Fake Steve Jobs: Microsoft drowning in complexity | Hacker News Reader

Fake Steve Jobs: Microsoft drowning in complexity

fakesteve.blogspot.com

13 pointsfarmer10 comments

Ehh.. I don't think you could even trim 50% of the features from Microsoft Word and still have a decent word application, let alone 90%.

90% probably applies to the code, not features. I'd say, MS could have cut 10% of features and 90% of code.

Could have, would have, should have.

Let's not even bother with stuffs that we don't know.

People made prediction of how screwed up Redmond is but in reality they're still shipping software plus showing other items like Surface, Photosynth, SeaDragon, DLR.

Not that all the stuffs counted as innovation, but the fact that those new items from Redmond are ready for production should show you how MS still active in the world of software.

Then again the people, who said "MS is screwed up, they should've done this and that", aren't working for MS. How could they know how bad MS screwed up?

The other people who worked for MS and said "MS is screwed up" are less than 100 headcounts compare to 60,000 MS employees. In a company, you cannot achieve 100% level of satisfaction. If you have 1000 headcounts, you have 1000 "wants".

I can see how MS is screwed up from the pieces of their code that are open, which can be extrapolated to the pieces of code that are closed.

Unfortunately Adobe follows their path now, and even trying to beat MS in producing bloated code. Photoshop, Dreamweaver and even Acrobat Reader will soon become unmaintainable monsters. Otherwise, how can one explain that a dozen of unimpressive new features in the new version makes the package twice as bigger?

Can you come up with a name of a big product that is not bloated?

There are professionals who prefer to pay (and pay big price) and use Photoshop than Snipshot, MS Paint, Paint.NET and others.

Bloat is different from complete (or "feature-full"). Bloat means very long installation processes (Microsoft is the champion here), long startup times, slow software, huge memory requirements, crashes, etc.

When you install a typical, cheap consumer device under Windows (anything: a printer, a joystick, etc.) from the vendor's CD-ROM it usually installs megabytes of bullshit, including automatically-started craplets with shiny but useless owner-drawn GUIs, etc. This is bloat. When I plug-in some USB stuff in my OpenBSD laptop, the kernel spits a few lines on the console to tell it has recognized the device and that's all.

edit: the last releases of Acrobat Reader, huge, very slow and buggy are a very good example of bloat.

Can you come up with a product that is complete (100% can serve everybody needs in the universe) but not bloat?

Can you come up with a product that starts faster, install faster, requires less memory requirements, and don't crash as much as MS Words but also provides the same amount of features comparable to MS Words?

When I plug my iPod to my Ubuntu version 6.06, Ubuntu crashed my iPod without any informative feedback. When I dmesg-ed, I saw some hex number and some usbX where X is a number.

Microsoft is far less interested in trimming the fat and far more interested in making sure that any feature an enterprise client could ask for is included. For Microsoft, software's a business.

I agree

Mmm, maybe Fake Steve Jobs is DHH. :)

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