The original people (not recruiters) who reached out to you should've connected after the decision was made. They probably figured the recruiters would do their dirty work, so no need to engage.
Full disclosure: I worked at Microsoft for over a decade, so I know how slow and lumbering it can be. I bet some emails were missed and people didn't follow up because "they had a lot of other things they were tracking".
Total misjudgment on their part. Thanks to this one HN post they already lost in terms of developer good will way more than his potential salary would be.
Every time anyone who uses WinGet, who read this, will think 'oh, yeah, that's the tool that Microsoft build their version of behind original author's back, while stringing him and ghosting for few months".
It's a totally different world inside a huge company like Microsoft, though. It's massive and its own little world. After working inside for a few years, you start thinking that it's "normal". You see projects start up and get shut down, you see people trying to get into the company, you see people trying to transfer to other teams within the company, you see people trying to leave the company, you see people in the same team for a decade or more, etc. Because of the scale of things, you sort of become numb to a lot of things you see, so I sort of "understand" if somebody just figured recruiting would sort out that someone wasn't the right "fit" for the company.
I don't think this kind of behavior is necessarily the right one, but it's the outcome of a large behemoth made up tens of thousands of people.
In reality, these kinds of antics just don't hurt companies significantly -- even ridiculously horrible things that are arguably crimes against humanity (have I invoked Godwin's law?) In comparison to some of the incredibly awful things companies do (and get away with), this is minor to the point of not even being a footnote in the annals of evil (note to self: don't google that term to check the spelling...).
However, there will be a few of us who will be reminded of why we don't do business with MS (and hence will have no need of WinGet). It won't make any difference, but it will be there.
So much of what Microsoft has been doing — GitHub, .NET Core, NPM, Visual Studio Code, Windows Subsystem for Linux, etc. — has been to build goodwill with “developers! developers! developers!” Taking the resources to do an acquihire (or hire + bonus) right is small relative to the PR hit.
And when I first heard about WinGet I though, "Yay! They continue to catch up to the place where developers are! Good for them!", but then this surfaced.
I suspect a week from now, 99% of people who read this will have forgotten about it.
Totally reasonable to still boycott them, makes more sense than getting annoyed at Microsoft in a situation like this (which is also deserved but more minor in the grand scheme of things).
Which was inadverted addition of arsenic specific to Morinaga in Japan, and not Nestle. However, the committe which managed the case and dragged it on was not created by the company but the Japanese government consisting of a newspaper publisher (??), a hospital director, 2 lawyers and a human rights lecturer.
So it seems like an insufficiently related market and lack of oversight made this drag on causing many deaths and even more people crippled by arsenic. One person was sentenced to 3 years in prison.
Compare with China who executed 2 people involved in the 2008 milk scandal and gave much harsher sentences to others. Although that scandal was deliberate rather than a cover up of bad practices.
WSL has been built for webdevs not to flock to *NIX from Windows, nothing else.
Even naming it "Windows Subsystem for Linux" is an insult, since it sounds as if it was something for Linux, when in reality it's a "Linux Subsystem for Windows" and doesn't benefit Linux itself in any way.
The developers of WSL have said* that was mostly a legal concern. Calling it “Linux Subsystem for Windows” (listing “Linux” first) has wider implications for copyright/licensing:
> Just who is allowed to call a product or service Linux, anyway?
> Linus Torvalds has an answer for that: Nobody. Not without his say-so.
> The term "Linux" is a trademark and Torvalds owns it. His assignee, an organization called the Linux Mark Institute (LMI), is empowered to collect licensing fees from companies and individuals who want to use the word commercially.
> - https://www.infoworld.com/article/2671387/linus-gets-tough-o...
*I think it was during a Microsoft Build 2020 Q&A with the WSL team, but I can't find the video on YouTube.
Alternatively, calling it something like Nix subsystem for Windows or maybe just LSW would also do the trick, this seems like a lame excuse.
The problem is people have short memories and are driven by convenience so will conveniently forget how evil a company is when they show another side. Or sometimes they can continue being evil and people still just do nothing because it's so convenient (see Amazon).
There is not enough direct experience of the evil for our monkey brains to make sense of it. If you see someone kill a baby with their own two hands you will never trade with that person again, they are dead to you full stop. If a company knowingly kills babies by proxy and extorts mothers you get mad for an afternoon then you forget. We need to evolve as a species or find some way to make it more real.
I've been anti-Microsoft for about 15 years but even I'll admit that I've warmed up to them over the past few years because of their seemingly good works (and amazing PR). Stuff like this helps me remember why healthy skepticism is still super important when it comes to giant companies like MS.
This happened to one of my referrals so i know this firsthand.