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Microsoft’s Very Good Day

newyorker.com

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Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#61

Post by kailuowang »

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…

You dont necessarily need to. I still use MS Windows from time to time and my perception is that fundamentally they still dont know how to write software properly: in windows 10, opening a folder full of large video files takes a painful long time, while all it needs to do is to list some file names. I understand that it must be trying to extract some extra "useful" information from those large files, but the keys is that it shouldnt block your UI from showing the basic stuff. In their outlook, if the network is having connection problem, the UI will become unresponsive. These might be silly easy bugs to fix but it exposed that fundamentally they still couldnt figure out how to separate things properly in software.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#62

Post by hvidgaard »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #52
andosa wrote: post #2

It definitely feels like Microsoft is on the right track with Nadella in charge.

I like nearly everything Microsoft is currently doing, except for their attitude towards privacy, which means that I'll be making efforts to move away from their platform out of principal.

As compared to Apples ecosystem, or Android, or? I simply don't get it. All of it is there to improve the experience for most users, and possible to turn the chatter of such that it shares next to nothing. What more could you ask for, in a system that aims to make is simple and feature rich for the average person?

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#63

Post by hvidgaard »

aswerty wrote: post #5
andosa wrote: post #2

It definitely feels like Microsoft is on the right track with Nadella in charge.

Yeah, with the likes of .Net Core it seems very much like Microsoft are on the right track. But you'll still see plenty of, what I call, "Microsoft decisions" that just make things into more hassle or expense than it should be purely for the pursuit of profit. One example is if you want to migrate from Linux to Windows 10 on a few computers you're legally required to buy a Windows 10 license for each machine you run.…

A license per machine. How is that wierd? The entire industry of commercial software works that way, one way or another. Either you pay per user, or pay per machine. Note you can run several VMs with Windows without paying for a licens. Honestly, I believe it's a matter of time before Windows is free anyway.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#64

Post by harkyns_castle »

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…

Personally, I'll never forgive them for their practices. They deliberately stifled competition, shafted developers, abused their position, and rubbed it in our faces.

There's no coming back from that, and I'll gladly educate newcomers to IT on their ways.

Let them die. The new CEO could be the second coming, you can't fix that cancerous attitude that is entrenched.

They deserve to become obsolete, at the very least.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#65

Post by berntb »

pjc50 wrote: post #33
codeulike wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh, the tactics did offend people. And still do. But it was always a small number of people that cared about software freedom. The Microsoft consent decree was about restricting browser choice by shipping their own browser as default and claiming it was unremovable. By contrast, today Apple idevices not only ship with a browser but ban all competing browsers (via the ban on run-time compilation effectively banning JI…

The same laws don't apply for monopolists as for others in the USA. (I wish it was more similar in my native country.)

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#66

Post by hga »

wainstead wrote: post #54
hga wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incompet…

> their browser, at least by version 3, was superior in speed and vastly superior in stability IIRC, Microsoft were using hidden APIs to accomplish this, putting Netscape at a disadvantage.

I don't recall that, not even allegations to the effect (there were such for Office competitors), plus I probably would have learned of such while working with a guy who had previous interned at Microsoft on IE of that era.

More directly, I'm not aware of any public Windows APIs that handed out data that tricked your code into doing a general protection fault (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_protection_fault), or in the case of WordPerfect, compel programmers to use their own printer drivers, and write code that regularly drops your tables, figures, etc. to the bottom of your document (unlike the other companies I cited, WordPerfect actually managed to ship a Windows version that didn't GP fault, but that was late, terribly buggy, and prompted all the WP fans I knew to reluctantly switch to MS Word).

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#67

Post by hvidgaard »

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…

Powershell really is powerful. It's just an entirely different paradigm. The unix philosophy is "Everything is a textfile and pipes" - Powershell on the other hand is "Everything is an object and calls", and it's equally powerful, albeit not as simple.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#68

Post by forgetsusername »

Touche wrote: post #36
andosa wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They haven't been hits, yet.

They can only innovate, and have no control over what "hits". The above are good products.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#69

Post by blumkvist »

harkyns_castle wrote: post #64
togusa wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Personally, I'll never forgive them for their practices. They deliberately stifled competition, shafted developers, abused their position, and rubbed it in our faces. There's no coming back from that, and I'll gladly educate newcomers to IT on their ways. Let them die. The new CEO could be the second coming, you can't fix that cancerous attitude that is entrenched. They deserve to become obsolete, at the very least.

>Let them die.

I wouldn't hold my breath.

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