Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Microsoft really patched XP

nothingjustworks.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 59 posts

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#21

Post by nivla »

chasing wrote: post #15

"Long story short, it hurt their IE brand. MS no longer has to worry about reputation management for the XP brand, but they sure do for IE." Maybe I'm being a little off-topic, here, but I don't think it can be overstated how much Internet Explorer has destroyed Microsoft's brand. Apart from it being their largest consumer-facing brand apart from Windows (I think), I suspect that more people came into programming thr…

I wouldn't go as far back as 1995. I remember using Netscape those days and IE was considered the "hip & modern browser" just like we do now for Chrome. It was the best viewed in IE days and since there were no real standards or committee back then, everyone wrote their own feature set including MS. It did sure give us the annoying and tags but remember it also gave us Ajax. The shit only really blew when Firefox came into scene with a faster, secure and more progressive browser than IE.

Although, I personally feel if firefox doesn't catchup with the webkit browsers, we will soon be taking a full circle.

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#22

Post by kyberias »

There's this particular style of writing blog articles that assumes that the reader knows all about the context of the topic (here: Microsoft has patched something, have they?) and the relevance to something (what, really?). It's a 5 minute brain dump for the author himself.

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#23

Post by masklinn »

chasing wrote: post #15

"Long story short, it hurt their IE brand. MS no longer has to worry about reputation management for the XP brand, but they sure do for IE." Maybe I'm being a little off-topic, here, but I don't think it can be overstated how much Internet Explorer has destroyed Microsoft's brand. Apart from it being their largest consumer-facing brand apart from Windows (I think), I suspect that more people came into programming thr…

> the side that steamrolled competition with their lower-quality software

That's not true at all, IE was the superior alternative (and the "standard-following" browser) when it steamrolled Netscape. The problem came after that and was a great demonstration of what happens when you give the keys to the kingdom to a single profit-driven entity.

I doubt anybody's learned shit though, considering how fast people jumped to a Chrome-based monoculture and started arguing for the blessing of any and all Google proprietary dropping.

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#24

Post by ConceptJunkie »

nivla wrote: post #21
chasing wrote: post #15

"Long story short, it hurt their IE brand. MS no longer has to worry about reputation management for the XP brand, but they sure do for IE." Maybe I'm being a little off-topic, here, but I don't think it can be overstated how much Internet Explorer has destroyed Microsoft's brand. Apart from it being their largest consumer-facing brand apart from Windows (I think), I suspect that more people came into programming thr…

I wouldn't go as far back as 1995. I remember using Netscape those days and IE was considered the "hip & modern browser" just like we do now for Chrome. It was the best viewed in IE days and since there were no real standards or committee back then, everyone wrote their own feature set including MS. It did sure give us the annoying and tags but remember it also gave us Ajax. The shit only really blew when Firefox cam…

Yeah, MSIE was the best browser through version 4. The real reason Netscape lost the browser wars was that it became a huge bloated mess. Now it probably couldn't have beat IE regardless of how good it was because of Microsoft's monopolistic practices, but IE was the best browser for a few years in the mid-90s.

Of course, they then proceeded to let it stagnate for the better part of a decade...

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#25

Post by drblast »

Arainach wrote: post #20
chasing wrote: post #15

"Long story short, it hurt their IE brand. MS no longer has to worry about reputation management for the XP brand, but they sure do for IE." Maybe I'm being a little off-topic, here, but I don't think it can be overstated how much Internet Explorer has destroyed Microsoft's brand. Apart from it being their largest consumer-facing brand apart from Windows (I think), I suspect that more people came into programming thr…

Huh? I think you're off by a decade. Microsoft burned a lot of reputation by letting IE stagnate between 2001 (IE6) and 2011 (IE9), but at the time IE5 and IE6 shipped, they were legitimately faster, more compliant, and all-around better browsers than the Netscape versions of the time. I don't remember IE4 to comment on that, but there was certainly a time where IE was the best browser, both to users and developers.…

When IE4 came out there was no comparison. Netscape Communicator was already a bloated, unstable mess. IE4 was a giant leap forward at the time with a cohesive DOM.

And IE 5 brought xmlhttprequest, which became kinda popular.

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#26

Post by mnw21cam »

coldcode wrote: post #19
BlakePetersen wrote: post #4

Looks like their WP DB borked...

#1 on HN on Saturday was about 150/min sustained. That's not even 3 per second. What in WP makes this an issue, or is it just running WP on a shared instance on a wimpy server. Or is it some config in WP that you need to change?

Some web sites are limited by a fairly paltry network usage limit, not by throughput of the server. I don't think you can ever assume that a privately-held domain can cope with unaccustomed traffic, even if it is only 3 per second. Seems to be responding well now, anyway.

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#27

Post by jobsquad »

aninteger wrote: post #18
ezreal420 wrote: post #8

It's actually much simpler than you think. Microsoft have some big customers that pay them to maintain XP. Microsoft like making money, so they maintain XP for them. If these patches make it to general availability is up to Microsoft however, and it looks like they are still doing that.

Big customers like Target that would prefer to run their POS machines on Windows XP. So sad..

I assume these are Windows XP Embedded machines, which have support as far out as 2019[1].

[1]: http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-remember-some-xp-based-embedd...

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#28

Post by nandhp »

nivla wrote: post #21
chasing wrote: post #15

"Long story short, it hurt their IE brand. MS no longer has to worry about reputation management for the XP brand, but they sure do for IE." Maybe I'm being a little off-topic, here, but I don't think it can be overstated how much Internet Explorer has destroyed Microsoft's brand. Apart from it being their largest consumer-facing brand apart from Windows (I think), I suspect that more people came into programming thr…

I wouldn't go as far back as 1995. I remember using Netscape those days and IE was considered the "hip & modern browser" just like we do now for Chrome. It was the best viewed in IE days and since there were no real standards or committee back then, everyone wrote their own feature set including MS. It did sure give us the annoying and tags but remember it also gave us Ajax. The shit only really blew when Firefox cam…

>

was from Netscape. http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag

In related amusements: https://www.google.com/search?q=%3Cblink%3E+tag

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#29

Post by aleem »

Arainach wrote: post #20
chasing wrote: post #15

"Long story short, it hurt their IE brand. MS no longer has to worry about reputation management for the XP brand, but they sure do for IE." Maybe I'm being a little off-topic, here, but I don't think it can be overstated how much Internet Explorer has destroyed Microsoft's brand. Apart from it being their largest consumer-facing brand apart from Windows (I think), I suspect that more people came into programming thr…

Huh? I think you're off by a decade. Microsoft burned a lot of reputation by letting IE stagnate between 2001 (IE6) and 2011 (IE9), but at the time IE5 and IE6 shipped, they were legitimately faster, more compliant, and all-around better browsers than the Netscape versions of the time. I don't remember IE4 to comment on that, but there was certainly a time where IE was the best browser, both to users and developers.…

> They simply failed to keep innovating on it.

This was not a failure. Web browsers are a direct threat to the Windows platform and Microsoft consciously chose to drop out of the browser wars.

Re: Why Microsoft really patched XP

#30

Post by ConceptJunkie »

aninteger wrote: post #18
ezreal420 wrote: post #8

It's actually much simpler than you think. Microsoft have some big customers that pay them to maintain XP. Microsoft like making money, so they maintain XP for them. If these patches make it to general availability is up to Microsoft however, and it looks like they are still doing that.

Big customers like Target that would prefer to run their POS machines on Windows XP. So sad..

It's not sad at all when XP does the job and it would cost ridiculous amounts of money to update for no benefit. Now, waiting until the product fell out of support was a mistake, but Microsoft failed to produce a compelling upgrade for XP, period. Even Windows 7, which people generally like, doesn't run on the same hardware as well as XP if that hardware is older, which XP computers are going to be. And Windows 8? Aside from whatever bug fixes or improvements to the kernel might be involved, there is not one thing in Windows 8 that does not exist solely to serve Microsoft's interests, regardless of what customers want.

You can't blame MS when the customers don't see the value in upgrading, because from their point of view, there wasn't one. Now that XP has been sunsetted, everyone is worried, and there are a lot of companies that were very foolish in not moving to a viable and supported solution... except that in some cases, there literally isn't one.

There's a tremendous amount of legacy software out there that does the job and doesn't need a newer OS. A few years ago, one of my kids had use a portable brain wave monitor for a couple days, and was issued a device that he would be hooked up to, and guess what? It ran Windows 2000. I wasn't surprised at all. Windows 2000, as an OS, was one of the most solid releases Microsoft ever had (not necessarily the userland stuff, some of which was horrible, but the OS itself was fine).

By the way, the monitor found that everything was normal, my kid's just weird. ;-)

I would imagine those devices are probably still in use, and why not? Windows 2000 was a perfectly solid OS and was very secure on a non-networked device. XP didn't suddenly become not a good OS, Microsoft just pulled the plug without offering a good option for people with old hardware that didn't want to (or couldn't afford to) replace it.

Post reply on HN