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Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

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Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#141

Post by malnourish »

wwortiz wrote: post #134
shadowsun7 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what his beef is with Microsoft Security Essentials, but I just tell my friends and family to get a Mac. It's too tiring keeping up with antivirus offerings, and constantly needing to clean up after their messes. I'd recommend Linux, to be honest, because it's a cheaper alternative. But because there's still no good way of using it without needing to open Terminal at some point - the Mac is, I suppose, a…

You can use ubuntu without opening the terminal, and have been able to for a while, the problem with linux is not the terminal it is whether or not the hardware is supported and software people need is supported.

The most difficult thing with Ubuntu that I have noticed is properly configuring and using a scanner.

Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#142

Post by cynicalkane »

sliverstorm wrote: post #92
bad_user wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTW ... both "autoremove" and "dist-upgrade" made my system unusable a couple of times. There's no software repository as properly maintained as Debian's ... but normal users can totally trash their systems and that is not OK.

> normal users can totally trash their systems and that is not OK. That is one of it's greatest shortcomings. Then again, on the other hand, that is one of it's greatest strengths.

It's not a strength. Poorly-defined, fundamentally broken behavior is not a strength.

Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#143

Post by raganwald »

CamperBob wrote: post #116
mrshoe wrote: post #8

If Gates had maintained a dictatorial death grip on his company like Steve Jobs has, MS probably could have made some decent products. It's one thing to yell at the people who made this system via email. It's quite another to never allow them to ship it in the first place .

Both companies have their strong and weak points... including some in critical strategic areas. For instance, if Jobs wants to live up to his reputation as a dictatorial advocate for quality and engineering, why doesn't he force-choke the program manager for iTunes?

I suspect that the iTunes UI Manager's job strongly resembles an Admiral's position. On a regular basis, I can see minions dragging the latest victim out of Steve's office while he intones, "Apology Accepted."

Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#145

Post by dieterrams »

tptacek wrote: post #75
mrshoe wrote: post #8

If Gates had maintained a dictatorial death grip on his company like Steve Jobs has, MS probably could have made some decent products. It's one thing to yell at the people who made this system via email. It's quite another to never allow them to ship it in the first place .

Utterly unfair comparison. The Apple and Microsoft business models are so unlike each other it's almost inaccurate to say they're in the same business. Apple can get product quality to the point they do because they laser focus on a few profitable segments. Microsoft's business model --- not "what Steve Ballmer thinks they should be doing this month" but their underlying business model --- involves them serving 80+%…

This is true, and I think it accounts for a lot of the difference in quality between their products. But in this case, it sounds like there just weren't clear, enforced rules about integration, interoperability, and usability. Not once in the email does Gates reference an existing, company-wide set of standards. Even a company like Microsoft is capable of having and enforcing such a thing, and it would actually boost productivity over the long run. If all the different teams are doing their own thing and subject to an off-the-cuff usability review only after they've shipped, they will ultimately spend more time making revisions than they would have spent targeting standards from the start.

I've no idea what Microsoft was like at the time, so maybe they did have such a thing, but if there was, I can't imagine it had much priority in the corporate culture.

Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#146

Post by c00p3r »

Most of the time you don't need some authority person's opinion to realize that something is a total mess. Your own experience is enough. That is what this email is all about - users will create their own opinion very quickly.

The another example is Java development. Everyone who run Maven2 build process (say to build clojure-contrib) will be amazed by a tons of a strange and useless messages, repeated downloads of what seems the same files (but, different minor version numbers) to unknown location. That process will took something like 10 minutes on 3G connection, while you have absolutely no idea what's going on (OK, I can figure out that it is a process of a recursive downloading and building dependencies, and because people don't care about migration to the latest stable versions, it will download half of internet.)

This alone tells me what is really happening in a Java world better than all Sun's brainwashing altogether. ^_^

btw, sudo apt-get install maven2 downloaded another 70Mb of shit (in case JDK is already installed). 70Mb for a apt+make replacement? Compressed Linux kernel sources are less in size.

Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#147

Post by rbanffy »

ido wrote: post #69
ssp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has made a bunch of very good products: - Windows 3.0 and 3.1 clearly hit exactly the sweet spot between DOS and OS/2 - Word and Excel were legitimately better than the competition (and still are, although there is not much competition left). - Internet Explorer 4 was so much better than Netscape 3 and 4 that it wasn't even funny - Windows 2000 and XP were very good operating systems

Almost all releases of the NT line were good (including Win 7). Was there any OS contemporary to NT 3.51 that was better than it at anything (beside win 95 when it comes to compatibility with more software & hardware)?

Solaris 2.5 was a very solid OS and better than NT 3.5 in most respects unless a defining criteria for "better" is "runs well on PCs", which it didn't.

OS/2 was also a good OS for x86 PCs. At least as good as NT, unless, again, you want it to run software designed for Windows.

Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#148

Post by rbanffy »

coin wrote: post #68
CWuestefeld wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly you're right, but I object to the claim about Excel being better. While Word was better than anything else I had found to use at the time (Word Perfect was a buggy mess). However, I claim that there were better spreadsheet products available. Certainly the one I used, Enable, was quite robust, and was more capable than Excel.

Excel for Windows was much better than Lotus 123 for Windows. Lotus basically took the DOS version of 123 and added some menus for it. It never did feel like a fist class GUI app.

Lotus took Microsoft's word seriously when Gates proclaimed OS/2 was the future and Windows was an interim step. Lotus invested a lot in 123 for OS/2 (123/G, IIRC) and, when the IBM/Microsoft divorce made evident they chose the wrong side, they had to port it to Windows all over again (with lots of different and conflicting APIs). Microsoft had no such problem.

Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#149

Post by rbanffy »

blasdel wrote: post #105
philwelch wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of crappy products make $1 billion per year, especially enterprise products.

As bad as Sharepoint is, most of its competitors are much worse and also make huge piles of money.

Nothing can be much worse than Sharepoint.

edit: there are categories of software that have representatives that are more dysfunctional than Sharepoint. Still, Sharepoint is pretty much the worst document management/intranet package you can find.

Re: Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"

#150

Post by dieterrams »

whyenot wrote: post #140
mrshoe wrote: post #8

If Gates had maintained a dictatorial death grip on his company like Steve Jobs has, MS probably could have made some decent products. It's one thing to yell at the people who made this system via email. It's quite another to never allow them to ship it in the first place .

Look at what Gates has done since he loosened his grip at MS. The Gates foundation's global health and global development programs have done tremendously important work to reduce human suffering in the 3rd world. Nothing Gates could do at MS would come even close to what he is doing now to make the world a better place. Compare to Steve Jobs who knows how to make wonderful shiny devices that cost more than what many…

This isn't about which CEO is the better human being. It's about which management style is more effective.
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