zlacker

Microsoft, like many other big modern tech companies, just treat goodwill like a currency. Now the time has come to spend it again.

I don't believe for a second that EEE is gone from Microsofts culture and strategy.

>>2pEXgD+(OP)
It's more that Microsoft is a huge company that contains both benevolent and malevolent actors. The Windows team has embraced dark patterns wholeheartedly whereas the VSCode team is doing good work to earn developer love. That these goals are in complete opposition seems to not trouble MS execs.

>>zarzav+t01
The VSCode team is busy releasing proprietary extensions which won't run on open source builds of Code, but only proprietary builds packaged by Microsoft.

>>zarzav+t01
It's not surprising that Microsoft's developer team is the one gathering goodwill, and it's not because they just happen to be staffed by good people. Microsoft bet against open source and lost, and they were watching themselves lose developer mindshare in real time with the rise of GitHub and open source languages/runtimes like Python, Node.js and Ruby, most of which run better and are easier to use (especially with native addons) in Linux and Unix (incl. macOS.) So suddenly you see VS Code, WSL, Windows Terminal, Azure, .NET Core, POSIX semantics in the Windows API, and so on, all aimed at keeping developers (but not end-users) running Windows on bare-metal, or at least using Microsoft cross-platform software in place of non-Microsoft cross-platform software.

On the other hand, Windows, which is absolutely dominant among end-users, is the one employing dark patterns because they know it isn't under threat. These aren't coincidences.