I work in the public sector and we’ve been in bed with Microsoft for decades. Happy to have been too, I personally think we should do more Open Source for transparency reasons, but the truth is that Microsoft is the best major tech partner that we have. They may be the only major tech partner that we have that actually understands non-tech high-regulatory enterprise in fact, though Amazon is getting there with AWS. As an example of what I mean by that is major incident. We like to be able to call people, we’re like that in the public sector, and with Microsoft Seattle will quite literally be on the phone with us until our issue is fixed, with a lot of other tech companies you either talk to a chatbot, fill out some form or make a ticket in their support system. When the bureaucracy makes stuff like NSIS (EU security standard) they are always first to implement it. On the development front we’ve seen nothing but improvements over the years, and the fact that they’ve adopted the non-Microsoft techs we use like Node.JS and Python to be first class citizens is amazing. So is the fact that we can now buy C# code instead of JAVA and still run it on Linux servers. So I have a lot of praise for Microsoft.
I don’t see any sort of change in their culture though. Sure they’ve adopted Open Source, and that’s amazing, but they’ve done it because it was the best way to keep enterprise on Microsoft products, even on the development front because Office365 has no real competition.
.Net Core is a good example, it works everywhere but if you’re not using it with Visual Studio for Windows and the Azure devops stack you’ll just not be on equal footing to those who do. There was an issue with the .Net Core 2.1 watch command where it would require a full systems restart on Macs for more than a month, I mean, that’s just not taking Mac using developers seriously. Visual Studio Code has quickly become everyone’s favourite editor, but you know how you get the most out of it? By setting it up with WSL. Of course none of this is an issue of you buy into the Microsoft environment. I mentioned Node.JS, well a lot of the Azure DevOps works with Node as well, and it’s just a natural thing to do when your C# stack is already living there. Of course the flip side of this is that you can never really leave.
I think Microsoft continues to improve, but they haven’t changed a bit.
I don’t see any sort of change in their culture though. Sure they’ve adopted Open Source, and that’s amazing, but they’ve done it because it was the best way to keep enterprise on Microsoft products, even on the development front because Office365 has no real competition.
.Net Core is a good example, it works everywhere but if you’re not using it with Visual Studio for Windows and the Azure devops stack you’ll just not be on equal footing to those who do. There was an issue with the .Net Core 2.1 watch command where it would require a full systems restart on Macs for more than a month, I mean, that’s just not taking Mac using developers seriously. Visual Studio Code has quickly become everyone’s favourite editor, but you know how you get the most out of it? By setting it up with WSL. Of course none of this is an issue of you buy into the Microsoft environment. I mentioned Node.JS, well a lot of the Azure DevOps works with Node as well, and it’s just a natural thing to do when your C# stack is already living there. Of course the flip side of this is that you can never really leave.
I think Microsoft continues to improve, but they haven’t changed a bit.