The Cancer Of Microsoft’s Tastlessness | Hacker News Reader

The Cancer Of Microsoft’s Tastlessness

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35 pointsmikecane19 comments

Microsoft is right.

I've reinstalled two laptops in the last six months (for friends) - and was able to use the correct serial number because it was on the bottom of the laptop.

Without that they'd have been stuck with a machine that didn't get updates and warned them about being unverified all the time.

To me, that sounds more like an argument against software that requires serial numbers to work, rather than for splattering stickers on laptops.

Seems to me not to be about Right and Wrong, decisions on aesthetics are not so binary. Usefulness does not mean that it is tasteful, Microsoft has chosen this licensing scheme.

It's perfectly possible for this information to be hidden and still be available when needed. Particularly when Microsoft has so much persuasive power in this industry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism_(architecture)

Would it have been so difficult to undo the usually single screw to enter the battery compartment. And it's clearly stated in the article that the reason they wanted the label on the outside was for "branding". Ridiculous.

The author definitely gets points for the title, but the Microsoft serial numbers is only 1 of 9 stickers on the back, and takes up maybe 20% of that sticker real estate.

Is this really Microsofts fault?

if they refused to budge, in that instance, yes.

>The author definitely gets points for the title

They'd get more points from me if "tastelessness" was spelled properly.

>>>They'd get more points from me if "tastelessness" was spelled properly.

DOH! So this guy coined Reeze's Law. It states, once Post or Send is hit, typos multiply. And there is no way to see them until everyone else has. Thanks.

I agree - this isn't MSFT's fault!

Many of the big boys were well capitalized enough (dell / Compaq / etc) to have built an integrated hardware/software platform like Apple did to keep things beautiful.

But most of them were too busy counting their money churning out uninspired hardware that had the single purpose of running Windows software.

Many of the big boys were well capitalized enough (dell / Compaq / etc) to have built an integrated hardware/software platform like Apple did to keep things beautiful.

Whoah you have a serious historical blindspot here. Back in the day everyone did have their own integrated platform. Microsoft killed every one of them. Apple only managed to hang on by the skin of their teeth due to the loyalty of their userbase after coasting on their achievements made in the 80s. It was a very close call though, Apple almost didn't have time to bring Jobs back, it was only because they had a stronghold in publishing which persisted longer than it should have because of weak color management in Windows.

The idea that an OEM manufacturer like Dell or Compaq had the ability to build and market a brand-new OS exactly during the time when Microsoft was driving nails in established OS coffins on a weekly basis is just not realistic.

Points well taken. My frame of reference was the 1990s - I wasn't referrng to the wild-west spirit of 80s but I completely forgot about BeOS/BeBox, NeXT, and other commercial vendors. . .

Still amazing to watch Apple pull it off after all these years.

Exciting times.

I'm amazed Schwartz is making a big thing of his time there, let alone in a "what I couldn't say" bent. He was CEO - isn't it the role of the CEO to blast the inefficiencies out to get a company to function?

Even five years ago Sun could have made a play for desktop dominance. They had a good codebase, operating system teams, hardware teams, brand, well-regarded language platform and VM, ability to recruit star hackers - everything you should need to be a strong competitor to take back the desktop (which they'd had in the 80s) if they'd wanted to.

That story doesn't seem to make much sense. I can only guess that Lenovo was getting money (or a reduction on the price for the Windows license) for displaying the sticker. After all, if you buy a standalone Windows, you are not forced to attach a a sticker to your notebook afterwards. So Lenovo could have just bought standalone licenses.

So Micrososoft paid for an ad, and Lenovo didn't want to display it despite getting the money. Might be bad taste to pay for an ad on a notebook to begin with, but it is a different story.

On the one hand it's a good move to pound into people's brains that all base belong to Microsoft - design be damned.

On the other hand does it really help to associate your brand with the bottom of the barrel laptop / desktop?

And then hide the Microsoft brand on Xbox360 / Zune?

MSFT is more like a country in a state of perpetual civil war than they are a computer company.

Having come from Microsoft not too long ago, I really think that "warring city-states" is a much better description of how Microsoft internal politics works than the typical Microsoft-as-monolith metaphors.

Do you think it's more a "warring city-states" structure than most other very large corporations?

As Microsoft is the only very large corporation I've worked for so far, I'm afraid I can't really make a comparison.

A bit off topic, but [Warring States](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warring_states) happens to be the golden age of Chinese philosophy, akin to Europe's Age of Enlightenment. The intellectual output grew out of necessities of competition.

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

These things are machines with which we do work. To make them such extensions of ourselves that we start identifying ourselves by them ("I'm a Mac, I'm a PC") is pathologically insane.

It's the bottom of your computer. If you care that much about what the bottom of your computer looks like, then I tend to doubt you don't care enough about your work.

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