The company has, and has always had, a winner-take-all, paranoid violent reaction to all possible competitors in any of the spaces it occupies. It has established and held a strong market position by defining for itself an exclusive platform, first through mandatory per-unit licensing (MS DOS/Windows 3x), later through its mutually leveraged dominance of the desktop OS / office suite space, which it has tried (with varying levels of success) to extend into servers and services largely through mail and calendar, directory, collaboration, and database (MS Exchange, MS Active Directory, Sharepoint, MS SQL Server) tools. Introduction of any of these within a business environment pretty much inevitably sticks a wedge in the door. Moreover, interaction between Microsoft and other tools is often weak and buggy, encouraging a Microsoft-only monoculture.
As others have noted, Microsoft have a hell of a lot to live down. Not just in the F/OSS world, but in their mortally aggressive attitude toward all comers: DR DOS, Novell, WordPerfect, Lotus, Netscape, Sun, Linux, GPL, BeOS, and Google. Among others.
Currently, they are looking to quash competition on the x86 platform by locking down the UEFI bootloader:
Many, myself included, see Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures as one more in a long succession of Microsoft-acting proxies fighting its battles on the patent front:
> "Looking cool" is the last and least thing they've got to do to atone.
Maybe to us, the 1% on HN.
But most people don't know or care much about Microsoft's tarnished past. Some have already forgotten.
I wholeheartedly agree with everything you're saying, but to me you seem to imply that this is a bad move or that it won't work. Unfortunately, I think for Joe consumer "Looking cool" might actually be enough to continue to buy in to the Microsoft jails.
"Joe consumer" doesn't really care about Git or Node.js. Looks like they are finally trying to catch attention of developers, and I don't see how this could be a bad thing.
Joe probably cares about Metro, though, which is a far more significant piece here.
And let's not kid ourselves; Microsoft is catching the attention of developers mainly in order to extract money from them once they lock in to the Microsoft ecosystem. It may or may not be a Bad Thing, but it's not doing any favors to the Node or Git communities that they'd like us to think they care about.
Well, you could always speculate about intentions, but supporting open source tools seems like a step in the right direction. The community usually benefits from more popularity, and open source licenses offer some level of protection from "embrace and extend".
Windows RT(for ARM) requires the bootloader to be locked like the iPad's is.
Windows 8 on x86 requires the UEFI on PC to provide an option to disable secure boot and allow a physically present user to add any signing keys of their choice. Windows 8 will happily boot on any hardware that does not support UEFI secure boot(most current PCs) and will also boot without any complaints if Secure Boot is disabled by the user.
Note: The above requirement is only to get the hardware Windows 8 certified. Microsoft is legally prohibited from requiring anything from the PC OEMs.
Why is there SO much confusion around this in these parts? I see these exact type of back and forth arguments and utter confusion in almost every discussion related to UEFI or secure boot .
Say what you will about the management. I've spent time with several of their product teams over the years. They've been doing a lot to embrace open platforms, reach out to OS communities, invest in real innovation, and generally not be dicks.
Senior-level folks may or may not see the light, but from what I've seen, the company is changing from the bottom up, with or without them.
And in the event you've been reading with the comprehension bit set to "off": disavowing their past, and repudiating current similar aggressive actions (IV and UEFI noted, others are out there), would be a big step.
Firing Ballmer would help. It's not sufficient (see above). It may not be necessary, though to my mind it is on the basis that people rarely fundamentally change, and a large part of Microsoft's corporate DNA is intrinsically linked to Gates (still Chairman[1]) and Ballmer.
It's not the full story of IBM's 1990s transition, but it touches on some key elements.
The change happened with a replacement at the top. Lou Gerstner. And no, in my list of people earning much intrinsic love from me, tobacco company execs don't score high.
Money quote, however: “I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game – it is the game.”
He had to change the culture. And he did.
There's a lot written on that subject. Makes for interesting reading.
The astroturfing against Google has certainly been going on for the past decade. IV/Myhrvold is current. UEFI is current. A number of EU antitrust issues are current. Gaming the office market (no r/w tools available for Android) is current (and Google are now doing a Claytonesque disruptive innovation in that space as they did with Google Docs in the online space).
There's a whole side rant about the ills the Microsoft have spawned in malware, spam, spyware, etc., which despite several decades of protestation on the part of the company's apologist, have simply failed to materialize on other platforms to any vaguely similar fraction of a magnitude. My reasoned analysis is that the security issues are driven by engineering design decisions, and the engineering design decisions are driven by business and marketing objectives, which again are a conquer-at-all-costs, scorched-earth, mentality. My conclusion is that a world in which proprietary control of both operating systems and applications markets is held within a single corporate entity is fundamentally untenable, and that F/OSS si a very strong countervailing force (Apple presents an interesting side case that can also be explored). We've heard again and again "but it's better now", but ... it's not.
I could go on. I can't go on at length with specific references right now, but you've given me inspiration to do so, for which I give you thanks.
The point remains: the company has a fundamental attitude toward competition and exclusive markets. And the boy had cried "wolf" (or rather "but we're different now") far too often a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
No, there really isn't anything cool about Microsoft; and I can't really see why anybody would use their inferior, proprietary, locked-down crap instead of F/OSS solutions.
Besides, I think they murder programmers for code or something...
OK, maybe they're not as evil as the fictional Microsoft-a-like in Antitrust[1] but still, cmon, this is Microsoft we're talking about. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"[2], anybody?
And aren't these guys still trying to prohibit dual booting of Windows alongside Linux/Android on some devices or something? Yeah, that's cool behavior.
Really I just think this is a knee-jerk reaction. I think Microsoft is really trying and people are just gonna hate. Show me a successful company who isn't getting sued by another one.
P.S. I still can't dual boot android on my iPhone, so why is Apple any better? Apple is a closed system, more so than Microsoft.
You probably weren't around in the 90's and didn't see the damage done to the market by Microsoft. It's not about Microsoft "being sued" or making a "closed platform". It was their pushing IE4 as part of OS updates to kill Netscape. It was about cutting a sweetheart, loss-leader deal with AOL to replace the browser in the biggest ISP in the world. It was about shipping a mostly compliant Java 1.1 implementation and then refusing to update it, basically breaking Java in the browser by default (applets written for the Sun plugin would run and fail). And after achieving market dominance in browsers, it was about sitting on the technology for years, providing minimal updates and no standards work while competing browsers struggled vainly to move the technology forward (all done to try to kill off the "web" as a platform, of course). It's about releasing a completely worthless "XML" document format based on undocumented binary legacy stuff, and attempting to bribe and cajole multiple standards bodies into endorsing it.
MS is not a nice company. But they've maneuvered themselves into a position where they are no longer dominant, and are having to compete on technology. So they certainly seem nice enough now (and they did in the early 80's too). But I don't trust them; the culture is broken and evil.
(Edit, because some of the responses are conflating the issues: to be clear, I don't think Apple is a "nice company" either. But their position and dominance today isn't nearly as damaging as MS's was in the 90's. I worried for a while that it would be, maybe 2 years ago, but the truth is iOS has very robust competition, and is actually losing market share slowly. I'm not worried. Let Apple be evil as long as it's within their own universe and not affecting the market.)
A lot of your examples could be used against current darling companies.
Cutting a sweetheart, loss-leader deal with AOL to replace the browser with their own? Isn't that pretty similar to what Google is doing with Firefox to the tune of a couple hundred million a year? (And something that Microsoft has been banned from doing with their own proprietary browser?)
They refused to update Java -- Apple refuses to even allow Flash, which is elsewise standard on something like 97% of computers.
'Pushing IE4 as a part of OS updates' -- wait, they're not supposed to promote their own software (notwithstanding the business with uninstalling Netscape, that was indeed evil).
Trying to kill off the web? Okay, at this point you've lost it.
Cutting a sweetheart, loss-leader deal with AOL to replace the browser with their own? Isn't that pretty similar to what Google is doing with Firefox to the tune of a couple hundred million a year? (And something that Microsoft has been banned from doing with their own proprietary browser?)
Oh come on. If you're going to argue here, at least have your facts straight. The Google deal with FF is only about the default search engine and homepage. Most people switch their homepage to something else anyways. And all the major search engine plugins ship with FF; it's just that Google is the default one. (Did MS ship Netscape with Windows?)
Also, it's not "loss leader" for Google, unless you have radically redefined the meaning of "loss". Google makes a ton of money from FF searches; it just chooses to share a portion of the proceeds with Mozilla. Microsoft has deeper pockets than Google, and there's nothing preventing MS from buying out FF's search bar, _given_ that they have lots of money.
> Apple refuses to even allow Flash, which is elsewise standard on something like 97% of computers.
.... and responsible for 97% of the malware out there. I, for one, am glad Apple took this stand. It allowed for HTML5 to blossom.
This is all missing the point. Context matters in antitrust issues. Google doesn't have a 97+% monopoly position in web browsers, nor are they using Firefox (or Chrome) to deliberately harm their competitors in search (quite the opposite in fact). Apple likewise is not using a monopoly to harm Adobe, who have access to a larger smartphone market than iOS already (and in fact are shipping out of the box on most of those devices).
And you realize there's an important difference between "promoting one's own software" and deliberately installing (and making default) a free (!) equivalent to your biggest competitor's software on every single one of your monopoly-sized installed base?
But consider the alternative. Not shipping part of their software that fits on their platform just for the sake of making sure that the consumer's decision is purely unbiased? That'd be an awful business move, and they knew that.
>Cutting a sweetheart, loss-leader deal with AOL to replace the browser with their own? Isn't that pretty similar to what Google is doing with Firefox to the tune of a couple hundred million a year? (And something that Microsoft has been banned from doing with their own proprietary browser?)
What's the loss leader in this analogy? Google makes money off both Chrome and Firefox.
>They refused to update Java -- Apple refuses to even allow Flash, which is elsewise standard on something like 97% of computers.
I'd agree that this is exactly the same thing. Apple is hoping to replicate Microsoft's success, forcing businesses to choose which platform they develop for so that they can chase their competitors out of the market due to a dearth of choices.
> But they've maneuvered themselves into a position where they are no longer dominant
That's a fantasy. Microsoft still dominates their core market (the Office Suite) and they also dominate the enterprise server market. There's really nothing that can match Exchange + ActiveDirectory for ease of use and setup, both on the end-user side and on the admin side. Google Apps is nice, but it's got some shortcomings, and you can't host it on your own hardware.
It's certainly not a "fantasy". I work in the corporate world too, ducking PPTs daily. And I don't use windows, nor office, nor outlook. And it works fine, though I do have to do some impedance matching fairly often. In the consumer space, it's not even true: no one uses MS software beyond Windows and (increasingly less so) IE.
So yes, MS still "dominates" their own shrinking niche. But they are no longer able to leverage that to control other parts of the market. So they're not the threat they once were, even if they're still as evil.
I've seen the sentiment on HN generally is that if it's ageneral conversation about the post-PC world, MS is totally a dying platform losing relevance and Windows 8 is the worse software on the planet which will totally crash and burn and take down MS with no chance of survival in the hands of Apple and Google.
However, if we're talking about Secure Boot in Windows RT or Firefox on Windows RT, suddenly it's Microsoft trying to kill off Linux and Firefox in Windows 8/RT with their utter dominance of computing.
And what boggles the mind is that it's many of the exact same posters making both these arguments.
You're not the only one who was there. And some of us discrete with your interpretation(s). When Microsoft included TCP/IP in Win3.11 for Workgroups, they killed a lot of proprietary, expensive products. Should that have triggered an anti-trust investigation, too?
Did Windows having TCP/IP break my ability to put my SunOS boxes on the internet? Because IE4's crushing dominance sure broke my ability to use a lot of the web from my Linux box in 2001. MS never would have gotten that market share for IE without leveraging their monopoly position in windows.
I don't really want to rehearse that argument again; and this seems to be waaaaay outside the scope of the original post. And, incidentally, nice moving-the-goalposts - you avoided the question of whether putting Trumpet Winsock et al. out-of-business to incorporate what we all consider to be part of the OS should have also been considered illegal.
You're right that this is increasingly a digression. I thought my point was more important, but I'll play on your field: Trumpet Winsock was shipping the same BSD code that everyone else was using, and built a business around it only because MS didn't bother to. When MS took the same code for themeslves, the market for proprietary products evaporated. Where is the "harm to the market" in that? Users got compatible software at a better price.
When Netscape was killed, Unix users lost the ability to use much of the web, because everyone started writing to IE only. And the reason that happened was because MS leveraged their windows monopoly illegally. I note you didn't have a reply to this bit. :)
It seems you are excluding by default that their mindset may have changed and that everyone who work or will ever work will always behave like their predecessors.
Shouldn't they at least get the benefit of the doubt?
(yes, I was around in the '90s and hated MS with a passion)
IE was simple the better browser at the time. I remember using Netscape 4 and then IE was just better and they kept iterating really fast(that seems to be MS' mantra, come in late and iterate fast, see Word, Excel, Powerpoint, XBox, etc and even the big fish Windows(remember the first few versions before Windows 3.11 for Workgroups?). Of course there are some failures like Bing and
Zune but you can't blame them for not trying.
>t was about cutting a sweetheart, loss-leader deal with AOL to replace the browser in the biggest ISP in the world
You mean like Google's loss leader Android which they put on the market for free by using money from their search dominance resulting in killing WebOS, RIM, Nokia and almost everyone else except Apple?
>And after achieving market dominance in browsers, it was about sitting on the technology for years, providing minimal updates and no standards work while competing browsers struggled vainly to move the technology forward (all done to try to kill off the "web" as a platform, of course
There is a grain in truth to what you say, but I believe it was primarily for two reasons. Netscape dying off, and browser releases tied to OS versions(maybe because of the antitrust trial where they claimed they were related). Since Vista got delayed and they hit the reset button the middle, IE7 got really delayed, and of course they didn't want to spend a whole bunch of money and effort to release an interim version, just like Apple doesn't really care about web apps right now or replacing Flash with HTML5(Jobs' blog pont rant about Flash on iOS promised much more and proper HTML5 support is still sorely lacking in iOS) since it is simply not a priority for Apple.
>MS is not a nice company. But they've maneuvered themselves into a position where they are no longer dominant, and are having to compete on technology. So they certainly seem nice enough now (and they did in the early 80's too). But I don't trust them; the culture is broken and evil.
If Apple had their way(which now they seem to be doing), Firefox wouldn't even exist, so there's nothing left to kill. Look at their 30% cut of services provided to iOS users and how it killed many apps and their MFN rule(no service can provide a lower rate for other platforms if it wants to use in app purchasing).
In these conversations(like in Mozilla's blog posts about Firefox on Windows RT etc.), I frequently see that Apple is the elephant in the room that no wants to even mention in passing since it undermines their point.
Just to reply to one thing in isolation (because frankly you can get a better treatment of all this point-by-point stuff by doing a Google groups search from 1997):
> You mean like Google's loss leader Android which they put on the market for free by using money from their search dominance resulting in killing WebOS, RIM, Nokia and almost everyone else except Apple?
Android is open source. I can build it, run it, change it and ship it all by myself for whatever I want. So yes: I make a moral exception here. (edit: cooldeal, stop flaming. I'm running CM9 built from source, with my own modifications, on my very own phone. That passes the test. Trying to equate not-as-open-as-I'd-like-it-to-be behavior on Google's part with Microsoft's anticompetitive behavior in the 90's is just plain insane. Stop it.)
I wept for Netscape because its fall broke web browsing on all platforms other than windows (that's the "damage to the market" part -- I didn't and still don't give a crap about Netscape, Inc.)
I shed no tears for RIM or Nokia, sorry. WebOS was open and good (but the market has spoken and prefers Android), so maybe HP gets a misty eye or two.
>Android is open source. I can build it, run it, change it and ship it all by myself for whatever I want. So yes: I make a moral exception here.
You mean the same Android that all development happens behind closed doors without taking in any patches except for the kernel and one or a few OEMs get sweetheart early access deals from Google? When the device is sold into the market, Google throws a bunch of code over the wall, and everyone including other small OEMs with no sweetheart deals and Cyanogen mod are left to scramble in a mad rush to support their phones and tablets, drivers and software. Ever wonder why it takes such a long time for new Android OS updates? Of course, all this is explicitly designed to favor their Nexus devics over other Android OEMs. Look at how Motorola, HTC etc. are doing in their financial statements. Motorola is at a loss (and got taken over by Google), HTC's profits are plunging and LG is not going good either.
Remember there was no source for Honeycomb at all which hurt Cyanogen mod for tablets and smaller tablet makers had to do with Gingerbread, a phone OS?
Even iOS, Windows Phone and Windows release beta versions etc. for the ecosystem to get ready for new versions.
>I shed no tears for RIM or Nokia, sorry. WebOS was open and good (but the market has spoken and prefers Android), so maybe HP gets a misty eye or two
So when Google does essentially the same thing as others, the market has spoken about WebOS/Meego/Maemo, but when it's MS, the market hasn't spoken about Word Perfect, Lotus Notes, Open Office, Netscape etc. etc. and it was all because of them dumping loss leaders on the market or manipulation?
>Just to reply to one thing in isolation (because frankly you can get a better treatment of all this point-by-point stuff by doing a Google groups search from 1997):
Very interesting that you don't want to talk about Apple, or compare it's "evilness" to Microsoft. Nor was I expecting you to. That usually is the case in these type of conversations. The elephant in the room has grown a second tail and still no one wants to even acknowledge its existence in these type of stories and comments.
> You mean like Google's loss leader Android which they put on the market for free by using money from their search dominance resulting in killing WebOS, RIM, Nokia and almost everyone else except Apple?
Not quite the same thing, when Android is Open Source and available for use by anyone. Now, granted, Google don't do as good a job as they could at doing real community oriented, participatory development of Android... but nonetheless, the source is available and it could be forked and developed by a Google competitor...
Change Android a bit too much for Google and lose access to the Marketplace, Google apps like maps and the ecosystem. Not everyone can pull an Amazon and make their own app marketplace.
Really I just think this is a knee-jerk reaction. I think Microsoft is really trying and people are just gonna hate.
I wouldn't really say it's knee-jerk. Microsoft have earned my mistrust with their demonstrated pattern of past behavior. Believe me, I've been a Microsoft critic going back to the early/mid 90's, so this isn't a recent thing.
And, regardless of whether that's true or not, they're still pitching proprietary, closed-source, locked-down crap that I, for one, have zero interest in.
Given a choice between "stuff" that I can't open up, poke around in, take apart, modify, rebuild, etc., and "stuff" that I have complete control over, why would I want the former?
P.S. I still can't dual boot android on my iPhone, so why is Apple any better?
They're not. F%!# Apple, as far as I'm concerned. :-)
Apple is a closed system, more so than Microsoft.
Yes, and? F%!# Apple AND Microsoft, as far as I'm concerned.
>Really I just think this is a knee-jerk reaction. I think Microsoft is really trying and people are just gonna hate
I'm really having trouble crying any tears of sympathy here. When you behave in a harmful and unacceptable manner, you have to be on your best behavior for a long time before people can trust you again. That's just how it works.
>P.S. I still can't dual boot android on my iPhone, so why is Apple any better? Apple is a closed system, more so than Microsoft.
Who said anything about Apple? Why do people always bring up Apple when anyone says something bad about Microsoft? Yes, Apple is hurting the software world with their practices. That has no bearing on whether Microsoft is too.
No, Microsoft has made some extremely serious mistakes in the past (eg. like repeatedly leveraging their monopoly to destroy competitors). And pretty much anything do won't make up for it.
Microsoft worked very hard to earn their hatred, and they absolutely deserve being shunned by the entire development community. I really wish this company would completely go away.
10 years is an eternity in this business. Even for Microsoft, who's a dinosaur, it's a full third of the time they've existed.
They have failed to excite me in the face of competition from Google, Apple and Linux, but it's not fair to write them off because of what they did in the 90s.
Microsoft has made various token attempts at being open source friendly in the past. Thing is, Microsoft has a lot to live down from the OSS perspective. I wont begin to consider Microsoft for anything serious until it "makes good" within an order of magnitude of the harm it has tried to do to the open source community.
I feel the same. I'd even argue that they continue to do more harm than good. So they aren't even moving in the right direction.
For me, telling their employees that patents would only be used defensively, then using them offensively (against Android) is as bad as anything they've ever done.
Microsoft is a behemoth of a company with presumably layers of bureaucratic and historical debris all over the place. Short of a very profound, top-down remodelling of the company, it's actually refreshing to see that new voices are popping up inside of MS and being allowed to advance this quickly.
That is not to say they don't have a lot to make up for, just that there might still be hope for Microsoft.
And this certainly is completely different from when they partnered with Apple, and then screwed them over. Or when they partnered with IBM, and then screwed them over. Or when they partnered with Mosaic, and then screwed them over. Or when they partnered with hardware OEMs, and then used then to screw over competitors. I'm sure this time, MS is really serious about being a community player.
Am I the only one who finds statements like this to be somewhat fanatical? Companies compete in all sorts of ways, but I find it hard to believe that Microsoft is some malevolent (thanks) empire trying to crush every OSS entity that they see.
Perhaps I just am not familiar enough with what they've done to harm OSS.
And, this is only the list of the last few years. I actually stopped caring about this sort of thing for the last five years or so simply because microsoft fans are not part of my life anymore. However, when I did, they were doing evil way back then, and had been since I started to pay attention.
As a Microsoft employee, I'm a bit confused about the C99 reference. You can get C99-compatible compilers from other sources that run under Windows, and if C99-compatibility is important, Microsoft will lose market share to them. My guess is that -- for the line-of-business developers that makes up the bulk of Microsofts dev market, C99 compatibility is simply not important.
Microsoft doesn't ship a Fortran 2008 compiler either; should they?
> if C99-compatibility is important, Microsoft will lose market share to them.
This would have been true if Microsoft wasn't also providing the platform. I have been avoiding MS platforms like the plague for the last 5 years, but when I last developed for Windows, you had to use the Microsoft C/C++ compiler to properly play with many system interfaces (some of which, e.g. IShellFolder, are only exposed this way).
Perhaps gcc is better these days, and you really can do without a Microsoft compiler; that wasn't the case 5 years ago.
> for the line-of-business developers that makes up the bulk of Microsofts dev market, C99 compatibility is simply not important.
Of course, neither was ODF/OASIS support, and neither was OOXML. But the former was an industry standard supported by every other player. And the latter was an incompatible standard introduced by Microsoft for political reasons and not even properly supported by them.
Which supports my claim that Microsoft is not becoming community friendly (for any community other than "Microsoft developers") or helpful in any way.
Microsoft doesn't need to ship a Fortran 2008 or C99 compiler. But I think there's no merit in the claim that Microsoft is trying to be friendly with the open/standard community, or that it has changed its ways (given in my list above) in any way.
There's nothing fancy about interfaces like IShellFolder. From a C perspective, they're just tables of function pointers. I don't know why they would require a Microsoft compiler. But if there's something in those headers that's not compatible with the C standard, then that's a much more valid complaint.
There are commercial compilers from Intel and others which I think are both thoroughly compatible with Windows and support some or all of C99; these are always options.
I wasn't taking issue with any of your other examples, because I'm largely sympathetic to those claims. But Microsoft's failure to sell a specific product you want from them seems like a different category of complaint entirely.
> But if there's something in those headers that's not compatible with the C standard, then that's a much more valid complaint.
There definitely was stuff incompatible. I think at some point gcc/icc started supporting these extensions, but for a long time, all of the midl / type library tools with MS only, and the header files used proprietary MS extensions.
You could, of course, rewrite the definitions for another compiler (COM was documented), but it was a tedious error prone thing to do.
> Microsoft's failure to sell a specific product you want from them seems like a different category of complaint entirely.
The list of complaints was far from complete, I tried to give complaints of different kind. This one is in the same category of the IE6 stagnation (market owned -> innovation stops, standards ignored). It's not as antisocial as the rest of the complaints, but it is definitely in the "Microsoft isn't a friend of the community" department.
It never ceases to amaze me how fast microsoft has been iterating with Azure, With Scott Gu running the team things have gotten even better.
As for the latest release just the change from that hideous Sliverlight management console is reason enough to be excited. The really interesting announcements should be coming in a few months when the different component providers (CloudDB, MongoDB, etc) start offering Azure based offerings.
If only they could come up with something better than cmd.exe, Windows could be a fairly decent system to work on. With Cygwin and other tools, the environment is fine, just lacking a decent local terminal and most of the 3rd party ones are just as bad last I looked.
... have you tried PowerShell? It's actually more like a scripting language. But if they called it PowerScript we'd just make fun of it for being bad Python. And the command window itself still sucks. I use cygwin/rxvt/screen/bash and only get burned a few times a week.
I use MSYS right now, which does an okay job for what I need it for, but it can be confusing when the MSYS grep isn't the same as the GnuWin32 grep (GnuWin32 has -P, MSYS grep doesn't).
POSIX isn't divine and infallible. PowerShell is actually quite nice, save for the arcane Windows console UI. I still prefer zsh, but that's no reason to immediately discard a competitor.
I have a windows workstation. Every single server I interact with is POSIX. POSIX isn't divine and infallible and PowerShell is nice, but it isn't as ubiquitous and I only have enough patience for one arcane shell language.
But, really, cool? Microsoft is trying too hard. Watching their videos is akin to rogue state propaganda. Does anyone really believe that IE9 is the "coolest" or "most beautiful" browser ever? (Let alone that being an important metric at all.) It's unfortunate that Microsoft thinks we'll actually believe this stuff.
On the other hand, props to them. I wouldn't have known about Alex Clare's "Too Close" track without that commercia.
I think it rarely makes sense to view Microsoft as one consistent entity; you have to look at which division is doing this and what are they're motives[1].
The Azure bit may have some affinity to the Windows Server division but probably doesn't feel pressure to sell desktop OS or Microsoft Office licenses. I think Azure wants to attract developers away from GAE and AWS, in that context this move makes perfect sense.
This is no more unusual than MS Office being available on Mac or Silverlight support being somewhat absent from Windows 8. Both things make some degree of sense when you 'follow the money'.
Microsoft seems to think that Node is a general purpose web application platform. It would be cooler if they recognised its values (real-time applications) and promoted it on that basis.
People talk about MS in generalizations and forget that it's made up of individuals like you and me. Individuals that use Mac and Linux at home, who code Ruby and Node.js in their free time and use git. These people inside MS exist and recent moves by MS show that their efforts to change MS from within are working.
The only thing interesting to me is that Ruby (on Rails) is missing from the developer center. Seems like if you support PHP, then RoR would be an easy win.
Is this something new? Microsoft has almost always supported popular platforms other than their own if they think they can make a few bucks off them. There are a whole bunch of examples for this including Office for Mac, IE for Mac, Hyper-V support for Linux, OneNote, Bing, On{x} for Android.
Of course you can ask why is there no Office for Linux? I believe the answer is more simple than "EVIL M$'. It takes a huge amount of effort to port Office to a new platform(remember how Chrome faced a bunch of issues with Desktop Linux), and MS probably believes it is not cost effective since some of Linux' users want nothing to do with Office or any MS product anyway. If Linux breaks 10% of user share, maybe you'll see Office for it. There are very strong rumors that MS is going to launch Office for iPad at the same they're going to release Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets with Office, which is going to one less reason for users to buy a Windows RT tablet over the iPad.
The company has, and has always had, a winner-take-all, paranoid violent reaction to all possible competitors in any of the spaces it occupies. It has established and held a strong market position by defining for itself an exclusive platform, first through mandatory per-unit licensing (MS DOS/Windows 3x), later through its mutually leveraged dominance of the desktop OS / office suite space, which it has tried (with varying levels of success) to extend into servers and services largely through mail and calendar, directory, collaboration, and database (MS Exchange, MS Active Directory, Sharepoint, MS SQL Server) tools. Introduction of any of these within a business environment pretty much inevitably sticks a wedge in the door. Moreover, interaction between Microsoft and other tools is often weak and buggy, encouraging a Microsoft-only monoculture.
I've just addressed this in a recent thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4081701
As others have noted, Microsoft have a hell of a lot to live down. Not just in the F/OSS world, but in their mortally aggressive attitude toward all comers: DR DOS, Novell, WordPerfect, Lotus, Netscape, Sun, Linux, GPL, BeOS, and Google. Among others.
Currently, they are looking to quash competition on the x86 platform by locking down the UEFI bootloader:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/microsoft%E2%80%99s-take...
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/red-hat-linux-pa...
Many, myself included, see Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures as one more in a long succession of Microsoft-acting proxies fighting its battles on the patent front:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/05/30/intellectu...
"Looking cool" is the last and least thing they've got to do to atone.
(Edit: paranoid winner-take-all intro paragraph).