Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a drag on the whole Microsoft ecosystem and heavily rate-limits the cycle time for new products. I don't see this as a problem; I like the stability of MS vs. Linux (having watched the rise and fall of devfs and hal now, along with the death of gnome-mount, gconf, gdm theming and xdmcp serving, etc.) OTOH, I think IE6's 10+ year support guarantee was a bit extreme. But, comparing developing something on IE vs.…
> I don't see this as a problem; I like the stability of MS vs. Linux (having watched the rise and fall of devfs and hal now, along with the death of gnome-mount, gconf, gdm theming and xdmcp serving, etc.) The problem that I see is that "stability" in the Microsoft world is entirely conditional on your willingness to upgrade everything all of the time since the whole toolkit is in a constant state of flux. Sure, you…
Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
311–320 of 381 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
The command line for Windows is now Powershell, which I find superior to Bash in many ways (although I appreciate Bash's relative simplicity, and I am still more familiar with the Bourne shell variants than I am Powershell). CMD.EXE is still included, but it is the red-headed stepchild. > the Window doesn't even resize properly. And the PowerShell window still does not resize horizontally by dragging, which is silly.…
I complain about the crappy Console subsystem every release, I'll try to shout louder :)
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#313Here is what I would like:
Find a precise title for a post, that is a program that receives a url, a document or any text input and outputs a precise title for that information.Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
I complain about the crappy Console subsystem every release, I'll try to shout louder :)
It will get shot down due to legacy requirements. It boggles my mind they didn't start Powershell "legacy-free" and just emulate/re-implement the existing command line commands.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wordpad has hidden characters.. and is therefore not a suitable notepad replacement. Notepad++ would be closer.
Really? I've had no trouble sharing files between Wordpad, cygwin, and unix while using Wordpad.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will get shot down due to legacy requirements. It boggles my mind they didn't start Powershell "legacy-free" and just emulate/re-implement the existing command line commands.
The problem if you do that, as soon as you run a console EXE, you're hosed, weird things will happen.
Thanks for your unofficial input throughout the threads. They've been great nuggets of info and insight from the inside, so to speak.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#317Some 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…
MS needs to really decide how much longer they want to push an OS that is based on Windows/DOS heritage and not unix You know the "Windows/DOS" stuff in NT is an emulation layer, right? It's known as WoW, Windows on Windows. The NT kernel is the work of Dave Cutler, of DEC VMS fame, and it is actually very, very good (form your own opinion about what has been layered on top of it).
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#318Why? Because they're too risk-averse, and willing to let really horrific UI slide - and as your customer demographic has demonstrated in recent years, they will buy into good UI and positive experiences in droves. They will line up for a week before release to get their hands on a UI that works... and MS doesn't have UI that works.
Look at things like the system tray - a terrible idea that everyone realized was a terrible idea back in 1998. 12 years later, it's still there and as bad as ever - this is a textbook case of MS being too afraid to pull the plug on a feature that frustrates its users every moment of every day. I'm not sure what kind of horrific fury had to be leveraged to get the Office team to do their (IMHO, very awesome) redesign, but the same thing needs to happen to Windows, and it needs to happen right the hell now.
If you need a good example of someone at MS who knows good UI, consult the Xbox team. These are the same guys who took a perfectly good UI (the original blade interface), threw it out, and implemented something much better, and were not afraid of stepping on some toes to do it. MS needs this spirit back in its UI development, across the board. Substandard UI should not be accepted at all, and there needs to be some centralized oversight into the user experience. The quality of UI, or hell, even the basic layout of UI, across the entirety of Windows is so marvelously inconsistent it's a wonder people can navigate your OS at all. Compare with MacOS X, where Apple has gone to great pains in the last 2 years to bring all the disjointed bits all back under the same banner, and unify the experience to something much more consistent and usable. MS needs the same.
Further, your entire approach to the touch market is broken. The multitouch functionality in Win7 is laughable. Your company has correctly surmised recently that the touch market is going to be a crucial one in your battle for the consumer OS market - but you're not going to win it (you're not even going to be an also-ran) if you keep concentrating on inconsequential, completely useless bits like multitouch scrolling. You need a version of Windows that is completely overhauled, UI-wise, for the touch device. It is completely insufficient to touch-enable your existing tiny buttons, make no significant changes to the main Windows UI, and call it a day. The way people interact with a touch device is completely different from how they use a desktop computer - Apple has realized this, and MS needs to realize this as well. There should not be "Win7, now with multitouch", there ought to be "Windows Touch" - a completely different user experience, leveraging the same technologies.
I'm not terribly qualified to speak on the enterprise market MS is dominating, but you guys are losing badly in the consumer space in every segment except video gaming. The Xbox team moves quickly, and they execute really well to critical and user acclaim - MS would be well served to study what has made that part of the company so successful, and the rest of their consumer products such utter failures.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I am mistaken but wasn't windows phone there before iPhone, MSN search before Google? The same argument can be also applied to other companies. There's Googles iPhone, Google's Facebook, Google's Windows, Google's Office and what not. I personally don't think its bad to compete on those fronts. The technology is changing and so companies have to adapt to these changes. I don't really see them going after every…
Kinda? The problem is that once a competitor shows up and does well (Google search, iPhone), Microsoft flails with their legacy stuff (Windows CE Mobile Phone Series 6.5, Microsoft Windows Media Audio PlaysForSure) for a couple years, and then apes the competitor as much as possible while throwing anybody who was invested in their products under a bus of incompatibility.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#320Two things really stand out for me. 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 inspiri…