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Ask HN: What should Microsoft do to change geek opinion?

14 points by aliostad ↗ HN
Since (and even before) Satya Nadella become CEO of Microsoft, a lot has changed. From adoption of Open Source technologies to open sourcing a big chunk of its active software stack, from hosting Linux on Azure to supporting Office and .NET on all major platforms, not to mention its active contributing to Hadoop and a lot of other projects.

Having said that all, I can see little being changed from the attitude of the community towards Microsoft. Some are still skeptic about how real a move it is while others feel it is too little too late. Some (including me) feel this comes out of utter desperation rather than a strategic move from a change in the vision of the company. And ss Satya himself said, the biggest challenge is changing the internal culture.

So would you think attitude of the general geek community has changed towards Microsoft? And if not, why that is and what would make you change your opinion?

22 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 71.7 ms ] thread
frozenport
I want the linux tools I am familiar with. This means a useful cmd, different FS layout and a gcc/icc style interface for MSVC.
Someone1234
cmd is deprecated, and has been replaced by Powershell (in 2009, six years ago!).

What file system layout would you want? UNIX? Does anybody think the current way the UNIX FS is used makes any rational sense? It is a giant disjointed mess, with a great deal of misusage by developers and users alike.

Microsoft could dispose of e.g. Program Files, Program Files (x86), Common Files, and also re-organise %AppData% and %windir% a decent amount. Remounting on / wouldn't provide much benefit (and technically Windows NT actually is mounted at \ they just use the root context for object storage, not files).

They have been trying some re-organisation with the Windows 8 "app" system. But since that has not been very successful neither has the project seen many results. Essentially they're siloing apps in the same way mobile devices do e.g. iOS apps/Android apps, etc.

SVC already is completely driven from the command line already (there is no UI).

pjungwir
Command-line ssh & scp would be awesome. Also something like wget/curl. In general for TCP/IP there is still just almost nothing.
Someone1234
Windows has wget. Well technically it has Powershell alias for Invoke-WebRequest, however if you type "wget example.com/file.exe -OutFile file.exe" it will do what you expect. It also has Invoke-RestMethod and System.Net.WebClient.UploadFile( 'http://example.com/submit', $filename ).

> In general for TCP/IP there is still just almost nothing.

No clue what that means or what it is in reference to.

frozenport
>>cmd is deprecated, and has been replaced by Powershell

I don't want powershell, I want the things I'm used to. For example, Mac OS gives me that.

rlw001
Microsoft has spent a lot of time and effort putting themselves in the this position (closed source, ignoring and even shunning open source, OEM agreements that border on predatory, and so on...)

Unfortunately I believe the only thing that will change opinions are a considerable amount of time and effort in the other direction.

thecrumb
And cron. Damn that Windows scheduler mess.
Someone1234
The UI is a mess, the actual task scheduler is pretty darn powerful.

cron is missing a bunch of Task Scheduler's toys e.g.

- Start task on computer idle (and no, "nice"/low priority is not what this does)

- Stop task if the computer ceases to be idle, restart task if idle state resumes

- Start only on AC, stop if computer moves to battery

- Wake computer to run this task (unreliable, but useful when it works)

- Start task only if network connection is available (<pick network connection>)

The following has to be hacked with a bash script:

- Random delayed start

- Stop tasks if they run too long

- Begin on event (list of 300+ events, +custom event filters)

Honestly your criticism is pretty silly. cron is very very basic, and has to be hacked to do most things. Task Scheduler is incredibly powerful and doesn't require giant ugly hacks or custom scripts to accomplish things. I really think your reply is born out of ignorance (of both cron AND task scheduler) or just a raw unwillingness to learn something different.

Microsoft COULD put cron into Windows, just remove 70%+ of task scheduler's functionality, and all knowledge of how the underlying system works. But at least it would be cross platform...

ChikkaChiChi
Open source all patents related to the threat *nix based operating systems.
dandare
I have not seen Win 8 so I can only speak from the previous 10 years of experience - they should fix the UX. I always hated how complicated and perplexing everything was and when something failed Win would almost laugh in my face blaming me for it.
jpetersonmn
For me if they would lower the prices of their msdn subscriptions I'd dev for their OS more. $699/year is the cheapest option to have access to their OS's for testing. That's pretty expensive in my opinion.
throwawaykf05
Most geeks I know of are OK with Microsoft, actually. I find online communities, in general, amplify the voices of a discontented minority because the vast majority don't bother saying anything about a topic that simply doesn't affect them much either negatively or positively.
serve_yay
They're trying a bunch of things, I'm sure some of them are working. I went to a JS conference recently and one of their dev evangelists was talking about using JS to control Arduinos or whatever. No proprietary-stack stuff in sight.

I don't have numbers to say "a majority", but a whole lot of developers don't use Windows. They really need to give up on the Windows-everywhere stuff, but as I understand it that was a Ballmer thing. Anyway, I mean, they're Microsoft. I'm sure they'll land on their feet.

sogen
They need More marketing.

Hire cool agencies like Hello Monday (they've done most of Google and Android stuff).

davidf18
Have more contributors to open source such as Scala and Spark. I was at a (Apache) Spark conference yesterday and IBM was demoing a Spark interface to iPython 3 notebooks. Something really useful. Microsoft wasn't even exhibiting.

Mimic the Unix command line environment of Mac that runs the various untilies (eg, homebrew).

mcintyre1994
Really I think this problem is overblown at this point. That said, a surefire way would be something like Twitters patent agreement - guarantee no offensive patent use. This would mean giving up a bunch of Android revenue though so I don't see it.
Torgo
limited IE testing VMs that work in Virtualbox that don't require a license or constant upgrades. I know there are VMs but last time I messed with them they lasted for a while and then stopped working.
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pc2g4d
Continue involvement with open source projects in a way that shows good will toward the larger community. Stay on the course it's on at the moment---it will pay off.
MalcolmDiggs
My (very low) opinion of them would change overnight if they released something (anything) that was definitively better than my other options. I try to be pretty pragmatic about these things; I'm always interested in using the best tools available. If they start making the best tools, I'll back them 100%! But for now, I just don't see how using their products gives me any kind of edge at all.
kyllo
Throwing their code on github, releasing cross-platform applications, and making it free to upgrade to Win10 is a big step in the right direction. They should also make Windows itself open source and just sell enterprise support.
antod
They have improved a lot recently but some things I'd really like to see...

* Ship native SSH (inc scp/sftp) and rsync clients and servers with Windows to make interoperability easier in heterogeneous environments. eg make SSH a first class transport option for Powershell remoting.

* Simplify the server licensing complexity, and then stop changing it all the time.

* Stop the secure boot shenanigans.

* Stop treating most HA, security or robustness features in SQL Server as "value adds" that are only in the really expensive editions.

* Contribute more engineering resources to improve open source interoperability projects and various 'DevOps' tools eg WinRM libraries, Configuration Management tools, Packer, Vagrant etc.