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Microsoft, Past and Future

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Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#111

Post by _ea1k »

scholia wrote: post #104
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's one way to spin a monopolist giving away a bundled product for free and reducing the incentive for others to enter that market.

Everybody else was adding a free browser to their OS and it was obviously going to become a requirement, as it is today with smartphones. It would have been foolish for Microsoft not to do it, and it was foolish of the US DoJ to think otherwise. Otherwise, Microsoft rewrote the browser so that the components could be used by other programs and by outside developers, so it wasn't a bundled product, it was integrated i…

I won't entirely blame the legal interference for Microsoft's software design in IE.

It would have been possible to keep the core HTML components without shipping a functional browser frontend.

It would have also been possible to make these core HTML components versionable, so that a given Windows version could offer multiple versions of IE at the same time.

The fact that they failed to do both of those things wasn't the fault of the courts. Some of their design decisions were explicitly made to make the browser itself appear more integral than it really was.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#112

Post by jrs99 »

whitef0x wrote: post #57
k-mcgrady wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "Yeah, so MS might dominate the content-creation/student/artist tablet niche" I doubt it. A keyboard alone isn't enough to win that market, great software is. Look at the content creation apps available on iOS - iMovie, Garageband, iWork, Paper, Brushes, DM1, Amplitube, Notion. It's going to be hard to catch up with that. They are built for touch. The people using them don't need a keyboard. A keyboard isn't reall…

I would like to add to that, quality of design that third party apps and native apps on Mac OSX seem to have (in general) is much higher; this brings the more 'artsy' and student vertical onboard. UI/UX has obviously been a large part of OSX for quite sometime, which is obviously aided by Apple's minimalist design philosophy. Moving from OSX to Windows I have noticed a large lack of ease of use and good UX flows in a…

a while back i noticed this when i moved from windows to osx. and still i feel a little (not as much though) that osx is not as "fluid" and has less "finesse" and that the UI in osx is not well designed, especially things like buttons, menu, placement of items, and even the look of the buttons, the dock, etc.

It seemed possible that it was due to my getting used to Windows and not being familiar with os x.

A part of me though thinks that Windows UI is in fact superior to OSX ui, and that OSX has a somewhat amateurish feel to it. If I ran a design-centric company and my OS looked like that for a decade, it would bother me strongly.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#113

Post by forgotAgain »

Microsoft's future will be determined by its past profit margins. To maintain it's historical margins it must succeed with devices. Cloud services are a low margin business. Their online applications will never generate the profits that their packaged software has. The fact that they are losing money on every Surface they sell is not encouraging.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#114

Post by matwood »

72deluxe wrote: post #54
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…

I hadn't thought about it but you're very correct about documentation for development. Doxygen generated pages are one thing, but the MSDN is another and it's excellent. Well done Microsoft.

I worked with MS technologies for years at a previous job and you are right that MSDN docs are the best out there. Javadoc, doxygen, etc... all pale in comparison. Now that I mostly work with OSS technologies I usually just read the source and any comments/docs that happen to be included.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#115

Post by csmithuk »

acqq wrote: post #79
csmithuk wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I complain that Red Hat support a bastardised version of Java (and Eclipse) that ships with their OS meaning that for the sake of sanity you have to deal with Oracle and RH to get a cohesive platform versus the single vendor. Subtly different.

Isn't the "bastardized version" of Java actually the "Java as supported by Red Hat"? If you don't want RH's support but still want some support of course you have to depend on some other company. And the reason why you consider RH's version "bastardized" is, I assume, that it's not "the newest and latest." Which is the main argument with which we started: that RH intentionally doesn't push "newest" all the time in or…

Not really. They barely support it, it's half integrated into RPM and is impossibly difficult to persuade a lot of stuff to work with it due to system dependencies on certain jars. You end up having to pull a full JDK from somewhere else which isn't supported.

If you look at the CLR there are only two major current versions: 2.0 and 4.0 and perfect legacy compat and wide support across all windows server versions.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#116

Post by draegtun »

72deluxe wrote: post #56
csmithuk wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Wind…

I had to upgrade a machine running an old version of Slackware on the 2.0 kernel. Yes, from about 1999 I think. It was impossible to get that Perl web system running on anything modern without massive pain. For the wonderful bliss of Linux-land, at least with Windows you know that something written 20 years ago will probably still work. (Yes, I know - they shouldn't have written it in Perl)

If it had been written in some other scripting language then I'd guess you would have had even more issues upgrading! Because Perl, despite all its supposed warts & bad image, remains highly backward compatible.

NB. The biggest issues I've seen in upgrading are modules that use C libraries (unfortunately things do change over time!).

As an example I'm still running a Perl web system & data munging backend that I wrote back in 2001 with only minor tweaks over the years for new/modern systems.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#117

Post by bane »

"Steve Fucking Jobs said that. He was exactly right."

Well it's good he said that, otherwise Gruber would twist himself into a knot trying to argue otherwise.

Though this is interesting

"If we include all iOS and Android devices the “computing” market in Q3 2008 was 92 million units of which Windows was 90%, whereas in Q3 2013 it was 269 million units of which Windows was 32%."

Actually doing the math, Q3 2008, Microsoft was about 83 million units. Q3 2013 Microsoft had just over 86 million units. So I guess it's still a growth? I'm sorry, revealing the actual numbers punctures Gruber's thesis. Rude of me.

I mean, nobody really conflated these categories when it was just Blackberries and video game consoles. Do I get to add Xbox units to this too?

Of course Microsoft missed the mobile boat and it's largely Ballmer's fault. That's well known and this kind of weird conflated analysis isn't insightful or interesting.

"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."

Ugh, please no. Data transmission has been hopelessly commoditized and I really don't want an Apple or a Microsoft inserting themselves into a low margin game and trying to figure out how to make it a high margin one.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#118

Post by ancarda »

6d0debc071 wrote: post #110
ancarda wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Web is/was a threat to Microsoft because if everything is a web app you suddenly have no platform lock in. I think Google foresaw this, or is at-least betting on it, with Chrome OS. Why would anyone use Windows; an expensive, proprietary, bug ridden OS when they can use Linux or Chrome OS to perform the same tasks?

> Why would anyone use Windows; an expensive, proprietary, bug ridden OS when they can use Linux or Chrome OS to perform the same tasks? Because for most people, for most setups, for most use cases, it just works. Expensive? It's rolled into the price of the PC they bought. Proprietary? They don't care. Bug ridden? I rarely see a Windows machine crash these days. Even the years old XP machines I deal with sometimes,…

>It's rolled into the price of the PC they bought

Are updates included for free? If not, it could be more expensive in the long run.

>I rarely see a Windows machine crash these days

I wasn't just talking about Windows and besides, not all bugs are visible -- they might manifest themselves as security holes. Companies (should) care a lot about security, if they did, I'm sure they'd be more interested in OSS.

I think I'm trying to reason with HN and not the average Windows dependent company. How many of us have relatives using Linux or Chrome OS? Very few? That could change down the line.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#119

Post by higherpurpose »

The idea that Microsoft would be "privacy-guarding" is completely laughable to me, when they have so much poorer security than even Google right now, and Google already has major privacy issues on its own. Microsoft would be one of the last company to trust with my privacy. At least when Google says they aren't giving direct access to their servers to the governments I somewhat believe them, but I wouldn't believe Microsoft at all if they said that to me. They've had too many Skype privacy blunders to trust them on this.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#120

Post by ZeroGravitas »

josefresco wrote: post #99
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's one way to spin a monopolist giving away a bundled product for free and reducing the incentive for others to enter that market.

Did you even use Netscape in the 90's? While most of the non tech loved it's bloated and "friendly" interface, the tech crowd I ran in used IE because it was lean, fast and didn't try to be some sort of "suite" that took over your PC. Sure MS leveraged their dominance in the OS world with brutal effectiveness, but Netscape was far from the ideal browser. In fact, Opera was our "Firefox" of the time as it could fit on…

Did you use all the hypothetical 90s browsers that never existed because there was "a monopolist giving away a bundled product for free and reducing the incentive for others to enter that market"?

No? Well that's my point.

And IE sucked from the very beginning, each and every time Microsoft could get away with it sucking due to lack of competition. Where was the spell checker? Clearly veto'd by the Office team, till IE10.

The "most innovative" browser took till 2012 to figure out that people wanted to spell check what they typed into a browser, or they intentionally hobbled their industry-crushing browser to benefit their older cash-cows. Either way it's bad. It had to be just good enough to starve the competition (and often it was easier to do that with "innovations" in bundling, lock-in and other dirty tricks than it was with features, speed or security) and then they left it to rot, when we had no other options to turn to and it took a concerted community effort to make many websites even bother to support any browser other than IE.

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