Believe it or not, but Microsoft has changed it now maintains a 😘decent code editor, provide official 🐱🏍support to run Linux on Windows
It seems like they don't want developer to go to Mac OS or Linux.
- Their Surface books are top notch in hardware.
- Vs Code, Windows Subsystem Linux, TypeScript are proof of what they are doing.🎉 🌹
They are doing great with Edge, It's great for casual browsing, It has most of the latest and greatest features like grid support, service Workers. It's not the great fit for development purposes through.😒😢
They are maintaining a lot of Open Source Projects too.👏
https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-windows
https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode
https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript
https://github.com/Microsoft/napajs
What are your thoughts guys, 😂
Top comments (5)
At the same time, they are collecting more user data than ever. Non-optional telemetry and usage data as well as selling data about your habits to ad companies. Every product they make includes some telemetry, and all of it I'm aware of is turned on by default and some of it cannot be disabled (thinking here of Window 10 and SQL Server Management Studio). VS Code has telemetry by default. Here's a complaint thread about .NET Core, which collects data about your usage unless you set an environment variable.
.NET core should not SPY on users by default
I should note that Google and Facebook pioneered this trend. Even some linux distros have data collection. It is not just Microsoft, but at least before Windows 10 they were not so heavy-handed about it.
It is following a (very sad) industry trend of providing "free" stuff which exfils unknown quantities/qualities of data about you. I guess most users don't seem to care about their privacy nowadays.
Edit: I should say that I am on the Microsoft stack. Some good stuff there like F# (also open source). Some things are moving in the right direction like you mentioned above, but privacy there is taking leaps and bounds backward (no different from the rest of the industry). I suppose their data collection bodes slightly better than Google or FB, who makes all their money off mining your personal data and the ads delivered with that.
And on the other side, they are introducing end-to-end encryption in Skype. It's a pretty complicated soup of good and bad but I definitely agree with your sentiment.
Yeah, there are some bright spots. Like a couple of years back, MS sued the US government because the FBI kept getting gag orders on most of their data requests. This prevent Microsoft from doing what it agreed to do with its customers, which is provide notice of warranted data disclosures. Though I'm sure nothing came of it, I liked the principle of the thing.
But in general, the marching orders up there seem to be that every product must have some kind of data collection built it, which form the basis of dev decisions. Having a product vision and engaging with customers... a dead practice, I guess. Then there are those products which go the extra mile of actually being funded by selling your collected data (Windows 10 and ad-based Skype come to mind, which still collects your "metadata" as mentioned in the Wired article).
(Slightly biased input)
Microsoft is definitely moving in the right direction. Not only are they maintaining a great presence in the hardware world, but their software is becoming ever more popular. More and more developers have switched to using VS Code, and personally I though I would never stop using Atom but now I feel the same about VS Code. Also, they were the #1 contributing organization to the Node.JS project in 2017, and one of the top overall open source contributing organizations (not just their own repositories).
After I switched from Brackets to Atom, I thought nothing would take me away from it. But VS Code did just that! :D