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Microsoft’s Very Good Day

newyorker.com

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Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#41

Post by gecko »

vegabook wrote: post #40
delish wrote: post #14

I struggle with changing my perception of Microsoft. I still characterize them by their Halloween documents and efforts to destroy Netscape. I would recommend the Surface to friends or family, which is a recent change. But I would never use Microsoft products. And not just because I'd be giving up years of Linux folk-knowledge. Childishly, when I watch a youtube video of someone far more skilled than me programming i…

I've taken a liking to a lot of what Microsoft is doing. I like the open source efforts, I like the RX libraries, the hardware looks great, to my mind the Metro interface is actually better than IOS/Android. I even like Windows 10. Problem is I could never go back to the DOS command prompt. I only moved to the *nix prompt about 6-7 years ago, and I could never go back. I know I can do cygwin etc but that still feels…

I think people with this attitude would be really pleasantly surprised by PowerShell and Cmder. Windows makes a very bad UNIX, but it has a great command-line story these days if you'll play with it on its own turf.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#42

Post by JustSomeNobody »

codeulike wrote: post #27
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #13

There's been lots of positive announcements from Microsoft recently, but I think I'll save the applause for when they can do those cool things and actually make money from it, not from extorting cash for patents, office document lock-in, and all their other "bad microsoft" stuff.

extorting cash for patents Standard practice among all the big players office document lock-in Standard practice among the players lucky enough to be able to do it (we now call it 'walled garden') ... My thesis is that all big tech firms now act as MS once did (or would if they could). But we're just used to it now.

Just because the "big players" all do it, doesn't make it right.

> But we're just used to it now.

It's time for complacency to end, yes?

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#43

Post by togusa »

delish wrote: post #14

I struggle with changing my perception of Microsoft. I still characterize them by their Halloween documents and efforts to destroy Netscape. I would recommend the Surface to friends or family, which is a recent change. But I would never use Microsoft products. And not just because I'd be giving up years of Linux folk-knowledge. Childishly, when I watch a youtube video of someone far more skilled than me programming i…

I'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.

They are still utter bastards and I sleep with one eye open.

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/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.

The marketing tactic of talking constantly about everything shiny drowns out these things going on behind the scenes. The press doesn't help this.

If there's any advice I can part on people is not to get all mushy and happy about it and always keep that eye open.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#44

Post by nileshtrivedi »

togusa wrote: post #43
delish wrote: post #14

I struggle with changing my perception of Microsoft. I still characterize them by their Halloween documents and efforts to destroy Netscape. I would recommend the Surface to friends or family, which is a recent change. But I would never use Microsoft products. And not just because I'd be giving up years of Linux folk-knowledge. Childishly, when I watch a youtube video of someone far more skilled than me programming i…

I'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. They are still utter bastards and I sleep with one eye open. 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 agreemen…

Don't forget corruption of ISO over OOXML standards.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#45

Post by hga »

codeulike wrote: post #19
delish wrote: post #14

I struggle with changing my perception of Microsoft. I still characterize them by their Halloween documents and efforts to destroy Netscape. I would recommend the Surface to friends or family, which is a recent change. But I would never use Microsoft products. And not just because I'd be giving up years of Linux folk-knowledge. Childishly, when I watch a youtube video of someone far more skilled than me programming i…

But what they did to destroy netscape (bundling a competing app with some other thing) is now a tactic so common that it is taken for granted. I guess what made it scary is that they really did have a strong monopoly and it looked like they might dominate forever. So its not so much the tactics that offend people, but how much power they had when wielding those tactics. Seems to me like every big tech firm now makes…

But what they did to destroy netscape (bundling a competing app with some other thing)

One other point worth remembering: their browser, at least by version 3, was superior in speed and vastly superior in stability. They also ushered in the modern era of web applications by inventing XMLHttpRequest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest).

Netscape destroyed itself as much as Microsoft helped them by incompetence in developing software, server as well as browser. A common pattern in the '90s was Microsoft's competitors losing their ability to develop mostly working software while Microsoft didn't. That sealed the fate of Lotus, WordPerfect, Netscape, and Ashton-Tate (dBASE), and Borland did themselves no favors by buying the latter.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#46

Post by JustSomeNobody »

iheartmemcache wrote: post #39
codeulike wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

extorting cash for patents Standard practice among all the big players office document lock-in Standard practice among the players lucky enough to be able to do it (we now call it 'walled garden') ... My thesis is that all big tech firms now act as MS once did (or would if they could). But we're just used to it now.

On first read, I was going to ask to get a link to that thesis, thinking it was some Masters or PhD work. Every 10 years you're going to have the 'big-evil'. I'm with you 100% about it being standard practices in big companies, and 110% about users being complacent about accepting the walled garden. Also re: patents- IBM has a huge patent portfolio. Very little of it is used to patent troll. Those boxed-office Texas…

> (I can't install my legally purchased copy of OS X on my Intel machine? Really?)

I thought the only way to legally purchase OS X was to buy it preinstalled on a mac.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#47

Post by octatoan »

curiousDog wrote: post #24
NicoJuicy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some evangelists ( Phil Haack ( now @ github), Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, ...) were ahead of Nadal when changing perception about Microsoft in terms of opensource and community.. It was a bottom-top approach with Nadal as result. Ballmer couldn't understand the new wave. Just like many "old" CEO's of software companies don't understand. I know companies who still keep programming in Access and Terminal S…

Haha, yeah and to think of it I always rooted for Federer ;)

GP probably meant Nadella, if someone's wondering.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#48

Post by ableal »

"The company was so in love with P.C.s (the hub for all things and for all time to come) that it came late to the Internet and much, much too late to mobile phones."

In the early 2000s, Microsoft did try pushing tablet computers, "pocket PCs" based on Windows CE (rivals to Palm PDAs) and even had Windows Phone OS in some smartphones.

That did not gain traction, because the user experience was not captivating, and they had missed the insight that fingers would be the way to go. (I'm not sure if earlier the capacitive touchscreen technology was already available in alternative to the resistive screens that required a stylus.)

I'd say that Apple's post-2007 success would not be possible without learning from Microsoft's expensive failures. But Microsoft did try.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#49

Post by tdkl »

andosa wrote: post #25
mrmondo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on your boat with this. I haven't seen any change that truly 'matters'. I have noticed them trying to increase their presence on technical and social media but the content really isn't anything of substance which leads me to feel that they're purely marketing moves.

Not sure I follow. In what sense are things like Surface Pro, Hololens, Surface book laptop, open source .NET etc. purely marketing moves?

They don't change anything software wise. Windows 10 is still being forced as a benchmark of how popular the OS is (and hilariously we heard this first on the MS event), while they didn't have the balls to address the privacy questions regarding data collection upfront and what will they do about it.

I guess people and media forget fast.

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