Stop making operating systems. Make IE cross platform, and make Visual Studio dump exe's out for every platform, become the de facto way to develop apps on every platform. Become awesome.
Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
321–330 of 381 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#322I'm pretty frank about not being a fan of microsoft. I actually tell people that if you absolutely must use windows, the only acceptable way to do it is on a virtual machine on a mac. I was just at the bitly hackathon night earlier this week and virtually to a person everyone was sporting some flavor of macbook, not to mention that the office is kitted out in imacs. I routinely stop by my local coffee shop hangout just to do a laptop head count, which you should already know consistently hovers in the 70-80% range in favor of apple.
It is not just that apple is better on virtually every measurable metric that consumers care about but it is that microsoft's offering is so piss poor. Virtually the only reason people still buy windows machines is price nowadays. I have personally 'converted' dozens of long time windows users to apple after converting myself back in 2003. Those that have not followed my advice only do so based on price and price alone. Even still, those are just a small percentage of most who seek my opinion.
In the interest of being useful and not simply telling microsoft to pack it in because they have already lost (because they have) I will try to contribute something...
Dear Microsoft,
Speaking from a developers point of view you should really take a look at where the action is nowadays. Now I don't know what you consider to be the current 'hotness' in general computer development today but I think it is fair to say that this very forum, HN, is where it is at. The slashdot of it's day, as it were. If you were to crunch the articles that have made the front page on any given day through your bing search tool over the lifespan of this site I would certainly wager a morning coffee and even a donut that you would be hard pressed to come up with a measly handfull of relevant microsoft related technology articles. If you were to run a sentiment analysis on all the articles and all the posts contained herein you would not have to have a phd level implementation to ascertain that the general sentiment towards microsoft is low in the extreme. Beyond sentiment there is simply asymptotically zero mindshare amongst todays developers in microsoft technology.
But bashing aside, lets just look at what people are playing with. Nodejs, NoSql, various jvm languages, cloud infrastructure and the like. Virtually none of those things are even remotely connected to microsoft and its technology stack in any way. Some of them (if not most) are not even available on windows. Bottom line is that the new breed of developers do not use and do not care about microsoft technologies, except for one small piece: IE. Every developer developing for the web concerns him or herself with the performance of their bit of code on IE. Thankfully this is becoming less and less of a concern through the use of cross-browser libraries like jQuery and it's brethren.
Having just watched the Pope give sermon upon lecture in the UK live on the BBC I feel compeled to say to you: Repent. For the current crop of developers worldwide do not heed your vision of the computing future. I would echo a lot of JunkDNA's comment[1] in the sense that if you are even concerned with getting a second look from developers you need to make your tools available to them where they live, namely unix based os's. You need to have all in one prepackaged virtual machines that will run under parallels and vmware on the mac. Pure and simple. Developers who are not already windows adherents use the mac to develop their wares or some flavor of unix, in which case my recommendation of a virtual stack still holds true in regards to vmware.
As a consumer I would not even consider buying any offering from microsoft as it stands. Neither the zune or a winmobile device. The former being an utter failure and the later being an utter failure in its previous incarnations and if not changed drastically will continue to be in its most recent incarnation. Again, look to apple. What are they doing? Do some of that and then add in your "added-value" flavoring. To second JunkDNA[1] yet again, two versions of windows please. One server, one desktop. I'm a computer professional for over a dozen years and I have no idea why there are so many versions of windows. Honestly, I don't know what to tell people when they ask other than you are out of your mind and there is no one running the ship over there in Redmond.
In closing, I would like to wish you the best and honestly hope that you get it together. I strongly believe that the apple phoenix rose from the ashes due to their epic defeat at your hands. If you can mount a comeback the competition will fuel the space to the benefit of consumers everywhere. Good luck.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#323Two words: browser compatibility. I really don't care what else they do as that won't affect my life in any way, but this is something I have to deal with daily, and is ultimately extremely frustrating, time consuming, and costs my employer a lot of money.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#324Some 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…
Another case: MS SQL Server. It's a real bear to connect to it from unix since (last I checked) there are no official drivers. You have to use some unix ODBC open source stuff and it's just not suitable for production work. FYI, you probably want to use the FreeTDS driver on Unix/Linux. It's not an ODBC driver and it is production quality.
I need to check again, but the last time I tried FreeTDS I got scared because of some serious encoding issues that were causing silent data loss. I have been following the bug report and it looks like this issue may have been finally patched recently, but it sort of scared me off from using FreeTDS.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem if you do that, as soon as you run a console EXE, you're hosed, weird things will happen.
As any of us who run resource kit, support kit, or development kit tools have found ;) Thanks for your unofficial input throughout the threads. They've been great nuggets of info and insight from the inside, so to speak.
Thanks - I certainly don't believe that Microsoft always has a good reason for what they do, but I try when I can to illustrate what was going through the engineers' heads when they built the thing.
When you build a system that has to work for everybody, from your grandma who just wants simplicity, all the way to the Federal Gov't who has complex requirements and restrictions, all while making 100% sure that everyone's programs work flawlessly even if they happen to be horribly written, sometimes you have to make lousy compromise choices, I think that's our biggest challenge by-far, is balancing the n-degrees of concerns through smart, disciplined engineering.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
If Microsoft could deploy a decent unix on top the NT kernel, that might not be a bad strategy. But the fact remains that there are a wealth of unix tools that you can compile and run on an number of unix variants, but are practically impossible to build and run on Windows without heavy customization. I'm arguing that is eventually going to be a problem for MS because they are forced to invent everything internally a…
There's a POSIX subsystem.
Way back in the day, Microsoft had their own Unix, Xenix. However they did a deal with AT&T to get out of the Unix market - they probably still can't sell a Unix even if they wanted to.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem if you do that, as soon as you run a console EXE, you're hosed, weird things will happen.
As any of us who run resource kit, support kit, or development kit tools have found ;) Thanks for your unofficial input throughout the threads. They've been great nuggets of info and insight from the inside, so to speak.
Also, here's a great example of how we have to balance "fix the bug!" with "make programs work!":
http://blog.paulbetts.org/index.php/2010/07/20/the-case-of-t...
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#328Dog food their own software and systems more, and where it's unpleasant to use - improve them. Far too much of my Microsoft using experience is of a solid technology which is idiotically annoying, and a new version which ups both desirable features and irritation at the same time. I mean the remote desktop client which has a ton of user experience flaws which hasn't improved for years, then developed another security…
jodrellblank - you are the voice inside my head.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#329Please abandon IE only interfaces for your enterprise products. Having a fully functioning web interface for outlook web access or sharepoint shouldn't be a big deal, but it is a constant problem, you cant force people to use IE, embrace the alternatives. Added features are not always good, we know Office is a cash cow, but it is also heavy as hell, offer a slim down office suite, not in software, but in features, or…
To be fair, OWA 2010 is fully functional in all modern browsers not just IE. So they are progressing.
I will admit, i didn't know this, and that is great news. However upgrading Exchange is no trivial task, and it would seem fairly trivial to release an update for their 2007 OWA that fixes this.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?
#330- Be more open to learning from, working with and using OSS software that was not written inside Redmond campus. I'm sure most of these projects would love to treat Windows as a first-class target platform. It's just not possible that Microsoft will be able to write best-in-class of every type of software. And I don't buy the argument that it opens you to a legal minefield. Apple is arguably a bigger company than you are now, by all the metrics that count, and manages to do this just fine. I have written software under the MIT license that is part of every shipping OS X installation now. It rocks.
- Licensing. Goddamn, fix it. DreamSpark/BizSpark is not the answer, it's a stalling tactic. I wouldn't use Microsoft technology for my own startup if it came to that, as I know licensing will kill me if I'm successful, and will also kill me if I'm not, once the timer runs out.
Background: Used to be a Linux/Unix dev, moved to .NET in 2004, but I still get offered jobs doing iPhone or Rails based web development on a regular basis due to my OSS profile. It's getting harder to turn them down, as I'm not convinced Microsoft's roadmap is not a dead end any more.