time. MS doing some open sourcing and being truly evil too in many other ways. why do you need to settle on one or the other?
Holy shite what I just read. It's like telling people: mafioso people are not so bad, they keep the streets clean and there is discipline around the city. They only pickpocket the foreigners...
I intended that line to be ambiguous. My real point is that whatever their true motives, they have managed to shed a lot of the Evil Empire appearance and younger people weren't even around when the really bad behavior was at its peak. So it's understandable that there's a wide gulf in the perception of MS between older and younger IT guys.
Not really. They still have the same sales tactic as they always have: make an inferior product that barely ticks the boxes, then manipulate everyone to ditch their competitors in all kinds of ways except for making a better product. These manipulative tactics are sometimes fair game, most are quite unethical and some even illegal.
You can make a product that pleases its users, or just cater to the interests of the ones with the buying decision, for enterprise users they are almost never the same. Microsoft, like Oracle, leans heavily on the second strategy. Their developer tools are often (not always) an exception to this principle. I think this is the true reason Microsoft is so disliked as a brand.
These are the kind of claims that make some Linux users tiresome to talk to. (Full disclosure: I am also a Linux user).
I'm not defending Microsoft, they are not necessarily my cup of tea, but these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era (part of 2014 and earlier).
Feel free to express your opinions, but don't be hateful!
The grandparent was also wryly highlighting the crevasse between post-Nadella Microsoft's PR, which you seem to believe, and their actions.
Despite "MS <3s Open Source" they never changed, you're just referencing a very successful era of marketing.
And poor Linux users are out here catching strays. Very "don't you say that about the $1T company!!!" of you to defend them, "fellow Linux user" (also very hi fellow kids..)
I try not to drink the Kool-Aid either on Microsoft's side (again, they are not necessarily my cup of tea), but the prevalence of the people with the "Hey! Remember that Steve Ballmer called Linux a cancer? Micro$$$hit!!" attitude sucks my energy dry.
well, gosh, I feel sorry for those American Linux developers of that time. I guess they were unAmerican, according to Allchin. if they were of this time, i guess they would have been deported by ICE.
Linus Torvalds might be a U.S. citizen today, but during the first years of Linux he was certainly not thinking U.S. values and that someday his biggest userbase would be there.
> Weekly news wrapup: Microsoft claims Linux is un-American:
I found it so funny and hypocritical that I highlighted some of the sillier phrases below - in italics :
-------------------------
About me
Ivan Montilla
I self-define as a challenger of the status quo.
Usually, I question trends. Normalcy is to be avoided. Some of the greatest opportunities lie where no one else is looking. I’m more of a niche markets guy.
My interests are ever-changing, but I’m currently interested in financial markets technology. I’m also passionate for software performance.
I do develop some software, but not professionally. I’m more of a power user of programming languages. I see it as a craft, both engineering and some form of art. ---------------------------
The thought that I would have to go through the trouble of reading some git repo to run a script that will debloat my OS, no matter how easy or straightforward might be, makes me feel tired. I don't want to fight my OS, I want it to work with me. Between searching and learning stuff for my job and searching and learning stuff for my personal development or hobbies, investing time in tinkering windows of all things doesn't exactly feel me with excitement. I would rather switch to Mac or invest time tinkering a linux distribution that actually respects me.
You really don't. It just requires messing with some group policy and settings. I did this 5-10 years ago and haven't had to really mess with it much since. I've never used an OS that did not require some effort to get in a state I like.
Spending time to configure your OS to your liking is one thing. Having to actively fight all the crap that the OS vendor has jammed into it is quite a bit different.
I don't think the two are equivalent, since one has a much more adversarial flavor to it.
Having run Linux for many years in my experience there is a lot of configuration that is not because it's "to my liking" but rather because X broke and now I need to figure out why. I don't mind it, because it's definitely worth it in the end.
> You can (for example) de-bloat Windows 11 out from the telemetry and annoying widgets nobody uses, including the invasive Copilot.
> After de-bloating, it's a decent OS on its own.
Sure you can. I, as a tech savvy person, can debloat Windows 11. If I dare to do it. If I know I can do it. If I search for information on the internet on how to do it. If I know how to search and follow those instructions. If I follow all the steps (and hope my tutorial covers everything). If Microsoft doesn’t push an update to bloat it again.
And with that, well I still don’t know how to install it without a Microsoft account. It’s so incredibly user hostile that even the insufferable Apple Walled Garden don’t force you into all of this shit.
Didn't know you knew, cool. I doubt this is a method that will become unavailable as enterprises still use it. Never say never, of course, but as long as Active Directory is still around there will need to be some way to suppress the MSFT Account option.
> insufferable Apple Walled Garden don’t force you into all of this shit
No, but they will lock you out of your account if you have a long gone debit card on there that you don't remember the numbers for or access to that school email your uni yanked back.
I wonder how many college kids got locked out of their iTunes account permanently after they graduated.
Not really. You can't fully remove large parts of the bloat without breaking Windows Update, and true removal of some features is invasive enough that it has to be done offline.
When you actually look at those de-bloating scripts or techniques in detail, it's clear that they only barely address the issues with Windows, and they're always chasing a moving target of anti-user bullshit.
Linux tends to tempt people to spend time configuring it, but most of that is customisation to taste that Windows users very rarely do.
You can just skip it and use everything with the distro defaults. it many even be less work than Windows as a lot more software is installed by default on installation.
I used to configure Windows, now I don't bother. But with Linux, I do because I must. Many OOTB defaults just aren't great, or some part of it requires configuration.
> but these claims are only true of anything pre-Nadella era
Why does this matter? How does that invalidate anything? Are global companies only accountable for their actions so long as they maintain the same CEO?
>but don't be hateful!
Won't someone please think of the poor global technology conglomerate!
- Creating a language (typescript) that took the front-end web community by storm.
- Becoming one of the real adopters of "progressive web apps". Apple is actively hostile to them, because they would eat into the 30% cut they are making from the apps distributed via the app store; Google, once a champion, has grown kinda tepid, because it also gets a cut from apps distributed via Google Play; but Microsoft now behave as if they are a believer.
- Shipping a tremendously popular text editor, Visual Studio Code.
> - Shipping a tremendously popular text editor, Visual Studio Code.
Which feels sluggish compared to how it used to be. They keep tacking on too much cruft to it. I used to call it a lightweight IDE, but now its just a bloated editor.
Sorry, but even with typescript, the frontend web community a shit-storm.
Anything Microsoft + web is a nightmare. Their login system is a redirect and re-auth hell and I loath anytime I need to log into anything Microsoft related.
But in reality my favorite keyboard before I switched to the MS keyboards was the one that came with my original IBM PC with the clicky keys. The biggest downside was that my mom and dad always knew when I was on the computer!
Likewise the Intellimouse Pro is my favourite mouse. Sadly they seem to have discontinued it in favor of the Surface mouse which has atrocious ergonomics.
They also discontinued the ergo keyboard that I am using to type this. I'm very worried that when this keyboard goes out I won't have another option.
There is a clone on the market, which I use at home, that so far has been pretty promising, but we'll see if it has they lasting power that this one does.
Kinesis makes a keyboard that's basically the Microsoft ergo layout but mechanical and you can remap the keys. I have one and like it. https://kinesis-ergo.com/keyboards/mwave/
> - making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
I don't personally get too attached to devices I purchase or begrudge others for what they buy so, I'm curious what made them "cringe hardware" in your opinion. Adoption aside, they looked like pretty compelling devices to me. Is this a case of buying anything that isn't Apple isn't cool? Or is there something deeper there?
> making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
The 25 year window you picked actually coincides almost exactly with the time since the original X-Box was launched. Seems an odd omission from the list of hardware MS released in that time period.
Also the IntelliMouse Explorer was released in late 1999, which nobody who has ever had to clean the gunk off a mouseball roller would describe as ‘cringe’.
This "Microsoft are good guys" is a bizarre recurring comment that has appeared on HN for quite a while now
It's like pretending people must choose from Russia, North Korea, South Sudan or the Central African Republic
Who are the good guys
None of these companies are "good guys"
These "Leave Microsoft alone" HN comments will undoubtedly persist
Perhaps there are MS employees who comment on HN and they are sensitive about criticism
The idea Microsoft is somehow benign is truly hilarious
It is not difficult to argue the damage this company causes today without retribution is far worse than what they did in the past
IME, Microsoft is very cult-like; the employees believe that Microsoft has a solution for any problem, and there is never, ever any contemplation that the company creates problems ;this does not stop with the employees, it can extend to others who are "bought in" to the Redmond ecosystem
Are pretty cool guys in command and firmly desiring to keep up with their ethos, or mere disposable shiny pawns that are one giant layoff away whatever good the profit are?
- Abandoned the worst web browser in existence. That they created :)
- Abandoned ActiveX (29 years ago), Silverlight (4 years ago)
+ Opened .NET to more platform than just Windows. It can now run very well on Linux, Mac, etc.
+ Made many of its locked down stuff open source - .NET, Z3, hell there was that few weeks ago open sourcing of the WinUI framework, etc.
+ Pivoted towards the cloud where OSS software synergizes with their cloud offerings.
Do they do corrupt deals with governments? Well yes, but so does every other big corp. And making cringe hardware isn't a crime in itself.
Do they still do a lot of shady shit? You bet, but they only started getting worse a few years ago. You are thinking it doesn't come in waves and it was all evil, all the time.
It's always better when companies are hungry for business. I thought that in 2016ish it was super cool for Microsoft to get into Linux, build VS Code, and make bets like the Surface Studio.
For comparison, I think Mac OS in 2008 was also at a bit of a golden age:
- You had native file support for .iso, .zip without needing to install crapware like Winzip.
- You even could preview *.psd files out the box.
- You had first-party apps like Image Capture to scan documents without needing to install extra software.
- There was an amazing third-party app ecosystem with things like Yojimbo, OnyX, Little Snitch, Quicksilver, Handbrake, Coda, Adium.
This was around the time of the "I'm a Mac" campaign when Apple was _hungry_ to win business away from Windows. All of these small, polished advantages made me fall in love with the experience.
OSX today is still good but there definitely isn't that same level of "underdog hunger" showing up in the products as of late.
Anyway I'm just trying to say companies being hungry for business shows up in its products and that's better for consumers.
Unfortunately for their timing, the Zune HD was them finally getting their idea of a music player spot on. It just happened to be 2 years after the release of iPhone.
Talk to some developers with 3-5yoe, they do see Microsoft as a cool company. For them it’s a company that created TypeScript, supports open source, runs NPM, created VSCode etc. None of them thinks of Internet Explorer, Zune, or anti competitive behavior. You will always associate MS with these failures, the generation after you won’t
I don't think this is the last generation of Xbox hardware but they definitely are not going to push the next iteration hard. I suspect they will start to license out the OS and have a broad set of hardware specs to follow. Treat it like the Surface, it will co-exist with other machines.
Essentially, the business model of the 3DO has finally been proven correct 30 years later. Do keep in mind a lot of the 3DO team did end up at Microsoft... maybe they played the long game...
Basically, PS5 sales recently reached 80 million. Xbox Series X/S is estimated about 30 million. They lost the generation where digital libraries were built and can't gain the market back.
There's been a lot of rumor lately that Xbox becomes a shell on top of Windows and just runs regular Windows games. The announcement of the Xbox ROG Ally using this same approach gives it a lot of weight.
It is crazy how they managed the bungle the Xbox One launch at just the right time to cause this cascade of issues over a decade later. It doesn't help that MS haven't had a huge AAA exclusive title in a very long time. Now that they have started cutting in hard on their game dev teams, they may end up more like the Microsoft Studios before Xbox was a thing.
Nothing of the sort has been leaked or said by Microsoft.
However, their strategy seems to be going all-in on Gamepass. And if you subscribe to Gamepass, Microsoft does not care if you play on your Steam Deck, iPad or Xbox.
This is also why they mentioned they might open up the Xbox to other stores (Steam), and why they have been releasing first party titles onto the PS5[0].
If you couple that info with them axing their own handheld and instead licensing out the Xbox name to Asus with the ROG Ally Xbox, it isn't a huge leap to assume they'll just license out the Xbox name to whichever OEM feels like making a console. The Xbox One and Series X / S already run the Windows Core kernel which would make going more wide on the hardware support quite easy, and the current hardware is semi off-the-shelf stuff from AMD anyway.
Not the Xbox itself, if it was just the standalone device, but the way they had chosen to modify Windows to have Xbox compatible APIs, which are worse than the previous Windows APIs.
The enshittification of Windows gaming started with the removal, or sometimes deprecation, of the Windows gaming APIs.
I don't know where you've been the last decade, but it's clear they have been perceived this way. Him describing that perception only to be ridiculed by you is a pretty low blow.
Far more than that, so tell me, are my association of Russia and United-States to imperialist behaviors actually outdated, or are some cultural traits unfortunately still persisting through time?
This is bullshit, the Zune was great and was doing incredibly well, at least around here.
It was THE device to have, people were going crazy for them; there was enough pent up demand that people were breaking windows and sliding into cars to get them.
At least in Germany at the time of the release of the various Zune generations, Zune was both hated by hipsters for not being "fashionable" (these users strongly preferred iPods), and by free software advocates (who were very vocal at the time, and also had at that time much more influence on the sentiment and feelings of "average users" than today) for its in-built DRM system.
In addition to being able to run any regular Windows application, it had the best and most intuitive feeling UX of any tablet in history. Amongst many other features, window management was gesture controlled and Internet Explorer had an alternate UI that moved the tabs to the bottom of the screen to make them easier to reach.
Sadly, Windows 10 removed all the good parts of Windows tablet mode, but its ideas were so good that Apple is still slowly copying bits of its interface for the iPad to this day.
This feels more like the OS is what you liked. Nothing really about the hardware which this thread is about regarding Microsoft making crap hardware products. Is the hardware so mediocre that the best thing about it was the OS where nothing about the hardware deserves comments? If that's the case, maybe that points to validating Microsoft makes crap hardware being a true comment.
The hardware was good but nothing that an iPad doesn’t have nowadays. It was revolutionary for the time with the detachable keyboard and trackpad and Wacom-like pen. The software was what made it an amazing device though.
You specifically stated "since it runs Windows, I will never use it" and I addressed that point. If your qualifier is "runs MacOS/iOS", then your following question is moot for every non-Apple device.
Either way, no one can answer your subjective opinion-based query. Go test it out at the dozens of kiosks in any city in a Western nation (or, barring that, watch a youtube video) and judge for yourself.
I wanted a response that was an actual answer to the question. Instead, you made a post which was not a response to the question. You commented on the background and assumed something to which was not true. Then you got offended that I called you out on it. And now here we are with "not reddit" responses.
You provided no details on build quality of the Surface. You provided no information on if the touchscreen makes it a better product. You provided nothing useful towards answering the question I asked.
> Linux runs perfectly fine on most of the Surfaces [...] There's the usual asterisk here or there,
Are we reading the same tables? The last several models are full of question marks and crosses in the support matrix, and many models old and new seemingly require the linux-surface kernel fork for key features like touchscreens and even some touchpads, you can't just install your distro of choice.
Even compared to my disappointing experience running Linux at home, I'd say that's more of an asterisk minefield, except for a few Surface Laptop models.
I'll give you that the laptops models fare better, I said as much already I think, but I feel you're overselling the support for the form factor most people associate with the Surface brand:
The 5G version of the Surface Pro 10 (second to last) is completely unusable, the SP8-10 need a kernel fork just for keyboard and touchpad (!), SP4-10 need it for the touchscreen (SP4 is 2015), and the cameras won't work at all since SP7 (2019).
Don't get me wrong, I still run Linux on my devices and would be willing to tinker with custom kernels if certain hardware were worth it. I just can't consider this "runs perfectly fine".
The Zune was 100% uncool, but man did I like the hardware and software sooo much better than the iPod / ITunes. I was just sad that I never found anyone to "squirt" at.
eh, they had short blip in the relatively recent history, especially with developers, in mid 2010s.
With dotnet core 1-3 - open source cross platform .net, that was modern, fresh and clearly a project done by developers for developers. add vscode to this and it seems nice.
but as soon as 5 hit, if you look into details, they went to their usual bullshit, starting with stapling together winforms and wpf to it. the feel of the project shifted from 'developers for developers' to usual top down management.
vscode is also a weird case - it looks open source, but isn't at all(the builds you get aren't just from the same codebase + no access to extensions legally if you build your own, or fork it)
Microsoft has for the longest time been about business only. Any virtue signaling was just marketing.
Years back they were gloating about how their AI systems (pre-LLM stuff) could allow for great oil production while at the same time talking projecting the image of a clean green future.
This gave me the good belly laugh I needed.
For the last 25 years, Microsoft was known for:
- being the no. 1 enemy of free software
- shipping the worst web browser in existence, despite 80%+ market share
- making corrupt deals with governments around the world to tie them to their office software suite
- creating vendor-locked proprietary extensions to kill open technologies (ActiveX plugins, Silverlight, C++/CLI, MSJVM, etc.)
- making cringe hardware that basically noone purchased (Zune, Windows Phone)
The last time they might have been considered the "cool guys" was sometime in the 90s.