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The Microsoft Empire Reboots

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Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#51

Post by dragonwriter »

david927 wrote: post #19
Nitramp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish someone would build a robust OS & GUI toolkit and ship it with developer tools... I think that's the web. The development that used to happen in VB6 & Delphi simply has migrated there, desktop apps from that segment are dead.

I think you're right, and it's a huge indictment. The web, as an application platform, is worse than VB ever was. Think about that for a moment: We've regressed from VB. The usual tradeoff is: easy to write, hard to extend and maintain. But the web is hard to write and hard to extend/maintain. We have some of the smartest people in the world in our industry, and evidently we're all idiots.

> But the web is hard to write and hard to extend/maintain.

The web is distributed and distributed is hard. The problem is that it is also what people want. We haven't regressed from VB6 -- we've advanced, but the demands of the market may have gotten more complicated faster than the popular tools have advanced in their ability to simplify them.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#52

Post by [deleted] »

Immortalin wrote: post #33
thomasahle wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Young programmers today tend to start with the Javascript family. There have probably never been languages with the same visual tools built in, rapidness of feedback and ease of sharing with friends.

Not true, I am a young programmer and I learned vb6 as my first language. It ran perfectly well on windows xp.

[deleted]

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#53

Post by scientist »

asdfologist wrote: post #20
scientist wrote: post #18

Microsoft seems to be a crumbling empire. They seem not even able to maintain their websites. Here is a message I got today from Microsoft Azure: "NO ACTION REQUIRED: We want to notify you of an upcoming maintenance operation to your Virtual Machines in West Europe, starting at 23:00 Saturday, October 18th UTC. Single instance virtual machine deployments that are not in availability sets will reboot once during this…

Yes, they sent out one broken link, and therefore they're a crumbling empire.

It's not the first time they send broken links. I've also received some in marketing emails from them. And it's not the only issue with Microsoft, but it's illustrative for how they are unable to manage the complexity of their stuff.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#54

Post by albertzeyer »

Immortalin wrote: post #15

Their greatest mistake(s) were the removal of visual basic 6 line of products and windows 10. Visual basic 6 is my first programming language and is probably still my favourite. The problem with lua and python and most other "beginner friendly" languages is that it is hard to do anything useful when u are just starting other than printing hello world to terminal. My intro to vb6 was creating a simple calculator, it w…

Note that Lazarus (http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/) (Delphi clone, based on Free Pascal) works today and is somewhat like that. And it's Open Source and cross-platform (works on Windows, Linux, MacOSX).

But maybe it's still not simple enough. Also, Object Pascal is probably harder to learn than VB6, esp for a beginner.

I also started mostly with VB6 and still somewhat miss it... Nowadays I mostly use C++ and Python on Linux or MacOSX and have tried many many other languages in the meanwhile. But I still miss VB6 somehow.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#55

Post by Joeri »

ptx wrote: post #49
Joeri wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that the present day version of delphi is the best it has ever been, and competitive feature wise with other platforms, but because it has a non-trivial price tag everyone pretends it's defunct. The reality is that the only programming languages which remain are either open source, or the default solution for a mass market OS, and all of them are free. You can't build an entry level dev solution like cla…

There is Free Pascal[0] and their Lazarus IDE[1], which are free, open source, cross-platform and largely Delphi-compatible – but they still don't seem to be taking the world by storm. [0] http://www.freepascal.org/ [1] http://lazarus.freepascal.org/

That is true, but I suspect it is due to Pascal style languages falling out of fashion more than anything else.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#56

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #46
ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear ya about VB6, I think that making it incompatible with VB.Net was a mistake. But ASP.NET webforms? Ugh. I maintain a slightly older website using webforms, and it feels like I'm in the web development dark ages. Its a literal ghetto of tech that is used no where else.

Have you ever been to corporate america? ASP.NET webforms is used heavily everywhere including but definitely not limited to marketing agencies, the financial sector (investment and banking down on through collection agencies), healthcare, call centers, etc etc etc. If you approach a lot of those places and show them something like AngularJS they'll be like "where are all of the high-level tags and rich components th…

Yes I work for a stereotypical .Net shop. Just because it's ubiquitous in the Enterprise doesn't mean it's not crap. I generally love MSFTs dev tools, but web forms are still a ghetto compared to MVC.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#57

Post by Roboprog »

dredmorbius wrote: post #7
deanclatworthy wrote: post #2

How is it in this day and age a magazine like VanityFair can have such an awful UX on mobile: - I can't read the article because some as keeps jumping me back to the top of the page a few seconds after I scroll - the article font is tiny and hard to read anyway - for some reason even though there is a large body of text, ios doesn't allow me to use reader mode

Which is why I say Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. I wish pretty much every damned site in existence rendered as on Readability.

There is something to be said for getting to HTML paragraphs and lists, and then stopping.

None of this "Everybody has a 2048 pixel wide monitor to view my 4 huge columns in" (I used divs instead of tables, so it's OK that it takes 2 K pixels to render, right? Right?)

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#58

Post by blinkingled »

personZ wrote: post #41
x0x0 wrote: post #6

(I think) it's not hard to understand where microsoft went wrong. Ballmer just doesn't seem to get where the industry is going. As evidence, this quote from the article: Indeed, Ballmer seemed to have no intention of leaving when he announced a massive reorganization of the entire company in July 2013. Behind the scenes he had also begun negotiating an acquisition that was meant to transform Microsoft. He had become…

Either way, differentiated companies -- apple -- require completely different strategies than nondifferentiated -- samsung. How is Apple differentiated? To a user that wants a smartphone to send emails, visit websites, play fantasy football, take pictures, etc, Apple is every bit in competition with Xiaomi as Samsung is. To many, many users, smartphones are effectively a commodity now. Which is why Apple devices feat…

>How is Apple differentiated?

Don't forget marketing. I don't think anyone plays the marketing game better than Apple. They are essentially marketing themselves as different and the fact that it works is nothing short of miraculous in the face of actuality!

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#59

Post by rgbrenner »

Immortalin wrote: post #33
thomasahle wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Young programmers today tend to start with the Javascript family. There have probably never been languages with the same visual tools built in, rapidness of feedback and ease of sharing with friends.

Not true, I am a young programmer and I learned vb6 as my first language. It ran perfectly well on windows xp.

VB6 (the last release of VB) is 16 years old, and has been unsupported for 6 years.

Even if it was your first language, you can't possibly be a typical new programmer.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#60

Post by personZ »

vinceguidry wrote: post #42
personZ wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either way, differentiated companies -- apple -- require completely different strategies than nondifferentiated -- samsung. How is Apple differentiated? To a user that wants a smartphone to send emails, visit websites, play fantasy football, take pictures, etc, Apple is every bit in competition with Xiaomi as Samsung is. To many, many users, smartphones are effectively a commodity now. Which is why Apple devices feat…

> Apple still makes and sells the iPhone 4S, a three year old device. You can get this in the $200-ish range. Further most of Apple's pricing has been contingent upon the scam that are cell phone contracts, where right now you can get the iPhone 5, for instance, for "$0". That is, by most definitions, the "low end". No, the consumers on the real low end of the cell phone market can't afford or can't get approved to h…

Most phone makers chase this market in some way, Apple doesn't.

Except that they still make and sell the iPhone 4s. That is absolutely and undeniably chasing the "very low end" market (it's $199 no contract, which is pretty bottom tier).

http://www.virginmobileusa.com/shop/cell-phones/iPhone4S-8GB...

Now I suppose we can just keep arguing this down, but historically Samsung was "Chasing the low end" because their devices were $0 on a contract (ergo, in the $600 range. The iPhone 5s is currently $0 on a contract). Now that floor keeps falling, Apple is selling a $200 device, and we're still going to argue that they super don't care about the low end, and they're some sort of exclusive device despite burger flipping teenagers buying it?

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