Thank you for BizSpark and the Express editions of everything. Also please buy Adobe, un-fuck Flash, and make Express editions of their expensive-assed tools too.
No, let flash die. And the sooner the better.
Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
151–160 of 381 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#152Why continue to develop proprietary software for problems that have been solved over and over in open source (code editing, code compilers, browsers, email clients, word processing, the list is endless)? People--and businesses--are not going to continue being okay with shelling out hundreds/thousands of dollars for something they can get for free. It may be profitable now, but it won't be in the future.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#153* 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 cou…
Dual-monitor remote desktop! Please??!!
You need the RDP 6 client (>Vista), but it's there. Open Remote Desktop Connection, Click Display Tab, check "Use all my monitors for the remote session"
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#154Make Windows fully POSIX compatible out-of-box.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#155Next desktop shell needs to have an open interface to programmers such that modification of widgets and replacement is now open to the community. Programmers will find this especially useful. No more stupid dialog boxes with scroll items showing 4 at a time but containing 5000 items. And get that stupid advertisement out of MSN messenger.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dog food their own software and systems more, and where it's unpleasant to use - improve them The bits of MS that do do this (e.g. the Visual Studio team) produce extremely high quality. Tho' I can't imagine that the Word or Excel teams use any other word processor or spreadsheet...
> "Word or Excel teams use any other word processor or spreadsheet." Reinforces your point and his. Word and Excel are best in class, nothing else comes close - OpenOffice, Google Docs, Documents to go on mobiles are ok substitutes but not as good as the real thing. This as real impact on your productivity which is why I use office.live.com, can't believe that is free at the moment.
I'm not sure it's comparable: the work of making Visual Studio is much the same as the work that people would do with Visual Studio. But if you are a Word developer, while you'd use it to write a letter, you might not have much experience of using it for a truly large document, like an entire book.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#157Get WPS7 to feature parity with iOS as soon as possible. I think there are actually a number of reasonably disaffected iPhone users who want to switch, but don't want to give up e.g. copy/paste or multitasking. Also, make it clear to people that using WPS7 means using the Zune client, and that the Zune client is better than iTunes - I think you already have the better software here, but zero brand awareness.
Get your secret hacker teams to make stuff that feels futuristic. Surface is cool, a mouse with a touch surface would have been okay if Apple didn't beat you to it, but why don't you make some freaking HUD goggles with eye tracking or something? You have the financial and intellectual resources to do it. I guess you get points for Kinect here, but right now Kinect is the exception rather than the rule, at least in the public's perception. Releasing something as cool for non-gamers as Kinect is for gamers, and I think the mindshare gains will be huge. You won't out-Apple Apple (and I don't think you should want to) as the shapers of tech fashion, and I doubt it's possible to out-Google Google as the shapers of the web, so be the shapers of the future instead.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#158Interesting if real. Ok lets go for benefit of the doubt, starting with the highest priority items: Mobile technology - The Windows phone 7 will not succeed. Sure you will sell a few phones but for the marketing and sheer executive brainspend on this you will not get a profitable return within 5 years. I had a good debate on Quora about what sucess looks like for Microsoft and I don't think this is realistically achi…
So the best decision would be to give up on the OS and focus on applications such as MS Office and XBOX game centre for iOS and Android devices. Alternatively buy RIM... This is not a viable "growth strategy." MS has worked on these boring enterprise products for 15 years already, and buying RIM and developing Office is more of the same. I can't foresee any new tech coming from these boring strategies. MS's ceiling f…
My thinking on this was that if they bought RIM they would greatly increase their marketshare in those "boring" but profitable "enterprise products". Lets face it the Blackberry OS sux, even v6 is a poor iOs clone and Windows mobile has reasonable enterprise penetration but not great. So put the next version of the Blackberry on a decently powered hardware and WP7. Offer activesync as an option a silver option and BES as gold option. It could be a synergistic mix for both companies that would let the focus on what they are good at (enterprise over consumer in the mobile space), leverage RIM's excellent marketshare and with MS enterprise OS and Exchange products and actually allow them to effectively fight Apple and Google in a very profitable area.
Agree with you on enterprise tablet, imagine the "Blackpad" running WP7
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think he is probably drawing on sources like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1698213 That has best buy saying tablets are cannibalizing their netbook revenue. This does not mean that netbooks or laptops are dead - personally for the current price I find something like an ACER1215N a lot better value for my usecases than an ipad. This is primarily due to the the HDMI out, USB input for storage, rich client…
Ridiculous. You can't even type on a tablet properly or angle the display. Again, I would say that in 99% of cases, people who buy a tablet are not buying it instead of a laptop, but as well as.
Agreed. However whatever that laptop is going to be, you can bet it will be something more powerful than Chrome OS.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#160I recently got a windows 7 machine. Some things that bug me as a programmer using it, and make me wish I just paid up and got a mac: 1) WPF - I am trying to use this in my work life. It scares me when I hear your ex-product manager twittering that it's dead. I now feel like I should've done my app's front-end in qt or swing. 2) Will microsoft create in-built, tested, virtual desktop support already? More people use l…
Lots of issues with #2, many of which you encounter on OSX. Immovable dialogs that pop up on one screen while the app is on the other, leaving the app disabled (this is my OSX nit with Spaces). Applications that aren't ready to be shifted offscreen. Applications that can't handle either a larger screen size (if you virtualize as a BIG screen) or the idea that they're not in the minimized state but are not visible. It's a giant mess.
There were always good quality virtual desktop programs running around inside of MSFT written locally, but there was no way to get them up to ship quality when you considered the AppCompat issue.
One thing I both admired and hated when I worked at MSFT is that Apple users are content to purchase updates for every piece of software they own when a new major version of the OS is released.
Sidenote: I'm out of MSFT now and have been in a 100% Apple environment for my research for the last three years.