Am I the only one who cringes at the notion of buying anything from Microsoft? In the 90's, if you mentioned the "Evil Empire," everyone knew who you were talking about. Today, Microsoft is, to quote Steve Jobs, "Largely irrelevant."

The Surface is a convertible tablet pc (like the one my gf was smashing out of frustration a couple nights ago), flattened by 10^5 atmospheres of pressure to 1cm thickness.

Let sleeping evil empires rest.

And support the conscious ones? Pretty much every major tech company these days (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, etc.) is evil in some ways and not in others. People are excited because Microsoft is one of the few tech companies with the resources to bring new choices to market on a large scale. Actively hoping for less competition seems rather myopic to me.

Who needs to leave Microsoft for you to stop cringing? Does it matter? Do you need to see the company fail before you're comfortable? What about the companies that hire their ex-employees? Will they become evil as well?

I'm a linux guy, but to Microsoft I say, "bring the noise!" In the end we'll all benefit.

You ask a compelling question with "who needs to leave Microsoft for you stop cringing?". I'd suggest it is an institutional problem, and while not completely unique to Microsoft (see Apple, Oracle), it is embodied within nearly every aspect of their business model -- save the recent open source bear-hug, the overarching corporate goal is to do precisely the opposite of what you would wish to see: to have all other market options whittled down to One Microsoft Way. They are not currently open -- and as long as Windows and Office continue their bewildering dominance within corporate IT departments, they will never be open, as it is antagonistic to that goal.

Exactly. The whole conception of Microsoft is atavistic.

Wishing for the return of Microsoft reminds me of older disillusioned Russians after the Cold War fondly reminiscing about the Soviet Union. Or Hobbits hoping that if only Morgoth would return, he could counterbalance the power of Sauron and Mordor: because the only thing better than facing the Dark Enemy of the World, is having two Dark Enemies of the World!

I figured this latest burst of news from Microsoft is just a bunch of PR hits, the kind Microsoft used to get in exchange for trade rag journalist trips to Redmond & etc. The late print magazine "Brill's Content" ran something of an expose of Microsoft's journalist grooming techniques in the late 90s.

No. This is probably our own opportunity to get rid of/slow down the Microsoft monopoly, and yet many people "are excited to have Microsoft back". Strange.

Anyways, I fail to see how a company that brings us a boxy UI is more exciting than one that will bring us self-driving cars and AR glasses. But maybe it's just me.

They really are doing some cool stuff, the author mentions a few things. I'd also mention the stuff they are doing in software. ASP.NET MVC, F#, hell even good old C# is just getting better and better. There is plenty of room for Google, Apple and Microsoft to all create cool stuff.

ASP MVC isn't very good.

I'm not going to defend them any more unless they start cutting checks but you have to admit that even if you don't think it is any good at least they are trying. You work in a windows shop you use whatever Microsoft gives you, we could still be stuck with Web Forms.

That's the problem, Nancy is just so much better.

Well it is certainly smaller. I'd really like to use it at least for APIs where I am currently using the WCF rest and JSON stuff but it would be an uphill battle to get it deployed to production. Right now I use RabbitMQ and Redis internally and I fight the same battle over and over. They can't believe I wouldn't just use SQL Service Broker. I wish there was a way for Microsoft to "bless" projects like Nancy.

Its almost a syndrome, where many (not all) Microsoft shops can't envision using something in addition to what MS offers, even if the effect is positive for the developers, users, budget, timeline, etc.