Why do programmers hate Microsoft? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why do programmers hate Microsoft?

#21

Post by runjake » Thu, Oct 21, 2010, 3:03 PM UTC

Programmers generally don't hate Microsoft. They have one of the biggest (if not, THE) developer communities in existence. Developers have great access to outstanding developer documentation, engineers (channel9.msdn.com), and Microsoft lets its engineers blog candidly (blogs,msdn.com).

The same complaints the article cited could be levied against gcc, autoconf, and so on. And you could levy the same trollbaiting against Linux, *BSD, and Mac OS X. Because for any given thing, there is somebody out in the world who feels the need to hate it.

I do a lot of .NET development and I love it, but I prefer developing on a UNIX environment because I started there and ended up on DOS/Windows later on.

Re: Why do programmers hate Microsoft?

#22

Post by smackfu » Thu, Oct 21, 2010, 3:06 PM UTC

naner wrote: post #8

Anti-competitive, design-by-committee, aversion towards open source, corporate culture, bureaucratic, etc. I don't hate Microsoft but I avoid targeting their platforms. EDIT: Oh, and there's the malware thing.

You have described every company.

Re: Why do programmers hate Microsoft?

#23

Post by mhd » Thu, Oct 21, 2010, 3:06 PM UTC

mattmaroon wrote: post #13

Generally I think programmers hate Microsoft because programmers hate Microsoft. It's a self-perpetuating meme, and let's be honest, if your goal is to hate Microsoft (or any extremely large corporation) it's pretty easy to come up with reasons. Especially IE6, which is the Exxon Valdez of the programming world.

I think there's some truth in that. Besides factual reasons why one might dislike a particular company or piece of software, there's also the old tribal system. Back in the days, it was Amigas vs. Ataris vs PCs, or SGI vs HP vs IBM vs Apollo vs Sun…

Now, we all run the same hardware, so the operating system seems to be the only pièce de résistance left. Even the arguments between vi and Emacs lost their fervor, considering the size of both RAM and vim nowadays.

At least one item where your average geek ain't that different from a football fan…

Re: Why do programmers hate Microsoft?

#24

Post by smackfu » Thu, Oct 21, 2010, 3:08 PM UTC

aseem wrote: post #5

I don't think Microsoft executives are losing sleep over "Microsoft Hatred" as much as they are losing sleep over "Microsoft Irrelevance". How many college students know how to program on Win32? How many even know what Win32 is? In 10 years, these college students will be the senior developers at their respective companies. Certainly, any good engineer will choose the best tool for the job. But I find it unlikely tha…

Luckily, college students know Java, and C# is close enough to pick up.

Re: Why do programmers hate Microsoft?

#25

Post by archon » Thu, Oct 21, 2010, 3:08 PM UTC

aseem wrote: post #5

I don't think Microsoft executives are losing sleep over "Microsoft Hatred" as much as they are losing sleep over "Microsoft Irrelevance". How many college students know how to program on Win32? How many even know what Win32 is? In 10 years, these college students will be the senior developers at their respective companies. Certainly, any good engineer will choose the best tool for the job. But I find it unlikely tha…

> How many college students know how to program on Win32?

Not nearly as many as those who know how to program in .Net.

Re: Why do programmers hate Microsoft?

#26

Post by jackfoxy » Thu, Oct 21, 2010, 3:10 PM UTC

My main beefs with MS

1) Bloating Office products with each successive release and discontinuing the old menu structure. I finally did something about this and switched from Outlook to Thunderbird.

2) MS has alienated small and independent developers by making Visual Studio in a bewildering number of versions and charging too much for it. They're completely focused on enterprise computing, but the enterprise has been off-shoring development for the last 15 years, so bright young developers have no interest in MS technology.

Re: Why do programmers hate Microsoft?

#27

Post by ajays » Thu, Oct 21, 2010, 3:14 PM UTC

keithwarren wrote: post #7

Almost every person I have ever met who hates Microsoft was either ignorant of the matters (meaning they just read what other people said and never had original thoughts) or had a specific beef in one area that they let inform their thoughts about the company as a whole. Lots of web developers, especially those who were not professional developers in the 90s see and hear this horror story of a big mean monopolist who…

Microsoft doesn't understand that if you piss off enough people over the years, it's hard to get respect back quickly.

If you haven't followed the anti-trust case, you won't understand. For years, Microsoft treated others in the personal-computer space as enemies to be vanquished, instead of colleagues to be collaborated with. They used every trick under the sun to destroy other competing developers' works. And then came the big browser wars, and once again they did the same.

On a broad level: Microsoft refuses to "play well with others". While you are playing apologist for them, their minions are busy undermining open-source software, and trying to scare the European regulators into avoiding OSS.

On a side note: someone I know just designed this t-shirt; I think he's taking orders: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamp3/4777497224/

Re: Why do programmers hate Microsoft?

#28

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 21, 2010, 3:21 PM UTC

keithwarren wrote: post #7

Almost every person I have ever met who hates Microsoft was either ignorant of the matters (meaning they just read what other people said and never had original thoughts) or had a specific beef in one area that they let inform their thoughts about the company as a whole. Lots of web developers, especially those who were not professional developers in the 90s see and hear this horror story of a big mean monopolist who…

[deleted]

Re: Why do programmers hate Microsoft?

#29

Post by bitwize » Thu, Oct 21, 2010, 3:22 PM UTC

Programmers don't hate Microsoft.

Many hackers do. (No, not that kind of hacker. Those guys love Microsoft: plenty of vulnerabilities to exploit!)

But programmers, in general? They love Microsoft. Microsoft keeps food on their tables by providing Visual Basic, C#, and other tools that they can use to shovel out PoS or ERP code or whatever.

Most of the fun and innovation is in the realm of the hacker elite, though, to whom a Microsoft monoculture is both stifling and suffering from a chronic case of doing-it-wrong.

Re: Why do programmers hate Microsoft?

#30

Post by kogir » Thu, Oct 21, 2010, 3:23 PM UTC

mda wrote: post #20

keithwarren wrote: post #7

Almost every person I have ever met who hates Microsoft was either ignorant of the matters (meaning they just read what other people said and never had original thoughts) or had a specific beef in one area that they let inform their thoughts about the company as a whole. Lots of web developers, especially those who were not professional developers in the 90s see and hear this horror story of a big mean monopolist who…

Years ago we were writing some code involving windows telephony api. There was something wrong with one of the calls, it was not applying one of the parameters as documented in the api. Because of that we ended up dissembling it and making a binary patch to change a constant in a dll. We lost several weeks in the process. How long does it take Microsoft to fix a problem in an obscure dll that you depend on? Who knows…

I can't speak to support then, but now they'd handle a problem like that for free and have a hot fix available to you in no time. Microsoft product support services is really top notch.