Microsoft’s Very Good Day
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I would recommend the Surface to friends or family, which is a recent change. But I would never use Microsoft products. And not just because I'd be giving up years of Linux folk-knowledge. Childishly, when I watch a youtube video of someone far more skilled than me programming in Windows, I recoil a little.
I strive to avoid bias; I don't want the change in perception to happen merely after people like me die. My bias is fallacious, but it holds like any other deeply-felt bias.
Hell, I only recently stopped calling them M$.
(I am genuinely curious whether this continues; I tried to google "microsoft android patent threats" but found only news articles from 2013/2014 about the practice.)
"Microsoft and Google are pleased to announce an agreement on patent issues. As part of the agreement, the companies will dismiss all pending patent infringement litigation between them, including cases related to Motorola Mobility. "
That's different than cancelling outstanding lawsuits.
"Separately, Google and Microsoft have agreed to collaborate on certain patent matters and anticipate working together in other areas in the future to benefit our customers."
Last time I heard that was with Apple and was more like "I won't sue you for this and you won't sue me for that"
Oh, they absolutely did. Now they also threaten companies with lawsuits unless they install their own apps on Android devices [1]. I didn't say it was for the better. How this doesn't immediately alarm the anti-trust bodies for using patents to force companies to buy its products is still a puzzle to me.
Microsoft loves the rigged patent game and it's exploiting every minute of it, while fighting hard to ensure it stays this way [2] and also doing its best to make the copyright system worse, as well [3].
[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/2988525/android/microsoft-str...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/11/20...
[3] http://www.infoworld.com/article/2613305/patents/microsoft--...
If you really care, please stop using any company's products that do this.
Seems to me like every big tech firm now makes the same sorts of moves Microsoft did in the 80s/90s, but because none of them dominate it all kindof just becomes accepted as the way to compete. But if one of them _did_ become as dominant as MS were, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't hold back.
That said, is this all just another EMBRACE from Nadella? ;)
The Microsoft consent decree was about restricting browser choice by shipping their own browser as default and claiming it was unremovable. By contrast, today Apple idevices not only ship with a browser but ban all competing browsers (via the ban on run-time compilation effectively banning JIT compilers). Apple have total control over every application that is allowed to ship on the platform and take a 30% cut.
Google are responsible for Android, which is Free software to the absolute minimum they could get away with by law. It relies on millions of lines of GPL'd code, yet for most phones it's quite hard to get a rebuildable source tree that even includes all the kernel drivers, and if you do it may be prohibited from loading by a locked bootloader.
They promote it as a security feature, but it only protects their own interests. It does very little to protect actual user data (which is what the user cares about), and all to protect their eco-system (and therefore, their finances).
But it was technically unremovable, in those days you could open a windows explorer and type an URL and then you suddenly have internet explorer right into your window. It was an awful design flaw that costed them lagging apart after the post IE6 era.
The other thing is that wouldn't matter if Netscape were superior. Actually, it didn't matter because that was still the case and once better browsers came up (Firefox, Chrome), Internet Explorer turned in technical debt.
So still now the whole "the browser comes as default" sounds like a whining excuse to me.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/longterm/micro...
Had they succeeded with the IE strategy, ActiveX controls would have the same endemic status as Flash does now, but unimplementable on any browser other than IE.
The situation was still there when Firefox and Chrome came to play (and I suspect also the intent) and it didn't prevent IE to step aside.
The same goes to Flash... it is still there because there still are stuff you can't do in HTML 5 (streaming live video for instance) and without a real alternative we would have to live with it (hopefully that will change soon)
This is still the case, isn't it? You can type "//google.com" into Explorer's address bar and it will launch your default browser to that address.
One other point worth remembering: their browser, at least by version 3, was superior in speed and vastly superior in stability. They also ushered in the modern era of web applications by inventing XMLHttpRequest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest).
Netscape destroyed itself as much as Microsoft helped them by incompetence in developing software, server as well as browser. A common pattern in the '90s was Microsoft's competitors losing their ability to develop mostly working software while Microsoft didn't. That sealed the fate of Lotus, WordPerfect, Netscape, and Ashton-Tate (dBASE), and Borland did themselves no favors by buying the latter.
IIRC, Microsoft were using hidden APIs to accomplish this, putting Netscape at a disadvantage.
More directly, I'm not aware of any public Windows APIs that handed out data that tricked your code into doing a general protection fault (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_protection_fault), or in the case of WordPerfect, compel programmers to use their own printer drivers, and write code that regularly drops your tables, figures, etc. to the bottom of your document (unlike the other companies I cited, WordPerfect actually managed to ship a Windows version that didn't GP fault, but that was late, terribly buggy, and prompted all the WP fans I knew to reluctantly switch to MS Word).
Re. Netscape, IE on Windows surely helped, but Netscape did the no. 1 mistake and tried to rewrite everything from scratch - I can not think of any working product where it is better to throw everything out and redo everything "the right way", rather than iteratively improving the code. It's knowingly throwing out all business knowledge improvement and bugfixing you have ever done. It killed them, and would have even if IE was never bundled with Windows. In contrast, Windows 10 and Office 2016 contains code that can be traced more than 25 years back, and as evident with Vista development, MS is not afraid to accept when something has gone horribly wrong and throw it out and try again. Note that is not the same as rewriting, it is accepting that you spend a lot of resources making a prototype that ultimately showed no promise.
Not that MS does not do terrible things as a business. They do, exactly as any other business with that size. They have to or they will cease to exist in a few years.
This emphasizes a restriction technical debt may place on your company if your starting foundation is sufficiently poor. Lotus did a combination of these two fatal mistakes, they had a small team of 7 or so guys write the first version in 8086/8 assembly language, and I'm not sure exactly what happened to that team, but their EMS memory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_memory) mid-life kicker was unauthorized work done by a couple of guys who had left the company by the time Lotus used it in desperation because their complete rewrite of the code in C was failing so badly.
For that matter, their first Macintosh program, Jazz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Jazz) was fatally flawed in development. They again wrote it in assembly "for efficiency", but without close communications between team members. Instead, every N days each would bring a floppy disk with their updated code and a merge would be done. This resulted in a lot of duplication of functionality and a bloated binary (hitting the platform where it was at its worst); which among other things resulted in user frustration at having to swap floppy disks all the time as the Wikipedia article mentions.
Apple is a partial counterexample: Jobs rode a small team hard in creating the first rather limited assembly OS, software wise they largely wandered around in the wilderness and failed the complete rewrite (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)), then solved their problem by buying NeXT (and, oh, started bringing Jobs back into the fold, one of the very few non-programmers who can manage them), and doing a wholesale replacement with NeXTSTEP.
Not that MS does not do terrible things as a business. They do, exactly as any other business with that size. They have to or they will cease to exist in a few years.
Disagree. Microsoft's terrible things included screwing pretty much everybody who did business with them at the peer level, "You made a mistake, you trusted us," said 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe, quoting an unnamed Microsoft executive." (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2002/pulpit_20020620_0007...). You do enough of this and you run out of healthy companies willing to do business with you, and life becomes prohibitively expensive. Which phone carrier is willing to partner with Microsoft after e.g. the Microsoft Kin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin and I'm sure other stunts?
I can't think of another company at this level like this. Apple and Oracle, like Microsoft companies built on the vision of a single man, share some characteristics, but Apple hasn't screwed over every supplier, and works well enough with phone carriers. Has Oracle tried to screw over big iron competitors after it bought Sun?
The official Windows phone unit was doing its best to kill the Kin, it had to switch to Windows CE, it was required to support Exchange, and a lot of the code supplied to the Kin group, especially for Exchange, was in horrible shape.
Ah, and another example of this sort of bad Microsoft behavior: When they bought Danger, they ignored its contractual responsibilities to T-Mobile and expected to immediately repurpose Danger's technical employees. Oops, T-Mobile refused to put up with that, and those employees had to spend some time developing the last Sidekick models (and all this had a morale crushing effect, above and beyond that of being absorbed by Microsoft with its stack ranking el. al.).
People were doing Ajax-like things before XMLHTTPRequest with hidden iframes. XHR was more convenient, but it didn't bring new functionality to the table.
Netscape Navigator 4 had frustrating limitations once you had the data, but people were doing all sorts with it regardless. More was possible with Internet Explorer 4, but again, you didn't need XMLHTTPRequest. And if you just want to strip it back to the bare-bones of loading and saving data, a few people were even doing that as far back as Netscape Navigator 2 if I recall correctly – by dynamically loading new images with varying query string parameters.
They had the unmitigated gaul to include software with their operating system. Kinda like wordpad, file manager, hearts, calculator and dozens of other things that you'd expect to find on a computer. All those things had (and still have) alternatives that you can replace them with that may or may not cost money and may or may not be better. But somehow having a web browser installed by default was so obviously different as to be completely inexcusable even 20 years later.
As a customer, having a web browser installed on your new computer by default is a Good Thing. Removing it from the install could only possibly make things worse for end users.
It made no sense then, and even less sense now.
Of course, I get even rantier about the "antivirus" companies blocking Microsoft from including Defender (nee Security Essentials) out of the box with XP and Vista, under similar reasoning to the Netscape decision. How is antivirus not an Operating System feature (system protection)? I'm glad that decision has finally passed and I really hope that people stop paying for the security theater "antivirus" programs that remain out there as OEM bloatware and those "products" will finally die a long, much deserved death.
That's awful. But I think writing a competing app is a completely proper way to compete.
> they really did have a strong monopoly
Evidently they did not.
To those of us old enough to remember the "unbreakable" IBM monopoly, it's hard to worry too much about this stuff.
The reverse, as far as I know:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/10/15/55296...
This is just the tip of the iceberg with respect to application compatibility. I could probably write for months solely about bad things apps do and what we had to do to get them to work again (often in spite of themselves). Which is why I get particularly furious when people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure. I spent many sleepless nights fixing bugs in third-party programs just so they could keep running on Windows 95.
Problem is I could never go back to the DOS command prompt. I only moved to the *nix prompt about 6-7 years ago, and I could never go back. I know I can do cygwin etc but that still feels like a layer on top of something else that is awful.
Still to this day I can't even fscking grep.
For your particular example:
> help grep
Name Category Module Synopsis
---- -------- ------ --------
Out-File Cmdlet Microsoft.PowerShell.U... Sends output to a file.
Select-String Cmdlet Microsoft.PowerShell.U... Finds text in strings and files.
> help select-string
NAME
Select-String
SYNOPSIS
Finds text in strings and files.
SYNTAX
Select-String [-Pattern] <String[]> [-Path] <String[]> [-AllMatches] [-CaseSensitive] [-Context
[<Int32[]>]] [-Encoding {unicode | utf7 | utf8 | utf32 | ascii | bigendianunicode | default | oem}]
[-Exclude [<String[]>]] [-Include [<String[]>]] [-InformationAction {SilentlyContinue | Stop | Continue |
Inquire | Ignore | Suspend}] [-InformationVariable [<System.String>]] [-List] [-NotMatch] [-Quiet]
[-SimpleMatch] [<CommonParameters>]
EDIT: BTW, it's a bit annoying to type Select-String, so it'd be nice if it had an alias. Does it have one?
Well, you can get aliases in PowerShell by typing alias. But that'll give you a wall of text; what you want to do is to quickly search for things that are aliased to Select-String.
There are two ways to do this. First, you can pipe to a GUI that allows directly filtering the results:
> alias | out-gridview
> alias | select -first 1 | get-member
> alias | Where-Object { $_.definition -contains 'Select' }
> alias | ? { $_.definition -contains 'Select' }
You might be annoyed that Select-String is not aliased to grep. While many commands actually do have multiple aliases to both DOS and Unix equivalents (e.g., Get-ChildItem is aliased to gci, dir, and ls, and Remove-Item has ri, rm, and del as aliases), Select-String works differently enough from grep that it's not a default alias so you're not confused.
They have had decades now to get on board with developers, and cmd.exe is still their go-to console. They still strike me as a company of greedy corporate business folk, who happen to run a software company, as opposed to a software company that has to suffer greedy corporate drones to survive in our current race to the bottom.
In fact most admin gui's are now just calling powershell now.
Correct - it has a couple of crippling features, such as wrapping output at 80 characters even if piped to a file (unless you tell it otherwise every time).
I have about the same problem when it comes to bash. While bash may very well be described as "arcane" I believe this is mostly a problem of unwillingness to learn something new or different.
Understanding how PowerShell works takes a bit of time and re-thinking. It doesn't help that there's so much downright bad PowerShell code out there that was mindlessly converted from VBScript. Still, it's not that hard and the language is quite consistent and, well, powerful. They made quite a large effort to make sure that the underlying concepts are orthogonal and pervasive throughout. So learning just a few concepts actually make a very large part of the shell and language approachable and easy to understand.
You're right in that Python may be a more apt comparison, especially in that PowerShell's .NET foundation serves as the equivalent to Python's included libraries.
But that's a discussion that would have to happen every time people try to think of PowerShell as a weird bash. And it is a capable and useful shell, too. It just can do a lot of things much better than bash; they just look different.
I guess what I always want to know when people complain about powershell is what they were actually trying to do. I think it's an excellent tool for system administration in a Microsoft environment. When you start moving away from that use case, it gets less and less useful.
perhaps if they were not too opposed early on to horrible open source things and just one of the languages that already fit fairly well in that area (python for example) they wouldn't have had to go out of their way to make pretty shitty hacks (i really wonder if anyone in the powershell\winrm team did any testing or development with the machines more than 10 metres away)
I don't think something like Python would have been a good choice to use instead of PS. While I'm sympathetic to the complaint that PS is more of a programming language than a shell, that's even more true of Python. I use PS as a shell far more often than I use it for complicated scripting, and as much as I like Python, I just can't see using it as a shell.
PowerShell really is (or should be) obvious to a programmer but the concept isn't as simple to explain to a sysadmin that doesn't know/understand OOP programming concepts.
They are still utter bastards and I sleep with one eye open.
Currently the tally of bad stuff is pretty high: Patent wars against competitors, forced bundling agreements, lock in despite the open specification stuff which is mostly just wrong, being fucked over on audits and licensing agreement shuffling repeatedly, collaboration with NSA/PRISM, disregard for privacy, plain arrogance since Windows 8 the repeated termination of developer stacks (silverlight, WF3, AppFabric etc) that people built their entire products on.
The marketing tactic of talking constantly about everything shiny drowns out these things going on behind the scenes. The press doesn't help this.
If there's any advice I can part on people is not to get all mushy and happy about it and always keep that eye open.
There's no coming back from that, and I'll gladly educate newcomers to IT on their ways.
Let them die. The new CEO could be the second coming, you can't fix that cancerous attitude that is entrenched.
They deserve to become obsolete, at the very least.
I wouldn't hold my breath.
I would probably agree with that.
From a technology point of view, there are things I love about each company. Microsoft's Azure is pretty neat as is Google's Compute Engine. None of that matters to most people though.
seriously?
But I suppose with Balmer the salesman in charge in between Gates and Nadella they'd avoid sales channel betrayals like that.
If there was a cheaper connection just for the Kin, it would've done reasonably well as a replacement for the Sidekick.
Microsoft's database blunder with the Sidekick less than a year before the Kin's release (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sidekick_data_loss) also contributed, I'm sure, at that time few were willing to trust them with their data. It's a testament to how far Microsoft has come that that's apparently changed with Azure.
In this case, I view Verizon as replying in kind. Which is part of my point, when you treat your peers like s*, there are consequences.
Could you list instances of this? Don't get me wrong, they have been absolute bastards in some cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I4i is my go-to example). But keep in mind it is a huge company that has done business with thousands of firms over the past few decades, so to substantiate your point, you would have to produce a pretty big list.
I'm basically asking you, absent either of us going beyond searches like https://www.google.com/search?q=list+of+microsoft+crimes ^_^, to trust my observations of these businesses since the fall of 1977 when I started in the field. Heck, I was a great fan of Microsoft until NT 3.51 SP2 (and for a while beyond, it was Vista that completed the job). It was a pattern of behavior that became more and more obvious sometime in the late '90s that changed my opinion of the company, capped with their all out illegitimate assault on Linux and FOSS starting in the early '00s. And I of course don't expect you to take my word for it.
I just don't see it in their peers, not even Oracle.
Ah, here's a different angle: name the healthy peers that are willing to work with Microsoft today, beyond what's absolutely required. Yahoo! fails hard on healthy, Mozilla potentially as hard. I don't understand why/how Yahoo! is still in business, but Mozilla sure seems to be in their endgame (one reason I'm avoiding Rust for the time being).
Do you speak ill of banking corporations as often as you do of Microsoft?
Also, if you run Apple hardware at all do yourself a favor and take a look at all the screwed up shit that Apple has done because that company has always been an asshole to just about every entity that they come into contact with.
I don't hate Microsoft today, and only did during the period they posed an existential threat to Linux/FOSS (and it was a relatively gentle sort of hate, made particularly easy by Vista).
I don't run Apple hardware, never have in my life. In part because I count them as worse to users (well, prior to own goals like Vista and Windows 8), but also because as of late they've been behaving particularly bad. Made that decision in 1987, who knew, avoiding particularly closed ecosystems turned out to be a good idea all around in the long term.
I don't "speak ill of banking corporations" because I don't see, well, any that I can think of offhand in the US, being actively, aggressively evil. Stupid in many cases, for sure, but that's a different thing, and not axiomatically akin to Microsoft's crimes.
Yahoo made a number of strategic investments which are very profitable.
You could say they are an investment firm with a small tech-sector arm.
You can wish Microsoft would die, and still use an iPhone.
In fact, much of Apple's success can be attributed to Microsoft fumbling the mobile revolution. In other words, people who use Apple may be doing so directly because of how much worse Microsoft was -- due to Microsoft spending their limited resources on zero-sum tactics like shafting their developer ecosystem.
Compete or die. (Microsoft seems to act like they have a third alternative, monopolize. They're still immensely profitable so it's understandable that their shareholders are comfortable with their current course.)
Part of my current contract is migrating a customer away from SQL Server to Postgres, and it feels good. Automating powershell on aws instances doesn't feel so good, but it's temporary pain.
Typically, if someone hates Microsoft, they love either Apple or Google. That's been my experience at least.
Apple (Worst Offender but also helped Open Source at times)
Microsoft M$ (Middle of the road with it always depending on who you spoke with at the company)
Google (Most powerful of the three in terms of control over people's lives if they wanted it, but I seriously think they stumble ethically not on purpose. I believe they try to follow, "Don't be evil" as a whole)
That said, the Google+ real names insanity removed all my trust in the company's products at that level, and I'm only now considering doing business with them due to their low cost of cloud storage and trusting them at the technical and operational levels more than Amazon.
> Google... stumble ethically not on purpose.
Stumbling? When they ripped off Sun, they did so with deliberately and with awareness at the highest levels. There are emails revealed during the trial that leave no doubt.
Also, of all the companies engaged in all the smartphone patents wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_patent_wars), Google (via Motorola) was the only company that was actually found guilty of abusing patents: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/4-billion-motorol...
Pretty rich coming from a company that accused everyone else of abusing patents.
> When they ripped off Sun
Than why did Sun's CEO congratulate them? Sun also loves to rip off people look at Oracles' Unbreakable Linux AKA Redhat Linux.
I seriously have 30+ years of Apple hatred from before my Amiga days. Amiga community HATED Apple for their business practices and clear lack of innovation. I went to buy a Mac with my dad when released and my dad say the writing on the wall. Lies and more lies and Lisa wasn't more powerful just more expensive and you still sell those?
How do you explain things like this then?
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-skyhook-emails-2011-5?...
That's exactly what Microsoft is accused of doing.
That they were HUGELY upset that they would lose a data collection stream? Or that they were trying to figure out what to do? Android as a service has requirements or you can make a Fire Phone like Amazon did with the Open Source code of the product doesn't seem like M$.
You can explain what I am missing but the fact that we have Amazon Fire Phone and Fire Tablets all based on a fork of Android seems to kill the implications of these emails.
I don't think I would be able to use any form of technology if I was to hold a grudge for every large company that performed some sort of bad practice, with slave labor to privacy issues.
Luckily people that perform these bad practices will eventually get ousted and replaced, that's when I proceed with caution.
I think it's wrong to withhold fair consideration for MS products (specifically) just because they did something you think is wrong years ago.
Thanks to them, I paid mortgage off in under a decade. No other reason.
The things that matter when you're starting to work independently (which I screwed up I will add) are building contacts and getting out of the agency system as soon as possible. Also I'm a bad accountant but YMMV if that interests you. If you can, don't work on their site; remote work is far nicer.
> are building contacts and getting out of the agency system as soon as possible.
I know, but how do you do that? Right now I am working for home and remotely collaborating with a friend in a product, but the VC path is also hard :(
I'm going to add this as well: never work hard. Work out how not to work hard. Life is about what you do when you're not working for me at least.
I have several reasons but mostly subjective preferences. In my previous job I was a fulltime Linux developer, spending all day with an Ubuntu box. Linux is great until you have to patch it or fight with video drivers after an upgrade. I still develop components for Linux on the backend side but I am done with the desktop for a while.
Don't get me wrong that had happened to me in every platform I have worked with (yeah with MacOSX too). I guess my point is, after a while all platforms are more or less the same to me in the core (maybe Windows falls behinds on the console side but cmder is nice enough to make it up) and at the end is just the surface what would make a difference.
To me, Microsoft was the only one doing something different on the mobile side (not anymore though) so that was the candy that brought me to this side for now. I don't know if OC's reasons are more practical but for me are just subjective preference.
I have no hatred for anyone. Just you need to intimately know who you pays your bills at the end of the day.
Ballmer had an attitude that Microsoft needed to dominate every industry they participated in or they would take their toys and go home. That mindset doesn't work in today's technology world, where markets overlap and shift rapidly.
Nadella can't change the culture of the company overnight, but he has pushed through a bunch of great changes to their product strategy -- especially in the consumer space. I mean, Office 2016 finally has a consistent interface on OS X, Windows and Android/iOS. And Microsoft has an enterprise sales partnership with Apple! That would never have happened under Ballmer -- Microsoft is essentially letting Apple use its greatest asset (its partner sales channels) to push iPads so that Microsoft can sell Office and Exchange licenses. Nevermind that its channel partners were already selling their clients iPads anyway; Ballmer would have crammed Surface down the pipeline and wondered why sales numbers were sluggish.
I think toward the end of his tenure, Ballmer started to see why the company was so dysfunctional: it was built for the cutthroat tech landscape of 1998, not the highly fractured-but-integrated market of 2015. His last major moves as CEO were to get rid of the most divisive senior executives to pave the way for a guy like Nadella who could be a peacemaker with the rest of the tech world. Ballmer tore down the silos about a year before putting Nadella in charge of rebuilding the company, which in hindsight was a great move.
All this said, you're absolutely right about keeping one eye open: Nadella is pushing change from the top, but there are a lot of middle managers and junior executives who still do things the old way and will probably never change. You can't change the culture of a company overnight, and they will still continue to be evil in lots of small, subversive ways. If the market lets them get away with being shitty to their customers, they will do it.
So it is good that MS is been moving in the right direction, but there's still a lot of legacy crap holding back innovation.
That's weird, all the file-io operations in windows store apps are async for the very reason of not blocking the UI thread. How big was that folder? I'm geniuly curious.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2005/08/2... (not precisely the same thing, but related)
I've personally seen opening a folder full of photos produce a crash dialog pointing the blame at an Nvidia DLL.
Microsoft definitely knows how to write software, okay? They're really good at it. They ship a lot of it. There are many people there who are brighter than you and I and they know their stuff cold.
Microsoft is full of
- legacy stuff that is really hard to change (many, many reasons for this, few of them pleasant but all of them real)
- conflicting priorities (which bugs do we fix? will we destabilize the product if we fix them? are there more important things to do?)
- political bullshit, in the atmosphere of which it is hard to do the right thing
I left Microsoft three years ago, having spent 11 years there. I saw some howlingly bad software written (little of which shipped), and there are definitely groups there that are stronger than others, but I would never apply the phrase "fundamentally they don't know how to write software".
As far as I can tell, general management incompetence, including of course "political bullshit", is most responsible for their post-XP problems (along with becoming too toxic for healthy peer companies to want work with them, but I'm not sure that matters when enough of the people at the top are so bad).
Although ... what would you say was responsible for the failure of Longhorn? Wasn't that in part technical? Or did that derive from higher up?
Bill Gates actually touched that topic in is Reddit AMA. If I remember correctly, the bar was set up too high (i.e relational file system) and within the constrains it was a big challenge and at some point they had to deliver.
But #1 would seem to be more ambition than Microsoft could deliver at the time.
Anytime somebody mentions this, all I hear is, "They said mean things about my ideology of choice".
They financed a bogus lawfare campaign against Linux, although I doubt they knew it was utterly bogus (The SCO Group never actually owned any rights to UNIX(TM), and knew it before commencing the lawsuits.)
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-skyhook-emails-2011-5?...
http://www.androidauthority.com/google-speaks-up-on-the-acer...
do you? Doesn't really sound like it.
I haven't used Apple's product in Jobs' era, but I've heard a lot of good stories about how solid and easy-to-use their software was. Now I'm on Yosemite, experiencing annoying bugs and unexpected quits/freezes on a daily basis. I don't even dare to update to El Capitan. Yesterday I upgraded to XCode 7.0.1, and all my swift projects failed to compile. If it's not for the touchpad and screen I'd rather go back to my Arch Linux laptop.
Apple isn't bringing any more surprise or delight to me hardware-wise. And their software quality is declining day-by-day. Development wise, just take a look at XCode's newest reviews to learn how bad the dev experience is. Developers are what makes a platform succeed, and Apple doesn't seem to realize that.
However, MS has been amazing since Nadella. My favorite news is open sourcing .NET and making it available for Linux. VSCode is also solid and even feels more polished than Atom to me. Hololens looks cool. Surface definitely lives up to its hype.
Last week I interviewed with MS. At the end I asked about the interviewer's opinion on MS's change and attitude to Open Source, and in his response he had this line: "Because Open Source is the future". I can hardly imagine a MS staff in pre-Nadella era would have such opinions. MS has changed. I think people should put down their prejudice about MS's past and admit that. Going to Redmond next Wed for an onsite. Wish myself good luck.
There are some things that people find to be unforgivable. Not sure if anything MS has done qualifies for that for me, but in the area of gun control/the RKBA, which I've been fighting since the early '70s, there are companies like Ruger and Smith and Wesson which I absolutely refuse to do any business with after they betrayed US gun owners.
Sounds like your problem is that OS X has become Apple's red headed stepchild, iOS isn't reported to be having problems of this magnitude last time I checked. Too bad OS X is Apple's development platform of choice (only possible one???) for iOS....
Both apple and google have had their turn at the same position and done most if not all of the same dubious actions to end-users and developers as microsoft.
I respect a distrust for microsoft but I dont consider it rational to hate one of these big players more than another.
I guess people and media forget fast.
Standard practice among all the big players
office document lock-in
Standard practice among the players lucky enough to be able to do it (we now call it 'walled garden')
... My thesis is that all big tech firms now act as MS once did (or would if they could). But we're just used to it now.
Also re: patents- IBM has a huge patent portfolio. Very little of it is used to patent troll. Those boxed-office Texas shell LLP law-firms setup are nothing like what IBM is doing today (second only behind Red Hat in terms of core Linux kernel commits, IIRC[caveat: source was from a talk I attended in 2013 by one of the 3 upstream-controllers, including Linus]). "Evil 80s IBM" is now actually too stagnant to really exploit the consumer and barely breathing off of old banks and gov't systems that run System/36,360,38,390 on z/OS.
"Evil 90s MS" is now opening up basically everything for the consumer, minus the cash-cows (enterprises). MS Research funds tons of Haskell research, language development that gradually goes from PhD/post-doc work -> "obscure" languages like Haskell/F# -> C# (LINQ is effectively a monad). Python 3.5's new async/await is largely influenced by work Microsoft did (both in semantics and syntax). The CoreCLR is on Github. Inspect, modify, alter, run your F# code on a RS/6000 or 8 dollar ARM if you want to. Visual Studio Community Edition is free, a la the IntelliJ model. I argue they're now a net positive on the community. Just like IBM, they've realized the enterprise is where their money is, so charge for SQL Server licenses (which are really reasonably priced compared to Oracle), Sharepoint, Server, and Dynamics/Biztalk type stuff.
In the 80s it was IBM. In the 90s it was MS. Today, Apple performing so much walled-gardened anti-competitive practices (I can't install my legally purchased copy of OS X on my Intel machine? Really?) that it makes the MS DOJ trial look completely insignificant.
I thought the only way to legally purchase OS X was to buy it preinstalled on a mac.
I can't install Android on my iPhone as well, even if they have similar hardware
Unless it was advertised as capable of doing that, then you can't (of course you can with some hacking, but the idea is the same)
Does Apple have the same market share on phones as MS on the computing market of the 90s? So there you have it
> But we're just used to it now.
It's time for complacency to end, yes?
Things like Microsoft is changing and giving fuzzy feelings (really?), but the general audience is harder to get. I've seen huge billboards with surface 3 ads, special sections in stores, but I've never seen one in the wild.
As mentioned in the introduction, Windows 8 encompasses two UI styles within one product. Windows 8 on mobile devices and tablets is akin to Dr. Jekyll: a tortured soul hoping for redemption. On a regular PC, Windows 8 is Mr. Hyde: a monster that terrorizes poor office workers and strangles their productivity.
I've used it on my mother's Surface Pro (sysadmin stuff), and can't imagine using it on a desktop without major addons etc. The pain of maintaining a Linux desktop is much less for me.
I find more ridiculous the statement "we will never forgive Microsoft" than saying "we will never forgive Germany".
They're a company, not a charity, they're in the business of making money, and if making money implies using "dirty tactics" such as saying phone manufacturers "bundle Office in your phones or we will use our patents against you" it will certainly happen regardless of which company we're talking about.
Also, you should not be angered at Microsoft for collaborating with the NSA, but be angered at America for forcing companies to collaborate with the NSA. If you were in the position of Microsoft would you reject and risk loosing your company? Don't be ridiculous! If Apple is playing to be the victim right now, is because it's more profitable for them after the public outrage that followed Snowden's revelations.
There is a real world outside the Free Software bubble, a real world where companies struggle to survive and any means to survive, even at the expense of the competition, will certainly happen.
Microsoft sold us out to the NSA for a big fat cheque. Apple and Google have been fighting doing so every step of the way.
Companies that act like uncompetitive dicks should be shunned and regulated, especially when they do things like abuse the patent system.
There is a real world outside of the Realism bubble. A real world where people struggle for justice, and justice, even at the expense of wasting time talking on the internet, will certainly happen.
There is no such thing as justice other than "abide by the law".
Fine print: laws are subject to change, sometimes with good results by the perception of the majority of people, sometimes not.
And for everyone who says Microsoft should have told the NSA to shove it, just consider how quickly a major CEO can be taken down by the government: Jeff Smisek, widely considered one of the two most powerful men in the airline industry, was forced out of his position as CEO of United Airlines as part of a government corruption scandal with no more fanfare than a tersely worded press release. He has yet to be charged with anything, but criminal charges are inevitably coming. Any company that does business with the US government (as Microsoft does) is likely participating in some form of corruption or another. All they have to do is investigate that corruption and long jail sentences for senior executives will follow. It's essentially the NSA's version of "plata o plombo".
He was convicted of 19 counts of insider trading in Qwest stock on April 19, 2007 – charges he and many others claim are U.S. government retaliation for his refusal to give customer data to the National Security Agency in February, 2001.
Given the iffiness of such charges when it's your own company's stock, we have to at least entertain the proposition that refusing to work with the NSA is a ticket to Federal prison. Qwest is said to have been the only big company that refused.
But yeah, that's the jist of it. Refusing to comply with an NSA order will likely just end you up in jail on something else because the government has the power to lock you up. So we can't hold the companies who complied with them entirely responsible, as those companies are made up of individuals who have families to think of.
That's the thesis of Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/...), that:
The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague....
He'll have a lot more examples, I'm sure.
So we can't hold the companies who complied with them entirely responsible, as those companies are made up of individuals who have families to think of.
Especially since the Feds have no compunctions against going after your family if they can't pin something on you. E.g. junk bond figure Michael Millikan, who's real crime was creating a market for poorly managed companies.
I wish there was some type of bayesian submarine-ometer[1] that took the baseline percentage chance of any "article" being dressed-up PR on a particular website and performed some type of analysis on the company's marketing spend, brand perception, buzzwords, the interests of the article's author, and the article's similarity to other positive articles on the company/product.
It has a lot to live up to, I use my iPad every day and for a variety of things, but something I always wanted to do on my iPad, sketch, wasn't very satisfactory. And while I liked the Surface Pro 3's pen experience, its battery life was a challenge and some key Apps weren't there.
So long battery life, a better drawing experience, and a useful typing experience, and, for bonus, I can stop carrying around a laptop as well? Well if this thing can pull that off its a win for me, and I'll just put vmware workstation on it and run Linux when I'm doing my embedded work.
But the other thing it has done is really highlight the impact of market windows. Had the iPad Pro come out last year, or even in Q1 of this year, I would be using it already and probably not be buying the Surface Book.
For historical reasons the first thing I bought to try to do what I wanted was the "Touchbook" from Always Innovating. Detachable keyboard, touch screen. But not enough battery life, and the screen's resistive touch screen was not very useful. I also have the Illiad 2 from iREX which an an epaper display with a watcom stylus, loved the pen, and the readability of epaper, but very little app support and challenging storage options. For a while I've lived with both a laptop and the iPad. I'm really curious if this new box can meet my expectations.
The Surface Book is an exceptional piece of kit. It is telling that the top end book (16GB/512SSD) was the only one at one point to be sold-out on pre-order. None of the other options include 16GB of ram and I think this is a shame, but you cannot fault what they have done here.
Kudos. Microsoft now gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
There were only a few pockets of "New Microsoft" back then, but they were there if you looked, and they were working their asses off to change the culture. Clearly their work has paid off.
It was a bottom-top approach with Nadal as result. Ballmer couldn't understand the new wave. Just like many "old" CEO's of software companies don't understand.
I know companies who still keep programming in Access and Terminal Server, Asp forms, ... Just because their boss understands that.
The higher-ups have more to lose (in terms of encroached positions) and don't usually eat their own dog food.
In the early 2000s, Microsoft did try pushing tablet computers, "pocket PCs" based on Windows CE (rivals to Palm PDAs) and even had Windows Phone OS in some smartphones.
That did not gain traction, because the user experience was not captivating, and they had missed the insight that fingers would be the way to go. (I'm not sure if earlier the capacitive touchscreen technology was already available in alternative to the resistive screens that required a stylus.)
I'd say that Apple's post-2007 success would not be possible without learning from Microsoft's expensive failures. But Microsoft did try.
A few years ago I actually advised everyone to not use Microsoft's products. Every single product was subpar (Windows, Windows Phone, their laptops etc). Today, I'm happy to advise Surface Pro, Windows Phone, etc to anyone. They're striving more for innovation (e.g. Surface Pro, Surface Book), which is cool and will bring them success.
The one thing I dislike is the mail application (well, one day when I have the nerve and gumption I'll actually figure out how to attach a PDF, I think it has something to do with OneDrive and compatible applications, but I digress) and that there's not really an alternative to it.
In terms of usability it feels to me snappier and more logical than the IPhone of my girlfriend. Even after almost two years it doesn't feel like the performance is degrading.
If they don't kill the platform I plan to stick with it.
With Windows 10 on phones in November that platform will light up on phones finally. (Already the UWP Facebook app, as one example, is a leap forward in cross-OS feature parity compared to previous versions and it will be great to see that "day one" on Windows 10 phones.) On top of that you have "Project Astoria" which will mean very easy ports of existing Android apps to Windows 10 Phones for developers looking to leverage existing code investment. (Already somewhat released and being utilized is "Project Islandwood" and we're starting to see some iOS software ported to Windows through it.)
The UWP support on the Xbox One (and the merging of the Xbox and Windows Stores, huzzah) is supposed to light up as soon as November and we now know that a lot more developers will have access to HoloLens (which will also utilize the UWP) early next year. I think that access to Xboxen and HoloLens will encourage more developers to also consider cheaply scaling "down" to people's phones as well. So too should Continuum phones and their ability to offer side-by-side run "desktop-like" versions of UWP apps may drive some interesting apps to Windows Phone moving forward that have ignored it thus far.
I'm definitely going to pick up the Lumia 950XL phone when it goes on sale.
In their defence, we did that to them. They had to make all the N versions of Windows to appease EU courts. What's troubling is that no such restriction is placed on Apple or Google
One of Microsoft's weaknesses is definitely the complexity of their licensing.
The idea that one wouldn't have to purchase 3 licenses is crazy.
Or Office 365 Home - one license for up to 5 desktops/laptops + five tablets - crazy?
I'd be surprised if Windows didn't move to a subscription model soon. The current free period looks like an attempt at lock-in to me.
As compared to most/all open-source OSes (Android being only partially open source). This includes mobile OSes.
> " All of it is there to improve the experience for most users, and possible to turn the chatter of such that it shares next to nothing. What more could you ask for, in a system that aims to make is simple and feature rich for the average person?"
Did you not see the stories about Microsoft collecting data even after the settings to disable the features in question were used?
"Windows 10, however, shakes this up. Instead of two separate systems—one for error reporting, a second for collecting usage data—both have been rolled into one combined setting. This setting has four positions: off; basic error reporting and simple device capability reporting; enhanced diagnostic tracking that extends the basic information with more detailed error reporting, and usage telemetry; and full data, that adds process memory snapshots to the enhanced data. This means that there's no way to participate in error reporting without also participating in usage tracking, and vice versa.
Further, the "off" option is only available in Windows 10 Enterprise. The common home user versions of Windows, Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro, always collect (and report) at least "Basic" level information and no way to turn off the feature entirely.
The genuine privacy implications of this seem slight, but for those who absolutely do not want to send anything to Microsoft, Windows 10 is certainly a regression. Is Microsoft poring over this data, trying to sniff out the details of Windows users' lives and figure out all their secrets? It's highly unlikely—but the removal of the ability to turn off this reporting is nonetheless strange, and there's no clear reason for it."
But in any case, if that is the only thing one cannot turn completely off for average user, I'd say it's a pretty good compromise between features and still giving power to the powerusers. Still it's odd the off option isn't possible for everyone.
Why so? As far as I understand, Microsoft still goes with the templates their hardware OEMs already have: Surface is based on a tablet template, while Surface Pro and Surface Book are supposedly based on different laptop templates and the available options are thus defined by the OEMs. This also explains why the 'Pro' versions 1 and 2 had cameras inferior to the 'non-Pro' versions.
I wish Microsoft got their act together and gave more attention to design, while they are at it. If they are saying this is a tablet that can replace my computer, let it have what those tablets that can't have: cellular module. If it has a non-removable hard drive, let me have it in the greatest available capacity, sepecially while you already offer that on a lower-priced model.
Can you order a Macbook Air with cellular modem? because that has always been the range they designed the SP for.
2. They might, but they say it's a tablet, and it looks like a tablet, and it has touch screen. Tablets (often) have cellular.
Surface Book storage options listed as: "Solid state drive (SSD) options: 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB." http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/devices/surface-book#...
Is this just something not available right away, or do you not want a solid state? I am confused.
Some good ideas, but let's be real - ultimately a total niche product at $1500. Compare that the surface pro 3 has been selling about 3-4 million units in the last year ( q3/2014 - q2/2015 revenue was estimated around $3b, on devices costing about $800 + $130 keyboard), while Apple sells about 20m Mac units in the same timeframe, which is in itself STILL a niche! www.statista.com/statistics/263444/sales-of-apple-mac-computers-since-first-quarter-2006/
I just don't see how this is going to make any sort of real dent.
Beyond that, it strikes me that the way they talk focuses so much more on narrative than the actual products they're selling. Like "I want you to love MS because you love building things for other people" or whatever.