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Microsoft’s Very Good Day

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Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#131

Post by pmelendez »

togusa wrote: post #126
pmelendez wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you an independent developer? or working in a software shop? I am curious about your experience because I am trying (or just starting) to do independent things and your feedback sounds like a nice story to hear.

I'm a contractor/independent currently contracted to a financial company and a telecoms company concurrently. I have about 18 years' experience in total and have been on the contract market for 12 years. The things that matter when you're starting to work independently (which I screwed up I will add) are building contacts and getting out of the agency system as soon as possible. Also I'm a bad accountant but YMMV if…

That sounds great! Thanks for sharing it :)

> are building contacts and getting out of the agency system as soon as possible.

I know, but how do you do that? Right now I am working for home and remotely collaborating with a friend in a product, but the VC path is also hard :(

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#132

Post by Aldo_MX »

3pt14159 wrote: post #122
Aldo_MX wrote: post #112

Godwin's Law warning I find more ridiculous the statement "we will never forgive Microsoft" than saying "we will never forgive Germany". They're a company, not a charity, they're in the business of making money, and if making money implies using "dirty tactics" such as saying phone manufacturers "bundle Office in your phones or we will use our patents against you" it will certainly happen regardless of which company…

Part of their survival is depending on consumer perception of their brand. Microsoft sold us out to the NSA for a big fat cheque. Apple and Google have been fighting doing so every step of the way. Companies that act like uncompetitive dicks should be shunned and regulated, especially when they do things like abuse the patent system. There is a real world outside of the Realism bubble. A real world where people strug…

Do you understand the concept of "national security"? If you were to invent, for example, teleporting, and you rejected selling your invention to the government, the most likely outcome would be that the government would confiscate your invention and recruit you against your will under threats of being jailed for risking "national security".

There is no such thing as justice other than "abide by the law".

Fine print: laws are subject to change, sometimes with good results by the perception of the majority of people, sometimes not.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#133

Post by hga »

kabdib wrote: post #123
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…

"Microsoft doesn't know how to..." is an unfounded disparagement. Microsoft definitely knows how to write software, okay? They're really good at it. They ship a lot of it. There are many people there who are brighter than you and I and they know their stuff cold. Microsoft is full of - legacy stuff that is really hard to change (many, many reasons for this, few of them pleasant but all of them real) - conflicting pri…

I go so far as to say, starting a bit over two decades ago, that one of the "secrets" of Microsoft's success is their long term ability to write software that basically works. As I mention in another part of this subthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10352022), they beat their "Office" competitors in part by not losing that ability when all else but Borland did. (Borland didn't, but lost at higher levels of management, including buying one of those failed competitors.)

As far as I can tell, general management incompetence, including of course "political bullshit", is most responsible for their post-XP problems (along with becoming too toxic for healthy peer companies to want work with them, but I'm not sure that matters when enough of the people at the top are so bad).

Although ... what would you say was responsible for the failure of Longhorn? Wasn't that in part technical? Or did that derive from higher up?

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#134

Post by novaleaf »

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…

I went all in on XNA, and got very, very burned. It taught me a great lesson though: don't be locked into any vendor. I'm very happy about the .NET and Typescript developments as of late, and use Typescript for my web coding. But only because if Microsoft abandons it right now, I can continue on in plain JavaScript.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#135

Post by jinst8gmi »

detaro wrote: post #74
harkyns_castle wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sadly, if you use such rules there are not many big tech companies left that haven't done such things...

And continue to do such things... e.g. milking Android handset manufacturers using patents.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#136

Post by togusa »

pmelendez wrote: post #131
togusa wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a contractor/independent currently contracted to a financial company and a telecoms company concurrently. I have about 18 years' experience in total and have been on the contract market for 12 years. The things that matter when you're starting to work independently (which I screwed up I will add) are building contacts and getting out of the agency system as soon as possible. Also I'm a bad accountant but YMMV if…

That sounds great! Thanks for sharing it :) > are building contacts and getting out of the agency system as soon as possible. I know, but how do you do that? Right now I am working for home and remotely collaborating with a friend in a product, but the VC path is also hard :(

I'd go for a few agency jobs for a 2-6 month stint, be nice to people and spend your time working with them not alongside them and gain some reputation. After a couple of positions, return work is usually possible. Then general staff turnover in tech companies will propagate your reputation as well. The first 2 years is the most difficult.

I'm going to add this as well: never work hard. Work out how not to work hard. Life is about what you do when you're not working for me at least.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#137

Post by pmelendez »

ygra wrote: post #103
pmelendez wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Explorer is not a Windows Store app.

I know but he didn't say he was using explorer to open the folder and inspect the files. I was guessing he must be using an app to show them since is the only dialog that's different (I have multi-gb video folders in my pc and haven't seen the issue). He did say he was using Win10 and the file dialog is back to be the same so my guess would be incorrect anyway.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#138

Post by outworlder »

hga wrote: post #108
yread wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cancerous attitude seriously?

Seriously. Microsoft has an unmatched record of screwing pretty much everyone who did business with them, and otherwise abusing their position in the market. Worse than IBM when IBM was in their position.

Are you sure you didn't mean "Oracle"? As far as I know, Microsoft deals with their business partners fairly. They don't try to negotiate a deal directly with a big customer and bypass their partners, for instance.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#139

Post by wmoxam »

jacalata wrote: post #116
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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.

It's for sale directly from Apple - http://www.apple.com/au/shop/product/MC573Z/A/mac-os-x-106-s...

That's a quite old version of OSX (2009), and is meant for people needing to upgrade from OSX 10.5, as v10.5 wasn't upgradable over a network connection.

Re: Microsoft’s Very Good Day

#140

Post by shmerl »

awjr wrote: post #7

Their partnership with Google over Typescript and the general openness that they are pushing is fantastic. I really feel they are giving a lot to the developer community. The Surface Book is an exceptional piece of kit. It is telling that the top end book (16GB/512SSD) was the only one at one point to be sold-out on pre-order. None of the other options include 16GB of ram and I think this is a shame, but you cannot f…

I'm waiting for them to join Vulkan working group.
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