Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This isn't your father's Microsoft

sawers.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 94 posts

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#41

Post by notimetorelax »

kerng wrote: post #18
joveian wrote: post #3

"Maybe the Microsoft strategy is to intro into the Linux/Java/LAMPish/open-source camp community, burnish their image, and hope they consider their commercial offerings." Try plugging a USB stick with an ext2 partition into Windows 10. At least in 1803, you get TWO dialog boxes asking you to format the partition, with the default being format! In between is another dialog box with just one button. This is the new Mic…

To be fair, this seems not like a mainstream use case... and you can use WSL to read it if you really want to (which seems like an advanced use case anyway). Cross platform FAT32 is the standard and Microsoft made that open.

I think a token amount of effort to try to detect ext file system and not to offer to wipe it clean might have improved the user experience. Small things like that accumulate and aggravate.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#42

Post by ygra »

yoloClin wrote: post #24

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 po…

Word stores the text language as part of the formatting, effectively, and it can change mid-sentence. Spell check wouldn't really work otherwise in multi-language documents. So you probably have to select everything once and set your preferred language.

It also gets quite clever with detecting repeated formatting. Just like Word can notice when the part up to a colon of each enumeration item is bold and does this automatically, it can notice that the second column of a table is always the same language and can even change the keyboard layout accordingly. But overriding the language once for everything should stop all that, still.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#43

Post by ublaze »

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…

I have to add Git. They seem to have a dedicated Git performance team. I recently sent a patch to improve git performance, and have mostly been collaborating with friendly Microsoft engineers. Not what I expected at a first glance.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#44

Post by alasdair_ »

For me, windows 10 is still an issue. I don’t like being spied on. I don’t like disabling cortana and bing and sending everything i type to microsoft and having my choices overwritten every single update. I don’t like having to delete fucking candy cruah for the third time. Respect the very deliberate choices I made and perhaps I’d use it seriously again.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#45

Post by scarface74 »

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…

Most developers work for companies that go where the money and eyeballs are. They are both on web and mobile. No matter how “friendly” MS is, if you want to develop for iOS, you have to have a Mac.

The entirety of Mac revenue is around 10% of Apple’s revenue. If it does lose the love of developers, it doesn’t make a difference.

That being said, I’m mostly all in on Apple - the Watch, iPhone, iPad, AppleTV, and soon AirPods Pro. But I don’t see any purpose for buying a Mac. My tooling and other apps would be the same and you have a lot more options at better prices on Windows.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#46

Post by smohare »

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…

Do any serious developers who are not already steeped in the MS ecosystem actually clamor to work in that environment? Half of the tools I use on a daily basis are not MS friendly.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#47

Post by taneq »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #21

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 b…

> Crapware pre-installed

The first rule of buying a prebuilt system has always been nuke it from orbit and start from scratch. Sounds like this isn’t changing any time soon.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#48

Post by taneq »

yoloClin wrote: post #24

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 po…

The most brain dead thing about Windows, IMO, is that the keyboard selection is tied to locale. You want UK English but using a US keyboard (as you do on a laptop)? Screw you, it’s US spelling or a UK layout.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#49

Post by nstart »

Just adding this in case anyone is using vs code and is wondering about dev on windows. I'd say that wsl is nice for some tasks but I wouldn't rely on it as a daily driver. It's great for installing some CLI tools to perform certain tasks. Maybe some file grepping or searching that you want to do with your local stuff but find it infuriating to do with powershell or bat scripts. This doesn't mean WSL is bad by any means. It's actually great. But not good enough. Not yet.

But I use windows as my daily driver and what does work amazingly well for me is virtualbox and running a VM as my developer machine on it. I run Ubuntu server. And for developing, VS code has this amazing feature that allows one to connect to a remote and develop on it as if it's a local filesystem. This includes having extensions that interact with the remote too. This also means I don't do the whole shared folders dance with all its oddities around speed and syncing anymore. Honestly, it changed the whole windows dev game for me.

Once the new terminal for windows is actually v1 (not holding breath for that. Theres a lot of work for that. Its probably going to miss the winter v1 projection) I think the windows dev experience will be complete.

Re: This isn't your father's Microsoft

#50

Post by awa »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #21

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 b…

Doesnt Apple push the same way to connect you apple id to your machine?
Post reply on HN