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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft has a rich historic tradition of releasing seemingly well designed, well received tools and applications that are immediately clubbed to death by poor planning, toxic marketing, vague patch and maintenance priorities, and in many cases a near schizophrenic pursuit of niche or unrelated market dominance.

one wonders, for example, what Zune could have become had Microsoft just used that juggernaut dominance to focus on the customer and experience instead of drifting down a rabbit hole of byzantine industry pre-crime enforcement.

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You didn't own a Zune. They were FANTASTIC. They did focus on customer experience and usability... they were amazing.

I could put MP3s on there just as easily as I could an iPod, if not more easily.

The whole meaningless, punchline-less joke "Microsoft sux lol" thing that's been happening since the Triassic period is what did the Zune in; bystanders took the almost toothless anti-ms culture shared among nerd communities as if it were something that had an appropriate amount of merit. it had merit, yes, but not anywhere nearly as much as you would think if you listened to Linux nerds talk to each other for more than a few minutes.

It sure was, I have the ZuneHD still, it's still a beautiful device with an intuitive UI and nice clean software. Pity MS never figured out how to compete in marketing against existing sentiment and Apple (with their horribly clunky UI/Hardware and software of the iPod (which I had to support at work too)). It's a pity my Zune is almost a brick now, there's nothing wrong with it (my daughter listens to music and plays games on it now).

If I could put an open source OS on it I'd still be using it (so long as I can sync it with Linux too..)

> The whole meaningless, punchline-less joke "Microsoft sux lol" thing

You can't mention that without context. Why did Microsoft have a bad rap? Because they'd done bad/ill-considered things and it came back to bite them. The browser wars, Balmer's "linux is cancer" rhetoric [0], trying to create a "Microsoft internet" instead of the Internet, "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" [1] more generally. To name but a few.

The Zune might well have been a good device (don't know), but the "Microsoft sux lol" (as you put it) of the time wasn't meaningless. It was entirely of Microsoft's own doing.

[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

That seems like child-play compared to the google or apple of today.

Don't use a chromium browser.

yes, they earned it. I think I said that. did they earn as much BS as they've gotten over the past two decades? no.

Google Amazon and Facebook are doing FAR WORSE things today, and no one says anything. Many readers of this comment likely WORK AT one of these places, and are complicit in the crap these companies do, yet they excuse the things they do in any one of a million ways, just like employees at Microsoft did at the time. many of those same people today still bash on Microsoft for lesser offenses than they themselves are part of, so don't act like there is logic behind any of the derision that gets thrown around.

Microsoft derisiveness today is nothing more than bird calls to help nerds find each other in the wild, but then non-nerds hear it and assume that the most common squawks they hear from the flock are true. this is what the Zune was victim to. Windows phone also, likely, which was another excellent product doomed before it hit the market because people like to tell and hear the same jokes over and over and over again. Windows Phone struggled for a while, but it too fell victim to the attitude of the commoner: "I've never once used or even laid eyes on this product, but Microsoft made it so I'm going to poke fun at it endlessly."

ever hear a joke about Bing on a non-technical TV show? that's how far this shit reaches. Bing is FAR better than anyone gives it credit for and it gets better all the time. anyone care? nope! "Bing lol"

The ingenuity of the Windows Phone was leveraging technology to do what it did best to make a very fluid, very interactive UI. The tiles and metro text were obviously not very resource heavy to draw, which made for a wonderful experience.

Windows Phone leaned into the idea that it was a digital device, and it leveraged the strengths of digital devices and didn't pretend to be anything else. zero skeumorphism. it was VASTLY underrated.

For me, Bing does, at least some of the time, a much better job surfacing GitHub issues. Identical searches on Google and Bing will return githubmemory and github results respectively (and neither service returns both).

I'm not sure Bing ever returns githubmemory results unless you go out of your way to ask for it.

I wonder if Bing has solved the clone problem generally.

> The whole meaningless, punchline-less joke "Microsoft sux lol" thing that's been happening since the Triassic period is what did the Zune in

I don't know if that was near as much of a factor as the fact that Apple had basically solved the digital music problem almost 6 years prior with iTunes and the iPod, and everyone already had their music libraries there.

No, Apple's clever marketing department 'solved' the digital music problem. The iPod was a clunky, unintuitive and buggy product (not to mention the horrors of iTunes), but people didn't care because it was the 'thing to be seen with.' The market was told it was 'easy' so they pushed themselves to work it out.

>The iPod was a clunky, unintuitive and buggy product (not to mention the horrors of iTunes)

I'll give you that iTunes became fairly bloated and annoying to use but I don't think it's fair to describe the iPod as clunky and unintuitive, certainly not in comparison to many of the MP3 players that it competed with. The click wheel was a really good bit of design in my opinion.

A few years ago, I was using Windows 10 and a huge ad banner for OneDrive appeared in the file explorer. That was the final straw for me, and it's the reason I finally switched over to Linux 100% full time

To be fair, Ubuntu did that a couple of years ago with Ubuntu One, and iCloud and Google storage are also integrated with the respective OSes, and you can buy subscriptions with a couple of clicks.

Windows is basically freemium now, I haven't spent money for windows licenses in years, neither privately nor has the company I work at. We get 100 or so licenses as a MS Gold partner, but pay a lot for services around Office 365. It's strange, but this is the new industry status quo apparently.

Now what I find really offputting and weird is that MS Word had a banner the other day - something like "Looking for a new job? Download these templates to make a great impression!" after I opened my CV. I really really hope MS is not scanning the content of my files because that would be a big no go...

> MS Word had a banner the other day - something like "Looking for a new job? Download these templates to make a great impression!" after I opened my CV. I really really hope MS is not scanning the content of my files because that would be a big no go...

Isn't that classic Clippy/Clippit behaviour that Word has been famous for for years?

> Windows is basically freemium now,

"Windows is a service" as all the naggy "if you could update, say now, that would be terrific" banners say. And as we on Hackernews say, if you're not paying for a service you are not the customer.

my problem is I did pay for it

and now they shove ads in my face and reboot my machine without asking

I wouldn't mind so much if it was free... but it isn't

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