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The Microsoft Empire Reboots

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Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#141

Post by sidcool »

A long but intense article. I read just to test my attention span. The result weren't good, but I managed to finish the article in a single sitting, albeit with a couple of YouTube video watches in between.

One thing I hold bitterly against Microsoft is their abuse of monopoly. During the time they were kings of technology, there was little progress in Browser market, OS market, both PCs and phones. But I believe Microsoft has learnt their lesson, and under Nadella, the company is going to take the community along with it.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#142

Post by Immortalin »

alex_hitchins wrote: post #38
Immortalin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Out of interest, why did you choose vb6? I'd have thought you would need to go out your way to learn such an old platform.

My dad wasn't much of a programmer, he was a businessman. he had an old copy of vb6 that worked perfectly well and that was my first exposure to programming. Because of that, most other languages with their non-existent gui frameworks and messy IDEs seemed inferior in comparison as getting anything useful done on them was a pain. The jit interpretation allowed me to test my code without having to wait for compilation, at the same time, I can also export it as an compiled executable. Compiled vb is much faster than languages such as Python and Ruby that supposedly allow you to code fast. The current generation of .Net languages take ages to compile making test-driven development a huge pain sometimes.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#143

Post by throwawaymsft »

ScottBurson wrote: post #97
HillRat wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the coldest summer I ever spent in Seattle was hauling an iPad around meetings at Redmond. One L69 had this very pointed way of staring at the tablet, then at the big red clock, then back again. Keep in mind, I was part of a team coming in as a prospective customer . Just very weird. I still have hopes for Nadella -- maybe just because I'm an old Sun warhorse -- but it's going to require a big rethink of MSFT,…

> the coldest summer I ever spent in Seattle was hauling an iPad around meetings at Redmond > [from the article] “[Ballmer's] view was that anyone in the company who used the iPhone was a traitor,” says this person. “His dad worked for Ford, and that meant you had Ford in your garage.” This attitude drives me nuts. The best thing Ford and GM could have done in 1985 would have been to buy Civics and Corollas for 10% o…

Beautifully put. Used to work there and the inner navel gazing was painful. People assumed loyalty meant blindly ignoring competing products under the guise of "dogfooding". They would dismiss competitive products almost in disbelief that people would use them (without ever have tried!).

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#144

Post by mikaraento »

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…

A good touch UI is not a good pointer-based UI and vice versa.

A touch UI needs large hit zones, benefits from natural drag/scroll, has only one kind of click but can have multiple touchpoints.

A pointer UI can use very compact and precise interaction areas (text selection is a great example), right- and option-clicks and has very old conventions for drag and scroll.

Saying that Windows is touch unfriendly is missing the point of it being very pointer friendly.

Apple is slowly bringing the two paradigms closer, and people complain at each step.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#145

Post by stinos »

eps wrote: post #120
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…

The problem was the high-level mesaging from Microsoft. They weren't about desktop anymore, apparently

But that is just an impression, an interpretation, and probably a false one, no? I and lots of people I work with never treated it as such but rather like 'we also do touch&mobile now, next to the good old desktop'. That is what Windows 8/8.1 is for us and our customers: in essence Windows 7 + Metro. And it didn't affect the way we write our desktop software in any way. Except in practice that we have to press Win+D after login, not exactly a major overhaul.

On a sidenote: to us the fuzz over the start button is just a media-driven thing coming from people stuck in the point-and-click age of XP and earlier. Anyone doing serious computer work should be using keyboard shortcuts anyway. And hence wouldn't have any problems adapting to the lack of a point-and-click button when the 'Win key + start typing what you're looking for' does exacty te same, and has been doing that for quite some time.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#146

Post by mkhpalm »

Realistically... the biggest reason for irrelevance is Microsoft's concept that an operating system should be a prime source of revenue. An OS is the garden you want people to come to so you have prime real estate to sell your wares. Charging admission works great if you're the only garden in town... and not so much if you're not. Microsoft is putting itself into this position by forcing the market to move into the other, more easily accessible gardens. It has very little to do with UX/UI or anything like that. Most consumers actually don't want to learn how to do anything new if they can ever help it.

I'm constantly amazed that all these "experts" haven't figured out what happened to the 800 pound gorilla. Quite simply put, other gardens that people could live with and easier to access suddenly showed up. The vendors making and selling their wares went to the place people were at or wanted to go to. Its simple economics and you can point directly to the people who decided that WGA was a good idea for killing MS. Piracy itself is what made windows dominant to begin with.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#147

Post by pjc50 »

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…

How on earth is MFC obsolete? Old yes, but it works fine. If you want a standard Windows application in C++ it's what you use. C# is more common for new projects though, and replaces Visual Basic as the line-of-business app builder of choice.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#148

Post by Spearchucker »

mwcampbell wrote: post #138
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…

I've concluded that Windows Forms is the least bad of the official Microsoft GUI frameworks. MFC is OK if you can accept its crufty old flavor of C++. But it wouldn't allow for much sharing of code between Windows desktop apps and modern (Metro) apps, whereas a .NET-based solution would let you share non-GUI code easily. WPF was developed for a relatively short period of time, starting in the early 2000s, and then ba…

There's not much in the newer wave of technology from Microsoft I find useful. In addition to your point, WPF (XAML) is without a doubt a better HTML, and yet can at times be as brittle as HTML. Workflow Foundation is conceptually good, but it's a beast - I'm constantly thinking it's a workflow-flavoured instance of dependency injection. WCF is better, but then I don't use it for more than what I used to do with server-activated objects in Remoting. LINQ is what makes C# and Visual Basic.Net functional, and it's cool for that - but LINQ a big no-no for perf-sensitive code paths. Too much plumbing. MFC is veeeery familiar, but not as fast (dev time) as .Net, so I stick with WinForms. Which does a reasonable job of OO for UI.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#149

Post by spion »

dragonwriter wrote: post #51
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.

> 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.

But the web isn't hard because its distributed. Its mostly because HTML and CSS were not designed for making applications.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#150

Post by marktolson »

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…

I used to share similar feelings when VB.Net was first introduced. I couldn't believe there was no VB 7 and Visual Studio .Net was the official replacement. Having worked with .Net, winforms, MVC, webforms etc for over 10 years now, there is absolutely no comparison between the latest versions of Visual Studio and the archaic tools from VB 6 days. Yes, VB 6 starts faster, but that's pretty much where the pros end these days.
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