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

blog.seattlepi.com

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

#61

Post by WalterGR »

Seth_Kriticos wrote: post #42

Ok, this is kind of old shoe, but let's discuss the Windows usability a bit. I have to endure some amount of XP and 7 on a regular basis, so I have some understanding on how to work with them (well, mostly how to set up or correct things). Those that say that Windows 7 is so much better.. well, in some sense. I admittedly has better optics. And it crashes less. Administrative tasks got more tiresome though, compared…

Enough to make it very repetitive, too little that automation would make much sense, especially considering the abysmal automation tools Windows comes with cough shell cough

Hmm... I've been thinking about switching to Powershell. What do you find abysmal about it?

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

#62

Post by [deleted] »

josefresco wrote: post #22
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 .

You're right and the anonymous commenter on their site said it well: "The Steve Jobs version: "If the MovieMaker download site isn't working by tomorrow at 6 am I will come down there at 6:01 am an choke the living ___ out of all of you.""

[deleted]

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

#63

Post by bad_user »

mquander wrote: post #40
CWuestefeld wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a Windows person, but I've got Ubuntu on a netbook. It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to get the repository for XBMC set up so that it would let me install the program. Now I'd like to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.4, but I don't have quite enough space in the SSD to do it. I'd like to cut out some software that I don't really use on the netbook. But I can't figure out how to make it actually get rid of thing…

FYI, I think "apt-get autoremove" will do what you want -- list packages which were installed automatically as a dependency and are no longer necessary. (I'm not sure how or if you can do the same thing with the package management GUI.)

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.

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

#64

Post by cmelbye »

bmelton wrote: post #19
muhfuhkuh wrote: post #9

Seriously though, is all of this fixed in Windows 7, or are people just hyping that up because it sucks alot less than any previous Windows iterations? I don't think I've _ever_ seen a process that convoluted, and I've been using Linux OSes since _before_ the advent of dependency-resolvers like yum and apt (i.e, the bad old days of "RPM hell").

Windows 7 is pretty good actually, on its own. It's especially good if you compare it to any previous version of Windows (though I confess to having had good luck out of Win2k Pro.) I see a comment elsewhere stating that it's good if you let it pigeonhole you into using IE and Bing, but that's nonsense. I'm using Chrome and Duck Duck Go and all sorts of non-Microsoftian stuff, and everything works just fine on the ra…

Our schools ran Windows 2000 Professional for years. Solid as a rock.

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

#66

Post by gaius »

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

Add to the list SQL Server 2000 and above, and Visual Studio.

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

#68

Post by coin »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #39
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

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.

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

#69

Post by ido »

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

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)?

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

#70

Post by kenjackson »

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 .

The issue here though is that Bill was trying to download MovieMaker. I bet when Bill talked to the MovieMaker team he was given a demo of MovieMaker already installed on a computer.

With that said, at Apple the website feels like an extension of the company. WIth Microsoft the website seems like a standard site for a corporation.

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