Owen Williams:

Microsoft, it seems, has removed all of the barriers to remaining in your ‘flow.’ Surface is designed to adapt to the mode you want to be in, and just let you do it well. Getting shit done doesn’t require switching device or changing mode, you can just pull off the keyboard, or grab your pen and the very same machine adapts to you.

It took years to get here, but Microsoft has nailed it. By comparison, the competition is flailing around arguing about whether or not touchscreens have a place on laptops. The answer? Just let people choose.

This coherency is what I had come to expect from Apple, but iPad and MacBook look messier than ever. Sure, you can get an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, but you can’t use either of them in a meaningful way in tandem with your desktop workflow. It requires switching modes entirely, to a completely different operating system and interaction model, then back again.

The Surface lineup is super compelling now, and Windows continues to get better and better through minor feature updates every few months. Microsoft under its new CEO is cleaning up its act and actually conveying and executing a vision for how the personal computer fits into a modern lifestyle in 2018. At a time when Apple is struggling to remember that it’s creator audience exists, Microsoft is capitalizing on it and giving people what they want.

That said, it’s really silly that the Surface Studio 2, their iMac equivalent, is using a 7th generation CPU when Intel’s 8th generation has been out for months, and some of these are missing USB-C and Thunderbolt 3. There is definitely more work to do to bring these machines to peak performance.

Of all the companies to acquire GitHub, Microsoft is probably the best. What was a critical piece of internet infrastructure held up under a venture capital model will now at least be sustained by one of the biggest tentpole companies in the software industry. They will presumably be able to bring some organizational support and work to shore up the sites notoriously rocky reliability. And a company like Microsoft will hopefully not be able to shrug off a sexual harassment claim the way GitHub did.

I don’t see this alleviating a major problem with software engineering culture, the over-reliance on GitHub as a centralized home of code. Git is distributed by nature and most of the value added by GitHub (PRs, issues, wikis, etc.) are found on competitive platforms like GitLab and Bitbucket. But many companies rely exclusively on GitHub, and many tools like Travis CI support GitHub exclusively. Competition makes everyone better, and Microsoft will probably use its existing platforms to further lock in developers and companies and reduce competition.

I personally use a self-hosted instance of GitLab on my VPS server (which is quite easy to install nowadays), which provides me with all the features I would want and an unlimited capacity of private repositories. I use it for continuous integration and continuous deployment with its built-in Docker image registry, and those images get deployed automatically to servers. I’m hoping to do a tutorial on setting that up.

Interesting timing with WWDC kicking off tomorrow, though.