Ask HN: Will Microsoft ever become cool again? - mkovji
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akulbe
They're doing a hell of a lot more cool things than Apple, these days. Windows
is moving. macOS is terrible.

(Says the guy who's been a Mac user for >15 years and bought every new product
Apple has come out with.)

Apple is doing this to themselves. As a dev platform, their appeal is waning.
(Stop making shit laptops, and make your macOS stable again. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ )

Microsoft, under Nadella, is making the right moves, listening to their
userbase. It was enough to get me to switch back.

~~~
bernardino
Doesn't Windows have ads embedded w/in their OS?

~~~
michaeldwan
I’ve been using professional since release and haven’t seen an ad yet.

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nitwit005
If someone is on a windows machine, using the pre-installed IE11 or Edge
browser, I tend to assume it's a 70 year old these days. Or possibly someone
at a firm with some dated internal ActiveX page that needs IE.

That kind of association is extremely difficult to break. Car manufacturers
have struggled with similar impressions. You can make the greatest, and
cheapest, car in the world, and people won't buy it if it has that kind of
negative association.

~~~
CyberFonic
Talking of cars, Porsche sell stripped out, weekend racer versions for more
than the more luxurious ones. But it is a niche market. Same with computers
for nerds - we know what we are doing, but for the average consumer - which is
certainly MS's target market - the more bells and whistles the more impressive
it is in the showroom.

~~~
handbanana
I see what you’re trying to get at. But your example is not correct.

What Porsche model is a stripped down version of another? Porsche Turbo S —>
GT3/2 RS? Cayman GTS —> GT4?

Because in those 2 examples, there’s no stripping down.

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wilsonnb2
I think they're cool. The Surface Pro and Surface Book are the only computers
since the iPad first came out that I actually wanted to buy.

They also put Linux in Windows, released visual studio for free, created one
of the most popular text editors ever, and created 3 programming languages
that are generally well liked (C#, F#, and typescript).

I'm not sure how cool they are compared to Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and
Facebook but I personally tend to compare them to enterprise companies like
IBM and Oracle. Microsoft wins that coolness contest easily.

~~~
0x4f3759df
You left out that .NET Core is just as fast as Node.js [1] and .Net runs on
linux. Its pretty cool that I can write Linux programs now even though I am
terrible at c (to my neverending shame).

1
[https://stackoverflow.com/a/44093694/73804](https://stackoverflow.com/a/44093694/73804)

~~~
Yetanfou
Being bad at C (and family) does not mean you can not write 'Linux programs',
just pick any other language of choice and start writing. Recently the .Net
family has been added, before that Mono made a valiant attempt at supporting
it but those have been preceded (and might be succeeded) by a lengthy list of
languages in which 'Linux programs' can be written, from BASIC to Haskell,
from Python to Ocaml, from Fortran to Lisp, take your pick.

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CyberFonic
Cool to whom?

As a nerd, I would like them to do what Apple did: release a new, clean,
robust OS (based on OpenBSD would be smart, worked for Apple) and then provide
a shim for backward compatibility. That is, allow all existing programs to
still run but have a clean platform for future apps. Like ChromeOS I would
prefer this to be truly secure, robust and updated with minimal intrusion.

As a consumer, I want systems that are reliable, robust, secure, free from
malware, impossible to hack into, cheap and fast. In other words everything
that Windows currently isn't.

~~~
Yetanfou
The lower levels of Windows 10 are probably the least problematic so basing a
'new, clean, robust OS' on OpenBSD (which, by the way, Apple did _not_ do,
they used parts of the _FreeBSD_ userland on top of a Mach-inspired kernel)
would not do much good as they'd still have to include support for Win32 for
it to be considered a replacement for Windows. It is there Windows really
shows what it is made of: glue, tape, rubber bands, hastily erected
scaffolding around sassing facades, heavy structures built on top of unstable
foundations. Microsoft tries (and tries, and tries) to replace all that with
something new but they have a hard time making up their mind what the
replacement should be and where the focus should lie.

In this sense a good successor to Windows would be a lightweight VM host
running one-off instances of older Windows versions to support the host of
software made for that platform, allowing those instances to communicate with
each other. That might be good for users but it does not offer a path forward
for Microsoft.

In truth, there probably is no way forward for Microsoft in this space.
Windows is a dead end, the 'information at your fingertips' idea which Gates
spouted has come true but not by way of Windows.

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BjoernKW
Has it ever really been? I think that, as of today, Microsoft is cooler than
it’s ever been before.

~~~
eddof13
I agree. To me, out of the 'big 4', they are the coolest currently.

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bsvalley
Again or for the 1st time? They're focusing on the entreprise business and
moved away from the consumer business. So my guess is that it's pretty hard to
be "cool" in the entreprise world... Look at salesforce has been trying so
hard, it doesn't change the fact that their products don't mean anything to
the majority of people. So my answer would be... maybe?

~~~
wilsonnb2
Microsoft does plenty for the consumer or the non-enterprise ddeveloper.
Visual studio for free, VS Code, Typescript, Surface Pro, Surface Book,
Windows subsystem for Linux, etc.

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ggregoire
VSCode and the whole open source organization around it is super cool in my
opinion.

TypeScript and C# are great tools too.

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marketgod
Does cool matter? They were under $40 a share 5 years ago.

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fizzbuzzbazz2
I was reading a comment stection of a win xp pirated edition. It had los of
bug reports. 3-10 min after each there was a developer comment of the kind
"thats terrible!" 10-30 min after that a comment containing a patch was
posted.

Am i to understand this kind of service is impossible for a multibillion
company? You dont have any questions, you dont have any problem and we are
certainly not going to fix anything.

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tonyedgecombe
No, they are another dull corporation just like IBM, Oracle, Apple, Google,
etc. Don't fall for the PR of any of these companies. They aren't your
friends.

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Finnucane
Again?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
When IBM went to the PS/2 architecture, and the OS/2 software, to try to kill
the PC clone market and lock up the PC hardware and OS market for themselves,
Microsoft was the champion of freedom and openness. Really.

Windows 95 and 98 were when the GUI became cool. Well, cool _and available_ \-
it was cool on the Mac, but nobody had Macs.

~~~
Finnucane
Yeah, I could see how finally getting their GUI system more or less working a
decade after everyone else could be seen as cool. And yes, keeping the
corporate drone market away from a technically better product, also cool.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
"After everyone else"? Well, there was the Mac. And there was TopView. And
there was... who, exactly, is "everyone else"? There were workstations like
Silicon Graphics, but they didn't even pretend to be available (affordable)
for the average user. They weren't competition for the PC. On commodity
hardware, it was Windows and TopView, and TopView was... not very useful, to
put it charitably.

The PS/2 was a technically better product. It was also IBM's attempt to put
the genie back in the bottle, so that it could sell hardware at prices
considerably above the commodity level. Technically better? Cool. Not having
to pay several hundred dollars more for your hardware? The market thought that
was even more cool.

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rbanffy
No.

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api
MS hasn't been cool since the 80s and even then its coolness was debatable.

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NVRM
No fucking way.

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mindcrime
Sure, as soon as they open-source Windows, Office, and Sharepoint and make the
XBox platform Open Hardware.

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Finnucane
Open source Sharepoint? Why would anyone want that?

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mindcrime
They wouldn't, it's just the principle of the thing!

