The Microsoft Empire Reboots • Hacker News Board

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#81

Post by taway2012 » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 5:41 PM UTC

chrisabrams wrote: post #35

deanclatworthy wrote: post #2

How is it in this day and age a magazine like VanityFair can have such an awful UX on mobile: - I can't read the article because some as keeps jumping me back to the top of the page a few seconds after I scroll - the article font is tiny and hard to read anyway - for some reason even though there is a large body of text, ios doesn't allow me to use reader mode

Hey, I just started as Director of Engineering at VanityFair, and I can definitely agree with you our site is in much need of a UX overhaul. We are working to address the points you made plus may more issues that affect the site.

Hopefully the redesign won't give us light gray text on a white background, which seems to the rage these days. :)

I had zero problems reading the print version.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#82

Post by ZanyProgrammer » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 5:53 PM UTC

bartwe wrote: post #76

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern day WinForms in .Net work just as well for coding up simple GUIs.

Winforms is fine, not as powerful as what came before it but otherwise good. The problem with winforms is WPF supposedly deprecating it.

WPF has a much steeper learning curve though. For non customer facing desktop programs, WinForms is fine.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#83

Post by personZ » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 5:58 PM UTC

mwfunk wrote: post #78

blinkingled wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How is Apple differentiated? Don't forget marketing. I don't think anyone plays the marketing game better than Apple. They are essentially marketing themselves as different and the fact that it works is nothing short of miraculous in the face of actuality!

Samsung spends significantly more on marketing their mobile devices than Apple does. Not just a little more, a lot more [1]. Not just advertising, but deals with carriers to pay bonuses to retail staff for selling the devices. Microsoft doesn't spend quite as much promoting Windows Phone and the Surface, but it's still a lot more than Apple [2]. Marketing, at best, gets customers in the door. It doesn't generate bran…

Samsung spends significantly more on marketing their mobile devices than Apple does.

Samsung is estimated to have spent, in total, $364 million in 2013 in the US. Apple is estimated to have spent $350 million. Is that really "significantly more", especially given that Samsung's total mobile device market is wider than Apple's (e.g. feature phones and so on).

Indeed, thinking in terms of purely smartphones -- I see at least four Apple ads for every one Samsung ad I see. Maybe it's just my market (Toronto area), but there is absolutely no question that Apple's conventional ad spend, and their partnerships with carriers (that pollutes the numbers a bit), absolutely dwarfs Samsung's.

But of course Apple succeeds because they achieve excellence in all areas. As I mentioned elsewhere, they sure as hell are trying to compete, and anyone that argues that they live on some other plane, free of competition, is deluded.

The "bonuses to retail staff" thing, as an aside, seems to be some invention that appeared to justify Android sales, which clearly had to be caused by nefarious interference than consumer choice.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#84

Post by rconti » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 5:59 PM UTC

alex_hitchins wrote: post #75

bambax wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft just left browsers there and did nothing. Yes, but wasn't that intentional? Once IE4, then 6, had conquered the world, the point was to keep people from leaving Windows for the Web, and so IE dev was stopped dead.

"Browser tabs will only confuse people". Ha!

Actually I still argue that tabs are a Bad Thing. Developers have taken a thing that SHOULD be handled by the window manager, and written their own way of doing it -- every application slightly differently, naturally.

It's not as big a deal on Windows where the look+feel of various applications was always inconsistent as hell -- remember when Trillian was the most popular IM client, it seemed like in those days virtually every application handled windowing differently, it was terrible.

But it's a bigger issue on OS X and in Linux. Since both have functionality to cycle through windows of a given application, tabs become less important. Of course, we still end up with visual clutter, so even luddites like myself use tabs now and again. But this should really be implemented as an OS feature, not on a per-application basis.

Google, of course, vehemently disagrees, since they implement their own terrible look-and-feel everywhere. (see: crappy windowing inside of GMail, crappy windowing behavior of Hangouts, etc).

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#85

Post by Rapzid » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 6:06 PM UTC

The biggest shift I've noticed in Microsoft in recent years is its support and push for open source, cross platform components and projects. It seems that there may be a paradigm shift towards selling tools and an integrated platform while providing more choice and making inroads into the open source comminities.

This is exciting for me because I absolutely love .net and friends, but I'm also a Linux engineer and lean heavily toward open source and cross platform technologies. In recent years I have noted that with the existence of mono and mono develop(xamarin) C#/F# is right on the verge of being an excellent choice for open source tools and projects. I've been lamenting the fact that Microsoft's early platform lock in approach has prevented .net from being a serious java alternative(or the alternative it deserves to be). Its nature stiffling the open source ecosysytem .

The outlook has been getting rosier over the past 2 years though. Now we have OWIN, ASP.NET vNext, MVC6, entity framework 7, F#, and a strange officially unofficial interest in mono. Projects on github! These are welcome steps in an attempt to boost relevancy IMHO.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#86

Post by sauere » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 6:10 PM UTC

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…

When i talk to people who want to start programming, especially young high school kids i often hear that they want to stay flexible. Flexible both in the platform/stack they are working with and flexible in what they can do with the language and toolset.

VB6 offered none of this.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#87

Post by eschutte2 » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 6:18 PM UTC

demallien wrote: post #67

woah wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're idealizing Access for reasons unknown. If there actually was demand for such a tool, one would exist and would be making a ton of money. The fact that people use off the shelf SaaS is an indication of the fact that off the shelf SaaS is what they want. My suspicion is that Access is too hard for most business people, yet not powerful enough for actual developers to make something unique with. Salesforce has ma…

"You're idealizing Access for reasons unknown." Well, you might accept that I'm "idealizing" Access because, you know, I had a decent experience with it 20 years ago, as described in my first comment. No need to go searching for mysterious ulterior motives when they're explained in the post! For what it's worth, I do remember significant flaws in Access. For one thing, it was an absolute pain when we wanted to modify…

I'm finding these comments really fun to read, speaking as someone who spent years building and marketing exactly the product you describe. My feeling is that the other poster is right - there isn't much of a market there. Recall that even Microsoft didn't make (much) money off of Access - it just got used because it came pre-installed with Office. I'd love to be wrong about this.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#88

Post by robotresearcher » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 6:21 PM UTC

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…

MS has been trying with pen/touch for ages. They had a "Windows for Pen Computing" way back in the 3.1 days. It's not that they have not been trying. The WIMP desktop and app model just doesn't work well with touch. Apple wisely forked the interface because no one has been able to do a single interface that's any good.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#89

Post by HillRat » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 6:40 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #80

latch wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be one of the mistakes, but it isn't the start of the problem. Tangibly, it's either United States v. Microsoft Corporation or Longhorn / Vista. Intangibly, it's the attitude that permeated the company that said "we are right because we are Microsoft." There were few people you could talk to who'd think you had anything to offer someone who worked at Microsoft. You still see this today around products like…

This rings true. I had some relations with Microsoft last year and it's incredible how inward-looking they are. They spend most of the time telling you how great everything Microsoft-like is or will be, and don't seem to be well aware of the outside world. They know there are things like iPhones and Android devices, but they appear truly baffled that anyone would want one. They think it's some kind of conspiratory re…

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, which right now is basically just a cash pile in search of a market. Changing the burn rate is just playing at the margins (layoffs are not a strategy), and if there's a big plan underlying the Mojang acquisition it's incomprehensible to me on both strategic and financial levels. Likewise, mass-producing Perceptive Pixel displays, while undoubtedly cool, is both fiendishly difficult (PP was basically a garage manufactory, so this is a software company figuring out how to scale up a product that has never been mass-produced) and not something that can push market dominance. Buying Nokia kept MSFT in the mobile space at a very high price, but really only purchased time and space, not a turnkey strategy.

Having said all that, it seems to me that there are two companies on the auction block right now that could give Redmond the germ of a strategy. Both Xamarin and Unity would fit very comfortably in what is arguably MSFT's wheelhouse -- software development tools -- while giving the company a way to seamlessly increase their mobile app ecosystem.

Re: The Microsoft Empire Reboots

#90

Post by WoodenChair » Sat, Oct 11, 2014, 6:56 PM UTC

monstermonster wrote: post #70

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.

This, a million times. I'm a bit further down the abstraction chain but I am thoroughly glad I sit there all day writing C/C++ for Windows native (win32) GUI applications. I know once I've tested it on one machine it's going to work fine on all the other ones. It's the most stable API and platform I've ever seen. Code we wrote for Windows NT4 works fine on Windows 8.1 and behaves exactly the same. Compare that to our…

I completely agree with you guys. The tone deafness in this thread with regards to why VB6 appealed to beginners is striking.

No, beginners don't want to layout things in CSS, a declarative XML language, or any other 'text' way. They want to drag and drop components with the sort of ease of use that Visual Studio or Interface Builder offer. And they want a language coupled with that which features the simplicity of Python.

I too did some of my first serious programming in a VB like language in the 90s (RealBasic for Mac). I now develop beginner training materials in web development as a side gig and while we have fun - it's definitely not as satisfying as laying out a form in VB and having a real GUI in a matter of minutes that "Just Works."