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Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

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

#201

Post by moon_of_moon »

1. I've used Ubuntu on my desktop for the last 1.5 years. We switched most of our Windows servers to Linux over the last year as well. It would be great to have a free base Windows OS release, with zero bells and whistles, but a fully functional networking stack, and no connection limits. Provide the rest as a paid monthly service. The corporations that are going to pay for it, will pay for bells and whistles. Most of them are currently migrating to Linux, btw; the only thing that stops them if anything is the lack of paid support for the middleware.

2. Price your software according to purchasing power parity. If a book in a B&N store in SFO costs $US49, the same book costs about $USD10 in book stores in Bangalore. Do the same for Windows and MS Office. (Require that its paid for by a country specific credit card if you must).

3. Open an office somewhere more exciting than Seattle. Remember that most of the crew pulling all nighters and doing the death march are 4. Send me money, and I'll tell explain in detail how to turn around the online business.

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

#202

Post by kennedywm »

Tinned_Tuna wrote: post #46

The Xbox (bar it's heating issues) is a damn good product. The advertising still has a little way to go, but over all it's a nice package and it is a good user experience start to finish. Similarly, C# is a nice language, but I'm not (personally) overly keen on Visual Studio, I like smaller IDEs (personal preference here!). The main issue that I see is the obsession with integrating everything with Windows. Notice ho…

In terms of strategy, if you're the dominant player in the market, it simply isn't wise to make the experience for customers switching to other OSs more comfortable.

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

#203

Post by Yaggo »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #108
stuhacking wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know how Apple does it, but both my iMac and MacBook wake up in a second. I guess they keep the ram powered up and only save it to disk (hibernate) when running out of battery (or after certain amount of hours?). Anyway, they are totally silent and consume very little energy when sleeping. That's how it should be.

I love how the difference between sleep and hibernate is abstracted away in Apple's implementation.

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

#204

Post by stuhacking »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #108
stuhacking wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The OP specifically mentioned saving RAM to disk. I don't trust the battery in this work laptop to hold the state in RAM overnight.

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

#205

Post by aphexairlines »

loewenskind wrote: post #176
aphexairlines wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What decline? Microsoft reported $62.48 billion in revenue and $18.76 billion in net income for their FY 2010.

If all you ever look at is raw bottom line numbers, life is going to be one surprise after another for you.

That's an odd way of advocating hype over facts. And it's a bit of a stretch to pronounce Microsoft's decline if they're not #1 in a couple of trendy areas (cloud computing, smartphones).

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

#206

Post by x0t »

JunkDNA wrote: post #121

Some points: - It's annoying in this day and age to be forced into using the entire MS Stack when I need to work with one specific technology. For example: if I want to test a web app on various versions of IE, I have to run Windows. OK fine, even though IE is the only browser that is tied to one OS, I'll let that go. However, if I want to use the Microsoft-provided free MS Virtual Machine images, I have to run them…

I agree 100% with your last paragraph... their desire to keep bolting bits onto legacy software is a major annoyance and leads to a lot of kruft.

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

#207

Post by 10ren »

Xbox gui should be instantly responsive (at least as an option). It's so tediously slow, it even misses button presses - you have to wait for it. It's frustrating and unnecessary in a graphics machine. No offense, but even the grossly underpowered iPhone manages to be instant. Xbox Zune is even slower: the switch to movies takes many seconds. Perhaps this is setting up encryption modules - but it's absurd. Because of this, I avoid anything movie related (Of course, games are the key, but an unnecessarily shoddy experience actually makes me use the Xbox much less often.)

"Indie Games" aren't available on Australian Xbox - this would add a lot of value.

Gold Xbox: the inline link to "switch off auto-renewals" doesn't work. You have to ring up, and cancel instantly, losing the rest of the month. This comes across as underhanded and dishonest. Unless Xbox LIVE is a major profit center, this needlessly loses goodwill.

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

#209

Post by fauigerzigerk »

aphexairlines wrote: post #171
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #52

I would ask Steve Ballmer whether he is aware of the fact that Microsoft's licensing for Windows and SQL Server makes scaling out impossible and hence knocks their platform out of the race for cloud computing, at least when it comes to web apps. I would ask him whether he really thinks that SQL Azure with its $100 per month for 10GB price tag is anything but a sad joke. I would ask the people who design the Microsoft…

What decline? Microsoft reported $62.48 billion in revenue and $18.76 billion in net income for their FY 2010.

Their share price has gone sideways forever in spite of growing revenues and profits. It's called multiple contraction. The reason is that everyone knows they cannot continue to extract those kinds of margins from people forever for stuff that is basically commoditised.

[Edit] The funny thing is that they were the ones who commoditised computing. They were the ones who made computing cheap and ubiquitous. Now they are on the wrong side of the equation. Now they are the ones defending an overpriced unscalable model as IBM once did.

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

#210

Post by fauigerzigerk »

aphexairlines wrote: post #205
loewenskind wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all you ever look at is raw bottom line numbers, life is going to be one surprise after another for you.

That's an odd way of advocating hype over facts. And it's a bit of a stretch to pronounce Microsoft's decline if they're not #1 in a couple of trendy areas (cloud computing, smartphones).

Their problem is that cloud computing is the successor of Windows. It's not just some trendy area.
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