My niece asked me once, how can you sit in front of a computer and a keyboard all day? My answer: They pay me well, but I'd do it even if they didn't pay.

Microsoft hurt B&N? And here was me thinking it was a comination of Amazon and people not buying books anymore that was the problem. What was it specifically that Microsoft did? Cripple that horrible Nook thing?

PHP is only popular because there are more retards than intelligent people in the world.

Ponder this: Would a Microsoft that was fully committed to pushing Windows everywhere, release mobile Microsoft Office on iOS and Android a full year before they released it on Windows? The current Microsoft does. GP is correct, the new Microsoft is not a company that is "Windows only". Certain things in .Net are not going OS. WPF is a notable mention. Why? Because WPF is tightly integrated with DirectX, and porting DirectX to Linux is not going to happen.

Look for open-source equivalents of WPF coming down the line. Probably not from Microsoft though.

WinForms is not part of WPF, and it seems rather unlikely that WPF will ever be ported to anything but the Microsoft platform since it is tightly integrated with, and wholly dependent on, DirectX.

Visual Studio hasn't really cost "a pretty penny" in a long time, but now it is also free. Not a crippled version. Not a dumbed-down version. The Community Edition (ready for you to download) is equivalent to the old "Pro" offering.

Azure is pulling in billions each quarter. Apple has a significant portion of its infrastructure (iCloud is at least partly) on Azure. Without anyone noticing, Microsoft has gone cloud in a big way, and will probably be the worlds largest cloud vendor by summer (with current growth they'll pass Amazon somewhere in 1Q2015. If people move to .Net, Azure is going to be quite difficult to beat at least in the short term.

Also note that for the mobile platform, the Office group now targets mainly iOS and Android, mobile Windows is apparently way down the list, getting Office at least one year later than the other two. The Office groups is not an insignificant Microsoft department.

Since this is open-sourcing of their own software, please elaborate on how the final E in EEE is even theoretically possible. I don't care about their motives, I do however notice that they are making irreversible changes to their product portfolio that can only be beneficial to the community as such.

EEE is possible only if you take an open standard, build your product around it, then, after having some success, subtly change your product not to work with the open standard any more. Example Active Directory. Then the last of the three E's is possible. If they open source AD on the other hand, the final E isn't even remotely theoretically possible.

There is a difference between being suspicious and being raving mad paranoid. Most of /. posters come in the last category whenever there is the word "microsoft" somewhere in a post.

It isn't. Never has been (I'd love for QNX to take over the world). That doesn't mean that the retarded EEE mantra of paranoid and rather ignorant /. trolls are not worthy of being modded trolls though. They comments are fully retarded. With the direction that Microsoft is going now, the final E in the EEE simply isn't possible. Not even theoretically. Don't agree - please elaborate on how it could be.

Retarded trolls are retarded trolls, irrespective of what they are trolling about.

You haven't been paying attention. Mobile Office or Touch Office or whatever, is available for iOS and (I think) Android at least a full year than any Microsoft mobile device.

You are absolutely correct in this one. The people at MS are not dumb, the "one and only stack" is no longer. Microsoft is therefore, in a rather pragmatic manner, moving to stay relevant. You can see this in their open-sourcing a lot of their stuff, not only the .Net stack but also their C# compiler (Roslyn) etc. For anyone who is not a paranoid, retarded /. lunatic, this is a good thing. It also makes EEE basically impossible.

Are there other signs that Microsoft is moving in this direction? Yes, there is. The iPad (and probably also Android phones and tablets) are getting their touch-enabled versions of Microsoft Office at least a full year before any Windows tablet or phone. Given the importance of Office inside MS, there is no doubt that abandoning their own platform as the "most important" one is a huge flag of surrender to realities.

This simply isn't the Microsoft of the 1990s, and that's a good thing. No matter what the paranoid nuts go on about.

Oh, and as the "only" other managed software development environment, we should all be happy. C# and .Net is more than Java ever dreamed about being, and more than Java ever will be as long as Oracle uses a community process to manage the development. To me, a combo of .Net on the server and Angular and (at the moment, but that stuff changes all the time) Ionic on the client is fantastic. Cordova makes my life a good one, and .Net on the server blows Java out of the water every day of the week and 22 times on Sunday. Speaking here as someone being part of a team that delivered enterprise software (had it deployed at many customers) on the Java platform back in 1997-98 or so. JDK 1.0.2.

I am willing to bet most of the people reading /. are white, so that's not really an issue.

It's existence, size and importance. Any group, once it grows big enough, and no matter it's original motives, will be primarily concerned with its own existence once it grows past a handful of members. This is true in government, where the bureaucracy will, after a short while, be primarily interested in growing the bureaucracy. It is true in religious institutions who all eventually (quickly) lose sight of the religious aspects they are supposedly preaching and start concerning them selves primarily with growth, power and maintaining their own importance. It certainly happens in voluntary organizations like Greenpeace, which fast go on the same path as religious organizations.

Companies, to a degree, have some oversight. If they do not make enough money as they grow big, their growth will sooner or later be limited by stock holders demanding profit. Not at first, for sure, but over time. So companies will be allowed to stroke their own egos for a while but not indefinitely. Since a government bureaucracy caters to politicians, and the general electorate is retarded, there is no oversight over the bureaucracy. Since there is no God/Allah/Your favorite sky fairy there is no real oversight over religious institutions, and their membership is even more retarded than the average electorate. For organizations like Greenpeace the only oversight that exists is the internal oversight, and they are to busy in their own circle jerk to notice or care.

Your statement is self-contradictory. Accessing and co-opting the site was damaging the site, so damaging was not a mistake.