VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

Unwritten terms like "valid until I decide to tear it up haha lol" are not generally appreciated by companies that depend on your stuff for their business. Of course you can extort your existing customers until they manage to move away but basically in the longer term you're suiciding your entire business.

With Kubernetes, actually fast storage if you need it. Can scale up to AI demands if you need it.

Or proxmox or the like if you're small enough.

In case anyone else was wondering who "Simon" is, I'm pretty sure it refers to this editor: https://www.theregister.com/Author/Simon-Sharwood

I had to tell CurrentCo that I cannot reinstall their vSphere deployment at a client site because they bought a perpetual license, didn’t migrate it to Broadcom before they cut it off, and now we cannot simply go get the latest patch or appliance for that version number without inviting an audit and a sueball from Broadcom.

“Good thing Microsoft would never do that to us.”

Ha. Hahaha.

Compared to standing up literally any Linux distro and KVM, K8s remains an overly complex PITA to get off the ground and integrated into an org on the cheap/free. In that area, it handily loses to even Microsoft Hyper-V in the “just get us going” category of business adoption/velocity.

I’d really, really like to see K8s more streamlined for initial deployment than it is. It’s getting better, but I generally still have to grudgingly recommend a premium, managed control plane for any serious deployment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpE_xMRiCLE

2 companies ago was heavily invested in VMware. It impacted monitoring, backups, deployments, networking, cloud migration and more. I can only shudder at level of effort they might be going through to get off VMware.

Because of that, they probably won’t for years even as Broadcom screws them over.

> Many mid-market and regional operators view the new [subscription] structure as untenable and are actively exploring alternatives.. Nutanix emerged early as the leading competitive alternative to VMware.. over 2,700 new customers.. driven by organizations fleeing VMware's new pricing model.. [including] more than 50 Global 2000 companies, representing major enterprises willing to undertake complex, multi-year infrastructure overhauls.. With VMware serving approximately 200,000 customers globally, Nutanix sees most of the migration opportunity still ahead.

VMWare may have hiked the prices and might be an important dependency but at a certain point it is cheaper to sue and/or switch from them.

Seems that they have gone way past this point

If you need 40,000 servers to keep your business running (which you don't, your ~3-8 million weekly transactions can be processed on 1 computer, but whatever), hire people that will work on you, and whose paycheck depends on keeping those computers working, to keep those computers working.

Game theory arguments like "they wouldn't screw me over because other people won't want to do business with them" don't work when the other party is trying to maximize quarterly earnings, and their long-term thinking is in the order of ~2 years.

Imagine being a company so big that your strategy is to kick your clients in the teeth then throttle revenue out of them.

These aren't Broadcom's ICPs.

> Nutanix

Good for Nutanix. Market segmentation exists for a reason.

The article is also written by Steve McDowell, who's analyst firm (NAND Research) is sponsored by Nutanix [0][1]

Welcome to Enterprise Sales.

[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=93FbVZGDXoY

[1] - https://www.nutanix.com/theforecastbynutanix/technology/hype...

I always dreaded renewal time because it was normal for them to use it as an opportunity to extort us. Microsoft was a breeze in comparison. It's funny because Microsoft always had such a horrible reputation. I don't know if I was just so abused by VMware or what, but Microsoft was just easy. We had an annual true-up date and we always knew where we stood with them. We reported our numbers and that was it. No surprises ever and there was never an issue if we didn't report any growth. VMware was always pulling some kind of shit and was absolutely determined to push us over budget every time.

  - RedHat OpenShift (k8s)
  - Scale Computing HC3
  - Wind River Cloud 
  - public cloud providers

1) Have you ever been exposed to alternative communicators?

2) What features do you enjoy about teams

3) What platform are you using it from (Windows Desktop / Laptop? What spec)

4) Have you ever written a bot or integration?

5) Can you take me through a very brief working day for you, with a focus on collaborating with others.. (file sharing, online chats, IRL chats, meetings?)

Enterprise software licensing, support contracts, and technical account managers (TAMs) often run into hundreds of thousands or millions annually per organization. Yet, in practice, support tickets go unresolved or ignored, even for large clients.

The software quality of our most expensive products is extremely poor and unreliable, almost across the board. Many products suffer from bugs, outdated features, or incompatibility issues that disrupt operations. In development roles, this means wasted time on workarounds, custom patches, or integrations that shouldn't be necessary. For a non-small organization, this scales up to significant productivity losses and hidden costs in overhead.

These companies actively alienate us, the customer, through their business practices. Changes like aggressive licensing shifts (e.g., moving from per-core to per-employee models) force reevaluations and migrations and eroding trust (i.e. Oracle with Java, VMWare fiasco). This isn't isolated—it's a pattern where short-term revenue grabs risk long-term relationships, yet companies seem unfazed.

This jacks the entire ecosystem up. These practices stifle innovation by locking customers into suboptimal tools, increase overall IT spend industry-wide, and contribute to employee burnout in dev and ops teams.

It seems like it’s a race to the bottom. The strategy is to create an ecosystem with high switching costs and vendor lock-in. It just doesn’t seem sustainable, yet- it keeps truckin’ along.

That being said, I don’t see what 40k servers is for unless the POS machines are thin clients that use a substantial fraction of a server each.

There is very little incentive to produce high-quality software, to not alienate your customers, and to support the thing you already sold. Those things cost money. Money paid for those things is money not paid to shareholders, and that's the ultimate incentive in our system.

They've got you by the balls, and secretly, your CEO thinks their CEO is a genius for thinking up and implementing that business model. Pay up.

VMware on the other hand is dying because doing things that way hasn't been the state of the art for a long time.

1) WebEx and the open source chat that Oracle appropriated. Fortunately Zoom came and went too quickly.

2) Searching the Exchange corporate directory. BASIC features: status, embedding pictures, attaching files that Outlook would block. Sharing links that aren't obfuscated.

3) Can you even run Teams from Apple / Linux?

4) Ha! Imagine the nightmares for the person linking Atlassian and Teams.

5) Group texts, file shares, voice calls, recorded meetings. Meetings with groups from other companies is almost painless.

People would care a lot less if Broadcom had very gradually increase prices over 5 years or a decade, stopped support on version 7, stopped development on version 8 and gradually changed everything starting with version 9, but they decided in all their wisdom they wanted their investment back ASAP instead of waiting.

Maybe they should have looked at the licensing and support models Veeam uses.

In that sense I'm surprised it's only 40,000.

Working in agtech, I’ve always wondered if this isn’t just the disenfranchised farmer story.

Give a farmer 1,000 acres to farm, and if they’re playing the long game, they’ll intermix their high value crops with responsible crop rotations. Managed well, this business can go on indefinitely.

But tell them they have 5 years left to farm the ground, and that the land will be of no value after that, they’ll grow the most expensive crop they can every year, soil quality be damned. It makes the most sense from a value extraction point of view.

Broadcom seems to be the kind of farmers that buy up forsaken land and extract as much value as possible before it finally fails.

https://www.talos.dev

https://docs.k0sproject.io/v0.11.0/k0s-multi-node

I've been an msft employee for a couple of years and teams... Was ok. I prefer slack, but meetings, video, messaging, formatting, etc. was just fine in teams.

My point was not that running all that on one computer is a great idea, just that 40,000 servers for a CRUD application is way past what should be considered reasonable.

But even that's fine. I like computers, you can have 40,000 of them if you want, even if the only reason they exist is some guy's job security. However, you're insane if the guy keeping them running doesn't work for you.

Ok, then I can see why Teams ranks among them. I would invite you to try something like Zulip or Mattermost but I think ignorance is bliss and you should avoid knowing about anything that could be better. Your mind might do this for you (rejection) but best not to tempt fate.

> 2) Searching the Exchange corporate directory. BASIC features: status, embedding pictures, attaching files that Outlook would block. Sharing links that aren't obfuscated.

Appreciate the list, the only one of these that's Teams specific is searching a corp directory. Do you use the "Teams" functionality, or do you use the chat exclusively?

> 3) Can you even run Teams from Apple / Linux?

Yes, it's very slow. It's also very slow from laptops, the best "Teams experience" I've ever seen has been in GameDev where we all ran Windows 7 on dodecacore CPUs with 128-256G of DDR4.

It was still slower than Slack on my macbook air though.

> 4) Ha! Imagine the nightmares for the person linking Atlassian and Teams.

Yeah, people do. People also use Excel from within Teams.

Writing bots for Teams is a special nightmare, but webhooks can work.

> 5) Group texts, file shares, voice calls, recorded meetings. Meetings with groups from other companies is almost painless.

Do you spend a lot of your day face-to-face or more of your day in Teams?

Do you find yourself arranging meetings to sync rather than using the chat functionality?

Do you find that people have to ask around a lot to get an answer and then ask again later when it's forgotten, or can they find their answer in history?

Unfortunately. Teams is just as performant on MacOS/iOS as it is on Windows.

Guess this means I wont' get to run Teams in the company I'm joining, which is doing all its security attestation via Microsoft;

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32678839

Tell me you've never designed a system at this scale without telling me you've never designed something at this scale...

well I have news for you ;=)

I pity the people who have to deliver news like that from time to time.

Perl FTW, https://github.com/proxmox/pve-common

My preference is text chat but we do a lot of unscheduled voice chats when screen-sharing is involved. In-person meetings are nice when possible, it's been easy enough to connect a Teams meeting from a conference room phone.

Before Teams I set up a Mattermost instance, and I think RocketChat integrated to GitLab? Nobody used those. As we all know the value in these things comes from network effects; with Teams corporate IT can set Teams as a startup app by Domain policy, now everyone in your company has to be online. That's the real killer feature.

The current breed of managers in the US have decided to fire developers, abuse customers (you have nowhere to go) and burn all the money on AI (they believe it’ll solve all their problems).

Morale will remain low until an alternative spawns. Kinda with electric cars. Europeans, Japanese and Koreans are now forced to up their game and lower their prices.

I don’t like it, but that’s how the current technology environment is unfortunately setup.

God help the enterprise software segment if customers realize 90% of their needs are served perfectly well with KVM+QEMU and VMs.

Teams, that application IT is forcing me to use because they are a "Microsoft" house. Same application currently stating I'm on the _Calendar_ screen on the Task bar but actually in the _Chat_ screen; _Calendar_ bloatware feature and others have been removed and will always. Even when _Microsoft_ screws the user and force a reinstall of features after a Teams update.

Microsoft is a trillion dollar company that rejects quality user experience, QA, and is great at producing crap-ware. There is not a single product sell that I will spend a penny on. Still waiting on that 7+ year request to destroy | delete dangling pull request in Azure.

But the sheer work of getting to that point, safely and securely? It ruins the experience for me, personally.

That's how I run it.

VMware has always been a PITA, even in the late 2000's, we pivoted and bought several thousand physical machines for a new datacenter after they started to play tricks just weeks before we were going to turn up the DC.

They have always aspired to be Oracle like, where customers are hostages. Most people I knew who weren't stuck in the "Enterprise" trap moved to kvm/zen ASAP especially after the Westmere dramatically reduced the vm_exit() latency allowing for databases etc...

That was over 15 years ago, and outside of a very small number of niche use cases, tehre was no real argument to run container hosts on Vmware outside of a (IMHO) mistaken risk appetite.

It is really the fruit that ate itself, as had IT departments had a more data based risk assessment process, we would probably be heavily hybrid-cloud now. But the same Enterprise gravy train that VMware grew under killed them.

Shifting blame at great expense in licensing and agility to an _Enterprise_ solution was their jam...now Broadcom owns them an it is even worse.

  My point was not that running all that on one computer is a great idea...

Let's even say my numbers are wildly wrong, and they're processing 100x more transactions than what I claimed (which was already an overestimate). Tell me why you can't process 1600 transactions per second on one computer, especially for a country the size of the UK, where you would expect a ~15ms ping when talking to a server on the other side of the country.

This is the kind of thing that gets tech people a bad reputation. YOU don't need Excel. I don't need excel - but that guy? You have no idea what he needs and if the people he's supporting need (or just want) Excel to get their jobs done it is incredibly arrogant to tell him what he does or doesn't need.

Now, I've loathed Microsoft since the 90s, but that makes me a weird and special little petal - it doesn't count for squat in business.

Would there be real interest in a kubernetes distro that takes IPs and a (set of) domain names, and boots up on N nodes, installing letsencrypt, so that you can do a deployment and have ingress actually working?

Yet more vendor lock-in.

Our 5 year ELA for vmware went from 1.5M USD to 12M USD. Higher ed.

Our Hyper-V environment is coming online this month. It was already included with our ELA with Microsoft so we were able to splash out a bit for some higher tier support.

I've used both Teams and Zoom (and others). Honestly, I'd rather use Zoom instead of Teams.

> BASIC features: status, embedding pictures, attaching files that Outlook would block. Sharing links that aren't obfuscated.

Status is settable by just about any competitor to Teams. Slack and Zoom both can set your current status.

Embedding pictures and files is also not unique to Teams.

Obfuscated links? Just a matter of time before Microsoft changes that to some microsoft link for a "vulnerability scanner" and then charges the company for the privilege to block random things it doesn't understand how to scan.

> Can you even run Teams from Apple / Linux?

Yes / technically yes (not supported any more)

> Group texts, file shares, voice calls, recorded meetings. Meetings with groups from other companies is almost painless.

Slack and Zoom are better at all of these.

I was a beta tester for VMWare way back when. It was one of the first pieces of software I bought out of college. It was like manna from heaven, I could commit to Linux and have a backdoor for Windows and I needed it, and I did from time to time. I also did security testing over the years and once you've joined a machine to a Windows domain, it never can be made the same again. Vmware enabled that business without a spare laptop or spending tons of time rebuilding it. I've maintained the license since then, 25ish years. Bought it for the Mac too. I can't think of a worse transition than the one they're doing.

FYI. I know we weren't the only ones left gun shy after Oracle's legal team reached out to let us know about the dozen or so employees using VirtualBox from their work laptops a few years ago.

We already have to bite the bullet and pay for office, at least we get free chat

I wish Teams integrated better with Github Issues/PR, but it works well as a company-wide chat

If cost is your concern: SaaS Zulip is free.

Oh geez I dunno, surely now it's over for them

My favorite thing about leaving that job was never having to deal with VMWare ever again.

Just because "all" software companies have American entities doesn't mean you "won", that's just what happens when a jurisdiction let's companies do anything even if it's detrimental to society as a whole.

Poor mac users.

- HPE morpheus VM Essential

- Apache Cloudstack

- Platform9

...

A good system here will be distributed.

That being said, two servers (for redundancy) physically located at each branch ought to do the trick. Tesco has a bit over 5000 branches [0], so that’s 10k of the 40k VMWare seats right there. Throw in some extra seats so storage and compute can be separated at each location (maybe unnecessary but comes with some benefits) and so that there is still redundancy while a server or two at a site is being re-imaged and 40k seems about in the right ballpark even for a fairly lean implementation.

And, sure, all those on-site servers might be relatively inexpensive industrial units designed to tolerate a toasty, dusty, and occasionally damp closet that looks nothing like a tidy datacenter, but it still makes sense to run something like VMWare on them.

[0] https://www.tescoplc.com/investors/reports-results-and-prese...

It's 10x easier to just search reddit or internet archive for a link to the .dmg.

Oh, they didn’t want to deal with the “token” bullshit they added to the VMware download site that the updates come from. That’s why.

https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2025/03/24/downloa...

I think some of what I'm trying to portray is that this should be the incentive. Either do it or you don't have a customer. Yet, the customers don't hold this standard.

As an individual consumer, if I don't get what I pay for, I return it or can even submit a charge-back. Is it not irresponsible of business management to not do the same?

> I think ignorance is bliss and you should avoid knowing about anything that could be better. Your mind might do this for you (rejection) but best not to tempt fate.

There’s nothing intellectual about fake curiosity, passive aggressive remarks, or insistently pushing your opinion just for the sake of sounding smarter than the next guy.

I’m asking because for $12m I’d just buy all the employees some high end commodity hardware.

The academic work (including the supercomputer) will run Linux and open source systems for job scheduling etc.

I can tell you I've successfully been in Teams video conferences from my Linux desktop, in the browser. I was surprised too.

I work in this space for a retailer almost the same size as Tesco and when factoring in all the attendant organizations, businesses, and functions it requires, 40k servers does not surprise me at all.

Outside of just the brick-and-mortar stores you have Marketing, Retail, eComm, Merchandising, Strategic Sourcing, FP&A, Finance & Accounting, Asset Protection, Corporate Real Estate, Retail Real Estate, Internal Audit, Supply Chain, Transportation, Business Services, Data Science, etc etc. and IT at every level of those. Each one of these components is large enough to be a medium-to-large sized company in its own right.

They extract as much cash out of the decaying corpse as they can, and then discard it.

They were actually fairly open about this to investors when they bought VMware .

I havn't looked about but I'd be suprised if there wasn't also a large number of companies providing on prem control plane support.

* “No-Code Kubernetes”, that lets staff design basic (or even not-so-basic) deployments using a web-based GUI. We’re seeing more of this from a “understand how things work while they run” perspective, but I haven’t personally come across any “here’s your building blocks and explainers of the environment variables, go build” solutions.

* An “ESXi-ified” K8s. Talos comes so, so close to this, but I’d love something that was as easy to deploy into production as ESXi was on SD cards. Deploy as an appliance on bare metal or as a VM, and voila, Control Plane with an IP schema, network layer, AD CA/ACME support (including Let’s Encrypt), and a basic load balancer/ingress. Changing the setup is as simple as adding a basic text file with the control plane IP and join string (worker nodes), with a simple flag to add it as another control plane node for HA.

* Renewed focus on etcd management ease. A lot of the cert track focuses extensively on etcd management through kubectl, which is an unnecessary abstraction layer for things like backups, failovers, and redundancies in smaller IT departments.

* Automated migrations. The K8s evangelists hype it as being able to manage VMs, which would be great if kube-virt was standard (it’s an add-on). I’d like to see K8s either formally integrate it into the baseline or more distros make it a checkbox option at cluster creation. Part of that should also be support for automatic deployment creations for existing VMs in a hypervisor, by analyzing current settings and suggesting the YAML or JSON to replicate that VM in K8s with appropriate IP address, current storage, and ACLs

From a tech standpoint, the foundations for K8s success have long been polished into a mirror shine. At this point it’s usability and accessibility that remain broadly unaddressed, especially if we want more people and companies using iterative, composable infrastructure.

That's not true. The auto-update functionality is still there, it just doesn't find anything. (At least this is the case for Workstation; I assume it's similar for Fusion)

I know nothing about Tesco beyond that quick google search, but I’ve been at several companies where I would read online comments claiming we could reduce our workload to a few servers, and I would think of our tens of thousands of fully loaded machines and roll my eyes.

Kubernetes might have success, but AFAICS Kubernetes also sort of involves a new way of architecting applications (cloud native applications, 12-factor apps, microservices, etc.; whatever the buzzword du jour is). The idea with vmware was always to virtualize all those zillions of more or less idling physical servers, and get some snazzy management GUI to handle them all etc. etc.

To me, what I really don't like is that you can present the files and wiki via network file share, but the format of the wiki is read-only in that mode... it would be significantly better as user editable markdown with front-matter. It's some strange quasi-html extensions that you aren't going to be able to really even use.

I don't like that they separated the chat channels out... you now have unread, channels, chats, meeting chats... going between them is now a mess as I'm usually in a combination of meeting chats and 1:1 chats mostly.

While I do appreciate the integration of outlook's calendar, I really don't want meeting notifications for anything more than a couple days out... it can wait until I check my mail.

The real time video chat is okay... I think Zoom and Slack both have lightly better video quality and features though. I don't like Zoom's chat/discussion features nearly as much... I like Slack overall slightly better, but don't think some of the externalized integrations are as good as Teams.

Overall, it's "okay"... I don't love it as I think it's gotten worse over time while Slack is getting better, slowly. I'm not vocal enough to raise hell one way or another for/against it. I've used it on Linux without much issue... so it works well enough.

I used to work at a university, although I worked on the Linux/HPC side of things we did have regular contact with the IT department. So things the IT department used VM's for of the top of my head:

- Web servers. Yes, the official university web pages, with fronted servers, database servers and whatnot. But also a lot of departments had their own servers, even some research groups ran their own. To get rid of the zillions of ad-hoc servers running in closets here and there IT gave out VM's pretty freely to staff members.

- Email. Yes, this was before everyone + dog outsourced their email, so they ran their own in-house email servers.

- print servers

- (I think file servers were mostly non-VM appliances, my university used netapp's a lot)

- All kinds of management systems to manage the campus workstations and network. And things like Active Directory and other directory services type services which are critical.

- A zillion in-house applications for things like signing up for courses and other things necessary for handling thousands of students.

- A lot of bespoke systems given out to research groups for whatever purposes they needed, again in order to get rid of the zillion repurposed old pc's running in closets acting as servers or running some experiments etc.

- Critical services and some not-so-critical services as well had test environments to test changes before rolling out to production.

- Finance/admin stuff like payroll etc.

- Shell servers (ssh), RDP servers, VPN servers etc. to enable staff to access university services from outside.

All in all, it was hundreds and hundreds of VM's. Wouldn't surprise me if there were actually thousands.

* Checking whether each item scanned has satisfied a logical contract for a discount, some of which may be per-region, per-store, or even per-customer.

* If multiple exclusive coupons or deals are available, resolve the contradiction, preferably in favor of the customer.

* Check if any items or quantities of items require an ID to be shown before proceeding, and record information about the employee authorizing it.

* Update customer "rewards" data and generate any special offers so that you can put it onto their receipt.

And that's not even starting to get into all the other less-customer-synchronous stuff that you still need CPU power somewhere to do. Managing stock levels, orders, deliveries, price changes, anti-"shrinkage", employee shifts, market-research, status and repairs of freezer-units, operational logging and telemetry, every form of reporting/dashboard "strategic insight" stuff beloved by upper management...

Jeez! You just summarised my last decade working with software! Most kinds.

It wasn't this hard around the 2000's. Likely my age is a contributing factor, but experience should counteract that. But no. Software seems to go self serving more and more. Self serving the needs of the organization making the software. "Allowing" (more like delegating) users to help each other rather than robust support mostly through up to date and good documentation, in parallel of releasing unintuitive solutions so more training ours could be billed is something making every workin day a misery. Big part of the days are spent on satisfying the needs of the software (trying to figure out what now, mostly from random and outdated and tangentially relevant forum messages), rather than working the other way around.

The HPC side of the house actually used VMWare _less_ than the enterprise side. Mostly due to funding restrictions.

But you blanket claimed its fine, its not fine.

I won’t work in a company that forces me to use Teams- its a good proxy for how they think about internal communications and how they feel about staff.

You can claim what you want, I was curious, but don’t come in here telling people its ok to use teams- we’ve established that his options were fucking WebEx- which is also not fine.

Last time I checked Zoom was a pig on resources and required a weird background worker- and you couldn't even send files.

We still run a lot of VMs, just not VMware VMs.

Maybe in your experience. Virtually every company I've worked for or with in the last 2-3 decades (mostly enterprise shops to be fair) paid for support on critial infrastructure like VMware. Most of them are required to by various contract or regulatory requirement (like the Very Large Financial I'm at now). The tiny number of shops I worked with that blew off support were 1) SMB, and 2) run by idiots. YMMV.

As a random example, SQL Server Standard Edition is limited to a “very generous” maximum of four sockets, 24 cores, or 128 GB of memory.

That’s just slightly bigger then a laptop these days!

Azure offers a new VM series where the max memory limit of SQL Std is exceeded with just four cores (8 vCPUs): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/siz...

There are VMs available now that have crossed the “kilo core” threshold. You can draw pictures in their task manager by creatively putting load on the processors: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/siz...

The problem here is that Microsoft kept their license limits as constants relative to a reality that moved exponentially. They would have to have applied “inflation”, but they just saw their sales figures go up and up… and nobody will rock that boat!

Inevitably they’ll keep choking their product until it turns purple and dies. It’s a force of nature, there is nothing anybody can do do counter this naked corporate greed that is enabled by accidental mis-pricing. This can never be corrected, except by letting products die and be replaced wholesale in the market.

Time to learn PostgreSQL, I guess…

But kuvevirt with Kubernetes does much of the same, especially for companies that are--or know they will--move to containerized workloads anyway.

I'm happy wherever the contributions come from either way but I will never call Linux US-centric!

Lennart Poettering(German, works for American corps) comes to mind as an example, though not a kernel developer.

To be fair, zoom is somewhat slow too. Not to start up, but joining a meeting is like 5-10 second delay. Lord help you if you turn on your webcam.

Seriously, it's outlook levels of broken. Markdown doesn't work, I don't know what markdown engine they use but it's certainly not compliant to any sort of standard. Copying whitespace is just unbelievably fucked, your code becomes unreadable.

Which would be fine... If we could bulk indent. But do you know what highlight + tab does? Not indent, no, it selects the send button.

Teams, fuck you.

> Linux runs the world.

The world infra runs on top of Linux. Linux is open source. Most of this infra is American.

It's control-space. It is global on Windows as far as I know. Unfortunately you can't change it because I would love to have a single key I don't normally use assigned to it. I use a Mac keyboard with 19 function keys so there's plenty that I would never touch.

I agree with all the other criticism by the way, it's a messy slow clusterf*k.

But yes you're right, it's an American service offering that I for cost reasons and I avoid big cloud like the plague. USA surely knows how to charge for their services and lock customers in

And it would be a problem if it was, as ctrl shift is the default binding for show suggestions in IntelliJ and Rider.

All of the following you've already mentioned but I forgot you mentioning them in my rage at MS. Figuring out if I'm holding it wrong or not revealed another silly issue however: the push to talk button is hard coded to ctrl space, unlike other keybinds it doesn't show up in the keybinds dialog.

You’re talking to different people and didn’t even care. This is not fine.

> which is also not fine

You act like your word is law. Which is also not fine. You shouldn’t need someone on the internet reminding you of this.

That is an important consideration to have if you’re going to be telling people that its fine to inflict it on your workforce. You used cost as a reason but:

1) Teams is a seperate paid license now (since it was anti-competitive- the only way they could have grown such a market share with such a terrible product).

2) There are superior free alternatives.

Don’t come up in here, (in a thread where I am asking, genuinely, about what makes Teams a viable and active preference for people) saying its fine without any fucking follow up on why and then get bent out of shape when challenged.

Teams is not fine, if you’re working on the product or you have inflicted it on your workforce you should be better- I won’t pretend its ok so that you feel better.