Well, I don't know your age but a lot of us grew up during the 1990s and early 2000s and experienced Microsoft's bully behavior first hand while we were trying to make Linux[1], Free Software and Open Source more popular.
That kind of trust is hard to win back.
It may be childish but I've been enjoying Microsoft's fade into irrelevance the last decade.
How exactly has Microsoft "faded into irrelevance"?
Various versions of Windows are used on probably 90% or more of desktops and laptops, in both home and business settings. It still sees widespread server use.
Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook are widely used.
SQL Server is quite common within many enterprises.
Azure is a major player, and is seeing more and more adoption.
The porting of .NET to Linux and OS X is making Microsoft's development technologies available to a wider audience.
The Xbox brand of consoles is quite popular.
Microsoft has numerous offerings, across a range of sectors, that have huge uptake and are quite successful. I don't think that "irrelevance" is the way to describe Microsoft or their products.
Since I seem to have ruffled some feathers with my statement: compared to how dominant Microsoft used to be, they're now just one of the companies offering a certain product in many markets. This is a good thing.
"Irrelevance" was perhaps hyperbole but if you compare it to their past, well...
I'd say the only product they have left where one doesn't have much of a choice (in business mostly) but to use it is the Office line and even that is debatable nowadays.
So while many businesses would trade with Microsoft's position in a blink, they are not the unavoidable powerhouse they used to be.
The difference with the past is that the landscape expanded. We now have web and mobile, two areas where MS failed miserably and the companies that emerged are equal or larger in size than Microsoft. Other than that they're still the behemoth they used to be. Given that most of us here make our living from the web we think that Microsoft is irrelevant, which is far from true.
If you engage with corporate America at all, you'll find that Microsoft is not only relevant, but immutably ingrained into the DNA of the company. Office, SharePoint and SQL Server are not to be trifled with in corporate America - do not make the mistake of discounting their relevance or significance in how work gets done in the VAST majority of companies with >1,000 employees here.
> Microsoft is not only relevant, but immutably ingrained into the DNA of the company.
For the current generation, perhaps. There was a time Microsoft reigned pretty much alone, where there were no other viable options. During that time, Microsoft defined what a PC was and dictated what everything around one looked like.
That's not the case anymore, and it hasn't been for quite some time. Where you find Microsoft is much like where you expected IBM mainframes to be in the 90's - in high-inertia systems. It's too difficult (and, frankly, not that cost-effective) to convert your documents to other formats or to cloud-based office apps. What you gain from it is not enough. It's too difficult to move your AD users. It's too difficult to port your apps to use other databases after you fell for writing stored procedures in TSQL for everything.
Mainframes are not dead yet and will stay around for a while. Microsoft will stay around for some time too, but it will never again dictate what a computer is.
After all, if you look at a chicken really close, you'll realize dinosaurs are still around too.
I get that some of the developers and enthusiasts that were around professionally during that period would be untrusting of MS (rightfully so), but to say they've been fading into irrelevance when they still hold the vast majority of the marketshare in desktop/laptop OS? To me, that just sounds like whining of a bitter fanboy.
It's far from irrelevance, but you can't deny they've lost a lot from where they were. Their dominance over the desktop/laptop OS market is still real, but the market is shrinking in favor of other form factors. In their other markets, they're attacked from every side.
Microsoft antagonists tend to generate very fuzzy and imprecise opinions. They are akin to conspiracy theorist, and like the religious you can almost never narrow them down to a specific objective thing.
You will argue with concrete-objective facts and they will reply with generalities and feelings.
That might be because the "antagonists" are motivated by something more complex than whatever bulletpoint you're focused on... like the concept of free software. Try to think of an elevator pitch for it, now imagine how that would hold up in an adversarial debate where your interlocutor likens you to a "conspiracy theorist" or "the religious".
> Its a pattern -> learn to recognise it.
Yes, you've perfectly demonstrated the association fallacy, learn to recognize it.
If you point out to a football team supporter, that what constitutes their team is always in flux. Player's change, managers change, staffs change, owners change, uniforms change. Sometimes even grounds change and names even change <- objective facts!
You will rarely be able to dimmish that persons passion and feeling for that team or convince them that the other team isn't as bad as they feel it is.
I don't think any further examples of the association fallacy are necessary. Isn't it obvious that such analogies are debate tools, not useful in actual conversation? Do you expect someone to further the conversation about FreeBSD preference by defending sports fans?
Nearly all of those people have left Microsoft, more often than not for Amazon and Google when they've stayed in industry, so if you are unhappy with that behavior, then you know the right firms to take it out on.
I agree with your statement. I wouldn't trust MS to run FreeBSD on their hardware at all. What if they throttle the performance of FreeBSD without you ever knowing it? Embrace and extinguish has always been their motto.
Microsoft has supported Linux on Azure for years now. Why would they treat FreeBSD worse than Linux?
The only "evil" that I've experience with Linux is that Microsoft has price parity between Windows & SUSE Linux on Azure, which is competitive for Windows but a premium price for SUSE Linux (and an extra premium price for RedHat Enterprise).
Linux without a support contract should always be cheaper than Windows because that's the reality with the license costs. Microsoft's competitors are far cheaper for Linux VMs, but if you're willing to pay the premium it runs fine on Azure, and performs better than Windows on the same hardware (although the gap is smaller if you run Windows headless, using Windows Core).
I mean, for SUSE or RHEL you can just build your own image and BYOL. There's no need to use the standard images. Anyway, if your infrastructure is static enough that the per hour licensing costs don't make sense then why are you even using Azure/AWS/whatever instead of running inside your own DC?
Every time our IT Director talks about Azure I want to cringe, our infrastructure is relatively static and only grows - so it's straight up MORE expensive to put anything there (and this factors in power and cooling to the datacenter).
MS has every incentive to ensure that their Operating systems get the best hardware and show they are the more stable and scalable.
I wouldn't trust an operating system company that runs a "server farm" where they have their own OS and competitors. Why would Microsoft run their competition on their own hardware & data centers? If Azure breaks off from MS and becomes an independent company, OS agnostic, then maybe they can win my trust back.
I like Azure & would only use it for MS based OS, DB etc. I would never run, nor would I recommend any other OS running on Azure, ever. There are other "server farm" vendors that I can choose from for non MS based cloud computing.
I don't think there's a single blue badge (old colloquialism for "Microsoft employee") that believes BSD and nix are "competitors". Why wouldn't Azure run other OSes? It's not a virtualized Windows hosting service, it's a virtualized OS hosting service.
Agreed on other points made on this thread regarding pricing, though.
Because it's a commoditized market. MS knows damn well that if Linux, etc were shown to be significantly slower on Hyper-V/Azure than on other platforms, they wouldn't get subscribers. Bang for the buck is an important factor in business decisions, and there are a ton of other providers out there to keep MS honest.
That kind of trust is hard to win back.
It may be childish but I've been enjoying Microsoft's fade into irrelevance the last decade.
[1] Amongst other OSes.