Microsoft, Past and Future • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#31

Post by gnaffle » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 9:17 AM UTC

spiderPig wrote: post #21

NDizzle wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to take a hell of a lot from MS in order to have someone like me buy back in. I'll present one of the other perspectives. I was all-Microsoft, from MS DOS up through Windows Server 2003. Late 90s MCSE, nothing but MS. Most of my time was spent building and maintaining NT4.0 installations and then migrating to 2000. I got tired of keeping pace with the amount of changes in all of the services somewhere betw…

That doesn't sound like a good habit to have in this industry, things change and software evolves. Android's first few versions sucked..a lot for instance. Heck, most the of the early versions of OSS suck. Are you saying there should be a constant rate of change? If you're a programmer, you should really try coding on Visual Studio 2012/.NET/F# and C#. It's a breeze. Very smooth compared to Eclipse.

How is it compared to IntelliJ?

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#32

Post by josteink » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 9:20 AM UTC

23arboo wrote: post #24

tempestn wrote: post #12

This piece seems pretty spot-on all around. That said, I don't know anything about Mr. Nadella, but I have spent a significant chunk of time trying to use the Bing API from the Azure market, as well as competing products from Yahoo and Google. I found the Microsoft API to be significantly behind both competitors in features, performance, documentation, terms of use, and price. Even with Yahoo BOSS using Bing's index,…

Speculation: Azure will get a decent priority now that Nadedlla is CEO. Azure has been playing catcup with aws for quite some time now.

Azure has been playing catcup with aws for quite some time now.

And it shows. A year ago I wouldn't even consider Azure as a platform. Now I'm starting to wonder if AWS is worth it.

They've been iterating like crazy.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#33

Post by jamespo » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 9:22 AM UTC

csmithuk wrote: post #25

acqq wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but I just can't believe you're real. Red Hat has the most stable (measued in the years of support without the change in the underlying technologies) OS configurations of all commercial offerings. What was that that you got better supported from Microsoft than from Red Hat? Specifics please.

Actually no. We get 13-14 years out of Microsoft offerings which is enough lead time for test, provisioning and an 8-10 year lifecycle. Plus due to overlap we have enough time to test v.next. With respect to support you get a very narrow configuration of supported software and hardware with RH. Keeping it rolling isn't as easy as it looks. The developer support is awful as well. Documentation is shitty,you're tied to…

Red Hat are taking steps to address the development software through "Software Collections", but JDK wise I don't see how that differs from windows?

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#34

Post by simonh » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 9:23 AM UTC

beloch wrote: post #28

What I find surprising is that, in the process of writing a historical review on Microsoft, anyone would ignore the fact that MS has repeatedly identified areas of profit, moved in, failed spectacularly, iterated aggressively, and ultimately become dominant, at least for a time. e.g. What killed Netscape? Microsoft's surface tablets are signs of big things to come. They're currently too expensive for what they are, b…

MS currently has an advantage in digitizer features on the Surface. But if a swing like this was going to happen, for the reasons you suggest, it would be happening right now.

Furthermore, even if such a swing does begin, you are assuming two things: Firstly that Apple will not respond effectively to MS establishing such a niche. Secondly that Android will also fail to compete for that niche.

The problem is that all the innovative new mobile creativity apps are currently coming out on iOS, digitizer tech or no. Apple has never subscribed to the creation/consumption world view, or even used the term 'consumption' to my knowledge. It sounds like something people died from in the Middle Ages. Their flagship day one launch apps for the iPad were all creative apps - Garageband, Pages, etc.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#35

Post by smokinn » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 9:24 AM UTC

onli wrote: post #10

> The world is in need of high-quality, reliable, developer-friendly, trustworthy, privacy-guarding cloud computing platforms. That's the thing for me: That doesn't work anymore. Privacy-Guarding destroys that. Normally, I would fully agree that this is a good vision for Microsoft, continuing to be on the Desktop (especially corporate), trying to be on other markets and failing mostly, but becoming a big cloud player…

What about recycling the "private cloud" into something actually useful?

Microsoft has amazing expertise into taking any computer a 3rd party provides and making it work with their software. What about providing "cloud services" that can be guaranteed to never exit your own corporate firewall? I imagine this is going to be a huge need in the near future. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it were a standard EU regular within 5 years.

This seems like an amazingly huge opportunity they could capitalize on. Become the standard software cloud solution of all software the way they they own email in the enterprise with exchange. Plenty of companies are large enough to own their own racks of virtualized servers and would pay good money to run well integrated Microsoft software on them.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#36

Post by csmithuk » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 9:27 AM UTC

gnaffle wrote: post #30

csmithuk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually no. We get 13-14 years out of Microsoft offerings which is enough lead time for test, provisioning and an 8-10 year lifecycle. Plus due to overlap we have enough time to test v.next. With respect to support you get a very narrow configuration of supported software and hardware with RH. Keeping it rolling isn't as easy as it looks. The developer support is awful as well. Documentation is shitty,you're tied to…

How are you any more tied to old JDK versions on Linux, compared to Microsoft? Also, I'm curious to what requirements you have that makes it OK to upgrade hardware and apply service packs and Java updates, but not to do OS release upgrades on Linux?

There are no supported versions by RedHat other than that which ships with the OS distribution. To get a recent JDK we then have to deal with Oracle as well and the cost goes right up. With the CLR and Microsoft there is one point of call under one contract. Plus no one wants to deal with Oracle.

Hardware isn't upgraded. It's replaced when it fails. It's easier to get hardware off the shelf that is certified for Windows Server (any version!). This is particularly true on the tail end of a product lifecycle.

The OS upgrades in Linux are usually utterly painful (Debian included). If you go with CentOS/RH, you have to do this every 5 years at average due to the API churn in Linux distributions[1]. You need to get your developers on there ASAP. With Service Packs and Java updates, a simple test cycle will suffice as they don't break the API contracts. They promise this and deliver.

[1] The kernel syscall interface is fine but major versions of Apache, glibc and compilers and anything even vaguely related to client-side stuff is a PITA.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#37

Post by gnaffle » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 9:28 AM UTC

23arboo wrote: post #22

temuze wrote: post #3

> Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world. The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device. That sounds more like Google to me!

Microsoft can can do in the enterprise, they are entrenched pretty deep!

Microsofts enterprise business is founded on the fact that everyone runs Windows, so no, that doesn't work well in the long run (ask Novell).

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#38

Post by csmithuk » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 9:28 AM UTC

jamespo wrote: post #33

csmithuk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually no. We get 13-14 years out of Microsoft offerings which is enough lead time for test, provisioning and an 8-10 year lifecycle. Plus due to overlap we have enough time to test v.next. With respect to support you get a very narrow configuration of supported software and hardware with RH. Keeping it rolling isn't as easy as it looks. The developer support is awful as well. Documentation is shitty,you're tied to…

Red Hat are taking steps to address the development software through "Software Collections", but JDK wise I don't see how that differs from windows?

You're right. But Windows has CLR which is integrated in Microsoft's support offerings.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#39

Post by josteink » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 9:29 AM UTC

no_gravity wrote: post #23

"Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world" There already are servers sending data everywhere. For example the servers of Google, Facebook and Wikipedia. How would Microsoft convince those guys or new companies to get rid of their solid, free and open stack and pay for Microsofts closed stuff? This is much different from "A computer on every desk and in every home running Micros…

How would Microsoft convince those guys or new companies to get rid of their solid, free and open stack and pay for Microsofts closed stuff?

They don't have to. They can keep on using their free and open stack, but moving to Azure instead of using Google compute engine or AWS.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#40

Post by netnichols » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 9:40 AM UTC

gnaffle wrote: post #17

tempestn wrote: post #12

This piece seems pretty spot-on all around. That said, I don't know anything about Mr. Nadella, but I have spent a significant chunk of time trying to use the Bing API from the Azure market, as well as competing products from Yahoo and Google. I found the Microsoft API to be significantly behind both competitors in features, performance, documentation, terms of use, and price. Even with Yahoo BOSS using Bing's index,…

I think it is spot-on right up to the conclusion, which I disagree with. > The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device. I don't see how Gruber can come to this conclusion unless he has suddenly changed position and thinks the open web will eventually win out over native apps. The problem, of course, is that for a company that wants to be Microsofts size, they _need_ to own the platfo…

> I don't see how Gruber can come to this conclusion unless he has suddenly changed position and thinks the open web will eventually win out over native apps.

How does his statement have anything to do with 'open web' vs. native apps? How many native apps do you use that have no 'cloud' component whatsoever?

Gruber isn't talking about Microsoft making a bunch of web applications, he's talking about them becoming a key player in the data services arena, i.e. offering a platform for providing data to both web applications and native applications alike.