You're not paying shit for those expenses. Read what the poster actually said.

You're not paying $100k on an IT guy because you don't need an IT guy to set up all your server stuff.

You don't need to pay $100k on servers because you just pay MS for their cloud service. You don't need to pay for any cloud software because MS integrates it seamlessly into the user-side of Windows.

I run a personal version of Office 365 after switching over from LibreOffice and let me just say that the two aren't even remotely comparable. LibreOffice is at least a decade behind MS Office and I can't believe I ever thought them equal. People here are probably going to think I'm some shill for MS but I'm not, I'm just not afraid to throw a good product under the bus without ever trying it and getting a grip.

And I know there's a lot of MS hate from IT people, and sure, I hear you, they could do a lot more to make it better for all you tech wizards that know networking like the back of your hand. It's probably that which is clouding your judgment of their system. To a non-programmer, non-tech guy who thinks CLI is some small government agency and not common language infrastructure or command line interface, MS's stuff is gosh darn fantastic.

The interfaces, in general, are intuitive and easy to understand and everything usually just works out of the box. Usually. With the amount of software that goes into putting together an OS it would be surprising if it weren't. But that's okay. And Office 365 works with the cloud effortlessly. It's nowhere near as clunky as Google Drive (Do you really want to have to trust them with your data?). You just press save and it's in your document folder and on another document folder on your cloud service. Piece of cake.

I mean really what do you actually want here? Do you want Apple taking over and forcing everyone to use the same hardware and lock down everything you develop? Is that what you really want? Do you want Linux running hands free on every computer? That's fine too, but only if you're okay with having to deal with a market share that's all over the place because you have to deal with six or so distros and you can't rely on the user to be smart enough to figure out how to get your program to work on it.

That's what I really get from people on the MS hate train, just a common lack of understanding about what the non-programmer thinks and feels. I have seen so many bad UI designs and such that make perfect sense from a programming aspect, but are confusing and unintuitive for the person you designed them.

So don't bash MS for building a superior model to the open source alternatives for 90% of the market share.

Anything with a rewarding stimulus can become an addiction. But only a in a subgroup of people whose brains seriously screw up and over-react to the positive stimulus. It's more of an addiction spectrum than a switch, but there are people who are genuinely addicted to the internet (or online games, since the internet is really too broad a category; cue stories about Koreans playing until they die).

I don't know whether or not most people who go to this camp are seriously addicted. I'm sure there are a few, but all I know is that someone is making money off of this.

Given his philanthropic generosity for helping out genuinely poor countries, I doubt he views anyone making a developer's salary as poor.

You mean the factory workers over in some country that doesn't have adequate minimum wage laws and worker protection?

I weep for the poor factory owners who can no longer make gobs of money off of MS's patronage on the backs of their fellow humans.

Failure? What failure?

Maybe for gaming and some smart TV shenanigans I don't even know, but for the research/development world it's been the greatest thing ever. All that's changed is that MS went, "Why are we producing two versions of the same thing?" And then said, "Oh, in that case we'll just produce one version, then make an adapter."

In other words, MS made an excellent business move that saves the money and doesn't cost anyone anything.

Whoa dude C++? FORTRAN is the REAL language. Get your fancy high level crap out of here.

I like my languages like I like my coffee: without synaptic sugar.

Yeah MS is evil and nothing they do is ever good. .NET? More like FailNET. Why don't you just use Java? Java has uhh... It's uhhh better because you can use it on like 10% of the computer market-share, or something! Yeah portability!

Plus what's up with Windows? Why can't everyone just learn Bash or something and use Linux (but only [insert favorite distro]). GUIs are dumb! I went to programming school so like, everyone else should know what I know about computers, sheesh stupid morons.

And why not just open source everything, no strings attached? They don't need to make money! Also *grumble grumble* my job doesn't pay me enough *grumble*.

Whoo am I right guys?

So what time is the book burning? I've got a whole library to go through. We'll have to hunt down that cloud so we can stab it with pitchforks, though.

Unless your sport is casual walking it won't.

I agree. This demonstrates there needs to be a law holding the business or its new owner accountable for promises they've made, voiding any agreements the consumer may have made.

Which means if it's a subscription model, then being required to fulfill the subscription or refund the amount paid for the subscription. If you pay someone $120 to do something for twelve months and they only do it for half a month, they're legally obligated (already) to repay you half the money. It breaks down when you have hidden legal agreements that work out of this.

Maybe there is a law out there that does protect people from this. A criminal one against fraud or something, who knows. It just feels wrong than Sony can say, "Well you're boned," and then make off with all the money that people paid to them.

No, it really is a piece of paper.

What matter is that it's a piece of paper that other people think means something. The same way a twenty dollar bill is just a piece of paper. Hey it could be counterfeit even. And that's where the analogy ends.

At the end of the day it's just something that gets you past the screening process of interviews. Speaking about software developers specifically, there's little chance you'd even make it to an interview without a CS degree or previous experience working as one. Even if you attach some stellar projects to your resume they're not likely going to look through them. They're going to go, "Welp no degree into the discard pile." Hell, even if you make it you have to be way better than the junior developers they would hire who have degrees just because you don't have one. It's not the best system but that's how it works because it's the easiest and people are lazy. Hence the term of "degree mills".

So in the end you're competing against people who went through the same process as you, getting their freshly minted degree and finally ready to start being productive members of society. Now is when you insert the thousands upon thousands of horror stories about junior developers and how they're utterly worthless. Not all of them, but I'm sure there's not much good to say about the majority, since I happen to know a CS student or two who are A+ programmers. But both of them do projects on their own time and have gone far beyond their curriculum. In short, a degree is not a ticket to a job; it's a ticket to a job interview. And that's all it's really worth.

You're not paying for some unique skill set, everything you learn you can get through OCW or textbooks. Anything you can't get through there is likely to be run down low quality. Of course there is always an exception, most people have one or two great professors who make a huge impact on them throughout their four (or five, who's counting!). But is it really worth the tens of thousands of dollars a year? Don't think so. College isn't the Marines, and you can't expect everyone that comes out of it to proficient with the M16 rifle.

I suppose Android is terrible for the same reason, then.

I suppose you have a point about what OS actually means.

From my perspective they're being generous and it may have just been overlooked that they weren't actually being true to it. It just seems asinine to demand more from MS.