Do you really think they have changed? They got this "We are good guys now" talk going on recently and I'm not against it, but I have lost all trust in them, they have to gain it back and can only prove themselves with actions now.
On a side note, I'm also displeased with microsoft's products I'm almost forced to use. Can you imagine that uninstallation of Visual Studio 2015 from SSD takes 20 minutes? And it doesn't even fully uninstall it. Windows updates are no better. Really makes you wonder if it's still 1998 at Microsoft.
I think it's foolish to believe someone, who lied to you before, only based on words. I agree, people come and go, but if you are "new blood" you can only do so much.
But I not against Microsoft in particular. They are rich and powerful. It would be good, if they are really good guys now. I give them a chance to prove themselves. But i don't expect much.
>what actual actions could they take that would cause you to change your mind about them?
Maybe start making good products? What more can they do? And going back to "new blood" point again, do you think noone in Visual Studio devteam noticed that uninstallation taking 20 minutes? I'm 100% sure that there is guy who did, but he just cannot do anything. He have no power to change things. "It's working now somehow, so don't even think about touching it." And everything is like that at Microsoft.
And that whole telemetry stuff in win10. Every single option (telemetry/internet search/ads etc) is turned off, yet i open up wireshark and still see it calling home every time i type something in start menu. It's like they don't respect me and think that i'm stupid. Why it has to be this way?
"We are different now, but we are still the same." And nothing has changed. Pretty sad.
I've worked at MSFT since 2011, on developer tools and Azure. (My opinions are my own, of course).
When I first joined Microsoft, it was prior to the launch of Win8, and I saw a lot of complacency throughout many parts of the company. I found it frustrating, because I came from an open-source background on the Java stack, and I wanted to see more innovation.
In just a few years, things have changed dramatically, and that is because the market has changed. As others have said on this thread, Windows is no longer the key to Microsoft's business success, it is the ecosystem of products that Microsoft sells.
That is why there have been all of these cultural changes, because the industry has shifted, and there are some really smart leaders at Microsoft (e.g. Scott Guthrie) who realize that we have to change to stay viable.
So, the terrible practices you once saw just don't even make sense anymore. Microsoft is being challenged in every market it operates in, which means that we're forced to innovate. This turns out to be better for everyone, including employees like me. (I came from an academic research background, and I'd never want to work somewhere that was happy with the status quo.)
And yes, the Visual Studio 2015 uninstall takes a really long time. Some installs also take forever. They've made a ton of improvements in the new preview VS 2017.
The reason this wasn't done previously was not that a few engineers couldn't change things (though sometimes that is true), but rather that it was a hard engineering problem. It's easy to think that a big company has infinite resources, but the reality is that you can't build a product with too big of a team (see: Mythical Man Month), so you have to choose what you focus on. If you were to ask most customers, they'd rather have new features than have a better installation experience. That is, until the install experience got in people's way.
I don't work on anything related to the Windows client, so I can't speak to the telemetry, but what you're describing does sound pretty annoying. It is all anonymized (I know this because I'm familiar with the privacy reviews that all code has to go through), but I can see the case for wanting to opt out completely.
Obviously, one post is not going to change your mind (and I'm not looking to do so), but I'd suggest you look at leadership and philosophy changes, not just individuals.
Their approach to tricking users into upgrading to Windows 10 by the use of repeated deceptive updates and dark patterns in ther GWX spyware convinces me that no, they haven't changed a bit.
In 1998 I'd been a professional developer for over five years. I remember the Halloween documents. I agree with you that it is important to understand history - but things change and I also think its healthy to eventually move on.
It's healthy to move on if given enough time wounds have healed. Moving on without a good reason is naive and asking to be made a fool of again. Corporations are not people, they are borderline sociopathic like people though and need to be brought to task and constantly hounded and harassed to prevent them becoming complacent in their social responsibility.
In Microsoft's case, many people believe they keep showing their true colours from time to time.
