Microsoft is interesting again

Not to downplay the change taking place, but what portion of the work that MS as a company does is represented by the flashy stuff that has everyone calling it a &quot;new Microsoft&quot;? Did all that middle-management and infighting and bureaucratic stasis just... disappear?<p>In other words, nerds often heap disdain on marketing but they are as susceptible to it as anyone else. The marketing to which they are susceptible is just less recognizable as such.

It&#x27;s true, Microsoft is suddenly a palatable company without the greedy, vengeful, angry attitude of Steve Ballmer. With the anachronistic culture of the founders now entirely purged, I see no reason why they would not become a credible competitor in many markets. They are hungry to prove they are relevant again, giving them the incentive of a startup, while they have essentially unlimited cash.<p>As much as some part of me squirms when I say it, Microsoft really is a player again.

I didn&#x27;t think this was horribly written until I saw the &quot;move to SF&quot; line about 8 times. Sorry, SF location isn&#x27;t going to do anything for MSFT. So sick of all the fanboy shit about life in SF.

Microsoft did miss the boats on open source, search, mobile, social, and cloud, but they continued to #win what they previously cared about: enterprise. No one has meaningfully entered their arena.<p>Now they want to play ball, which is wise... since business is unfortunately likely to pursue social, mobile, and cloud for enterprise.

If you read that article, what I see is that Microsoft has been forced to do the following:<p>Give away everything for free<p>Produce it&#x27;s own hardware, and at a loss (Surface may have made $1b now, but it&#x27;s lost more than that over it&#x27;s lifetime)<p>Frankly, I don&#x27;t know how they are making money now a days.

Microsoft has always failed when they have tried to enforce their own standards in the industry. Moving away from this mistake and recognizing that promoting something that is relevant and makes sense is the only way to go forward is a huge step.<p>Funding new interesting ideas will always help them also secure a better seat in the open source community as most startups rely on open source technologies.

<i>&quot;If Android &amp; Cyanogen both run Android Apps perfectly, and Cyanogen doesn’t have to come bundled with Google’s suite of services….well….hmmmm…do the math.&quot;</i><p>Android: hate the new GUI and every game prompting me to sign in to stupid G+ or whatever it&#x27;s called. Anyone tried Cyanogen on Nexus 2013 tablet?