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White_N_Nerdy

Correction... Microsoft /has made/ some excellent products. Here are some more for the list:

Xbox

SharePoint

Sql Server

DirectX

Visual Studio

Expression Studio

Team Foundation

Team Viewer

Windows Server

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Have you ever had to support sharepoint? I don't know if I'd consider it an excellent product.

I think "excellent" is nowhere close to any adjective I would use to describe it.

You may consider it good, as long as you have never, ever used anything more sophisticated than a network share to manage your documents.

Reminds me of the phrase "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." SharePoint works with so many MS products and there is such a huge eco system that goes with it. I think it's a safe bet for many companies that already rely on MS products. I would also give a lot of credit to the MS consulting/salesforce for many sales of that product.

It makes $1 billion per year

Lots of crappy products make $1 billion per year, especially enterprise products.

As bad as Sharepoint is, most of its competitors are much worse and also make huge piles of money.

Nothing can be much worse than Sharepoint.

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.

Enterprise software can be surprisingly awful. blasdel's story is the best, but I remember being astonished that you could actually pay for version control software. The fact that said version control software didn't even have atomic commits but did, interestingly enough, run on its own proprietary file system was almost a Kafkaesque punchline.

Sounds like you've never been forced to use any of the Oracle Applications webapps!

They may be bad, but come on, much worse than Sharepoint?

Yes, worse than Lotus Notes or Sharepoint.

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.

Your words remind me of a software called ChangePoint. Nightmares about it still haunt me.

> SharePoint

You must be kidding...

God, that thing /sucks/.

Most of those are "mee too products". Not breaking new ground, and certainly not the best of options.

Xbox was revolutionary. Online multiplayer on a console had been tried many times before — as far back as the Sega Genesis and as recently as the Xbox's rival, Playstation 2 — and failed miserably every time. Microsoft was the first company to make it work, and their current implementation is still probably the best.

And I don't know any developer who would dismiss Visual Studio. In most regards, it's a best-of-breed IDE.

> And I don't know any developer who would dismiss Visual Studio.

You are new around here, right? Make yourself comfortable and you will know droves of them in no time. ;)

I would be fascinated to hear from them. I know lots of developers don't use Visual Studio for some reason or another (I'm one of them), but I've never heard anyone call Visual Studio a poor IDE.

I edit in Emacs, then build and debug in VS (when I can). It's a good combo and less clumsy than it sounds.

Java IDEs like Eclipse and IntelliJ made VS look like a toy until very recent editions. No built-in refactoring support, limited configurability for keyboard shortcuts, minimal integration with external build tools and SCM systems -- it was horrible going back to C# development from Java when I was doing both in 2005-2006.

Not sure where eclipse is at now but I have less than fond memories of that beast. I did most of my java coding in ultraedit so I could actually listen to mp3s at the same time back then.

Not that I had a lot of love for VS either, but I don't remember it ever running as heavy as eclipse.

I used VS for the better part of my 10-year stint at a BFE, and it served rather well. However, i would be reluctant to go back to it having spent serious quality time with emacs.

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).

Heh, I don't know a better word for it. That's how people who are enthusiastic about IDEs tend to talk. I would hesitate to call it "awesome" or anything like that, but among IDEs, it's well thought-of.

Point of clarification -

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.

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