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The New 'One Microsoft' Is Finally Poised For the Future
redletterdave writes: "The stodgy old enterprise company whose former CEO once called open source Linux a 'cancer' is gone. So is its notorious tendency to keep developers and consumers within its walled gardens. The 'One Microsoft' goal that looked like more gaseous corporate rhetoric upon its debut last summer now is instead much closer to actual reality. No longer are there different kernels for Windows 8, Windows Phone or Windows RT it's now all just One Windows. As goes the Windows kernel, so goes the entire company. Microsoft finally appears to have aimed all its guns outside the company rather than at internal rivals. Now it needs to rebuild its empire upon this new reality."
Their motto of "Developers, Developers, Developers" also disappeared with Ballmer's exit. Everything is now getting locked down to the max in their attempt to be like Apple. What makes it worse is that they don't seem to have a direction as far as application development goes. They were strongly pushing portable .NET when there was no need for cross platform applications, but as soon as ARM gets into their mix of products, they drop that strategy and go with a native code strategy. It's all mixed up and extremely confusing. Their complete lack of direction is certainly not welcoming to developers trying to figure out how they should target the Windows platform, and that doesn't even take into account their confusion on user interfaces as well.
Microsoft's previous success was based on offering very cheap products that were friendly to developers. Yeah, their products were buggy and unfinished, but they were a bargain, and you could always "embrace and extend" them as you saw fit. Now, they are trying to market themselves as a premium luxury product like Apple (at least the consumer end) and walling the garden as much as possible. They're locking down the hardware, too, and alienating their hardware partners, who were the greatest drivers of their previous success. It's a big change. Can they do it? Hyundai managed to convert themselves from being a discount car manufacturer to a more upscale brand, but Hyundai didn't have the problem with their brand reputation that Microsoft has. Microsoft has made cheap crap for so long, I don't see how they manage to convince everyone that they are now an "upscale" high quality manufacturer of products and services.
But GPL is indeed cancerous, intentionally so. Interacting with GPL code is a mine field if you don't want to GPL your code as well, there was no lie in that.