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Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

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Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#71

Post by bni »

White_N_Nerdy wrote: post #56
mrshoe wrote: post #8

If Gates had maintained a dictatorial death grip on his company like Steve Jobs has, MS probably could have made some decent products. It's one thing to yell at the people who made this system via email. It's quite another to never allow them to ship it in the first place .

Correction... Microsoft /has made/ some excellent products. Here are some more for the list: Xbox SharePoint Sql Server DirectX Visual Studio Expression Studio Team Foundation Team Viewer Windows Server

Most of those are "mee too products". Not breaking new ground, and certainly not the best of options.

Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#72

Post by walkon »

ssp wrote: post #32
mrshoe wrote: post #8

If Gates had maintained a dictatorial death grip on his company like Steve Jobs has, MS probably could have made some decent products. It's one thing to yell at the people who made this system via email. It's quite another to never allow them to ship it in the first place .

Microsoft has made a bunch of very good products: - Windows 3.0 and 3.1 clearly hit exactly the sweet spot between DOS and OS/2 - Word and Excel were legitimately better than the competition (and still are, although there is not much competition left). - Internet Explorer 4 was so much better than Netscape 3 and 4 that it wasn't even funny - Windows 2000 and XP were very good operating systems

I agree, when you consider when products were released and compare it to similar offerings at those times, many Microsoft products are (or were) "decent". I would add these:

- Windows 95: Not perfectly stable or technically very groundbreaking, but a good enough combination of usability and features to be considered decent in my mind and millions of others at the time.

- IE6: great at the time. Some of the standards it doesn't support didn't exist when it came out. Also, IE5 introduced the Microsoft.XMLHTTP ActiveX control, which was the foundation for XMLHttpRequest. If that wasn’t created by Microsoft at the time, AJAX almost certainly wouldn’t be as ubiquitous as it is today.

- SQL Server 20xx: Perhaps RDMS's aren't your thing, but they're very much needed for now, and Microsoft's can certainly handle most relational db needs.

- .NET 3.5+ and C# 3+: If you want a statically typed language and platform, anything .NET 3.5 or greater are at least ok.

- ASP.NET MVC 2+: Not quit the same as a dynamically-based ROR or Django and they also don’t give you a default ORM; you pick it, but its solid and improving. Source code is available; contribs aren’t.

- Visual Studio 2008+: Again, not some crazy vim/emacs setup, although plugins can somewhat help simulate that, but these definitely don’t suck at all.

- IIS7+: Just because it’s not Apache doesn't mean it isn't decent. It is quite powerful and secure.

- Windows Server 2003+: Never had bad experiences with these.

- Microsoft Security Essentials: Very good and free antivirus.

I’m sure there’s more, but it is an exaggeration to say Microsoft hasn’t made any decent products. Certainly some of these don’t seem as good overall when accounting for the licensing costs and associated culture/stigma that comes with working in Microsoft shops, but many of products in and of themselves are decent.

Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#73

Post by MrRage »

ssp wrote: post #32
mrshoe wrote: post #8

If Gates had maintained a dictatorial death grip on his company like Steve Jobs has, MS probably could have made some decent products. It's one thing to yell at the people who made this system via email. It's quite another to never allow them to ship it in the first place .

Microsoft has made a bunch of very good products: - Windows 3.0 and 3.1 clearly hit exactly the sweet spot between DOS and OS/2 - Word and Excel were legitimately better than the competition (and still are, although there is not much competition left). - Internet Explorer 4 was so much better than Netscape 3 and 4 that it wasn't even funny - Windows 2000 and XP were very good operating systems

> Windows 2000 and XP were very good operating systems

I by no means am some Microsoft hater, but I'm amused about this tinted rose glass nostalgia for XP. It's easy to say XP is a good system now with the maturity of three service packs and the bad taste of Vista still in our mouths, but I remember all those years ago much dislike of XP around the internet. Among other things, it was a security nightmare that wasn't even fixed until SP2. You put release day XP on your machine and put it on the internet and you're machine will be probably hacked within the hour.

On the other hand not to many people stuck with Vista. A fully patched Vista installation works just fine nowadays. It still has higher system requirements, but those requirements are now 4 year old systems.

Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#74

Post by Marticus »

josefresco wrote: post #22
mrshoe wrote: post #8

If Gates had maintained a dictatorial death grip on his company like Steve Jobs has, MS probably could have made some decent products. It's one thing to yell at the people who made this system via email. It's quite another to never allow them to ship it in the first place .

You're right and the anonymous commenter on their site said it well: "The Steve Jobs version: "If the MovieMaker download site isn't working by tomorrow at 6 am I will come down there at 6:01 am an choke the living ___ out of all of you.""

Yup, now they just need to actually do that with quite a few of their own products and we'd have two happy, completely different corporations that don't release sh*tty software from time to time.

Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#75

Post by tptacek »

mrshoe wrote: post #8

If Gates had maintained a dictatorial death grip on his company like Steve Jobs has, MS probably could have made some decent products. It's one thing to yell at the people who made this system via email. It's quite another to never allow them to ship it in the first place .

Utterly unfair comparison. The Apple and Microsoft business models are so unlike each other it's almost inaccurate to say they're in the same business. Apple can get product quality to the point they do because they laser focus on a few profitable segments. Microsoft's business model --- not "what Steve Ballmer thinks they should be doing this month" but their underlying business model --- involves them serving 80+% of the market.

This is sort of like complaining that Safeway can't make ice cream as well as Ben and Jerry's.

Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#76

Post by narrator »

ssp wrote: post #32
mrshoe wrote: post #8

If Gates had maintained a dictatorial death grip on his company like Steve Jobs has, MS probably could have made some decent products. It's one thing to yell at the people who made this system via email. It's quite another to never allow them to ship it in the first place .

Microsoft has made a bunch of very good products: - Windows 3.0 and 3.1 clearly hit exactly the sweet spot between DOS and OS/2 - Word and Excel were legitimately better than the competition (and still are, although there is not much competition left). - Internet Explorer 4 was so much better than Netscape 3 and 4 that it wasn't even funny - Windows 2000 and XP were very good operating systems

Win2k being released was a huge blow to Linux at the time. Redhat 9 was so awful in comparison. I remember how a lot of developers I knew who had been Linux users actually switched back.

Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#77

Post by thehigherlife »

White_N_Nerdy wrote: post #56
mrshoe wrote: post #8

If Gates had maintained a dictatorial death grip on his company like Steve Jobs has, MS probably could have made some decent products. It's one thing to yell at the people who made this system via email. It's quite another to never allow them to ship it in the first place .

Correction... Microsoft /has made/ some excellent products. Here are some more for the list: Xbox SharePoint Sql Server DirectX Visual Studio Expression Studio Team Foundation Team Viewer Windows Server

Have you ever had to support sharepoint? I don't know if I'd consider it an excellent product.

Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#78

Post by mquander »

bad_user wrote: post #63
mquander wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, I think "apt-get autoremove" will do what you want -- list packages which were installed automatically as a dependency and are no longer necessary. (I'm not sure how or if you can do the same thing with the package management GUI.)

BTW ... both "autoremove" and "dist-upgrade" made my system unusable a couple of times. There's no software repository as properly maintained as Debian's ... but normal users can totally trash their systems and that is not OK.

I always assumed that it tended to work out for "normal" users -- that sucks if it doesn't. I tend to be the sort of person who "[thinks that] development versions, experimental and unstable are for old ladies" (HT to xorg-edgers.) I'm pretty sure that condemns me to a life of resolving weird incompatibilities. I definitely don't personally trust autoremove as far as I can chuck it.

(edit: my experience is on Ubuntu, not Debian.)

Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#79

Post by dmor »

thehigherlife wrote: post #77
White_N_Nerdy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction... Microsoft /has made/ some excellent products. Here are some more for the list: Xbox SharePoint Sql Server DirectX Visual Studio Expression Studio Team Foundation Team Viewer Windows Server

Have you ever had to support sharepoint? I don't know if I'd consider it an excellent product.

It makes $1 billion per year

Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#80

Post by alexdias »

oihuyjfrgtdfghj wrote: post #47
Elepsis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, no one took away the check boxes that let you choose which Windows Live programs you want to install when you're trying to run the installer. The installer doesn't even download any of those apps if you leave them unchecked. If you don't want Messenger, Photo Gallery, or even to sign up for a Windows Live ID, you don't have to get/do those things. Most people find that this is actually helpful, though, beca…

The problem is that it doesn't tell me it's going to let me have that option. Windows too often decides to do an update that will give me X extra stuff that I don't trust signing up for something like windows live just to get an included free movie player

Windows also lets you review whatever it is going to download in an update, so you can just disable the download of the X extra stuff that you don't trust signing up for.
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