Now there is also the full npm registry in the hands of Microsoft. What do you think about this?
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Honestly, I think they will be good stewards. Microsoft has always had the best IDEs and developer tools. And their hunger for world domination had its moment and is over. I think they’ll make sure it’s well integrated with GitHub, making it all that much more powerful and useful.
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i think microsoft improved its reputation (altough they still have not killed the damn internet explorer! 
), but still would be nice to have a dezentralized registry. In the future we will probably be able to install packages directly from repositories (github, gitlab, bitbucket, etc) or from urls directly (see deno)
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The raison d’être of almost any company outside the public sector is to make money to its owners. And world domination is a very good way of making money. So I’d bet the hunger’s still there, hopefully just constrained by competition.
But having said that, compared to the old days of Windows and IE dominance, I think it would be much more difficult for Microsoft to abuse its position with npm now. Should funky things start happening with npm it would probably be a lot easier to create a competing registry and get developers to use it than trying to convince end users to change their habits. Especially when considering how deno’s authors see the future with imports directly from the web, as @macrozone already mentioned. So considering this I don’t think there’s too much reason to be worried here. Microsoft will bring stability and has a good track record with developer tools.
Given from what I heard about their struggles this is probably for the best and in short to mid term I think we will see many good things come out of it.
That being said, the only thing to change that is change in management or goals/means at Microsoft. Especially worrying for me is the increasing dominance of Microsoft in development tools. One cynical explanation is that they are playing all nice now, but will quickly change once they gain monopoly in this sector. After all, that is the pattern with monopoly companies.
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Link to the blog post:
I agree for this being a positive thing for NPM as their past issues are now less likely to happen.
However I also agree with the monopoly, but even from another point of view: If everything crucial in terms of development is now running on Azure we may see one day the same as with all webapps running on AWS. Does anyone remember when AWS went down for some hours? The same threat is now inherent to development tools running in Azure.
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