
Git, Cloud, Node, Metro, is Microsoft starting to get a little bit cool? - junto
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/nodejs/tutorials/create-a-website-(mac)/
======
dredmorbius
No, they are not.

The company has, and has always had, a winner-take-all, paranoid violent
reaction to all possible competitors in any of the spaces it occupies. It has
established and held a strong market position by defining for itself an
exclusive platform, first through mandatory per-unit licensing (MS DOS/Windows
3x), later through its mutually leveraged dominance of the desktop OS / office
suite space, which it has tried (with varying levels of success) to extend
into servers and services largely through mail and calendar, directory,
collaboration, and database (MS Exchange, MS Active Directory, Sharepoint, MS
SQL Server) tools. Introduction of any of these within a business environment
pretty much inevitably sticks a wedge in the door. Moreover, interaction
between Microsoft and other tools is often weak and buggy, encouraging a
Microsoft-only monoculture.

I've just addressed this in a recent thread:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4081701>

As others have noted, Microsoft have a hell of a lot to live down. Not just in
the F/OSS world, but in their mortally aggressive attitude toward all comers:
DR DOS, Novell, WordPerfect, Lotus, Netscape, Sun, Linux, GPL, BeOS, and
Google. Among others.

Currently, they are looking to quash competition on the x86 platform by
locking down the UEFI bootloader:

[http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/microsoft%E2%80%99s-take...](http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/microsoft%E2%80%99s-take-
uefi-may-impede-linux-and-that%E2%80%99s-being-polite)

[http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/red-hat-linux-
pa...](http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/red-hat-linux-paying-to-
get-past-uefi-restrictions-on-windows-8/3666)

Many, myself included, see Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures as one more
in a long succession of Microsoft-acting proxies fighting its battles on the
patent front:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/05/30/intellectu...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/05/30/intellectual-
ventures-nathan-myhrvold-patent-troll-comes-to-d10/)

"Looking cool" is the last and least thing they've got to do to atone.

(Edit: paranoid winner-take-all intro paragraph).

~~~
Animus7
> "Looking cool" is the last and least thing they've got to do to atone.

Maybe to us, the 1% on HN.

But most people don't know or care much about Microsoft's tarnished past. Some
have already forgotten.

I wholeheartedly agree with everything you're saying, but to me you seem to
imply that this is a bad move or that it won't work. Unfortunately, I think
for Joe consumer "Looking cool" might actually be enough to continue to buy in
to the Microsoft jails.

~~~
adambyrtek
"Joe consumer" doesn't really care about Git or Node.js. Looks like they are
finally trying to catch attention of developers, and I don't see how this
could be a bad thing.

~~~
Animus7
Joe probably cares about Metro, though, which is a far more significant piece
here.

And let's not kid ourselves; Microsoft is catching the attention of developers
mainly in order to extract money from them once they lock in to the Microsoft
ecosystem. It may or may not be a Bad Thing, but it's not doing any favors to
the Node or Git communities that they'd like us to think they care about.

~~~
adambyrtek
Well, you could always speculate about intentions, but supporting open source
tools seems like a step in the right direction. The community usually benefits
from more popularity, and open source licenses offer some level of protection
from "embrace and extend".

~~~
beagle3
Except Microsoft's modus operandi in the past was "embrace, extend and
extinguish", which IS harmful to the community despite open licenses.

------
mindcrime
No, there really isn't anything cool about Microsoft; and I can't really see
why anybody would use their inferior, proprietary, locked-down crap instead of
F/OSS solutions.

Besides, I think they murder programmers for code or something...

OK, _maybe_ they're not as evil as the fictional Microsoft-a-like in
_Antitrust_ [1] but still, cmon, this is Microsoft we're talking about.
"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"[2], anybody?

And aren't these guys still trying to prohibit dual booting of Windows
alongside Linux/Android on some devices or something? Yeah, that's cool
behavior.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_%28film%29>

[2]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish>

~~~
KhalidAbuhakmeh
Really I just think this is a knee-jerk reaction. I think Microsoft is really
trying and people are just gonna hate. Show me a successful company who isn't
getting sued by another one.

P.S. I still can't dual boot android on my iPhone, so why is Apple any better?
Apple is a closed system, more so than Microsoft.

P.P.S. I love Apple and Microsoft.

~~~
ajross
You probably weren't around in the 90's and didn't see the damage done to the
market by Microsoft. It's not about Microsoft "being sued" or making a "closed
platform". It was their pushing IE4 as part of OS updates to kill Netscape. It
was about cutting a sweetheart, loss-leader deal with AOL to replace the
browser in the biggest ISP in the world. It was about shipping a mostly
compliant Java 1.1 implementation and then refusing to update it, basically
breaking Java in the browser by default (applets written for the Sun plugin
would run and fail). And after achieving market dominance in browsers, it was
about _sitting on the technology_ for years, providing minimal updates and no
standards work while competing browsers struggled vainly to move the
technology forward (all done to try to kill off the "web" as a platform, of
course). It's about releasing a completely worthless "XML" document format
based on undocumented binary legacy stuff, and attempting to bribe and cajole
multiple standards bodies into endorsing it.

MS is not a nice company. But they've maneuvered themselves into a position
where they are no longer dominant, and are having to compete on technology. So
they certainly seem nice enough now (and they did in the early 80's too). But
I don't trust them; the culture is broken and evil.

( _Edit, because some of the responses are conflating the issues: to be clear,
I don't think Apple is a "nice company" either. But their position and
dominance today isn't nearly as damaging as MS's was in the 90's. I worried
for a while that it would be, maybe 2 years ago, but the truth is iOS has very
robust competition, and is actually losing market share slowly. I'm not
worried. Let Apple be evil as long as it's within their own universe and not
affecting the market._ )

~~~
mmanfrin
A lot of your examples could be used against current darling companies.

Cutting a sweetheart, loss-leader deal with AOL to replace the browser with
their own? Isn't that pretty similar to what Google is doing with Firefox to
the tune of a couple hundred million a year? (And something that Microsoft has
been banned from doing with their own proprietary browser?)

They refused to update Java -- Apple refuses to even allow Flash, which is
elsewise standard on something like 97% of computers.

'Pushing IE4 as a part of OS updates' -- wait, they're not supposed to promote
their own software (notwithstanding the business with uninstalling Netscape,
that was indeed evil).

Trying to kill off the web? Okay, at this point you've lost it.

Stop seeing things in purely black and white.

~~~
ajross
This is all missing the point. Context matters in antitrust issues. Google
doesn't have a 97+% monopoly position in web browsers, nor are they using
Firefox (or Chrome) to deliberately harm their competitors in search (quite
the opposite in fact). Apple likewise is not using a monopoly to harm Adobe,
who have access to a larger smartphone market than iOS already (and in fact
are shipping out of the box on most of those devices).

And you realize there's an important difference between "promoting one's own
software" and deliberately installing (and making default) a free (!)
equivalent to your biggest competitor's software on every single one of your
monopoly-sized installed base?

~~~
yawgmoth
But consider the alternative. Not shipping part of their software that fits on
their platform just for the sake of making sure that the consumer's decision
is purely unbiased? That'd be an awful business move, and they knew that.

------
JoelMcCracken
Microsoft has made various token attempts at being open source friendly in the
past. Thing is, Microsoft has _a lot_ to live down from the OSS perspective. I
wont begin to consider Microsoft for anything serious until it "makes good"
within an order of magnitude of the harm it has tried to do to the open source
community.

~~~
yawgmoth
Am I the only one who finds statements like this to be somewhat fanatical?
Companies compete in all sorts of ways, but I find it hard to believe that
Microsoft is some malevolent (thanks) empire trying to crush every OSS entity
that they see.

Perhaps I just am not familiar enough with what they've done to harm OSS.

~~~
beagle3
> Perhaps I just am not familiar enough with what they've done to harm OSS.

That is probably the case. They've done a lot of harm to OSS and the technical
community in general:

\- OOXML vote stacking,

\- Patent suit threats chilling effects against virtualdub

\- Vague FUD claims against Linux infringing on intellectual property, never
substantiated

\- Extortion of fees from handset producers for using Android

\- Disallowing dual boot on Win8 ARMS (and that goes some 15 years back - and
was one of the ways they killed BeOS)

\- Refusing to support ISO standards (like C99) and IETF standards (until they
were forced to by dwindling market share)

It is my impression that Microsoft has repeatedly shown they will not act
antisocially only when they have no other choice.

~~~
CurtHagenlocher
As a Microsoft employee, I'm a bit confused about the C99 reference. You can
get C99-compatible compilers from other sources that run under Windows, and if
C99-compatibility is important, Microsoft will lose market share to them. My
guess is that -- for the line-of-business developers that makes up the bulk of
Microsofts dev market, C99 compatibility is simply not important.

Microsoft doesn't ship a Fortran 2008 compiler either; should they?

~~~
beagle3
> if C99-compatibility is important, Microsoft will lose market share to them.

This would have been true if Microsoft wasn't also providing the platform. I
have been avoiding MS platforms like the plague for the last 5 years, but when
I last developed for Windows, you had to use the Microsoft C/C++ compiler to
properly play with many system interfaces (some of which, e.g. IShellFolder,
are only exposed this way).

Perhaps gcc is better these days, and you really can do without a Microsoft
compiler; that wasn't the case 5 years ago.

> for the line-of-business developers that makes up the bulk of Microsofts dev
> market, C99 compatibility is simply not important.

Of course, neither was ODF/OASIS support, and neither was OOXML. But the
former was an industry standard supported by every other player. And the
latter was an incompatible standard introduced by Microsoft for political
reasons and not even properly supported by them.

Which supports my claim that Microsoft is not becoming community friendly (for
any community other than "Microsoft developers") or helpful in any way.

Microsoft doesn't need to ship a Fortran 2008 or C99 compiler. But I think
there's no merit in the claim that Microsoft is trying to be friendly with the
open/standard community, or that it has changed its ways (given in my list
above) in any way.

~~~
CurtHagenlocher
There's nothing fancy about interfaces like IShellFolder. From a C
perspective, they're just tables of function pointers. I don't know why they
would require a Microsoft compiler. But if there's something in those headers
that's not compatible with the C standard, then that's a much more valid
complaint.

There are commercial compilers from Intel and others which I think are both
thoroughly compatible with Windows and support some or all of C99; these are
always options.

I wasn't taking issue with any of your other examples, because I'm largely
sympathetic to those claims. But Microsoft's failure to sell a specific
product you want from them seems like a different category of complaint
entirely.

~~~
beagle3
> But if there's something in those headers that's not compatible with the C
> standard, then that's a much more valid complaint.

There definitely was stuff incompatible. I think at some point gcc/icc started
supporting these extensions, but for a long time, all of the midl / type
library tools with MS only, and the header files used proprietary MS
extensions.

You could, of course, rewrite the definitions for another compiler (COM was
documented), but it was a tedious error prone thing to do.

> Microsoft's failure to sell a specific product you want from them seems like
> a different category of complaint entirely.

The list of complaints was far from complete, I tried to give complaints of
different kind. This one is in the same category of the IE6 stagnation (market
owned -> innovation stops, standards ignored). It's not as antisocial as the
rest of the complaints, but it is definitely in the "Microsoft isn't a friend
of the community" department.

------
barranger
It never ceases to amaze me how fast microsoft has been iterating with Azure,
With Scott Gu running the team things have gotten even better.

As for the latest release just the change from that hideous Sliverlight
management console is reason enough to be excited. The really interesting
announcements should be coming in a few months when the different component
providers (CloudDB, MongoDB, etc) start offering Azure based offerings.

------
csarva
If only they could come up with something better than cmd.exe, Windows could
be a fairly decent system to work on. With Cygwin and other tools, the
environment is fine, just lacking a decent local terminal and most of the 3rd
party ones are just as bad last I looked.

~~~
lmm
Have you tried PowerShell? That's exactly what it's meant to do

~~~
meanguy
... have you tried PowerShell? It's actually more like a scripting language.
But if they called it PowerScript we'd just make fun of it for being bad
Python. And the command window itself still sucks. I use
cygwin/rxvt/screen/bash and only get burned a few times a week.

~~~
revolutions
Mentioned this above somewhere, but thought I'd leave it here, too. Try
Console. <http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/>

It makes working in Windows much, much nicer.

------
webmat
I love how some of the screenshots show the Chrome browser and a Mac console
:-)

~~~
rufibarbatus
But also IE/Windows. And at the bottom of the article, there are links for
additional resources in Windows and UNIX-like flavours.

------
debacle
Microsoft has been working towards cool for a few years. All they need for me
to never move away is a native POSIX shell.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
POSIX isn't divine and infallible. PowerShell is actually quite nice, save for
the arcane Windows console UI. I still prefer zsh, but that's no reason to
immediately discard a competitor.

~~~
debacle
I have a windows workstation. Every single server I interact with is POSIX.
POSIX isn't divine and infallible and PowerShell is nice, but it isn't as
ubiquitous and I only have enough patience for one arcane shell language.

------
thomasnext
Don't forget IE9, the first browser with a dubstep commercial!
<http://youtu.be/7u2KN_Q0sy8>

But, really, cool? Microsoft is trying too hard. Watching their videos is akin
to rogue state propaganda. Does anyone really believe that IE9 is the
"coolest" or "most beautiful" browser ever? (Let alone that being an important
metric at all.) It's unfortunate that Microsoft thinks we'll actually believe
this stuff.

On the other hand, props to them. I wouldn't have known about Alex Clare's
"Too Close" track without that commercia.

------
d4nt
I think it rarely makes sense to view Microsoft as one consistent entity; you
have to look at which division is doing this and what are they're motives[1].

The Azure bit may have some affinity to the Windows Server division but
probably doesn't feel pressure to sell desktop OS or Microsoft Office
licenses. I think Azure wants to attract developers away from GAE and AWS, in
that context this move makes perfect sense.

This is no more unusual than MS Office being available on Mac or Silverlight
support being somewhat absent from Windows 8. Both things make some degree of
sense when you 'follow the money'.

[1]: <http://www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-org-charts-2011-6>

------
moondowner
You can host node apps on lots of platforms - Heroku, OpenShift, DotCloud,
Cloud Foundry, Rackspace Cloud - the list goes on...

When you have so much competition, and you aren't the first in the game, you
have to change ;)

------
Kudos
Microsoft seems to think that Node is a general purpose web application
platform. It would be cooler if they recognised its values (real-time
applications) and promoted it on that basis.

~~~
ghurlman
For their purposes (Node = another thing running on Azure), it is just another
platform. It's not their job to sell the platforms, just host them.

------
Symmetry
Microsoft is a big complicated company. It shouldn't be surprising that there
are cool parts and less cool parts.

~~~
jinushaun
People talk about MS in generalizations and forget that it's made up of
individuals like you and me. Individuals that use Mac and Linux at home, who
code Ruby and Node.js in their free time and use git. These people inside MS
exist and recent moves by MS show that their efforts to change MS from within
are working.

------
KhalidAbuhakmeh
The only thing interesting to me is that Ruby (on Rails) is missing from the
developer center. Seems like if you support PHP, then RoR would be an easy
win.

[https://www.windowsazure.com/en-
us/develop/nodejs/tutorials/...](https://www.windowsazure.com/en-
us/develop/nodejs/tutorials/create-a-website-\(mac\)/)

Probably coming soon.

~~~
bsphil
Only the hacker community could think so.

------
realize
All except the Azure bit.

------
cooldeal
Is this something new? Microsoft has almost always supported popular platforms
other than their own if they think they can make a few bucks off them. There
are a whole bunch of examples for this including Office for Mac, IE for Mac,
Hyper-V support for Linux, OneNote, Bing, On{x} for Android.

Of course you can ask why is there no Office for Linux? I believe the answer
is more simple than "EVIL M$'. It takes a huge amount of effort to port Office
to a new platform(remember how Chrome faced a bunch of issues with Desktop
Linux), and MS probably believes it is not cost effective since some of Linux'
users want nothing to do with Office or any MS product anyway. If Linux breaks
10% of user share, maybe you'll see Office for it. There are very strong
rumors that MS is going to launch Office for iPad at the _same_ they're going
to release Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets with Office, which is going to one
less reason for users to buy a Windows RT tablet over the iPad.

------
TylerE
Seems to me they are being hipster - the opposite of true cool. They're
grasping at straws - whatever seems to be hot.

~~~
dredmorbius
So ... you're saying that Microsoft are trying to be cool ... before it is
cool?

~~~
TylerE
Sort of. True coolness is not something one can consciously attain, only earn
through actions.

