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Comment by michaeloder | Hacker News Reader

It boggles my mind that Microsoft and other companies with a similar reach don't spend more time on core features and tools. Minor improvements such as in this case can improve the productivity of 100s of millions of users.

For the next improvement, hopefully, Microsoft is paying attention to the Ars Technica comments: save unsaved entries to a temp file when the OS reboots. A recent files list would also be an improvement.

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Another comment mentions the lack of support for ctrl+backspace (which prints U+007F in the application instead of deleting an entire word).

https://superuser.com/questions/33142/ctrlbackspace-inserts-...

this also happens when renaming files in Explorer. i wonder if they're related

EDIT (i read the article):

> [Notepad] was, by design, little more than a very thin wrapper around a Windows multiline text-editing control.

maybe that's why?

> Minor improvements such as in this case can improve the productivity

Unfortunately when your sales come from hardware vendors and you have a monopoly those improvements have zero ROI and that's why minor improvements haven't happened until now when Apple has eroded their mind & marketshare.

Note, Apple's business model of selling direct to consumer means these small productivity improvements are noticed by the purchaser, which is why we often see minor improvements on their platform and not MS.

I'm afraid that notepad is one of those applications that has gotten updates, but no one notices: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=... . Similar issue when they revamped the internals of calculator.

A big issue when you’re the platform is not competing with the developers who write apps for said platform. If MS included a lot of great apps as stock, it would impact a lot of vendors. Just look at how much the anti-virus vendors complained about Windows Defender and the removal of APIs those tools used.

So here's a question: why shouldn't a platform just be a platform?

Because consumers don’t care what a platform is, they want a usable computing device. People are thoroughly frustrated by having to hunt for programs to do stuff that, to them, is an obvious necessity that should have been easy to do from the very start.

System utilities like notepad are a compromise between “giving users what they want” and “not burning too many bridges or attracting antitrust lawsuits”.

> Because consumers don’t care what a platform is

Just once I'd like to have a discussion where someone doesn't drag out the strawman "average user" bullshit.

Every platform vendor who knows what they are doing has a certain set of priorities and they are:

1. The company

2. The customer

3. Third party developers

You forgot "the government", which is really #3. Developers usually sit somewhere between "astronauts" and "things that from distance look like flies".

Which is why Microsoft Windows, the most targeted platform in the world for decades, never bothered to give a damn about developers.

I didn’t say that. But if you think MS will ever put developers’ needs before its own, the customers’ or the government’s, you are sorely deluded. They give a damn about developers only inasmuch as it helps their bottom line, like everyone else out there.

How is that a strawman? You never interact with non-techies that use computers? Those customers are the vast vast majority of the Windows userbase by far.

Because it is always trotted out with the implication that the user is precisely as stupid or uninterested as the poster needs them to be in order to make their case.

Odd that they don’t; that’s been a feature on macOS’ TextEdit for as long as I can remember, and I have to imagine Microsoft is watching macOS for inspiration (and vice versa).

> save unsaved entries to a temp file when the OS reboots.

What Microsoft's executives likely took from that: "Save unsaved entries to a Microsoft account document. Got it!"

> A recent files list would also be an improvement.

"Track users' OS usage behavior and serve ads based on that. Nailed it! What's next? We're on a roll here."

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