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A lot of people in the industry were turned off of Microsoft. Also academics tend to have FOSS-adjacent philosophies. IMO this really became a passion/pathology in the 2010s when it became viable and quite easy to live M$-free.

Another aspect is that M$ tools are used by millions, it's just that there's a selection bias for tried-and-true tool users to just quietly make things work. "Blue collar programmer" comes to mind. All the leading-edge churn, noise, and fatigue is the corner of the industry that generates tons of blog posts and HN links.

Most/all of their offerings seemed like legacy software/tools once IntelliJ, big JS projects, and SPAs became such a popular solution for software development on macOS and Ubuntu.

Now with VS Code, TypeScript, heavy dev in GitHub platform, cross-plat .NET, vcpkg, etc... and generally very powerful dev tooling, they actually have excellent offerings.

All that said, M$ clearly has a long road ahead of earning back good will in "high" tech corner of the industry and Academia.



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