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Microsoft, Past and Future

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Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#191

Post by 72deluxe »

acqq wrote: post #122
draegtun wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it was renamed modules between versions? I never got to the bottom of it. In fact, I aborted migrating it and ended up leaving it running, but instead virtualised the machine (that was fun!)

If I had known what I was doing with Perl, it might have been better. I was a bit harsh on Perl, apologies. But it still stands that migration on Linux boxes isn't massively easy or fun (not that Windows is either)

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#192

Post by zimpenfish »

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…

Out of pure academic interest, how many New Yorker covers have been drawn on the "content creation" Surface tablets compared with the "mere consumption" iOS devices? Or how many world renowned artists are having exhibitions of their Surface art vs their iOS art?

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#193

Post by ZeroGravitas »

sliverstorm wrote: post #142
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 really liked the OS but I had nothing but trouble with the [phone] hardware This tells us what, exactly, about the Surface Pro?

It was more a free association but since you ask:

That even someone directly targeted by Surface "professional-stylus-user" demographic, and who was willing to try Windows Phone, now has one foot in another ecosystem that also offers a quite popular tablet? Surface (and PC Gaming) wasn't enough to keep him on Windows Phone, but maybe iPhone will be enough to pull him to iPad (even if it's not as good for some tasks, but better for others e.g. gaming) if the two competing attempts at lock-in clash (and they will, because lock-in is lock-out if you're on the wrong side of it).

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#194

Post by ZeroGravitas »

mattmanser wrote: post #109
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if your data and apps are on that device you carry about, and not in the cloud so you can access them from both at once. And they just made the cloud guy CEO so he might be thought to favour that way.

Enterprise don't have their stuff in the cloud.

Then maybe Microsoft shouldn't have promoted the guy in charge of Azure (in their own word's "Microsoft's Cloud Platform") to CEO.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#195

Post by ZeroGravitas »

josefresco wrote: post #170
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Firefox added spell check in Oct of 2006 (according to Wikipedia) Nitpicking yes but the modern innovation in browsers didn't start in 2012 with Chrome more like 2005 with the first stable versions of FF. I agree Chrome put the whole market into another fenzy but you clearly missed the years prior when FF was the shit. Also, MS didn't make IE "just good enough" they integrated the browser into the entire OS! Good or…

I'm not sure why you think I'm such a Chrome fan, especially as nearly every other reply assumes that if I don't like monopolists interfering with the browser market to prop up their obsolete platforms I must be a Netscape fanboy.

Though, I have used Firefox since the days of Phoenix, back when some of the most important bugs where for evangelists to convince important websites to support anything other than IE (often just IE on Windows, since the Mac version was different, technically better, yet worse because lots of things didn't work on it). Presumably this is why everyone else thought IE was "better" since most of the web was written for it, and it alone.

But there were other browsers, remnants of a once thriving, competitive market, e.g. Omniweb for Mac OSX had inline spell checking in about 2000 (might even have had it back on NeXT). Safari launched with it in 2003 I think. There were plugins for IE and Firefox from around the same time. Firefox was held back because the Netscape spell-checking code (for the email component) was licenced so that was something that got ripped out when Mozilla was launched. Even so, they beat Microsoft (which had more money than God and had already written the most used spell checker on the planet) by 6 whole years!

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#196

Post by tolmasky »

angersock wrote: post #129
DrJokepu wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Another important realization is how many games are now being written in C# thanks to Mono/Unity, and on iOS no less! Arguably they may not be getting a "direct benefit" from this, but for example I would have never imagined ever being proficient in C#, yet here I am now with this skillset and fluent in a tech I would have otherwise had no interest in whatsoever. Because of this, I now actually have a favorable opinion of .NET, and while not having a particular interest in enterprise, would certainly be more likely to use these technologies for it if for whatever reason chance took me to that space.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#197

Post by hnisnotreddit »

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 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.

Apparently, You never participated in the IE4/Nashville beta. Shortly before Windows 98 took the world by storm, Microsoft unleashed a new Beta of Internet Explorer for all the people who drank the kool-aid of Dynamic HTML that was being marketed at the time. One of the "features" of the Nashville beta was the HTML-ifying of the desktop and file manager. Now, everyone that's used Windows since knows that you can right-click on the desktop, and hide desktop icons. This was considered a feature in the Nashville beta, because it gave more screen real estate to .htm files you could create for every folder, including Desktop. Before uninstalling the (crashy) beta, I spent a good 2 days with all sorts of spinning .GIF files on my desktop thinking I was the coolest person ever. Eventually, I realized my PC was performing at approximately half it's normal speed, exhibiting symtoms such as Explorer taking 45 seconds (I benchmarked) to render C:\WINDOWS\system32 with HTML, and did a full Win95 reinstall in order to remove the tendrils Nashville inserted.

I'd say IE4 was when it "started sucking", myself.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#198

Post by hnisnotreddit »

jimbokun wrote: post #171
scholia wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Everybody else was adding a free browser to their OS" Who else had an OS that mattered? Apple had single digit share, maybe BeOS? Sun? NeXT?

KDE 1.0 did have Konqueror/KTHML built-in, so maybe this was the example the grandparent was looking for.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#199

Post by Guvante »

DrJokepu wrote: post #135
Guvante wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you are saying the Xbox was never dominant. I don't think anyone could see the 360 doing any better. .NET is doing extremely well given the alternatives. Azure is picking up speed fairly well too.

I don't think Xbox ever dominated the console market the way Windows dominated the desktop operating system market or Office dominated the office application suite market. Not even close. Same goes for .NET. These are clearly very successful products but are very far from "dominating the market".

Different uses of the word. 30% market share is dominating in my book, and I believe both of those do that in their markets.

Windows is on a whole different level, you cannot compare anything to it because nothing comes close. 90% market share is practically impossible.

Re: Microsoft, Past and Future

#200

Post by codeulike »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #86
codeulike wrote: post #67

I think the Windows 8 gamble could still pay off. We're starting to see 8" tablets that run full Windows. Give it 12 months and the 8" form factor will be powerful enough to cover a lot of enterprise needs. 8" tablet + docking station is a very compelling way to get work done.

Only if your data and apps are on that device you carry about, and not in the cloud so you can access them from both at once. And they just made the cloud guy CEO so he might be thought to favour that way.

Even if everythings in the cloud, its still sometimes convenient to carry one device around - current state of work, open tabs, half written emails etc
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