Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#141

Post by loewenskind » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 2:07 PM UTC

rakkhi wrote: post #109

unexpected wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'll see how ChromeOS does! It seems to me that you won't see any netbooks labeled Google - you'll see them marketed as "Acer", "Asus", or "Dell". Focusing on the web experience and printing (to combine your reply to my other comment) seems like a very narrow niche to me. It seems like ChromeOS is trying to position itself between Android and something like Windows 7. Surfing the web and wanting to print is a common…

Keep a notebook for just 3 days, list out every activity that you do on a computer/computing device (tablet, smartphone etc) in just broad terms, personal and work: e.g. read hacker news, write report, review y, code x, watch movie, read magazine, listen to last.fm, gaming, print., scan, take photo, edit photo, check email, check social network, IM etc. Then put a +1 next to everything you did on the web (or could ha…

>People do not care it is Microsoft Windows or not they care that it does what they want, quickly, reliably and cheaply.

Except that this doesn't actually seem to be the case at all. Netbooks had this and the market utterly rejected it. Now they pay much more for Windows netbooks. Before anyone tries to jump into the market with Chrome OS (a less capable OS), they will need to explain why this was the case and what has changed.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#142

Post by zdw » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 2:08 PM UTC

If you're going to force OOXML on us, at least make your products support it correctly.

Last I checked, running a somewhat normal business document saved out of Word 2007/2010 wouldn't even pass the validation schemas written for it.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#143

Post by vyrotek » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 2:08 PM UTC

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #52

I would ask Steve Ballmer whether he is aware of the fact that Microsoft's licensing for Windows and SQL Server makes scaling out impossible and hence knocks their platform out of the race for cloud computing, at least when it comes to web apps. I would ask him whether he really thinks that SQL Azure with its $100 per month for 10GB price tag is anything but a sad joke. I would ask the people who design the Microsoft…

Agreed. We used a lot of Windows Azure services for our startup and found ourselves having to architect around pricing rather than creating what we knew should be the correct implementation.

There's a lot of things I love about Azure, but the dev community is getting restless. The forums are always talking about how Microsoft seems to have gone completely quiet on the topic of new Azure Features. Where is the Road Map?! Many people are considering switching to Amazon because of many missing basic features.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#144

Post by PhrosTT » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 2:08 PM UTC

fsipie wrote: post #85

Add stuff into vs2010 to make small, portable executables for Windows with minimal dependancies. Get rid of b.s. like silverlight and wpf and adopt html 5 big time. Rip off cocoa & iphone sdk and make a windows-alike version.

Silverlight is a windows-alike version of iphone sdk... only probably easier to use.

In general I think SL and WPF are good... but certain XAML things need to be fixed. When you need 5000 lines of XML to change 1 color, there's a problem.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#145

Post by david927 » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 2:12 PM UTC

To Ballmer: Steve, you've done a great job. You have enough money. You have nothing left to prove. Now is your time to enjoy your life. Step down.

To replace you, choose someone no one would suspect. Choose someone young, with a fairly strong technical background and mainly with a lot of vision. (And make sure that person can communicate that vision.) Choose someone who can inspire. Line up (in-house and acquire) some really great technologies and launch them with this person's takeover.

Shed whole divisions; trying to do too much has distracted you.

People have stopped being in awe of Microsoft. Restore that. And then go enjoy yourself.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#146

Post by Keyframe » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 2:13 PM UTC

I know probably no one will care here, but I'd really like to see WP7 availability more than this shameful list here: http://developer.windowsphone.com/Help.aspx?id=fd9b5508-6436...

I'm in Croatia, I have friends in Slovenia (EU Country) as well as Hungary (EU Country)... this is just sad.

Also, I'd like to see XNA spread to web. You can make a prototype game or a full indie game already for Windows, XBOX and WP7 from the same codebase, so why not extend that further to either Silverlight or a plugin like Unity? That would rock.

App store for PC would be a nice idea for windows, if done right.

And, finally, Windows Live for games tied into that app store would be neat, but I think it would even be better for microsoft to buy Steam platform and integrate it into windows. Yeah, I know - a far fetched dream.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#147

Post by towndrunk » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 2:14 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #111

seltzered wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be nice if this effort included some SL/WPF support as well. Java still has swing and (gulp) JavaFX, and last I checked they run on any OS. As of now, I'm starting to feel like one has to write in flex if they want a desktop app with good UX to run everywhere.

Different OSes use different UX paradigms. With Swing you end up with a common denominator, which really sucks and you're better off deploying a web app with a local server and a stripped down Firefox. Or you could do what the big boys do, share the business logic on all platforms, but implement the UI using native APIs. Here's a sample: http://www.skybound.ca/ The OS X client is implemented with Mono + MonoMac (Coco…

"you're better off deploying a web app with a local server and a stripped down Firefox."

Please don't do this... we use a product that went this route at work and it's a pile of crap.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#148

Post by rakkhi » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 2:14 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #136

jodrellblank wrote: post #81

Dog food their own software and systems more, and where it's unpleasant to use - improve them. Far too much of my Microsoft using experience is of a solid technology which is idiotically annoying, and a new version which ups both desirable features and irritation at the same time. I mean the remote desktop client which has a ton of user experience flaws which hasn't improved for years, then developed another security…

Dog food their own software and systems more, and where it's unpleasant to use - improve them The bits of MS that do do this (e.g. the Visual Studio team) produce extremely high quality. Tho' I can't imagine that the Word or Excel teams use any other word processor or spreadsheet...

> "Word or Excel teams use any other word processor or spreadsheet."

Reinforces your point and his. Word and Excel are best in class, nothing else comes close - OpenOffice, Google Docs, Documents to go on mobiles are ok substitutes but not as good as the real thing. This as real impact on your productivity which is why I use office.live.com, can't believe that is free at the moment.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#149

Post by towndrunk » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 2:16 PM UTC

Please do away with the registry! It was a failed attempt and is now just a mess.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#150

Post by bad_user » Fri, Sep 17, 2010, 2:16 PM UTC

BillGoates wrote: post #124

bad_user wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> @Balmer: Get rid of .NET. In Q4 2009 the Server and Tools division had a revenue of 3.5 billion, bigger than their Client division, their online services or their entertainment devices. .NET is one of their best products. It's one of the few reasons developers might develop for Windows Mobile 7. It's the single reason I actually thought about deployment on Windows servers. With a single platform you can target the…

The server and tools revenue doesn't say anything about .NET. I didn't say get rid of SQL server or their server OS. Compare the popularity of C# + VB.net to other languages to see .NET has less than 1/20th of the market. And that for a company that not so long ago dominated the software market. .NET is useless for * desktop applications, since the forward and backward compatibility is not guaranteed. * Downloadable…

On Window XP the download for .NET 3.5 Client is just ~28Mb for machines with no framework, ~ 40 MB for .NET 4 (again, with no other version) and the web installer is only ~800 KB.

Over 80% (or even 90%) of Windows clients have some version of .NET installed, and since it's being pushed through Windows Update, some stats are reporting .NET 3.5 at more than 60%.

The Windows 7 marketshare is bigger than 10%, which means there are more Windows 7 clients out there then OS X, and I haven't seen OS X developers complaining about a lack of users willing to try out their apps.

> Web Startups and/or social applications, because of the (sql) server costs

Yes, but it really depends on your needs. PlentyOfFish / StackOverflow are doing just fine.