Microsoft fumbled the Windows ball so hard, everybody i know got rid of their Windows PC and either went to Android/iPhone or got a Mac or Linux.
At work we can freely choose which OS we run on our machines. Guess what everybody wants since IT got forced to upgrade each laptop to Windows 11? Macbook Pro.
I personally am running Linux just because I already know how to use it but macOS (despite its flaws) is way less intrusive and much faster than Windows. Even Microsoft's own programs (Office 365, Teams) are running faster and have better UX on macOS than on Windows.
10% of Microsoft's revenue is Windows. Azure is closer to 40%. Their focus has shifted hard from software to services. Azure is making them around $100B and growing. It'd be far more surprising if they were putting their focus back to Windows in a saturated market given all the incentives they have to chase bigger revenue elsewhere.
We chose Azure for our startup because of data location, and it was cheaper than the other two as well. Data center locations may not matter much in the US (because everyone has this covered well), but it does in other places of the world.
Can't reply to @shorel, but of course Azure is running Linux servers. It has nothing to do with being tied to a Windows ecosystem.
Your choice to go with Azure probably has more to do with where you're getting value for cloud services, and where you started your project - in other words, how tied you are to the Azure ecosystem, or the AWS ecosystem as the case may be.
Most devs choosing Macbooks has a lot to do with culture. It's boutique, cool, and all the other successful people have it. Yes, officially it's always for technical reasons, but no one would ever admit to get something just because it's shiny.
A large majority of windows devs choose Apple hardware has to major challenges for MS.
If devs just want shiny flashy then MS has failed at providing that directly or through their partners. If devs are able to make credible technical reasons, year after year, that sustain IT & budgetary scrutiny, that also is a failure from MS.
Personally “being able to run docker without this bs” was credible for many years, tech that now is a de facto expectation for most .NET dev jobs and well-integrated-ish into windows and WSL.
If you're a grocery chain you know exactly how much an item costs and exactly how much you sell it for. You also simply order more or less stock of the item depending on how it's selling.
If you're a video game company, you invest millions of dollars in a project up front, for years, and you don't know until after release whether you:
- Make back all the money you spent plus a healthy profit on top.
- Just break even, but you lost the opportunity cost of all the other things that money could have been spent on with better utility.
- Your game flops and you wasted all the money you spent developing it.
It's also highly uneven. Extremely likely that King (Candy Crush) and Mojang (Minecraft) are making a ton of money, and everything else is a money pit where you pour in millions of dollars and you don't even make your money back.
The stores themselves aren't losing money if there's a natural disaster.. the farm does, the distributor likely does.. but not the store. The store just raises prices against future inventory pricing, often ahead of the inventory itself.
food demand is pretty inelastic their margins are low but they're fairly consistent. modern games can have budgets of a few hundred million dollars with absolutely no guarantee of sales. at those margins 1 failed triple ai have could wipe out several years of profits.
Russia is currently placing Russian citizens in the occupied parts of Ukraine exactly for this reason. If there will ever be a vote whether the Donbas Oblast or the Luhansk Oblast want to rejoin Ukraine, you can bet the vote will be pro Russia.
Same in Germany, although the employer can forbid this but needs to do this explicitly. Most employers don't forbid personal data on work machines or using your work email for personal things.
It also has something to do with the so called "Hackerparagraph" [1] under which whitehat hacking is basically impossible in Germany. Even writing a program that could potentially be used for hacking is a crime. If you followed the law word for word the authors of e.g. curl could be charged under this law.
> If you followed the law word for word the authors of e.g. curl could be charged under this law.
They really couldn't. BVerfG (Germany's constitutional court) has clearly said that dual use tools have a presumption of not being tools to break the law. It's been very clear that mens rea matters. And that a narrow reading of the law is the only constitutional reading.
The problem here is taking "word for word" as "by dictionary meaning", which is never how laws are read.
It's still a problematic law (together with §202a/b) because it doesn't clearly carve out space for grey-hat activities (white-hat attacks with authorization really don't fall under it even with creative reading).
On the upside, Germany is considering fixing that. On the downside, it moves with the speed of classic German bureaucracy and is being "discussed" since 2024.
> The problem here is taking "word for word" as "by dictionary meaning", which is never how laws are read.
Back in the days of "smart contracts" and "DAOS" this was something many well-meaning technical people struggeled with. Humans and their societies are flexible and therefore laws must be flexible as well (to a certain degree before it becomes damaging).
It's also why a lawyer/expert is usually recommended when engaged with legal matters: We as layman lack all the context around seemingly "simple" concepts, procedures and definitions. You can learn all of that or hire a professional.
Isn’t that by design so governments can prosecute citizens they don’t like? For example, curl is probably ok but that one annoying Kim Dotcom guy is probably going to catch a case under some dubious law.
The pirate bay case, one of the laws cited by the judges was an law written to target biker bars and their owners. It only takes a bit of creative work to bend laws and prior cases to match an already made conclusion, if that conclusion has enough political support.
In that way, I don't really think the government need to design laws to have loop holes in them. With enough political pressure they can get the judges to make any decision they like.
> some countries find such creative ways to stifle innovation while they look to be caring about safety or what not
I'm not sure white-hat hacking is broadly compatible with German culture. Keep in mind that going bankrupt in Germany permanently closes off lots of avenues, from future lending to whether you can be in senior management at a public company.
Bankruptcy does not usually permanently bar you from loans or holding senior management position, there are temporary restrictions, unless grossly negligent. But your point still stands I guess, when compared to the US
Not illegal per se in Germany but you won't find a legal job that doesn't require you to have a bank account. Benefits will also only be paid electronically (exceptions for some asylum seekers apply).
You also cannot get a tax refund or pay taxes without a bank account.
The comments explain the nuance there pretty well:
> This study had 16 participants, with a mix of previous exposure to AI tools - 56% of them had never used Cursor before, and the study was mainly about Cursor.
> My intuition here is that this study mainly demonstrated that the learning curve on AI-assisted development is high enough that asking developers to bake it into their existing workflows reduces their performance while they climb that learing curve.
Giving people a tool, that have no experience with it, and expecting them to be productive feels... odd?
That's a good point. Myself is the easiest person to fool.
I knocked together a quick analysis of my commit graphs going back several years, if you're interested: https://mccormick.cx/gh/
My average leading up to 2023 was around 2k commits per year. 2023 I started using ChatGPT and I hit my highest commits so far that year at 2,600. 2024 I moved to a different country, which broke my productivity. I started using aider at the end of 2024 and in 2025 I again hit my highest commits ever at 2,900. This year is looking pretty solid.
From this it looks to me like I'm at least 1.4x more productive than before.
As a freelancer I have to track issues closed and hours pretty closely so I can give estimates and updates to clients. My baseline was always "two issues closed per working day". These are issues I create myself (full stack, self-managed freelancer) so the average granularity has stayed roughly constant.
This morning I closed 8 issues on a client project. I estimate I am averaging around 4 issues per working day these days. I know this because I have to actually close the issues each day. So on that metric my productivity has roughly doubled.
I believe those studies for sure. I think there is nuance to using these tools well, and I think a lot of people are going backwards and introducing more bugs than progress through vibe coding. I do not think I have gone backwards, and the metrics I have available seem to agree with that assessment.
Love your approach and that you actually have "before vs. after" numbers to back it up!
I personally also use AI in a similar way, strongly guiding it instead of vibe-coding. It reduces frustration because it surely "types" faster and better than me, including figuring out some syntax nuances.
But often I jump in and do some parts by myself. Either "starting" something (creating a directory, file, method etc.) to let the LLM fill in the "boring" parts, or "finishing" something by me filling in the "important" parts (like business logic etc.).
I think it's way easier to retain authorship and codebase understanding this way, and it's more fun as well (for me).
But in the industry right now there is a heavy push for "vibe coding".
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