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Ask HN: Will Microsoft ever become cool again?

by mkovji on 6/8/18, 7:25 PM with 50 comments

by akulbe on 6/8/18, 7:43 PM
They're doing a hell of a lot more cool things than Apple, these days. Windows is moving. macOS is terrible.
(Says the guy who's been a Mac user for >15 years and bought every new product Apple has come out with.)
Apple is doing this to themselves. As a dev platform, their appeal is waning. (Stop making shit laptops, and make your macOS stable again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
Microsoft, under Nadella, is making the right moves, listening to their userbase. It was enough to get me to switch back.
by nitwit005 on 6/8/18, 10:05 PM
If someone is on a windows machine, using the pre-installed IE11 or Edge browser, I tend to assume it's a 70 year old these days. Or possibly someone at a firm with some dated internal ActiveX page that needs IE.
That kind of association is extremely difficult to break. Car manufacturers have struggled with similar impressions. You can make the greatest, and cheapest, car in the world, and people won't buy it if it has that kind of negative association.
by wilsonnb2 on 6/8/18, 11:34 PM
I think they're cool. The Surface Pro and Surface Book are the only computers since the iPad first came out that I actually wanted to buy.
They also put Linux in Windows, released visual studio for free, created one of the most popular text editors ever, and created 3 programming languages that are generally well liked (C#, F#, and typescript).
I'm not sure how cool they are compared to Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and Facebook but I personally tend to compare them to enterprise companies like IBM and Oracle. Microsoft wins that coolness contest easily.
by CyberFonic on 6/9/18, 1:39 AM
Cool to whom?
As a nerd, I would like them to do what Apple did: release a new, clean, robust OS (based on OpenBSD would be smart, worked for Apple) and then provide a shim for backward compatibility. That is, allow all existing programs to still run but have a clean platform for future apps. Like ChromeOS I would prefer this to be truly secure, robust and updated with minimal intrusion.
As a consumer, I want systems that are reliable, robust, secure, free from malware, impossible to hack into, cheap and fast. In other words everything that Windows currently isn't.
by BjoernKW on 6/8/18, 9:50 PM
Has it ever really been? I think that, as of today, Microsoft is cooler than it’s ever been before.
by bsvalley on 6/8/18, 8:22 PM
Again or for the 1st time? They're focusing on the entreprise business and moved away from the consumer business. So my guess is that it's pretty hard to be "cool" in the entreprise world... Look at salesforce has been trying so hard, it doesn't change the fact that their products don't mean anything to the majority of people. So my answer would be... maybe?
by ggregoire on 6/9/18, 12:11 AM
VSCode and the whole open source organization around it is super cool in my opinion.
TypeScript and C# are great tools too.
by marketgod on 6/8/18, 7:35 PM
Does cool matter? They were under $40 a share 5 years ago.
by fizzbuzzbazz2 on 6/9/18, 1:04 AM
I was reading a comment stection of a win xp pirated edition. It had los of bug reports. 3-10 min after each there was a developer comment of the kind "thats terrible!" 10-30 min after that a comment containing a patch was posted.
Am i to understand this kind of service is impossible for a multibillion company? You dont have any questions, you dont have any problem and we are certainly not going to fix anything.
by tonyedgecombe on 6/9/18, 6:50 AM
No, they are another dull corporation just like IBM, Oracle, Apple, Google, etc. Don't fall for the PR of any of these companies. They aren't your friends.
by Finnucane on 6/8/18, 7:27 PM
Again?
by rbanffy on 6/8/18, 7:26 PM
No.
by api on 6/8/18, 7:30 PM
MS hasn't been cool since the 80s and even then its coolness was debatable.
by NVRM on 6/8/18, 11:22 PM
No fucking way.
by mindcrime on 6/8/18, 8:34 PM
Sure, as soon as they open-source Windows, Office, and Sharepoint and make the XBox platform Open Hardware.