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Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#291

Post by alexgartrell »

So, I think I'm a pretty good programmer (Resume's in the profile, if you're curious) and I happen to be interviewing with Microsoft on the 11th, so here's my perspective.

From a recruiting point of view, the way you guys outsource travel arrangements is a total PITA. Source Sure (or whatever) really, really sucks, and it's bogus that interviewing for a job should be more time consuming and paperwork intensive than my taxes, and complete with an audit. You don't have to go full-out Fog Creek on your interview process or anything, but I think taking the arrangements back in-house would do wonders for you guys.

Other than that, it'd be cool if I could be convinced that I would work on something interesting and meaningful without having to watch out for Office Politics and mismanagement (what I was overwhelming warned about by former full-time employees as well as former interns). It is my sincere hope that such bubbles exist within Microsoft for at least a small portion of your developers.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#292

Post by allwein »

ary wrote: post #272

Two things really stand out for me. 1. Please, please, PLEASE take the App Store model that Apple has used and apply it to Xbox Live. There is already a process by which developers have to get their wares certified to run on the Xbox so the review process is pretty much already in place. The barrier to entry on the 360 needs to be significantly lowered (there have been half-baked efforts, but nothing terribly inspiri…

RE: #1 Have you checked out the XNA Creators Club and Xbox Live Indie Games? This seems to be exactly what you're looking for and has been around for a while.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Live_Indie_Games

http://creators.xna.com/en-US/

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#293

Post by jpr »

motters wrote: post #196
tmountain wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Linux as much as the next guy, but this is off base. A good deal of Microsoft's strength lies in backward compatibility and entrenchment. Serving up a brand new OS could potentially destroy that competitive advantage. A better strategy might be to incorporate better support for open protocols and document formats into their products and allow easier interoperability with the outside world. My biggest beef with…

I disagree. I think much of the weaknesses of Windows - especially its security woes - are due to trying to be too backward compatible with previous versions, which has meant that long standing problems have either not been addressed, or only inadequately patched over. Making a clean break with the past and moving to a new system where network security is fundamentally designed into the product from the very beginnin…

Backward compatibility may be a weakness in security, but a strength otherwise. I like it very much that I can still run many of my games that I purchased in the 90's on the Windows 7. AFAICT, Linux can't easily offer such a long binary backwards compatibility (please correct me if I'm wrong).

I also think that - along the lines of what tmountain said above - more important than open source code, is that protocols and formats are open.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#294

Post by nooneelse »

jodrellblank wrote: post #81

Dog food their own software and systems more, and where it's unpleasant to use - improve them. Far too much of my Microsoft using experience is of a solid technology which is idiotically annoying, and a new version which ups both desirable features and irritation at the same time. I mean the remote desktop client which has a ton of user experience flaws which hasn't improved for years, then developed another security…

Dog food their own software and systems more, and where it's unpleasant to use - improve them.

I actually wonder if, at the MS scale, that can start to be an impediment between the developers living inside the large MS sphere of software and their understanding of what it is like for average users who don't live entirely inside that sphere.

I mean, isn't one of the complaints that they don't make their tools interoperate and play nice with non-MS software enough... don't use open standards and formats enough? Well, from their perspective that would make sense; they are dog fooding inside an all MS zone. Inside that zone, interoperation is shifted down in priority from where outsiders would put it.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#295

Post by sriramk »

If folks want to mail SteveB, just mail steveb@microsoft.com. He has given out his email address on multiple occasions (like http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/steve/2005/06-06Tech...).

I can attest that he reads all his emails and often responds (I am low in the MSFT food chain but have always gotten responses from him).

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#296

Post by CoryMathews »

BrandonM wrote: post #278
cturner wrote: post #243

Phwoa. What an opportunity. I'm a developer/admin. I use windows on desktop, mac on laptop, and do most of my work ssh'd into unix hosts. While I was at uni I worked as a NT administrator in a datacentre but always found the platform like a straight-jacket compared to unix. 1) Windows would be a lot better if there was less of it. A good combination would be a Windows UI, Microsoft developer tools, Microsoft producti…

3) The world needs a new type of word processor, where editing is done by structure. Users should then be able to render that data in different ways - styled for printing, or for the web. At the moment data is very brittle. TeX solved this decades ago. In my understanding, there are several word processors that can output LaTeX. 13) For the love of god, please get somebody to take fifteen minutes and update notepad s…

Wordpad has hidden characters.. and is therefore not a suitable notepad replacement. Notepad++ would be closer.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#297

Post by cloudkj »

Despite not being an employee, I have close personal Microsoft ties, so I regularly hear about what goes on in Redmond. Anytime I'm involved in a discussion about Microsoft's future, the first and foremost point I bring up is how Microsoft needs to divest its investments in order to succeed in the future, or have any impact on shareholder value with respect to its stock price. Microsoft is more of a giant company with several distinct product silos. The Windows and Office product silos are cash cows, while the other ones often struggle to catch up. It's like a giant, lumbering robot trying to move through molasses. Microsoft needs to divest and spin off some of its various smaller divisions and allow for more autonomy. Let them operate as they please and allow for the market forces to take effect.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#298

Post by xpaulbettsx »

gaius wrote: post #139
JunkDNA wrote: post #121

Some points: - It's annoying in this day and age to be forced into using the entire MS Stack when I need to work with one specific technology. For example: if I want to test a web app on various versions of IE, I have to run Windows. OK fine, even though IE is the only browser that is tied to one OS, I'll let that go. However, if I want to use the Microsoft-provided free MS Virtual Machine images, I have to run them…

MS needs to really decide how much longer they want to push an OS that is based on Windows/DOS heritage and not unix You know the "Windows/DOS" stuff in NT is an emulation layer, right? It's known as WoW, Windows on Windows. The NT kernel is the work of Dave Cutler, of DEC VMS fame, and it is actually very, very good (form your own opinion about what has been layered on top of it).

Not quite :) The DOS emulation layer in Windows 32-bit is called VDM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_DOS_machine) - WOW is a technology that allows one bitness apps to run on a different bitness OS. WOW used to let 16-bit Windows apps run on a 32-bit OS (i.e. Win95), and nowadays, WOW64 is a shim layer that allows 32-bit applications to run on a 64-bit OS

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#299

Post by BrandonM »

CoryMathews wrote: post #296
BrandonM wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3) The world needs a new type of word processor, where editing is done by structure. Users should then be able to render that data in different ways - styled for printing, or for the web. At the moment data is very brittle. TeX solved this decades ago. In my understanding, there are several word processors that can output LaTeX. 13) For the love of god, please get somebody to take fifteen minutes and update notepad s…

Wordpad has hidden characters.. and is therefore not a suitable notepad replacement. Notepad++ would be closer.

Really? I've had no trouble sharing files between Wordpad, cygwin, and unix while using Wordpad.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to tell Microsoft?

#300

Post by xpaulbettsx »

agscala wrote: post #289
gaius wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS needs to really decide how much longer they want to push an OS that is based on Windows/DOS heritage and not unix You know the "Windows/DOS" stuff in NT is an emulation layer, right? It's known as WoW, Windows on Windows. The NT kernel is the work of Dave Cutler, of DEC VMS fame, and it is actually very, very good (form your own opinion about what has been layered on top of it).

Oh, so that what the WoW in the SysWoW64 folder name means

Yep, the SysWOW64 directory has all the 32-bit DLLs in the system (usually an identical copy to the Win7 32-bit DLLs, though not always), and the System32 folder has the 64-bit binaries. Yes, this is confusing, but not breaking apps was more important
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