Everyone who has ever bet against Microsoft trying to enclose or eliminate something it takes an interest in has been wrong. Why should this be any different?
Are you using Windows Phone running on Nokia to Bing! and decide, email with Hotmail, chat with Skype, updating your Silverlight blog with LiveWriter, navigating with Autoroute? ... nobody else is, the people who bet against all those things were right.
So wait, you're trying to interpret me saying "Microsoft tries to close up or eliminate anything it takes an interest in" to mean "Microsoft never loses"? Very different things.
You can't trust Microsoft to act in the interest of open-source projects, transparency in general, or the users of any of the things it buys. Not all of their attempts to harm ecosystems or products work, and this has very little to do with whether they win competitions with other tech giants. In fact, sometimes user distrust stemming from their long history of Embrace Extend Extinguish and other user-hostilities has played into their failures. But like most shambling behemoths of companies, their deep pockets allow them to stay the course through many failures
You said "Everyone who has ever bet against Microsoft [...] has been wrong", that's not my interpretation, that's your words. Unless you're going to argue that them spending $8Bn on Skype doesn't count as "taking an interest in" or their multiple legal attacks on Android weren't "trying to close up or eliminate" competition?
Yes, you can indeed make sentences mean different things by omitting entire important clauses from them. You have clearly misread what I said. Microsoft did indeed fuck up skype, and try to attack android, and this is in fact consistent with my claim that Microsoft will try to enclose or eliminate any software they take an interest in. My point being that you can't trust microsoft with stewardship over a tool that's free or open. I get that it's embarassing to misread something, but you're not only doubling down about your misunderstanding, but trying to have a completely irrelevant argument with me based on your misinterpretation
