I disagree. Before the game plan was to keep everyone in windows. Now with iOS and android killing things it's no longer about just windows. Satya's vision is very different from Ballmer. The big money makers are now shifting to Azure. This means if open sourcing tools that didn't make money will attract more Devs to azure. That is very valuable in the long term in business sense. This also gives Microsoft a good rep and gives a broader reach.
> I disagree. Before the game plan was to keep everyone in windows.
Three things:
1) That describes a corporate goal, not a set of behaviors used to achieve it. There are many companies out there who also have the goal of "Keep everyone using our software.". Not many of them have utilized such destructive techniques as Microsoft has in pursuit of that goal.
2) Your second sentence would be more correctly spelt "Microsoft's game plan is to keep everyone using Microsoft software, wherever possible.". When you spell it that way, it becomes clear that the big picture actually hasn't changed. Windows was (and remains) a big part of that game plan, but for the past decade or two, it would be hard for an honest observer to make the claim that Microsoft was only interested in keeping folks on Windows.
3) Many of us have seen Microsoft play nice with the wider community. They never play nice for very long. The more cynical old-timers would say that this "play nice" phase is -itself- a part of the EEE strategy.
I really dislike this line of thinking. It assumes things can't change. Microsoft as a corporation is just a brand, the people have come and gone and with it much of the ideology and decision making thought.
People that think this way have a ridiculous amount of brand loyalty which really means nothing. The people change behind the brand all the time. It's clear that MSFT is changing. It's clear from the people that I've talked to that work there. It's clear from the messaging by senior management.
> I really dislike this line of thinking. It assumes things can't change.
I never said that things can't change. I've seen many companies change over the years. However, Microsoft's anti-competitive and underhanded practices have been extremely profitable for them and have -all things considered- resulted in very few negative consequences.
> It's clear [that MSFT is changing] from the people that I've talked to that work there. It's clear from the messaging by senior management.
Both Plus and Hangouts were supposed to be bold new directions for Google. At the time, it was abundantly clear from talking to most people who worked there and senior management that everyone was totally stoked about these new platforms and that this was the direction that the company was going to go for the foreseeable future.
But here we are -four years later- and Hangouts is -all things considered- a steaming pile and everyone in the company knows it, Google is slowly but steadily disentangling itself from Plus (and Plus from its services), and Vivek Gundotra -the former head of Plus- quietly "left the company" several years past.
As you say, companies change.
> It's clear that MSFT is changing.
This isn't the first time that it has been "clear" that Microsoft was changing. In the past it turned out to be a temporary change in order to gain reputation, or new users for their platforms or... Like I said before, "Playing the nice guy" has -historically- been just a small -and fleeting- phase of Microsoft's dirty market domination strategies.
Given the enormous amount of harm Microsoft has done to the industry over the past several decades, (and given Microsoft's historical propensity for lock-in and intentionally high switching costs) I'm going to wait for a very long time before seriously entertaining the claims that Microsoft has actually changed.
