Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

1. Please, please, PLEASE take the App Store model that Apple has used and apply it to Xbox Live. There is already a process by which developers have to get their wares certified to run on the Xbox so the review process is pretty much already in place. The barrier to entry on the 360 needs to be significantly lowered (there have been half-baked efforts, but nothing terribly inspiring). One of the most exciting rumors (that didn't happen) about the Apple TV was that it would be running iOS and allow for apps on a television. The Xbox 360 is in a great position to make this a reality. Let me write tiny games/apps for the 360, and let it be easier to get them on Live than it is to get on Apple's App Store.

2. The way the entire company thinks about User Interface / User Experience design is, if I may be impolite, fucked. What little I've been able to read regarding how MS goes about designing the parts of their software that people see and use comes down to this; We follow whatever Office does and middle management sanitizes everything. It's no wonder that something great like Courier died inside of Microsoft. Designing applications for humans is very, very hard. Designing applications for humans inside of a huge bureaucracy is next to impossible. There are probably people working at MS with titles like "User Advocate" and other nonsense, but the end product reflects that those people are incompetent, impotent, or both. A team of powerful, capable people need the ability to "stop the line" and say no to the bullshit. The company has coasted for far too long on UI/UX familiarity due to the pervasiveness of its products. People hate using MS software. My family hate their Windows PCs. The gloss and fresh paint of Vista/7 haven't addressed the common person's frustration. In a business environment people have an incentive to adapt to bad software and work around it. At home my mother just wants her computer to print a photo at the click of a button, at the proper resolution, with the right orientation, and exactly how she sees it on the screen. Experienced business and technical users have mentally blocked out the usability cruft of the last 20 years, but the consumer market is and will continue to be unforgiving. This is why Apple is eating your lunch.

I've resorted to using Google to find documents on MSDN because its index seems to be more up to date and tends to give me the non-broken links (why doesn't Microsoft use Bing to power MSDN search!?!?).

Navigating MSDN for documentation is painful at best.

Also, it would be really nice to have all of the .net exceptions well documented in one place.

TeX solved this decades ago. In my understanding, there are several word processors that can output LaTeX.

13) For the love of god, please get somebody to take fifteen minutes and update notepad so that it respects unix line-endings.

For the love of god, quit using Notepad! Wordpad is superior in every way. Seriously though, I used to have the same gripe as you until a took a couple minutes to set Wordpad as the default program for opening txt files. Microsoft needs to just make Notepad be a symlink to Wordpad and get rid of Notepad altogether.

I remember installing Windows 3.11 from floppy over my MS-DOS install on a 386 and I've used every version of Windows through to XP since.

But you lost me, all my machines run OS X or *nix, I've never run Windows on the server, I don't own any Microsoft software and I don't use any online Microsoft products (Bing, etc).

My love for computers bloomed when the Internet became available to the measses, C1992. That's when you decided that you wanted to own the Internet so you created your own, MSN Home. It didn't work, and you never really got the Internet until it was too late.

You are irrelevant, Microsoft, and due to the way your company is set up to profit mostly from selling Windows + Office to corporations you will never see any reason to stamp out the irrelevancy until it is too late.

In many ways it's very sad.