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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?"

#161

Post by kabdib »

philwelch wrote: post #88
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

Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were pale imitations of the Mac OS of the time. 95 was the first "good enough", and it was still not the equal of System 7. For commodity hardware, they might have been the best available, but that's an adequacy criterion, not a "very good" criterion. Most of the others I have no disagreement with.

The /Mac/ was a pale imitation of itself, by those standards. Developing a Mac app was just as gnarly as developing a Windows 3.1 app, but by 1995 Microsoft had Visual Basic (to Apple's HyperCard, which was virtually moribund at that point) and MS took off and /owned/ the database client market.

Apple never really believed in its development tools group, and the market share they lost in the 90s shows that. They are still paying for lost opportunity.

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

#162

Post by kabdib »

rbanffy wrote: post #137
White_N_Nerdy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction... Microsoft /has made/ some excellent products. Here are some more for the list: Xbox SharePoint Sql Server DirectX Visual Studio Expression Studio Team Foundation Team Viewer Windows Server

> SharePoint You must be kidding...

God, that thing /sucks/.

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

#163

Post by kabdib »

chc wrote: post #121
vetinari wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I don't know any developer who would dismiss Visual Studio. You are new around here, right? Make yourself comfortable and you will know droves of them in no time. ;)

I would be fascinated to hear from them. I know lots of developers don't use Visual Studio for some reason or another (I'm one of them), but I've never heard anyone call Visual Studio a poor IDE.

I edit in Emacs, then build and debug in VS (when I can). It's a good combo and less clumsy than it sounds.

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

#164

Post by blasdel »

rbanffy wrote: post #157
blasdel wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you've never been forced to use any of the Oracle Applications webapps!

They may be bad, but come on, much worse than Sharepoint?

Yes, worse than Lotus Notes or Sharepoint.

I've seen some gibberingly awful Oracle web interfaces for HR stuff like entering time cards, but the worst was a "Software Life Cycle Management" thing that a client was using — a bizarre issue tracker with piles of inane baked in process.

When you logged in it would open a sole chrome-less popup window. You weren't allowed to be logged in more than once per account: one computer, one browser session, one window, one tab, period. There were no hyperlinks and only one URL — all the buttons POSTed a form with tons of parameters back to the same URL, with lots of state both in the session on the server and independently in cookies. You couldn't link to anything, it had a ridiculous taxonomy system, and the search was actively antagonistic to you finding anything. Most of the actual data worth looking at was in unindexed Word documents attached to the issues.

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

#165

Post by zenocon »

MrRage wrote: post #73
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

> Windows 2000 and XP were very good operating systems I by no means am some Microsoft hater, but I'm amused about this tinted rose glass nostalgia for XP. It's easy to say XP is a good system now with the maturity of three service packs and the bad taste of Vista still in our mouths, but I remember all those years ago much dislike of XP around the internet. Among other things, it was a security nightmare that wasn't…

who cares? you can say this about any major release number OS. go ahead and throw out netbsd stats all you want. no one tries to hack that b/c no one cares. stats are a funny game, my friend.

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

#166

Post by seunosewa »

MrRage wrote: post #73
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

> Windows 2000 and XP were very good operating systems I by no means am some Microsoft hater, but I'm amused about this tinted rose glass nostalgia for XP. It's easy to say XP is a good system now with the maturity of three service packs and the bad taste of Vista still in our mouths, but I remember all those years ago much dislike of XP around the internet. Among other things, it was a security nightmare that wasn't…

I remember really loving XP when it first came out. It was much better than 98 and Me and faster than 2000.

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

#167

Post by johnthedebs »

whyenot wrote: post #159
johnthedebs wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see people write this all the time, and it makes me sick. Bill Gates decided he made enough money at Microsoft and wanted to pursue other things. That's fantastic, for him and millions of others. Steve Jobs has decided to do what he loves until he can't any more. That's also fantastic, for him and for millions of others. They're both making positive changes for lots and lots of people. Who are you, or anyone else,…

Steve Jobs releasing some new shiny thing that makes the lives of some very affluent people (on the global scale for wealth) magrinally better, doesn't compare, is not even in the same ball park, as ensuring that hundreds of thousands of people don't go blind in central Africa. That is my belief, and of course I understand that not everyone else shares it.

I can appreciate that point of view, though I don't totally agree.

The problem I have is that they're no longer doing the same thing - it's like comparing Bill Gates to Donald Trump. It might have made sense to compare Bill and Steve while they were working in the same field, but why bother any more?

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

#168

Post by philwelch »

rbanffy wrote: post #149
blasdel wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Enterprise software can be surprisingly awful. blasdel's story is the best, but I remember being astonished that you could actually pay for version control software. The fact that said version control software didn't even have atomic commits but did, interestingly enough, run on its own proprietary file system was almost a Kafkaesque punchline.

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

#169

Post by watmough »

plnewman wrote: post #114
walkon wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, when you consider when products were released and compare it to similar offerings at those times, many Microsoft products are (or were) "decent". I would add these: - Windows 95: Not perfectly stable or technically very groundbreaking, but a good enough combination of usability and features to be considered decent in my mind and millions of others at the time. - IE6: great at the time. Some of the standards…

I always bring up Flight Simulator whenever there's some MS bashing going on. I miss the Microsoft of my youth,

MS Access 1.0 was fantastic when it came out. I can almost taste that box arriving in my office.

23 freakin' floppies though! Awesome piece of software.

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

#170

Post by duck »

ssp wrote: post #32
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 .

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

And made so many other competitor products better too. We wouldn't be where we are now without them.
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