Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 381 posts

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#101

Post by bad_user »

BillGoates wrote: post #91

I would tell Microsoft to go back to their 90s mindset. Less focussed on big corporations, and more on getting (Windows) Microsoft software everywhere. Back then Microsoft was maybe an evil empire, but at least they did some exciting things from a developers viewpoint. @Balmer: Get rid of .NET. There are people who use it, and some of them actually like it, but it will never become the huge success you thought it wou…

> @Balmer: Get rid of .NET.

In Q4 2009 the Server and Tools division had a revenue of 3.5 billion, bigger than their Client division, their online services or their entertainment devices.

.NET is one of their best products. It's one of the few reasons developers might develop for Windows Mobile 7. It's the single reason I actually thought about deployment on Windows servers.

With a single platform you can target the web, desktop clients (even clients running on Mac OS X / Linux), rich intranet web apps (Flex-like) or mobile apps (Silverlight has been released for Symbian, WinMo7, MeeGo and probably Android following).

Getting rid of .NET could be the stupidest thing they ever did, and probably the last nail in their coffin.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#102

Post by sspencer »

rakkhi wrote: post #84
roadnottaken wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The desktop is NOT DEAD. All those other devices are primarily for consuming media -- which is great. But I'm still using a desktop with a keyboard if I want to do any, y'know, work. I spend ~8-12 hours a day on a desktop and everyone else I know with any kind of office-job does too. And that's a lot of people. Tablets/console-games aren't going to change this any time soon.

I'm currently working on a the 3'rd floor of a household brand and as I look around there is not a single desktop, everyone is using a laptop - some with a docking station some without. Everyone has a large 24inch monitor to plug their laptop into. My last company issued an IT direction that we would not buy anymore desktops - only Sunrays for virtual desktops. So as far as the future of desktops in offices, I am not…

Same setup here (a very small shop) - everyone usually just plugs in a 24" monitor to their MBP. Can't remember the last time I used a desktop tower. Notebooks, monitors, and servers are the offices of the future.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#103

Post by gizmomagico »

BillGoates wrote: post #91

I would tell Microsoft to go back to their 90s mindset. Less focussed on big corporations, and more on getting (Windows) Microsoft software everywhere. Back then Microsoft was maybe an evil empire, but at least they did some exciting things from a developers viewpoint. @Balmer: Get rid of .NET. There are people who use it, and some of them actually like it, but it will never become the huge success you thought it wou…

Don't wait for W3C, if it's up to them we will have to wait till 2019 for a complete HTML5 specification. The other browser developers will either follow, and if not, developers will decide if they make a windows only application.

Wow! Are you actually suggesting they try and hold back the development of the web for another 5-10 years, if they can pull it off?

"Just make everything about websites IE-specific again and we're all good!"

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#104

Post by martin »

* Dual-monitor remote desktop! Please??!!

* What are you guys doing with Windows Installer (MSI)? You create this installation standard which everyone adopts, then you stop supporting it yourself, making people install Office 2007 and Silverlight with BS desktop startup scripts. WTF?

* As alluded to by others here, stop making stupid UI changes for no reason. I've been using Windows since 1992, upgraded to Win7 a couple months ago, and STILL can't find anything. I'm in support, and it's basically impossible to lead a user through anything over the phone anymore, because (for example) getting to the screen where you uninstall a program looks different on almost every Windows version I support, often with multiple variations per OS.

* The .NET runtime gets corrupted ALL THE TIME for our users. This is at least partially because you release patches that fail to rollback upon unsucessful install (see http://blog.usabilitythinking.com/2010/06/root-cause-for-cor...). This was enough of a problem before you started bundling .NET with Windows so that now I can't even have a user uninstall/reinstall it without really messing with his OS.

* This may make me sound silly, but I miss VB6 -- not the language itself, but rather the ease with which you could easily throw together an executable and send it to a user and have it just work. Now, I have to build a whole installer unless I want to have issues with missing .NET versions or weird .NET security issues.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#105

Post by seltzered »

MetricMike wrote: post #64
bad_user wrote: post #56

I would like Microsoft's Developer Division to start supporting Linux more ... Windows servers are too expensive for me making scale-out strategies a PITA and IMHO technically inferior to Linux from a startup perspective. Biztalk/Webspark are nice initiatives, but not enough. And I would totally shell out the cash for a MSDN subscription / Visual Studio if I could choose Linux for deployment. Better yet, collaborate…

Collaboration with Mono on .NET would be the "killer" news for me. With Java looking increasingly shaky, it'd be nice to have a second "write-once, run-everywhere" paradigm. While this may not end up being the greatest of reasons, a lot of my classmates shy away from .NET languages/MSFT technologies because they're more difficult to develop in Linux. Getting rid of that complaint would be super awesome.

It'd be nice if this effort included some SL/WPF support as well. Java still has swing and (gulp) JavaFX, and last I checked they run on any OS. As of now, I'm starting to feel like one has to write in flex if they want a desktop app with good UX to run everywhere.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#106

Post by bad_user »

edanm wrote: post #50

The biggest thing Microsoft should do is make the desktop king again. This is possible - users don't care whether they are using web applications or actual apps, but there are huge benefits (in terms of what you can do) to desktop applications. This is evident in the amazing rise of Apple's App Store. But there's a problem. Web programming, while allowing generally crummier applications, has some benefits that far ou…

They already did it. It's called ClickOnce deployment ... http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/t71a733d(VS.80).aspx

Doesn't have much traction though.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#107

Post by mhb »

narag wrote: post #68

A modest request: please, with each version don't make it more and more difficult to make the Windows explorer behave as in Windows 95. I mean having a folder tree and detailed view. Some people still work a lot with files and folders "the old way". Bonus points for not moving the configuration screens around. Things that have changed with explorer: less space for content, caused by adding not-so-useful toolbars, fol…

You should check out Total Commander:

http://www.ghisler.com/

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#108

Post by AndrewDucker »

stuhacking wrote: post #66
Yaggo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone reboot a system, instead of putting it to sleep¹? (Except when restart is required by an upgrade.) [1] Powered-off-and-ram-image-stored-to-disk type of sleep.

My work laptop (Vista `Enterprise') takes longer to wake from hibernate than it does to cold boot.

But that's hibernate - Sleep takes less than 2 seconds to recover from for me.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#109

Post by rakkhi »

unexpected wrote: post #88
cryptoz wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome OS was not designed to be a tablet OS. It can be used on a tablet, but if you read the launch blog post it's very clear they are targeting netbooks, not tablets. Since that day they have of course expanded to include tablets, but suggesting that was the original idea is misleading at best. Also, Chrome OS hasn't been released to the public yet and so it's absurd to call it "dead". The planned release date is i…

We'll see how ChromeOS does! It seems to me that you won't see any netbooks labeled Google - you'll see them marketed as "Acer", "Asus", or "Dell". Focusing on the web experience and printing (to combine your reply to my other comment) seems like a very narrow niche to me. It seems like ChromeOS is trying to position itself between Android and something like Windows 7. Surfing the web and wanting to print is a common…

Keep a notebook for just 3 days, list out every activity that you do on a computer/computing device (tablet, smartphone etc) in just broad terms, personal and work: e.g. read hacker news, write report, review y, code x, watch movie, read magazine, listen to last.fm, gaming, print., scan, take photo, edit photo, check email, check social network, IM etc.

Then put a +1 next to everything you did on the web (or could have been if you Google it and found a web service for that) and a -1 to everything that you could not.

Work out what +1 and -1 as a % of normal. For me it was 95%, for my wife was 100%.

That is why Chromium will work. I put Ubuntu on for my wife put some links titled Facebook, TV, Music. She didn't even notice she was not on Windows anymore.

You hit the nail on the head: "labeled Google - you'll see them marketed as "Acer", "Asus", or "Dell" . People do not care it is Microsoft Windows or not they care that it does what they want, quickly, reliably and cheaply.

My blog on living without Windows, preparing for Chrome: http://rakkhi.blogspot.com/2010/07/preparing-for-chrome-livi...

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#110

Post by d2x »

Clean up your products' APIs - make them more consistent. I had to work with Dynamics GP's .NET API a few years ago, and it was quite cryptic.

I recently had to work with SQL SMO, and in this case, numerous references to small DLLs that, by themselves did very little.

These may be minor nitpicks in the grand scheme of things, but they contribute to a perception that Microsoft is fragmented and lacks consistency across products, and make developers' lives needlessly difficult.

Post reply on HN