I&#x27;m an MSDN subscriber, write C# all day and am sitting in front of Win8.1, writing this in IE11 with a Lumia 640 next to me.<p>They are still utter bastards and I sleep with one eye open.<p>Currently the tally of bad stuff is pretty high: Patent wars against competitors, forced bundling agreements, lock in despite the open specification stuff which is mostly just wrong, being fucked over on audits and licensing agreement shuffling repeatedly, collaboration with NSA&#x2F;PRISM, disregard for privacy, plain arrogance since Windows 8 the repeated termination of developer stacks (silverlight, WF3, AppFabric etc) that people built their entire products on.<p>The marketing tactic of talking constantly about everything shiny drowns out these things going on behind the scenes. The press doesn&#x27;t help this.<p>If there&#x27;s any advice I can part on people is not to get all mushy and happy about it and always keep that eye open.