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The Microsoft Empire Reboots

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Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#111

Post by mistermann »

monstermonster wrote: post #70
david927 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This, a million times. I'm a bit further down the abstraction chain but I am thoroughly glad I sit there all day writing C/C++ for Windows native (win32) GUI applications. I know once I've tested it on one machine it's going to work fine on all the other ones. It's the most stable API and platform I've ever seen. Code we wrote for Windows NT4 works fine on Windows 8.1 and behaves exactly the same. Compare that to our…

I agree, but if your coworkers is anything like mine and you asked him if there is a fundamental problem with web development as a platform choice for internal apps, I expect he would suddenly forget all the pain he goes through on a regular basis. I've watched my company burn about a million dollars unnecessarily in the last two years because of choosing a 100% web interface for an entirely internal project (of dubious value in the first place).

The zealotry in this field is getting close to unsustainable in my opinion. Companies thought the proliferation of ms access apps was bad, wait until they try to do something with the proliferation of overarchitected web apps based on a wide assortment of fashionable at the time but now unpopular languages and frameworks that hardly anyone has experience on and is most certainly not interested in working on.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#112

Post by MichaelGG »

robotresearcher wrote: post #88
MichaelGG wrote: post #71

>I put the A-team resources on Longhorn, not on phones or browsers. Hilarious. It wasn't the lack of an A-team resource on browsers, it was the lack of any team. Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing. Microsoft's other big sin is counting on its hardware partners. They could have preempted the iPod, for instance, but they just hoped Creative and others would deliver a great experience, while they sat bac…

MS has been trying with pen/touch for ages. They had a "Windows for Pen Computing" way back in the 3.1 days. It's not that they have not been trying. The WIMP desktop and app model just doesn't work well with touch. Apple wisely forked the interface because no one has been able to do a single interface that's any good.

MSR had a neat little thing that allowed some sort of "snap to UI element" functionality. That way, targeting a 16x16px thing like "close tab" wouldn't be so difficult.

Or they could have some sort of gesture that lets me go into a high accuracy mode. Or really, anything at all to make it easy to deal with. But nope, your finger becomes the new cursor and that's that.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#113

Post by MichaelGG »

bambax wrote: post #73
MichaelGG wrote: post #71

>I put the A-team resources on Longhorn, not on phones or browsers. Hilarious. It wasn't the lack of an A-team resource on browsers, it was the lack of any team. Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing. Microsoft's other big sin is counting on its hardware partners. They could have preempted the iPod, for instance, but they just hoped Creative and others would deliver a great experience, while they sat bac…

> Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing. Yes, but wasn't that intentional? Once IE4, then 6, had conquered the world, the point was to keep people from leaving Windows for the Web, and so IE dev was stopped dead.

Right, which makes Ballmer's "I didn't put great people on the team" history re-write just laughably wrong.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#114

Post by mistermann »

dragonwriter wrote: post #72
demallien wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, and if you are trying to do the full stack, you had better toss in some node.js or Ruby on Rails, plus SQL. Web development is really hard for non-developers to grok. I keep thinking back to an Access application that I threw together in a couple of days, back in the 90s for managing a team of about 40 technicians. It was being used for task tracking, and had some wiki-like features as well. When I started that…

> These days, rather than dealing with that mess, many companies just go for an off-the-shelf hosted solution that sort of fits their needs, such as Basecamp, or Jira, or Igloo. The existence of these products is a sign that we've gone off in the wrong direction somewhere No, its a sign that the web has enabled easier application delivery with greater reach at lower cost; Access is still around, after all, and most b…

Unless they are getting advice from developers. Do you know any developers who would say "why don't you just use Access, it will take a week" when the alternative is a fun new 3 month web based project where they get to choose and try out the latest languages and frameworks? I certainly don't.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#115

Post by mistermann »

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #69
ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but it's crap that gets those Enterprises from A to B. What I want to know is, what better crap is there that offers the ease of use that webforms does? If there's nothing better then this is the best crap we have. It's kind of like how gas-guzzling, environment-ruining automobiles in general are crappy, but what practical alternatives exist that actually cover all of the use cases?

Programmers seem to as a matter of principle be vehemently opposed to the notion of cost / benefit being at least as important as "technical correctness" or whatever you want to call it. If its cheap, sustainable, and satisfies user requirements, that should be enough, should it not?

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#116

Post by mistermann »

grokys wrote: post #31
damian2000 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK WPF isn't dead, its popular with line of business apps. But yeah, disappointing there's been only minor improvements to it in the last 4 years, during which they've been focusing their efforts on WinRT. I was just reading something about the subject here http://pragmateek.com/is-wpf-dead-the-present-and-future-of-...

Oh I mean I use it almost every day and it has many good points, but the complete lack of interest from MS is obvious. I mean, even renaming a window doesn't work properly in Visual Studio. Most of it hasn't even been updated to use generics. It still uses DX9. But there's no better option.

A massive strategic error on Microsoft's part. They're now stuck on the wrong side of what Joes Spolsky called I think fire and motion.

They still own the desktop, yet they ignore it.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#117

Post by ilaksh »

Microsoft has some of the most amazing products and many terrific engineers.

Unfortunately, it is also has some extremely negative associations, most of which have been earned and even, perhaps, proven.

* unfair and sometimes illegal business practices

* sabotage of innovative technologies when they conflict with Microsoft's monopolies

* eugenics

* empire

* surveillance state (Skype/NSA)

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#118

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #69
ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but it's crap that gets those Enterprises from A to B. What I want to know is, what better crap is there that offers the ease of use that webforms does? If there's nothing better then this is the best crap we have. It's kind of like how gas-guzzling, environment-ruining automobiles in general are crappy, but what practical alternatives exist that actually cover all of the use cases?

From my own perspective, I don't want to limit my career choices to the MSFT (enterprise) ghetto. At least with ASP.NET MVC you're at least using a paradigm that's common outside the enterprise-verse, and translates into being able to learn and pick up other stuff. As for web forms, unless you want to be limited to a niche, they don't seem that great for career advancement.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#119

Post by IBM »

personZ wrote: post #83
mwfunk wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung spends significantly more on marketing their mobile devices than Apple does. Not just a little more, a lot more [1]. Not just advertising, but deals with carriers to pay bonuses to retail staff for selling the devices. Microsoft doesn't spend quite as much promoting Windows Phone and the Surface, but it's still a lot more than Apple [2]. Marketing, at best, gets customers in the door. It doesn't generate bran…

Samsung spends significantly more on marketing their mobile devices than Apple does. Samsung is estimated to have spent, in total, $364 million in 2013 in the US. Apple is estimated to have spent $350 million. Is that really "significantly more", especially given that Samsung's total mobile device market is wider than Apple's (e.g. feature phones and so on). Indeed, thinking in terms of purely smartphones -- I see at…

Marketing isn't just advertising. The last chart illustrates the massive difference in marketing spend between Apple and Samsung.

http://www.asymco.com/2013/04/02/the-cost-of-selling-galaxie...

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#120

Post by eps »

grokys wrote: post #25

> The holy grail for Microsoft would be getting developers to write new software for Windows again, putting Windows back at the center of a new virtuous circle. And yet there is no currently properly supported way to write desktop applications for Windows! MFC = obsolete, WinForms = maintenance mode, WPF = Dead on arrival, WinRT = Metro only. For all the people saying "web is where it's at", there are some things tha…

Plain Win32 hasn't gone anywhere and with few days of work you can get an MFC-like framework up and running. Not the beginners task, but not a rocket science either. But the UI framework availability is not a cause of people writing less for Windows now than they did before. Far from it.

The problem was the high-level mesaging from Microsoft. They weren't about desktop anymore, apparently, but that's exactly where I make money being a Windows software developer. They were now mobile. They were Metro-shmetro. They wanted to leave behind everyhting that helped me make living by writing Windows apps and move on to conquer new domains. They neglected me and my interests. But I can say that I like how things are changing now. They put Start button back. They appear to be opening Windows Store to non-Metro apps. Good, excellent, they are on the right track... that's assuming they don't screw the hell out of Windows 10 with their Asimov telemtry bullshit, but it's an altogether different issue. At least they are paying a bit more attention to what people actually want instead of what Microsoft thinks they should be wanting.

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