> have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti-developer Microsoft used to be
Microsoft has historically been anti-opensource, but not anti-developer. Their first product was a BASIC interpreter and in my experience throughout the 90s and early 2000s their developer ecosystem (aka Visual Studio) has really been first-class.
I am not a fan of Microsoft because they have been openly hostile to open source, but I don't think it's fair to say they have been anti-developer.
There is some nuance here. Microsoft executed "commoditize your complement" to perfection - the complements to their OS being PC hardware and applications.
This meant they had to be insanely good at supporting a vast array of diverse hardware, but also offered exceptionally good support for developers to keep the barriers of entry low in the Windows software market. They had even a cute name for these commoditized and neutered competitors - "ISVs". Basically, Microsoft owned the OS and the major applications like office & enterprise software, media, browser etc. and everything else was supplied by an ISV, for example your accounting software for country XYZ, a market where MS had no interest in entering.
As long as you kept within the ISV playground, MS was developer friendly, but it would turn very hostile to any perceived competitor to their core assets. Undocumented APIs, monopoly abuse, dark patterns, the entire circus. This strategy made the PC market impenetrable for nearly two decades, and it was only through sheer luck and complacency that the mobile revolution caught them on the wrong foot.
I wish we could have open platforms that competitive players can extend and develop without owning outright and excluding other competitors.
It's the great next step in regulating monopolies, contemporary products no longer exist standalone in the marketplace but must always interoperate with existing infrastructure and platforms. The last decades of tech competition were a repetition of this basic tune, some first mover more or less stumbling into a de-facto standard and then fighting like hell to maintain its dominance and undeserved rent extraction.
The situation is complicated by the nature of international trade vs local regulations, it might not be good for your national consumers to be fleeced by a platform monopoly, but you more than make up for it if your national tech champions achieve world-dominance.
> The last decades of tech competition were a repetition of this basic tune, some first mover more or less stumbling into a de-facto standard and then fighting like hell to maintain its dominance and undeserved rent extraction.
The development costs for Windows (as a common platform, stripped of any add-on that could be provided by other competitive players) are a footnote in the costs of the global software market for Windows. There is indeed a complex problem to be solved of how to organize an open platform so that the development costs are paid, but it's not fundamentally a question of resources. Multiple companies and open source teams have achieved roughly similar feats with many orders of magnitude less resources than what MS rent-extracted from the Windows OS consumers.
Ditto for hardware, you need a well defined and stable interface and the vendors will adhere to it once there is critical mass.
> Isn't that true for every industry?
In almost every such historic example that still exists in some fashion today (railways, energy, telco, utilities etc.), there was strong regulatory action to break up monopolies accompanied by rigorous standardization of the common interfaces.
I don't have a problem with competitive players inventing industries and new ways of doing things for the allure of monopoly profit. Just with the sluggish regulatory action in the particular case of computing tech, well past the point where it has become an established and essential resource for society.
> The development costs for Windows (as a common platform, stripped of any add-on that could be provided by other competitive players) are a footnote in the costs of the global software market for Windows. There is indeed a complex problem to be solved of how to organize an open platform so that the development costs are paid, but it's not fundamentally a question of resources. Multiple companies and open source teams have achieved roughly similar feats with many orders of magnitude less resources than what MS rent-extracted from the Windows OS consumers.
I was talking about Windows Phone, a mobile operating system. To have an open platform, you have to have one big company paying and managing its development. Otherwise you end up with fragmentation, lack of ABI stability, backwards incompatibilities and "distros" like with Linux on the desktop, and that is not exactly a consumer success.
If you want an open platform, you have Android. But apart Huawei (which was forced by US government) and maybe some few small manufacturers from China, I don't see much competition in the space.
Contrast this with a parallel world in which we have Android, iOS, Windows Phone, WebOS, Bada, Tizen, Maemo, BlackBerry etc.
By monetising OSS and sidestepping copyleft licenses to suggest you the same code repackaged as part of proprietary autocomplete for which you pay MS and not original authors?
That is not anti-developer, but definitely anti-opensource. As a developer I dont really care my code is used to make copilot better and sold in that way.
You should care if your code's license is being violated by being reproduced without attribution. Undermining OSS's licenses can ultimately weaken it, and the cynic in me suspects MS is fully aware of this.
the economic contracts offered to developers by Microsoft were very different than in other development ecosystems. Microsoft always represented a different economic culture than many others, developers chose their allies based on multiple criteria.
Microsoft was also a long time anti-commandline and against scripting, they tried to made everything clickable, with wizards and s**, and remove text and keyboard-input as much as possible for admins and devs.
Thinking about, Copilot is in it's own way, a continuation of this, just more dev-friendly.
> Microsoft was also a long time anti-commandline and against scripting, they tried to made everything clickable, with wizards and s*,
I'd categorize this as incompetence, not malice towards developers.
Specifically: Microsoft thought that code-creation wizards and UI would offer a better story than command line and text. Those attempts were misguided, and MS adjusted. The command line culture at MS has been pervasive for a long time, despite the quirkiness of DOS, so I must object to your categorization of MS being anti command-line and anti-scripting.
Yeah, but then they made PowerShell, which was at the time seriously the most advanced shell and shell scripting language out there. PS got pretty mixed reactions because it was different than BASH, but the idea of typed pipes of objects instead of one-size-fits-all streams of lines of text was (and still is) powerful. (The syntax could be a little less verbose though)
Being a developer isn't the same as being a command line user.
Most Windows users prefer GUI over the command line.
That being said, Microsoft released PowerShell, Windows Terminal and lots of command line tools. A large part of the Windows administration can be done trough command line if one so desires.
Microsoft has historically been anti-opensource, but not anti-developer. Their first product was a BASIC interpreter and in my experience throughout the 90s and early 2000s their developer ecosystem (aka Visual Studio) has really been first-class.
I am not a fan of Microsoft because they have been openly hostile to open source, but I don't think it's fair to say they have been anti-developer.