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.
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
- 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).
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.