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This isn't your father's Microsoft

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Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#21

Post by jacobsenscott »

We just got two cheapish windows laptops after many years of not using windows at all.

Pros:

* Keyboard quality (compared to macbooks)

* Low cost

* Good physical design if you choose the right brand (thinkpad carbon for example)

Cons:

* Dark patterns push you hard to connect your account to a skype/xbox/microsoft live/whatever they call it these days account

* License key hell is still a thing

* Schizophrenic split between screens that work on high DPI displays and screens that don't. Sometimes in the same application.

* Too many versions of windows with features arbitrarily disabled depending on the version you have. Neither of these two laptops can enabled bitlocker, and no windows linux subsystem. Is all the code for bitlocker and wsl on my disk? I bet it is, just routed around with an `if version` branch.

* Crapware pre-installed

* Fairly crashy. On one if you put it to sleep with a full screen app open it wakes up with a black screen. Needs a hard reboot every time.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#22

Post by jojo14 »

jchw wrote: post #12
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #5

While this isn’t your father’s Microsoft, this is your grandfather’s Microsoft. Before they started creating business applications and operating systems, Microsoft was in the business of programming tools. Their first software was Microsoft Basic. Microsoft Basic was available on pretty much every major personal computer platform. Thus in some sense this is Microsoft returning to its roots as a cross-platform program…

To be fair, Microsoft Basic practically was an operating system, in its day. It’s what many computers booted into, and sometimes the environment in which everything else was run from.

To be fair BASIC was not much of a deal. The interpreter is just a REPL. Very basic at it, hence the name. The BASIC was not invented by MS: they replicated it. The real operating system part was done by computer manufacturers. For instance it was Dragon Data that brought the "kind of" OS routines in the Dragon32. Floppy disk managment, I/O, etc. MS just brought the REPL and ... bugs.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#24

Post by yoloClin »

I think there are sections of Microsoft that are very, very good but crappier sections are bringing down company perception somewhat - the company vision is somewhat confused when they drop a cross-platform SQL server and then introduce telementry into Windows.

Microsoft Office, if anything, has gone completely backwards in regards to UX. On a fundamental level it 'just works' but when I started becoming more of a power user I found reproducible bugs, unexpected or inconsistent behaviors, and a complete lack of extensibility for creating / modifying docx documents programmatically in !C#.

By far my least favorite issue is the constant battle I have with locale - I'm not sure if the document creators local was set to EN-US or if my system config is not correct, but every time I try and force the document to EN-AU it seems to switch back seemingly on a per-section basis or something. The most amusing side effect of this is the 'Read aloud' voice changing gender mid sentence but the amusement is quickly offset by it deciding to auto-correct perfectly valid EN-AU spelling for its American localisation for the fifth time in a paragraph.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#25

Post by makecheck »

You can’t judge a company only by its shiny new things; you also have to judge how they’re handling what’s already there.

And right now, there are some exceedingly-common things that are far too broken considering how many decades Microsoft has had to fix them. I’m sure we all have our lists but just off the top of my head...

- The complete inability of an OS named Windows to remember where any of its windows were a second ago, after you have the audacity to plug in a cable such as a dock or external monitor.

- An OS that drinks laptop energy from a giant straw, combined with an OS that is poor at restoring state when the machine inevitably runs out of battery in your bag and has to be rebooted unexpectedly when you open the lid.

- An OS and apps that cannot handle the extremely common scenario of a network outage or even a momentary blip. I will be spammed with a half-dozen login prompts from all over the place as punishment for the crime of briefly losing WiFi, as network disks and other apps all lose their minds. The OS also cannot auto-close any of these prompts when I reconnect.

- Core UI elements can become completely unusable. For example, I should be able to click the WiFi task bar icon at any time, yet at some point this menu will just stop working (its icon still highlights when clicked but no menu appears anymore!). Text is frequently cut off to the point where I am required to hover for a tooltip to even see what the rest of the text says...assuming that a tooltip has been implemented.

- The OS still completely disrespects its users. Completely unimportant windows will appear right in the middle of the screen, blocking everything behind them, with no apparent way to close them or even move them.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#26

Post by jml7c5 »

I hate to distract from the content of the article, but I have a request from those without good vision: the text color on this blog is just a shade over 50% grey. I know people are opposed to the starkness of #000-on-#FFF text, but going approximately #888-on-#FFF seems extreme.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#27

Post by jojo14 »

I'm kind of puzzled by this fanboism about "a new MS happening now". The new propaganda is along: "Hey! reset everything you know about MS. The new MS is shiny!". Why would anybody support MS without being a shareholder or without having any financial interest. Given their proven track record it would be pretty obvious to be cautious about MS. IMHO MS have all the reasons to be doomed. They are way behind technically in key CS areas: HPC, Mobile, embedded, etc. Their flagship OS is FUBAR due to 2 decades of accumulated bloat. Anyway we might envision a future for MS as a profitable business: Embrace 21st century standards, port their SW on *nix(es) and make profit on their core competencies: that is developing boring non innovative SW for big companies.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#28

Post by thaumasiotes »

jojo14 wrote: post #22
jchw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Microsoft Basic practically was an operating system, in its day. It’s what many computers booted into, and sometimes the environment in which everything else was run from.

To be fair BASIC was not much of a deal. The interpreter is just a REPL. Very basic at it, hence the name. The BASIC was not invented by MS: they replicated it. The real operating system part was done by computer manufacturers. For instance it was Dragon Data that brought the "kind of" OS routines in the Dragon32. Floppy disk managment, I/O, etc. MS just brought the REPL and ... bugs.

> BASIC was not much of a deal. The interpreter is just a REPL. Very basic at it, hence the name.

The language is named after its goal of being something easy to learn. It is a fairly contrived acronym, Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#29

Post by jakear »

jchw wrote: post #8

.NET Core would’ve been really incredible had it come a few years earlier, but I’ve been too busy being enamored by Go and Rust to really consider it more. Still, it is very nice to use when I do use it. I am quite excited by the way it handles async. I had some issues trying to use debuggers under Linux due to licensing... a little bit of “old world” Microsoft? I really don’t care for Windows 10 at all, and make a p…

What do you mean by “it’s hard to shake the feeling that maybe something is off”?

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#30

Post by tptacek »

Tossrock wrote: post #19

I think the pendulum has been swinging from Apple towards Microsoft for developer friendliness for some time now. This is definitely an active strategy on MS's part, and a huge misstep by Apple. Some key parts of the MS strategy: - Embracing Linux. Beyond what's mentioned in the article, there's the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and the new Terminal app. Being able to run Ubuntu (or whichever distribution) natively on…

What changes here would meaningfully change the competitive balance? A macOS subsystem for Linux doesn't sound interesting. Neither, really, does a new IDE for building macOS and iOS applications. What's the real misstep here? The crappy Apple keyboard?
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