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Microsoft’s Very Good Day

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Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#91

Post by Infinitesimus »

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.

Out of curiosity, is it fair to assume you use hardware and software by a source you consider more ethical then? (your classification above rules out Apple and Google as well since they've both done less-than-stellar things )

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#92

Post by jasonkester »

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…

Indeed. Even at the time it seemed like the silliest possible thing you could get upset about. I remember not being able to parse why anybody thought it was bad.

They had the unmitigated gaul to include software with their operating system. Kinda like wordpad, file manager, hearts, calculator and dozens of other things that you'd expect to find on a computer. All those things had (and still have) alternatives that you can replace them with that may or may not cost money and may or may not be better. But somehow having a web browser installed by default was so obviously different as to be completely inexcusable even 20 years later.

As a customer, having a web browser installed on your new computer by default is a Good Thing. Removing it from the install could only possibly make things worse for end users.

It made no sense then, and even less sense now.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#93

Post by pmelendez »

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…

That's fair, I am also like that. However, what you describe is the common practice of pretty much every north-american corporation. My motto is to be with an eye open not matter who is the actor

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#94

Post by sfilipov »

pmelendez wrote: post #73
kailuowang wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. That's weird, all the file-io operations in windows store apps are async for the very reason of not blocking the UI thread. How big was that folder? I'm geniuly curious.

I think he refers to File Explorer (explorer.exe) which has nothing to do with Windows Store Apps.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#95

Post by Spooks »

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.

A lot of the people that were there when practices were at their worse are no longer there.

I don't think I would be able to use any form of technology if I was to hold a grudge for every large company that performed some sort of bad practice, with slave labor to privacy issues.

Luckily people that perform these bad practices will eventually get ousted and replaced, that's when I proceed with caution.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#96

Post by roymurdock »

It's funny how people will believe that one person, Satya Nadella, can have such a profound impact on a company of hundreds of thousands of people. It's all about crafting a story and offering people an explanation for why the company is changing.

I wish there was some type of bayesian submarine-ometer[1] that took the baseline percentage chance of any "article" being dressed-up PR on a particular website and performed some type of analysis on the company's marketing spend, brand perception, buzzwords, the interests of the article's author, and the article's similarity to other positive articles on the company/product.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#97

Post by togusa »

traverseda wrote: post #88
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…

So why are you programming in microsoft culture?

Good question.

Thanks to them, I paid mortgage off in under a decade. No other reason.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#98

Post by JimDabell »

hga wrote: post #45
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…

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…

> They also ushered in the modern era of web applications by inventing XMLHttpRequest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest).

People were doing Ajax-like things before XMLHTTPRequest with hidden iframes. XHR was more convenient, but it didn't bring new functionality to the table.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#99

Post by togusa »

pmelendez wrote: post #93
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…

That's fair, I am also like that. However, what you describe is the common practice of pretty much every north-american corporation. My motto is to be with an eye open not matter who is the actor

Couldn't agree more. I'm not saying Google or Apple for example are any better here. Even RedHat who I also deal with have their problems.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#100

Post by jessaustin »

math wrote: post #28
NotOscarWilde wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To cool down some of the optimism in this comment section: Microsoft is still accepting cash for practically every Android phone made because of their patent threats, or did they change their ways in this regard as well? (I am genuinely curious whether this continues; I tried to google "microsoft android patent threats" but found only news articles from 2013/2014 about the practice.)

On this, I get a lot more upset with those setting the rules than those playing the game.

As this TPP thing reminds us yet again, those are the same people.
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