Summary: "Nothing Has Truly Changed Since Netscape and Antitrust," as we put it four days ago; the 'new' Microsoft is the exact same company with the exact same strategies, which include destruction by assimilation

"It's déjà vu all over again," a reader told us, citing or reciting (or even quoting) Yogi Berra.

Over the years we've covered more examples than we care to remember of companies betrayed by Microsoft after Microsoft had called them "partners" and 'stole' whatever they had. Here's the latest from yesterday. Our reader quoted from it: "Microsoft projects don't exactly compete on a level playing field with community OSS projects."

Obviously.

"It's all about brands and brand dilution/hijacking."Also: "If you look at the announcements for Microsoft products that compete with their own ecosystem, one thing you'll very rarely see is any acknowledgement of the OSS projects they displace."

It's all about brands and brand dilution/hijacking. It's a derivative of E.E.E.

Then: "We suddenly found ourselves competing with a product from Microsoft that looked similar, that was being given away (perception, at least), that was integrated with VS, and that was being pushed in every Azure keynote."

Visual Studio is proprietary software, but Microsoft uses "Code" for constant openwashing of it.

On it goes: "So if Microsoft release a product that competes with an existing open source community project, I think there's two things you can assume: It's unlikely they didn't do their research or weren't aware of the alternative..."

"Visual Studio is proprietary software, but Microsoft uses "Code" for constant openwashing of it."What, did you expect Microsoft to actually help you?

Reality sinks in: ".NET OSS maintainers will struggle to build professionally supported OSS projects because Microsoft will immediately become the default (in the conversation, at least) in any market they enter..."

Why even use .NET? Microsoft is in complete control of everything, if not through code and binaries, then through software patents.

When you become a partner of well-known crooks (decades of history to serve as evidence) it'll never end well for you. It's all about Microsoft, not about you...

Where was Skype and where was Nokia before Microsoft came? They used to have almost a monopoly. As for LinkedIn, it didn't really catch on, did it? Down the drain....

"We suppose that the brain drain at GitHub (many workers left in protest, including top-level ones) almost certainly plays a role..."The same reader also sent us Sam Hancock's new article "Hotmail’s Journey from Internet Must-Have to Laughing Stock"

Christine Hall has told me, "Hotmail started to go downhill the minute Redmond bought it."

The reader said: "What happened is, they got Hotmail rewritten in Windows [PDF] and it took them ages."

The article's summary states: "Microsoft’s email service was once the cutting edge in online communication. Now, it’s a relic from the days of dial-up [I]nternet. What happened?"

Microsoft is exploiting and hijacking other people's work, including GNU/Linux and many repositories in GitHub. Microsoft does so very poorly. Already, as we noted the other day, people complain that they're unable to access GitHub because they use Firefox on a mobile device. We suppose that the brain drain at GitHub (many workers left in protest, including top-level ones) almost certainly plays a role...

Wait until various functionalities of GitHub are only available for users ('useds') of Azure, VS, Windows and so on... remember what happened to Skype, which used to be truly cross-platform until Microsoft bagged it. ⬆