Since (and even before) Satya Nadella become CEO of Microsoft, a lot has changed. From adoption of Open Source technologies to open sourcing a big chunk of its active software stack, from hosting Linux on Azure to supporting Office and .NET on all major platforms, not to mention its active contributing to Hadoop and a lot of other projects.<p>Having said that all, I can see little being changed from the attitude of the community towards Microsoft. Some are still skeptic about how real a move it is while others feel it is too little too late. Some (including me) feel this comes out of utter desperation rather than a strategic move from a change in the vision of the company. And ss Satya himself said, the biggest challenge is changing the internal culture.<p>So would you think attitude of the general geek community has changed towards Microsoft? And if not, why that is and what would make you change your opinion?
Most geeks I know of are OK with Microsoft, actually. I find online communities, in general, amplify the voices of a discontented minority because the vast majority don't bother saying anything about a topic that simply doesn't affect them much either negatively or positively.
Microsoft has spent a lot of time and effort putting themselves in the this position (closed source, ignoring and even shunning open source, OEM agreements that border on predatory, and so on...)<p>Unfortunately I believe the only thing that will change opinions are a considerable amount of time and effort in the other direction.
They have improved a lot recently but some things I'd really like to see...<p>* Ship native SSH (inc scp/sftp) and rsync clients and servers with Windows to make interoperability easier in heterogeneous environments. eg make SSH a first class transport option for Powershell remoting.<p>* Simplify the server licensing complexity, and then stop changing it all the time.<p>* Stop the secure boot shenanigans.<p>* Stop treating most HA, security or robustness features in SQL Server as "value adds" that are only in the really expensive editions.<p>* Contribute more engineering resources to improve open source interoperability projects and various 'DevOps' tools eg WinRM libraries, Configuration Management tools, Packer, Vagrant etc.
Really I think this problem is overblown at this point. That said, a surefire way would be something like Twitters patent agreement - guarantee no offensive patent use. This would mean giving up a bunch of Android revenue though so I don't see it.
For me if they would lower the prices of their msdn subscriptions I'd dev for their OS more. $699/year is the cheapest option to have access to their OS's for testing. That's pretty expensive in my opinion.
They're trying a bunch of things, I'm sure some of them are working. I went to a JS conference recently and one of their dev evangelists was talking about using JS to control Arduinos or whatever. No proprietary-stack stuff in sight.<p>I don't have numbers to say "a majority", but a whole lot of developers don't use Windows. They really need to give up on the Windows-everywhere stuff, but as I understand it that was a Ballmer thing. Anyway, I mean, they're Microsoft. I'm sure they'll land on their feet.
My (very low) opinion of them would change overnight if they released something (anything) that was definitively better than my other options. I try to be pretty pragmatic about these things; I'm always interested in using the best tools available. If they start making the best tools, I'll back them 100%! But for now, I just don't see how using their products gives me any kind of edge at all.
Have more contributors to open source such as Scala and Spark. I was at a (Apache) Spark conference yesterday and IBM was demoing a Spark interface to iPython 3 notebooks. Something really useful. Microsoft wasn't even exhibiting.<p>Mimic the Unix command line environment of Mac that runs the various untilies (eg, homebrew).
Throwing their code on github, releasing cross-platform applications, and making it free to upgrade to Win10 is a big step in the right direction. They should also make Windows itself open source and just sell enterprise support.
Continue involvement with open source projects in a way that shows good will toward the larger community. Stay on the course it's on at the moment---it will pay off.
limited IE testing VMs that work in Virtualbox that don't require a license or constant upgrades. I know there are VMs but last time I messed with them they lasted for a while and then stopped working.
I have not seen Win 8 so I can only speak from the previous 10 years of experience - they should fix the UX. I always hated how complicated and perplexing everything was and when something failed Win would almost laugh in my face blaming me for it.