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Does Microsoft do this in 2025?

Like seriously - I haven't heard of them doing it in quite a long time. I know they were atrocious in the 90s and 00s, I'm not disputing that at all. Are there any examples of them continuing this behavior in the last decade though?

Further, a huge percentage of the people making those decisions back then are no longer with the company, different people are in charge, etc. The industry has changed it's relationship with open source - company board rooms aren't scared of the consequences of loading open source onto a server, the legality and liabilities have been hashed out, and MS isn't really even capable of pulling those fear levers anymore. MS itself has repositioned in the industry - their dreams of total computing dominance have been shattered: there's no chance of a windows derivative owning the server market any more, there's no money in browsers or consumer OSes (heck even MS's domination in gaming is showing cracks due the the efforts of valve). Point being - would it even make strategic sense for them to try to EEE anything anymore?

Note: I have almost no ties to MS. I haven't used an MS os or desktop software since before covid (in any capacity, even moving the mouse on a computer running windows). I don't use any of their SaaS products personally or professionally. There are integrations between the products I help build and azure, however those are not a major source of revenue for my employer and I do very little work that even touches that stuff. Point being - I'm pretty non-MS in my life and don't have any sort of loyalty or incentive to defend them. I do abhor their EEE actions back in the 90s and 00s when they were doing them, and those still make me angry... but that's not a reason to assume that different people at a company are going to act the same as the old-school ones.



Just read this a few days ago, so maybe the behaviour is better than it was, but still. Here is the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750535




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