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Microsoft is Dead (2007)

paulgraham.com

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Re: Microsoft is Dead (2007)

#181

Post by al2o3cr »

mbruce wrote: post #91
blntechie wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't control panel decently organized even in Windows XP SP2? Honestly, I don't see much difference between Mac's System Preferences now and Control Panel of Windows XP era. Searching these settings sucked in XP but Windows 7 resolved that. Windows 8 is one thing I can agree with you. It made using the PC unnecessarily hard for mouse and keyboard users.

One can classify sw development companies into dev centric or UI centric. Microsoft is the former. Tivo, Apple ( more to apple than this though) and some others are User centric. It refers to where the seat of power is in the company which defines strategy and envelops products. A dev centric company like Microsoft does not become User centric by hiring a UI designer.. Hence, Windows UI will always be sub par. USer c…

Something tells me the COM-wranglers out there might quibble with the "dev-centric" label. :)

Re: Microsoft is Dead (2007)

#182

Post by tanzam75 »

gnaffle wrote: post #178
tanzam75 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's simply astonishing that the "Vista shut down menu" meme continues to come up after all this time, and that the wrong lessons continue to be drawn. Between Windows Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft changed exactly one thing. They replaced the two icons with a single text label that said "Shut down." Nothing else changed. There was still a fly-out menu. There were still half-a-dozen options that users vaguely underst…

I agree that the main problem wasn't the options, but I do think that some of options are were unnecessary (the distinction between hibernate and sleep, for instance). The real lesson is that design by comittee over years trying to reach a compromise will often result in terrible design decisions. It wouldn't even have been a problem if they had kept the icon, if it just did what people expected it to! (shutdown, not…

I agree that the default was wrong in Windows Vista. I disagree that an icon would've been OK -- as Joel Spolsky pointed out, he had no idea what the icon would do. That's why he opened the fly-out menu, and that's why a lot of users opened the fly-out menu. Where they got confused.

I just found it frustrating that the tech press echo chamber ganged up on the fly-out menu, when that wasn't even the problem. The fact that Microsoft eliminated the complaints with just one button in Windows 7 shows exactly where the actual problem was.

Re: Microsoft is Dead (2007)

#183

Post by dspeyer »

primitivesuave wrote: post #18

The most common form of Microsoft-hate usually centers around how a company of such gargantuan size makes such gargantuan fuck-ups. But this is to be expected of companies of gargantuan size, and is certainly not limited to Microsoft alone (although recently they've had more than their fair share). My qualm with Microsoft is all the little things that they let slip through. Little things like having a control panel w…

> Is it really possible that not a single person at Microsoft tried changing a setting on their Windows machine and realized how difficult it was to even find the setting?

When I was at MS, we usually used the command line to change settings. It was horrible. It used GUIDs. Literally GUIDs. But it was a stable target. You didn't have to relearn it every nightly build. And you could script it.

We sort of assumed that if the control panel would sit still we could learn it easily enough, but that assumption couldn't be tested until it was too late.

Re: Microsoft is Dead (2007)

#184

Post by tshile »

saturdaysaint wrote: post #171
tshile wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, he was right, people that design software no longer had to worry about Microsoft. Except that it's 2014 and Microsoft is still relevant. The techy bubble on the west coast may all be using Mac's but microsoft products can still be found throughout the rest of the world. I like PG, and love his essays, but this one was just bad. I'm not even talking about his prediction, just the way he puts it out there. It's j…

How are they still relevant exactly? They're doing some interesting things, but I know dozens of people that rarely if ever touch an MS operating system every day, unthinkable a decade ago, and they're missing out on nothing. I can't think of a must use piece of software that launched on an MS platform (outside Xbox) in the last 5 years. That puts them pretty low on the relevance totem pole.

Your comment is the exact same as PG's - because you don't see it with your own two eyes it must not exist.

There are millions of people that are working off of microsoft exchange servers, using websites hosted by microsoft IIS, involved in environments managed using active directory, work collaboratively with others using sharepoint (there's lots of job opportunities as a shairpoint dev, by the way), .NET developers, people working with Azure and Office 365, use SQL server databases, using microsoft office products, having their traffic pass through UAG systems, and so and so on. In addition they're one of the leading tech companies when it comes to helping fight spam and cyber crime activity (when I say one of the leading tech companies I mean one of the leading tech companies that's mission statement isn't to mainly fight spam and cyber crime.)

Hyper-v, file shares, remote desktop gateway and services, the list of services microsoft has its hands in is very, very long. Microsoft does a whole hell of a lot more than just produce an office suite and an operating system.

Just because you're personally surrounded by linux and mac users doesn't mean microsoft is irrelevant. It just means your scope on the world is narrow enough that it's out of your personal bubble.

There's nothing wrong with that, as long as you recognize it for what it is - your own little world that is not a perfect representation of the real world.

If the premise is that Microsoft no longer has a death grip on the technology sector, with the ability to throw its weight in whatever direction it pleases whenever it pleases, then I would agree with that.

Dead? Not even close.

(But they may be dead in the not too distant future. i do not have a crystal ball. but right now they're hardly dead, 7 years after PG's essay.)

Re: Microsoft is Dead (2007)

#185

Post by lurkinggrue »

gnaffle wrote: post #114
primitivesuave wrote: post #18

The most common form of Microsoft-hate usually centers around how a company of such gargantuan size makes such gargantuan fuck-ups. But this is to be expected of companies of gargantuan size, and is certainly not limited to Microsoft alone (although recently they've had more than their fair share). My qualm with Microsoft is all the little things that they let slip through. Little things like having a control panel w…

Here's a good story about the shutdown menu in Vista, and how it came to be: Original rant by Joel Spolsky: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html Answer from the guy working on the shutdown menu: http://moishelettvin.blogspot.no/2006/11/windows-shutdown-cr... Another response from the guy that implemented the OSX shutdown menu: http://arno.org/arnotify/2006/11/the-design-of-the-mac-os-x-...

"This highlights a style of software design shared by Microsoft and the open source movement, in both cases driven by a desire for consensus and for "Making Everybody Happy," but it's based on the misconceived notion that lots of choices make people happy, which we really need to rethink."

Unfortunately we are down this road and I'm unhappy with software taking away features I use. I can't wait for chrome to be one white screen with no buttons.

Re: Microsoft is Dead (2007)

#186

Post by lurkinggrue »

gnaffle wrote: post #178
tanzam75 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's simply astonishing that the "Vista shut down menu" meme continues to come up after all this time, and that the wrong lessons continue to be drawn. Between Windows Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft changed exactly one thing. They replaced the two icons with a single text label that said "Shut down." Nothing else changed. There was still a fly-out menu. There were still half-a-dozen options that users vaguely underst…

I agree that the main problem wasn't the options, but I do think that some of options are were unnecessary (the distinction between hibernate and sleep, for instance). The real lesson is that design by comittee over years trying to reach a compromise will often result in terrible design decisions. It wouldn't even have been a problem if they had kept the icon, if it just did what people expected it to! (shutdown, not…

Sometimes a designers experience does not match other people. Example is I use reboot and logout far more than I use Shutdown

Re: Microsoft is Dead (2007)

#187

Post by hiharryhere »

schuke wrote: post #78
beefman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The critical characteristic of the desktop here isn't its use of native code. It's more the local filesystem. Many mobile apps use network data. From this perspective they have more in common with web apps than with desktop software. Despite this, I'm inclined to agree that the web is threatened. The desktop may be defined by local files but the web wasn't defined by remote ones. It was more about the culture. More a…

> It's not that people who learned to compute on the desktop are abandoning it for mobile. It's that most people couldn't handle desktop computing in the first place. Totally agree. For most everyday scenarios, using Windows is like flying a Boeing 737 for your daily commute: it's a huge overkill, requiring way too much setting up and maintenance and when you incidentally touches one switch the whole thing stops work…

I dig this analogy. Since moving my folks over to iPads, I get emails from them daily, photos shared with me and zero distressed support calls.

Re: Microsoft is Dead (2007)

#188

Post by us0r »

Thiz wrote: post #137

Microsoft wanted to destroy the web, and they lost. They tried to destroy linux, and they lost. They tried to destroy apple, and they lost. They tried to destroy android, and they lost. That's why we, web, linux, apple, android fans hate microsoft with a passion. While they succeeded in destroying so many other companies and technologies, we were there and we fought those fights. We never forget.

"They tried to destroy android, and they lost."

Actually they make more on Android then Google. I would call that #winning.

Re: Microsoft is Dead (2007)

#189

Post by headgasket »

billyhoffman wrote: post #160
headgasket wrote: post #150

C# and .net killed MS. The same virus killed Sun and will kill oracle. Technologies that try to isolate the coder from the machine by creating a funnelled dumbed-down common interface are inherently flawed because the HW evolves faster than the software.

You are seriously saying somehow that languages which abstract away hardware details are bad? "Assembly? Bad! you should know the instructions op codes." "C? Bad! you should know assembly! What are you trying to do? Write an operating system that is portable beyond the PDP architecture?" "Java? Bad! You should manage your own memory! And the STL should be good enough for anyone." Abstraction, by reducing complexity o…

Sorry I did not formulate my though properly. Let's try this:

Companies that try to use a language/platform combination to isolate the coder from the machine by creating a funnelled dumbed-down common interface and executing environment are pursuing a loose-loose path.

1. the HW evolves faster than the software 2. the coder wants to hack the most out of the hardware 3. the OpenSource community is a paradigm shift for software companies, you can't put the cat back in the bag.

Cheers

Re: Microsoft is Dead (2007)

#190

Post by spaceborn »

TwoBit wrote: post #94
spaceborn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the article's credibility is killed by the use of the word dead How? The author clearly doesn't mean "out of business" when he says "dead". He means that what Microsoft once was, or what it represented, is dead. The idea once conveyed by the word "Microsoft" is dead. It's not sensationalist clickbait, it's a metaphor.

Well he may mean that, but that's not what comes to mind when most people think of the word "dead." And picking that particular word to use as liberally as he does comes across as overly dramatic.

I suspect this article may have been written for an audience with a collectively higher level of reading comprehension than what you describe.
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