I was born in 1993. I kind of heard lots of rumbling about Microsoft being evil as I grew up, but I wasn't fully understanding of the anti trust thing.
It used to suprise me that people saw cool tech from Microsoft (like VSCode) and complain about it.
I now see the first innings of a very silly game Microsoft are going to start playing over the next few years. Sure, they are going to make lots of money, but a whole generation of developers are learning to avoid them.
Microsoft had a very fair shot at redeeming themselves, but with how Teams, GitHub and all the AI crap they push into GitHub and Windows, it's clear they have not changed one bit.
They did change a lot. Previously Microsoft actually cared about its main product lines. They did lots of anticompetitive things to get people onboarded. Being anticompetitive and making products that deeply bundled stuff was their evil badge not hypetrain rugpulls. However, they were adding features developers and sysadmins wanted. That's how so many businesses got Active Directory. There is still no equivalent alternative to AD. There are subsets but no equivalent set of the complete featureset. After Ballmer the company changed.
Microsoft of Nadella is different. It looks more like a boring Silicon Valley monopoly. They had good products years ago and it got people hooked and now its a game of endless rugpulls. Microsoft of now doesn't care about the featureset. They just jump from one hype train to another. People keep paying them for the stuff they did in early 2000s. Nobody cares about newer stuff including Microsoft themselves.
It used to suprise me that people saw cool tech from Microsoft (like VSCode) and complain about it.
I now see the first innings of a very silly game Microsoft are going to start playing over the next few years. Sure, they are going to make lots of money, but a whole generation of developers are learning to avoid them.
Thanks for trying to warn us old heads!