With respect to the progress made by some MS divisions (and the people pushing for it), it seems not all of MS is keeping up. For example, this was on HN today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11167964

It's hard to trust that the currently good sides of MS will be allowed to stay good while other sides of MS are still behaving badly.

Thanks Scott, I have kept up on your work and blog and I wanted to say I appreciate what you do.

There could be many ways to undo the good things MS has done recently, and they are not perfect, but I am much happier the direction in the past year than I have been since the start of the company.

"A newsletter entry dated 26 December 2012 states: "MS [Microsoft], working with the FBI, developed a surveillance capability to deal" with the issue. "These solutions were successfully tested and went live 12 Dec 2012."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...

Noticed how this date is withing those 5 year of "It's a whole new Microsoft" mantra you guys chanting over and over?

Nonsense. The last 5 years shows that Microsoft isn't quite sure about it yet. Better? Yes. A "whole new Microsoft"? No.

Except for Microsoft's lawyers who are still using patents against Linux. Same old Microsoft.

Is it even possible for you guys to kill the undead SCO monster now? At any rate, it's still working away.

It worries me more that Microsoft has a track record of abandoning developer tools for the next shiny thing.

Yep, now they show full-screen ads on the OS itself. Huge improvement.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11167964

I'm sure there are Officially no privacy implications here.

Scott, any word on the inside on whether Excel is going to ever get some major enhancements? The object model desperately needs an improvement, and the ability to write VBA with C# would be spectacular.

Skype? Sunrise?

Such win Scott.

I look forward to that. However, after 20 years of bad behavior, it's not unfair to be guarded for a long time after that. Does cancer relapse? Does alcoholism relapse? How about the politics of Russia? How long did democracy last? I applaud your efforts. The road is yet long.

...Xamarin studio isn't a competitor to Visual Studio?

That's all I know that Xamarin makes, so I think this article is going a bit over my head, but it'll be a shame if I suddenly need a Microsoft account to use it. I do like diversity in my language tooling.

It's curious to me how some people don't update their thinking. Microsoft is so far from being the dominate software behemoth that practiced EEE that's it's almost sad. The old Microsoft paid a price for that arrogant attitude of theirs that led them to make some bad decisions that got them to their reduced status today. I applaud efforts by the new crew to turn things around.

I thought that with Skype, then Nokia.

Because Microsoft's decisions have always been driven as much by its byzantine internal politics as by any rational perspective on the market?

Embrace a new technology

Extend with proprietary functionality

Extinguish the competition