I think to be honest that some of the stuff Microsoft have been working on behind the scenes is probably scaring the crap out of Apple and Google. There's not been a platform as holistic and complete as Microsoft's offerings so far and they are adding REAL value daily rather than just moving the chess pieces to great fanfare.
One thing has for me: people are spending lots of money on them. Top slicing that is pretty easy.
Oh and most problems are solved or canned so all we're doing is gluing things together and making it look pretty (which is what programming via abstractions is all about).
I would rather say it has become apparent over the last year. I say windows 8 marks the moment.
That's where Microsoft realized they needed to garner goodwill and at that point Google had so much global market share (web traffic, browsers, mobile) they could say fuck all to everything and anyone.
And they started doing just that. Anyone else remember the forced and sneaky adaption tactics that was Google+?
I would say on Microsoft's part it was when Ballmer was ousted and Nadella took the reins. Nadella seems to be genuinely open to working with instead of against other companies and open source projects. I think he realized the ship was sinking, and he's doing what he can to save it, throwing out old and dead business practices in the process.
I actually like the "new" Microsoft and the direction it's heading, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around that fact.
Ballmer was at the helm when this train started rolling. It has taken years to get here. When Hanselman said to Miguel, "We did it." on stage at dev connect, I took that to mean something much larger than open sourcing Core.net. There has been a push from within on open-sourcing and pivoting on their approach to many of their lines of business that has taken so many people so many small battles, that I would sya Satya's ascendancy was the coming out party for a movement vs. some catalytic event.
You're right of course, these changes didn't happen with the flip of a switch. It just seems that so much good has happened at/from Microsoft in the relatively short time since Nadella took over, it's almost as if that was the moment the shackles were taken off. Obviously the ground work was laid when Ballmer was still in charge, but it was almost as if he resisted the changes that were coming down the pipe to the very end.
Google still open sources their apps. That's why there's almost always two versions of each app on Android. Messenger versus Hangouts. Google also allows you to remove ANY AND ALL information they have on you that is used to target advertisements. Google also allows you to export ANY AND ALL data you use in their services and to import it to any other service you choose.
Are both versions of their apps open source and do they have equivalent features? Second question (maybe based upon old info) but I thought deleting email from GMail does not really delete the email which is retained for Google's purposes? These are sincere questions and not intended to be rhetorical.
Equivalent features that are not tied into Google services? Yes. Messenger does MMS/SMS. So does Hangouts. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that specific services (Voice calling over GTalk) should require the specific app (Hangouts)
And no, Google does not keep emails. After 30 days you cannot recover anything.
>If you can't find your messages in All Mail, Spam, or Trash, or by performing a search, then they've been permanently removed from Gmail, possibly deleted by someone else. We regret that we are unable to recover messages that have been permanently deleted.
I can confirm that having emails permanently deleted, such as when I unsubscribed from mailings from a store I deleted my account from... I stopped receiving advertisements in the sidebar related to that store. When you stop getting ads about specific things after deleting all emails about those specific things, I would say that's fairly conclusive.
That's not going to happen any time soon. Not because they don't want to but because the whole process would be monumentally complicated and expensive.
I suspect we'll see a new 100% managed code IDE in the next 3-5 years that will fit this area nicely. It'll have bits of Visual Studio in it and it may even be called Visual Studio but it won't be what we have now.
Are you confusing "Visual Studio 2015 ... uilding applications that run on platforms including Windows, Linux, iOS and Android." with "Visual Studio 2015 will run on"?
I was confusing "cross-platform" with "runs on", yeah. I thought that as Ars says Visual Studio is cross platform, that it would mean it runs on multiple platforms. A closer read indicates that may not be true.
