On: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

[jacquesm]

There are plenty of attempts at the creation of new walled gardens, but I don't think they will have a very long life.

The examples you give are all tied to very specific hardware, microsoft thrived on open hardware making tools and supporting those tools.

Look at where IBM is going for what microsoft could be like.

[bad_user → jacquesm]

I would really like to believe that, but more and more I think we're heading for a closed/industry.

The App Store isn't the only example, how about all those developers integrating their apps with Facebook, Twitter or the Google apis.

[jacquesm → bad_user]

Github.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/github.com

Really, open source is growing faster than it ever did before, the products are getting much better, they're slowly wising up to the fact that open source does not mean 'shitty support' or 'no need for marketing'. More and more people are finding ways to make money in open source projects.

Drupal got a very large amount of funding based on software they're giving away (ok, not my personal choice, but still).

And so on. Open source is maturing, and microsoft could do a lot worse than set a trend for a change instead of trying to hold on to the brakes as hard as they can.