Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?"
blog.seattlepi.com
blog.seattlepi.com
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 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.""
Some folks will rip apart shoddy work because they don't care if the creators get personally upset about it. They're not looking for a confrontation, but if there is one, they feel justified.
Other people are bothered that the creators are not personally upset about how shoddy the work is and make quite sure that they are. It's a subtle but important difference.
There's also a subtle difference between the 1st part of this sentence alone and the entire sentence.
- 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
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.
When people make choices they also look at convenience and price ... having these products packaged and nicely integrated with each-other was genius.
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)?
Better than SCO Unix of the period as a desktop.
OS/2 was also a good OS for x86 PCs. At least as good as NT, unless, again, you want it to run software designed for Windows.
I would, however, much rather use NT 3.51 as a desktop OS than Solaris 2.5 with CDE and its 80s-style command line utilities (luckily it seems they are using GNU stuff nowadays?).
- Windows 95: Not perfectly stable or technically very groundbreaking, but a good enough combination of usability and features to be considered decent in my mind and millions of others at the time.
- IE6: great at the time. Some of the standards it doesn't support didn't exist when it came out. Also, IE5 introduced the Microsoft.XMLHTTP ActiveX control, which was the foundation for XMLHttpRequest. If that wasn’t created by Microsoft at the time, AJAX almost certainly wouldn’t be as ubiquitous as it is today.
- SQL Server 20xx: Perhaps RDMS's aren't your thing, but they're very much needed for now, and Microsoft's can certainly handle most relational db needs.
- .NET 3.5+ and C# 3+: If you want a statically typed language and platform, anything .NET 3.5 or greater are at least ok.
- ASP.NET MVC 2+: Not quit the same as a dynamically-based ROR or Django and they also don’t give you a default ORM; you pick it, but its solid and improving. Source code is available; contribs aren’t.
- Visual Studio 2008+: Again, not some crazy vim/emacs setup, although plugins can somewhat help simulate that, but these definitely don’t suck at all.
- IIS7+: Just because it’s not Apache doesn't mean it isn't decent. It is quite powerful and secure.
- Windows Server 2003+: Never had bad experiences with these.
- Microsoft Security Essentials: Very good and free antivirus.
I’m sure there’s more, but it is an exaggeration to say Microsoft hasn’t made any decent products. Certainly some of these don’t seem as good overall when accounting for the licensing costs and associated culture/stigma that comes with working in Microsoft shops, but many of products in and of themselves are decent.
-Windows 95? Come on, your memory fails. It was utterly usable and crashed hard everyday. Any other OS of the time was better. It was so basic... paint? notepad? a big pile of shit. And they have been budling the same crap more than 10 years until Windows 7.
-IE6 was good at the time. It's sad it was so many time without new versions.
-The first usable SQLS was the 2000, and sincerely, until 2003 oracle ran circles around it.
-.NET and C# is OK, fine lenguage.
-ASP.NET I do not know.
-Visual Studio is OK, but almost because it has no competition.
-IIS7+: I do not remember the last version I touched, but I had to clean my hands with bleach after. Oh! and it came with W2000, and obligatory for some SQL Server stuff, for no aparent reason.
-Windows Server 2003, better than the 2000, yes. And grey.
-Microsoft Security Essentials: no please.
It's too tiring keeping up with antivirus offerings, and constantly needing to clean up after their messes.
I'd recommend Linux, to be honest, because it's a cheaper alternative. But because there's still no good way of using it without needing to open Terminal at some point - the Mac is, I suppose, a good compromise.
There are quite a number of things that they'd like to do that isn't clearly expressed - or even easily findable! - though Ubuntu's GUI. They will struggle with it for a bit.
Plus: even if we set that aside, there will be certain bits of hardware you'll want to use that would require opening the Terminal to configure/install.
Because my objective is to minimize my time spent on helping my friends/relatives with their computers, Ubuntu simply isn't a good enough alternative to Windows. You merely trade the time spent on making the computer virus-proof with time spent teaching them where to find things (which is funny, because most of the time I'm finding things for the first time myself, seeing as I prefer the Terminal).
As opposed to the Mac - I send them away to buy one, and they never come back to me for help.
PS: Why the downvotes? I expressed a justified assertion, backed up with some evidence, and people react to the fact that I'm dissing Linux? Tsk, HN, I expected more of you.
There are quite a number of things that they'd like to do that isn't clearly expressed - or even easily findable! - though OSX's GUI. They will struggle with it for a bit.
--
Really, it's just a learning curve and it's the same for any new OS.
Most non-technical people don't have the habit of figuring out what to do. They have the habit of doing what they're used to. For most, if you change even the smallest thing in their interface it can be catastrophic. (My mom often calls me for things like not being able to use internet at all anymore because the bookmarks bar is gone because someone accidentally hit ctrl+b or something).
I think the whole "Apple just works" thing is majorly overblown. Every time I have to use an OSX laptop I cringe because I have to look for stuff in the weirdest places and it takes me so long to figure out how to do things that I often just give up (if I'm using an OSX laptop it's usually because I don't have much time and just bummed the first laptop that was around). I can't imagine my mom magically finding everything intuitively if I can''t.
Also, you say you backed your assertion up with evidence. What evidence? I see none at all. The plural of anecdote is not data. (I'm not saying I'm providing evidence either, I'm simply providing a counter-example to your anecdote.)
Note too that I said some evidence.
>I think the whole "Apple just works" thing is majorly overblown.
I suppose the simplest way to prove this is to consider the alternative: of what other operating system, taking into account everything that a non-technical user needs, can this be said to be true? Perhaps it is not true of all our current operating systems, but if it is more preposterous to claim that Windows or Linux 'just works', then Apple takes the cake and my point is justified.
Whether it is overblown or not is not my concern - it is currently the best that we have, and I have to make do. Perhaps iPad-like devices would prove to be better, but that future is still two-three years away.
Anecdotal evidence seems to support this: I wince whenever I see the Macs my friends and family use - the desktop is cluttered beyond repair, the dock is stretched across the screen, and they don't know how to use various core features (expose, frontrow, etc). But they don't complain, and they don't ask me for as much help as they did before, and this is the only metric that matters to me.
I'm happy, they're happy. What's not to like?
Change your mindset from hacker to 'non-technical relative or friend', and that problem goes away.
"There will be certain bits of hardware you'll want to use that will not work with you new system." is how they would phrase it, and oftentimes, it does not really bother them at all.
Even if it would bother them, getting a Mac likely would not help, as it would get them the same results for some of their old hardware.
The best synopsis I heard (I can't remember who said it, nobody famous) was that "The hardest part about learning Linux is UNlearning whatever else you know first."
I think that correctly asserts that yeah, you won't find things in the "Control Panel", and you won't be able to "Win+R" for a run dialog, etc. Otherwise, I personally have had nothing but positive feedback from my less technical friends that I've turned on to Ubuntu, except for the usual complaints, or when they have to give up foo application because it doesn't exist (Photoshop, World of Warcraft, whatever.)
Some years ago there was a project set up to fix those Linux hardware issues, and they effectively didn't do any work, because they couldn't find reasonable hardware that wasn't supported by Linux.
I have a (crappy) scanner that has no working drivers for any Windows beyond 98 and Mac OS beyond version 9, but it works just fine under Ubuntu/Linux. I haven't seen any mainstream, reasonable hardware that doesn't work under Linux for a long time. Really, from my perspective, hardware support under Linux is significantly better than under any other operating system.
Where it indeed gets spotty is the software to use the features of the hardware. E.g. Xsane rhymes a lot with insane, the various photo organiser tools are of varying quality, to say the least, and so on. Ubuntu is making progress, but there still are a lot of use cases where the GNU/Linux/Ubuntu desktop doesn't provide good alternatives.
23 freakin' floppies though! Awesome piece of software.
I by no means am some Microsoft hater, but I'm amused about this tinted rose glass nostalgia for XP. It's easy to say XP is a good system now with the maturity of three service packs and the bad taste of Vista still in our mouths, but I remember all those years ago much dislike of XP around the internet. Among other things, it was a security nightmare that wasn't even fixed until SP2. You put release day XP on your machine and put it on the internet and you're machine will be probably hacked within the hour.
On the other hand not to many people stuck with Vista. A fully patched Vista installation works just fine nowadays. It still has higher system requirements, but those requirements are now 4 year old systems.
Vista is and always will be a dog.
For commodity hardware, they might have been the best available, but that's an adequacy criterion, not a "very good" criterion.
Most of the others I have no disagreement with.
Apple never really believed in its development tools group, and the market share they lost in the 90s shows that. They are still paying for lost opportunity.
Continuing the "Microsoft and Apple are different" theme, the thing that's worth considering is that the "goodness" of these products is the goodness of well engineered compromises.
Current Word is actually a fusion of DOS word and the original Windows Word and while it has a huge feature set, this set is not terribly consistent. It's an achievement to make thing feel as good as it does. Similarly for the others and very different from producing a clean, "just works" app from the ground up (not necessarily a better or worse achievement imho).
(Not meant derogatory. Just in the sense of http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html)
[1] I say this despite having once written a piece (c. 1993) based on a Dr. Suess book that featured the lines "I could not merge 'grneggs' with 'ham'. I do not like you star dot sam."
My point is that it's easy to think Steve Jobs is in compete and total control of every pixel on an OSX screen and has intimate knowledge of the tiniest details about how every bundled app works, but the truth is probably closer to "Jobs hired a bunch of very smart people to do it for him, and managed them in a way that allowed them to function without the bureaucratic paralysis that plagues Microsoft." Which is a state very different from "dictatorial death grip."
(Though I won't argue that Jobs is indeed a benevolent dictator, and a damned good one).
Xbox
SharePoint
Sql Server
DirectX
Visual Studio
Expression Studio
Team Foundation
Team Viewer
Windows Server
And I don't know any developer who would dismiss Visual Studio. In most regards, it's a best-of-breed IDE.
You are new around here, right? Make yourself comfortable and you will know droves of them in no time. ;)
The plus about it is that it has all the stuff that you need to build the final payload/program/assembly/whatever. My discomfort with it these days would be that it requires too much mouse work.
(And best-of-breed sounds very BFE, or something that Gartner would say, hardly the people I would look to to know what is going on).
Not that I had a lot of love for VS either, but I don't remember it ever running as heavy as eclipse.
edit: there are categories of software that have representatives that are more dysfunctional than Sharepoint. Still, Sharepoint is pretty much the worst document management/intranet package you can find.
I've seen some gibberingly awful Oracle web interfaces for HR stuff like entering time cards, but the worst was a "Software Life Cycle Management" thing that a client was using — a bizarre issue tracker with piles of inane baked in process.
When you logged in it would open a sole chrome-less popup window. You weren't allowed to be logged in more than once per account: one computer, one browser session, one window, one tab, period. There were no hyperlinks and only one URL — all the buttons POSTed a form with tons of parameters back to the same URL, with lots of state both in the session on the server and independently in cookies. You couldn't link to anything, it had a ridiculous taxonomy system, and the search was actively antagonistic to you finding anything. Most of the actual data worth looking at was in unindexed Word documents attached to the issues.
You may consider it good, as long as you have never, ever used anything more sophisticated than a network share to manage your documents.
You must be kidding...
They bought the source code for SQL Server from Sybase; the foundations of the product weren't created at Microsoft. The wire protocol is still heavily compliant with sybase.
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.
This is sort of like complaining that Safeway can't make ice cream as well as Ben and Jerry's.
"What do you say we go get some sewer coffee, sewer cake, and Safeway Ice Cream?" - Futurama
And in fact, Safeway doesn't make ice cream as well as Ben and Jerry's. It's ice cream, not apples and oranges.
Apple is in a few markets where they serve a large majority of the market (music players being the obvious). There is probably room for Apple to improve on those products, but I suspect most rational people would not claim Apples products in those markets are as poorly made as most of Microsofts products. Effectively, it is not the unfair comparison you claim.
I've no idea what Microsoft was like at the time, so maybe they did have such a thing, but if there was, I can't imagine it had much priority in the corporate culture.
I suppose this is why many people prefer Ben and Jerry's ice cream to Safeway.
The distribution methods and relationships with customers differ a great deal, but both companies develop software, some of it very similar in purpose, and both also sell hardware. The problems outlined in the email were not related to problems integrating with others' hardware, so lack of ability to integrate with that isn't an excuse (this time).
I think it is the ice cream comparison that's the unfair one. Software sold in volume is a high margin business. With 80% market share there is neither the justification nor the excuse for the sort of blunders outlined in the email. Unlike ice cream, there are no physical ingredients to cut corners with. It's doubtful that things that compromised quality saved them any money at all. What resource did they lack?
It's not as if they were a hardware business operating on razor-thin margins to get market share and cutting corners to break even. They've got revenue, they've got cash, they've got many talented engineers. They spent about 9 times as much as Apple on R&D in 2007, about 7 times as much in 2009. Considering how often Apple has major OS updates, and introducing new/updated hardware designs, it seems like MS isn't producing as much fruit for the R&D money. Did I miss something?
R&D From the 10K filings with SEC
Microsoft USD 9 billion in 2009 https://investor.shareholder.com/msft/EdgarDetail.asp? CIK=789019&FID=1193125-09-158735&SID=09-00
Apple USD 1.3 billion in 2009 http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File? item=UGFyZW50SUQ9MTg1OTB8Q2hpbGRJRD0tMXxUeXBlPTM=&t=1
Compare to Steve Jobs who knows how to make wonderful shiny devices that cost more than what many in the third world will make in a lifetime, but who has done very little when it comes to philanthropy.
Just because you believe this does not mean everyone else does.
Bill Gates decided he made enough money at Microsoft and wanted to pursue other things. That's fantastic, for him and millions of others. Steve Jobs has decided to do what he loves until he can't any more. That's also fantastic, for him and for millions of others. They're both making positive changes for lots and lots of people. Who are you, or anyone else, to criticize that?
I don't see why these two need to be directly compared this way, as if Gates is finally showing his soft side means Jobs should too.
The problem I have is that they're no longer doing the same thing - it's like comparing Bill Gates to Donald Trump. It might have made sense to compare Bill and Steve while they were working in the same field, but why bother any more?
Aren't all people equal?
That said, I have read some awful things about the Bill Gates foundation so I'm a bit wary of taking his side.
Principally, the iPhone seems to have hastened the development of low-cost hand-held medical diagnostic equipment, including digital stethoscopes, portable ultrasound, eye examination, remote disease diagnosis, etc
Sometimes it takes a revolutionary product targeting affluent individuals to help drive innovation for everyone else.
I really hate this comparison for one reason: Gates has a lot more money than Jobs - IIRC the amount of Gates' wealth that he put toward the Gates Foundation is more than Jobs entire net worth.
There's also the matter of whether Jobs isn't pursuing philanthropy or if he's just not doing it publicly.
Microsoft products are great, not all of them but most of their software products are, it is the reason they own the desktop market and have millions of users using many of their software products every day.
I like Apple's products as well... but it is the hardware that I like... not so impressed with Apple's software such as Mail or Xcode.
The only thing that keeps me using my iPhone is safari and the screen. It's great. That's the killer feature to me. Yet it's annoying I can't turn images off without jailbreaking.
I don't really think apple delivers software products that are much better than MS products. Hardware yes although the xbox line is pretty sharp.
Or maybe I'm just getting old.
It sounds like you haven't seen a brand new Windows machine in awhile. They are cluttered beyond belief. The OSX clutter, in comparison, is unnoticeable.
The other nice thing about OSX though is that the migration tools have always been totally painless for me - when I get a new mac I DON'T have to go remove that stuff because it saves my settings automatically. I haven't had to remove the clutter since my first MacBook in like 2006 - the settings were carried over. In Windows this rarely works, and when it does it takes a lot of work and doesn't do a complete job.
This is, IMHO, one of MS's greatest struggles - it is not enough for Microsoft to develop a culture of top notch user experiences, but also all third party OEMs. This is a problem that Apple does not contend with.
We see this with Windows phone also - no amount of software and UI can save a device designed and manufactured with rock bottom quality.
I've always imagined one of the reasons Apple products are so polished is because Steve rides people like this all day long until they stop sucking.
Google is running into this. Their track record of late is spotty at best, and it's because their culture is too wild-west and "throw on wall, see if stick" style.
As much as geniuses are really good at solving problems plaguing modern society, they are really bad at focussing. They need leaders that understand them, like John Lasseter at Pixar. Alternatively, they need equally-genius benevolent dictators like Linus Torvalds (Linux, Git) to keep them in check. Failing that, they need supremely smart, pile-driving, and obliquely techie-cum-marketing obsessed leaders like Jobs at Apple.
Gates + Ballmer = those things above, but you really need one voice, not two. I think Google is having the same trouble having Sergey and Larry's style squaring almost diametrically against Eric Schmidt's.
well, that's my sad experience from a couple of big companies.
That and none of this involved 'big ticket' teams, movie maker makes $0, so they get squeezed out at meetings.
Almost every manager I've known assumes that the cost of communication or collaboration is near zero while the cost of development is extremely high. Often, the cost of duplication development effort is lower than the cost of adding another communication and collaboration channel.
Mind, people seem to have better experiences with Windows now than they did in the 90s. (Remember WindowsME? Gah...) Maybe Gates' attention and hectoring did help.
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").
As soon as you try not to use IE suddenly you can't do anything
Why not also complain that vendor specific -moz and -webkit prefixes don't work in IE?
FWIW, Outlook Web Access works perfectly well (in "light mode") in Chrome and Firefox, and I can download from MSDN just fine.
I don't really know what WGA is but have seen logos for it in the computer info dialog. I regularly download things from MSDNAA in Chrome, haven't tried the full MSDN portal.
Next time use ftp.
> LaserJet 6MP attached to it via parallel port.
That got me looking for the date this was written.
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 rather non-standard setup that I have.
Regardless, I fondly remember Windows 2000, though I also remember it as a MUCH more spartan system than 7 is, and 7 easily trounces it, in my humble opinion.
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 things that I uninstall. In particular, since installations are hierarchies of dependent packages, I can't see how to tell it "get rid of this and anything that it depends on, that isn't required by something else".
So for now, I can't upgrade my Ubuntu installation.
This sounds like your typical family member who can't get Windows to work right, doesn't it? I don't think that Linux has done anything better. They've done it different, and people who know the system can use it very effectively, but those of us who don't know the incantations are still out in the cold.
There's no software repository as properly maintained as Debian's ... but normal users can totally trash their systems and that is not OK.
(edit: my experience is on Ubuntu, not Debian.)
That is one of it's greatest shortcomings. Then again, on the other hand, that is one of it's greatest strengths.
Dependencies are automatically installed for all applications and are automatically removed when there are no packages left that need them, so don't worry about those!
If you're more a command line guy, you can do the same using aptitude (aptitude remove package-name). Packages under aptitude will be listed as (a)utomatically installed if they were installed as a requirement for another package, so you shouldn't have to remove those by hand.
On my slimmed down system I use "sudo aptitude" type "/appname[Enter]", where appname is from the list popcon gives, then "n" to find the package and then try "_" (Shift+-) which purges the packages. If something will break you get a warning "e" shows what the suggested action is "," and "." scroll through options and "!" applies. When you're happy "g" will list the actions to be taken and "g" again will confirm. "q" at any time quits or moves to the previous menu or list. HTH.
"They've done it different, and people who know the system can use it very effectively, but those of us who don't know the incantations are still out in the cold."
Agreed, but seriously, I've never had to go through such steps to do anything in Linux unless it was, for example, a brand new piece of hardware that didn't have kernel module. This was Microsoft Windows user trying to install Microsoft Moviemaker software by Microsoft. And, it took all that.
Beware, mixing 'apt-get' and 'aptitude' used to cause some issues, such as trying to remove software that wasn't installed with 'aptitude' (although it always asks first). I think this has been fixed in recent versions but I'm not sure.
They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).
It's funny how far we've come, with today's out of the box search tools this wouldnt be a problem
So I want a simple movie editor to clip 5secs off the beginning of a home movie - BUT to do this I have to sign up for an MS specific hotmail account, create a windows passport (I thought they had abandoned that?) get Windows messenger, windows photo viewer and be included in a whole bunch of MS specific social websites.
So I found a torrent of Movie maker 2.6 for XP - it works perfectly on Win7.
definitely. def-in-it-ely Always say it like this as you type.
Most people find that this is actually helpful, though, because signing up for (or using, since the vast majority of folks already have one) a Live ID enables a bunch of convenient features like easily uploading your photos and videos (either to Microsoft's services or to Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, etc.) And most users who use Movie Maker also want to, for instance, organize their photos. Let's not forget that iLife also comes as a suite for a reason.
On the other hand, signing up for a new throwaway account just to trash Microsoft... yeah, that's classy.
(Usual disclosure: I work at Microsoft.)
Windows too often decides to do an update that will give me X extra stuff that I don't trust signing up for something like windows live just to get an included free movie player
It's a magnitude easier than installing anything on Windows: Click Link. DMG gets mounted on desktop. Click continue a couple times.
But really that's quaint, too. Install iMovie on the iPhone or iPad: Search App Store. Click Install. Enter Password.
Expecting users to do anything else at install time is expecting too much.
Also, no-install / portable apps are ever such a pleasant trend - just copy the files and run them.
"Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time?"
No wonder he has no idea how horrible Windows is. He resets it every day.
It comes across as the sort of email you would write while criticizing/mocking a competitors product that you were powerless to change.
There's no demand for improvement, or accountability for making that happen. No wondering if this small experience is indicative of other problems. He's just "disappointed".
I know if the the richest man in the world said he was disappointed with something I had, the implications of not fixing the problem would be very clear. :)
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 to XP you have to wade through more windows to get to a specific configuration point. That gets very irksome if you want to perform some configuration for a dozen PC's. (Enough to make it very repetitive, too little that automation would make much sense, especially considering the abysmal automation tools Windows comes with coughshellcough). Other critical points are software management systems (lack of) and general disability in the usability sector.
Granted, learning to cope with a Linux system is somewhat more challenging, but once you are into it, it's really much less bother to do things, no matter the scale.
Microsoft still has a long way to go just to reach the current status. Maybe they will manage, as they seem to be very apt at keeping the stranglehold on the market.
And I will keep avoiding them as much as I can.
Hmm... I've been thinking about switching to Powershell. What do you find abysmal about it?
Same reason why tcsh and ksh didn't get traction, and they even have merit to them.
Who is the target audience? UNIX command line people certainly aren't. Then who, people that managed to learn VB Scripting host?
That's just not how things work.
No.
Who is the target audience?
People who want to utilize its access to hundreds of administration tasks across most (all?) of Microsoft's server products, to automate administration tasks.
EDIT to add:
Same reason why tcsh and ksh didn't get traction, and they even have merit to them.
I can't tell: is the implication here that Powershell doesn't have merit? I'm trying to understand.
In the world of enterprise Unix, ksh is king. It is used even for "serious" applications, not only as the sysadmin's glue of choice (the company where I work at was using, in 2009, a HR payroll application written in ksh. Had they not outsourced accounting to a third party, they would probably still be using it today).
Granted, "legacy" Unices are being slowly obsoleted by Linux, but ksh lives on. It would be unthinkable for RHEL or SLES to deprecate ksh and leave it out of the distribution - enterprise customers would probably think this is some kind of a bad joke.
Two years later, nothing about XP had changed, and I moved to OS X, just in time to avoid Vista...
So, while the letter is, itself, excellent, I'm not sure how much it did to help out Windows in the long run. (Maybe Windows 7 represents a change.)
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
Now, he's just "quite disappointed".
The second time I read it I actually laughed.
WTH???!!
Mystery solved.
The another example is Java development. Everyone who run Maven2 build process (say to build clojure-contrib) will be amazed by a tons of a strange and useless messages, repeated downloads of what seems the same files (but, different minor version numbers) to unknown location. That process will took something like 10 minutes on 3G connection, while you have absolutely no idea what's going on (OK, I can figure out that it is a process of a recursive downloading and building dependencies, and because people don't care about migration to the latest stable versions, it will download half of internet.)
This alone tells me what is really happening in a Java world better than all Sun's brainwashing altogether. ^_^
btw, sudo apt-get install maven2 downloaded another 70Mb of shit (in case JDK is already installed). 70Mb for a apt+make replacement? Compressed Linux kernel sources are less in size.