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Microsoft, Past and Future

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Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#121

Post by zerohm »

csmithuk wrote: post #6
stormbrew wrote: post #4

> No company today has reach or influence anything like what Microsoft had during the golden era of the PC. Not Apple, not Google, and not Microsoft itself. I think Google is pretty close, really. They obviously don't have an operating system for laptops or desktops that everyone uses, but using a computer without Google products is something that people just don't really do anymore. iOS, Android, OSX, Windows, Ubunt…

using a computer without Google products is something that people just don't really do anymore This is rather naive. In certain circles yes but by far the majority of people use just their search.

This is rather naive. In certain circles yes but by far the majority of people use just their search.

So you are saying a vast majority of people don't use gmail, google maps, or youtube. I'd venture to guess a vast majority of people use at least one of those things on a regular basis.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#122

Post by acqq »

draegtun wrote: post #116
72deluxe wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wrot…

Exactly. Perl 5 exists since 1994, so it's probably Perl 5 code there which needs probably little to no changes to run even today on the latest 5.x interpreter. I don't understand what were the issues that 72deluxe faced.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#123

Post by dasil003 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #95
dasil003 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it was the most innovative browser from '95 to '99.

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.

No it's not, those two things are completely independent. I know this because I was a web designer at the time and I remember. CSS 1.0 was largely pushed forward by Internet Explorer which I believe had cursory support in v3 and support dwarfing what Netscape was feebly able to role out in v4 browsers.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#124

Post by pmelendez »

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…

>"Moving from OSX to Windows I have noticed a large lack of ease of use and good UX flows in a lot of third party apps."

I would say that is because you were really used to OSX. I was the other way around and really dislike the whole OSX UI experience.

I think it is just a bias based on our previous experience. Right now after moving freely between OSX, Ubuntu and Windows at different jobs for the last 5 years, I still prefer the UI experience of Windows (I only wish Windows would have a command line similar to Linux's one and it would be perfect)

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#125

Post by pmelendez »

simonh wrote: post #59
dingle_thunk wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple were not the first company to create a phone with navigation features. Surface is a tablet which can also run Photoshop, AutoCAD, MATLAB, Visual Studio, Flash, and whatever other weird legacy apps are kicking around. It can multitask. It has a proper digitizer. It has a kickstand and a very innovative cover. Yes it's not a laptop. No it doesn't have the Android store. That doesn't mean it's useless. (P.S. just…

You had me interested right up until Flash. Really? Adobe and Autodesk all have multiple apps on iOS. How many Metro apps have they released? That's the metric that counts when we're talking about tablets. All the software you're talking about only really works in desktop/laptop mode with a mouse. As long as that is true, MS will be an also-ran in the tablet space.

>"Adobe and Autodesk all have multiple apps on iOS"

They don't really compare well, iOS versions lack a lot of important features in comparison with the windows ones.

>" How many Metro apps have they released? "

I believe the point is they don't need to, they desktop software runs just fine.

>"All the software you're talking about only really works in desktop/laptop mode with a mouse"

Not really, all those apps actually benefits from the use of a stylus (actually artist prefer that more than using a mouse) and that's something that you can't really do with an iPad (I own an Ipad2 and I had really tried hard to do anything productive on it without luck)

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#126

Post by Zigurd »

Microsoft's malaise is part real, and part illusion:

The illusion part is mostly obvious. Microsoft makes oceans of money. Heck of a malaise, right?

The real part of the malaise stems from Microsoft not being objective about itself. For example, Microsoft could easily make vastly more money if they looked at Windows as a legacy product and raised prices on the people who really need Windows.

Looking at Windows as a Product of the Future means they won't actually ship any Products of the Future, because that might contradict the dogma. That's a real malaise. That's what keeps the great ideas of the very smart people at Microsoft funneled through Windows product management. The new products that get through are mostly reactive, like IE, MSN, Bing Search, Bing Maps, etc.

The malaise is even more basic than "Should Microsoft be a consumer and enterprise business?" Dividing Microsoft that way would probably help, but fail to see the underlying cause, and that would leave the consumer part vulnerable to a continuation of what ails it now.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#127

Post by pmelendez »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #84
klipt wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What problem do Surface tablets solve? Art problems, apparently. Gabe of Penny Arcade seemed pretty positive about the Surface Pro: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/02/22/the-ms-surface-pro

He gave up on Windows phone after a year though: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2014/01/22/so-many-games1 "I made the switch back to an iphone recently after having a Windows phone for about a year. I really liked the OS but I had nothing but trouble with the hardware. I went through three different handsets and all of them ended up failing on me. Eventually I gave up and just bought an iPhone 5c. I have to say that aft…

>"I think I had managed to convince myself that the Windows app store was pretty solid. Jesus Christ was I wrong."

True, but keep in mind only refers to games in that article, which is hands down the stronger point of the app store. I don't play games any more and I hardly miss anything from iOS that doesn't exist in the Windows Phone Store.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#128

Post by berkut »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #95
dasil003 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it was the most innovative browser from '95 to '99.

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.

Netscape was a buggy piece of software back then, and when IE 4 and IE5 came out they were a breath of fresh air for the general user.

This was mostly back in the 28.8 and 56.6k modem days, and Netscape's caching of content was a joke:

Resize Netscape's window and what does it do? It would block (single thread) and re-download the content (HTML, images) instead of using the stuff in its cache. You could wait 30 secs before you were reading your page again. IE would instantly (well, disk cache and then re-render) redraw the page - on most non-heavy pages, you could interactively resize the window with no issues.

Netscape also inconsistently progressively downloaded content - something IE could do very well, making for a much smoother browsing experience.

From a UI perspective on limited connections, the difference was like night and day.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#129

Post by angersock »

DrJokepu wrote: post #85
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…

> 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 ... When was the last time they have actually managed to pull this off? Maybe the Xbox? It was never dominant or an area of profit. .NET? Never dominant or a di…

Xbox, Xbox Live, Xbox 360... yeah, sorry, they pretty much perfectly illustrated that point.

Considering the early advantage Java had over C#, who seems to be laughing now? Business apps (you know, the boring 90% of software) seems overwhelmingly in favor of those two languages, with C# doing a bit better.

I think you're rather wrong.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#130

Post by boomzilla »

simonh wrote: post #34
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…

I think Android will always play catch up due to the fragmentation. Great quality apps take a lot refinement and it's near impossible to do when you have > 10 main devices to build/test against.

I think MS took the right approach with the Surface/Metro, they really needed to reconsolidate their consumer software/hardware stack to provide a good user experience.

"When you care enough about software, you'll make your own hardware" -- Alan Kay.

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