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> I still don't forgive Microsoft for being absolutely massive tools in the past.

As a person who seems to defend Microsoft quite often on HN, I can't shake the feeling that if they get to first place in anything, they'll become massive tools once again.

I like seeing them as the underdog, it forces Microsoft to be kinder and more free, but I think innovation and progress would be seriously hindered (once again) if they grabbed the crown in a particular space.

What does "being massive tools" mean?

A "tool" in this context is something to be avoided :

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tool

At least in American slang "a tool" is synonymous with someone who is rude, uncaring, and generally arrogant. A "massive tool" is someone who takes all of those properties up a level.

Excerpted from Urban Dictionary: "The tool is usually someone who is unwelcome but no one has the balls to tell them to get lost. The tool is alwasys making comments that are out-of-place, out-of-line or just plain stupid. The tool is always trying too hard to fit in, and because of this, never will."

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tool#Noun I guess it's #7: An obnoxious or uptight person.

in this context a "tool" is a synonym for "dick"... basically stating that Microsoft are a bunch of dicks.

"Tool" is a synonym for "dick" that you can utter even in polite company.

In a way it has happened already with the XBox. After (in my opinion) winning the previous generation of console wars, they set out to ignore their main audience to appeal to the ones their marketing team has decide to target. The only thing I really liked seeing from MS recently was Sharepoint 2013, which really is very good, especially for developers.

Really? I'd actually be interested to hear more about Sharepoint. My experience with it is getting to be awhile ago, and it was VERY unpleasant. What does it do for developers now?

The single biggest thing for me was the framework for deploying "apps" through azure. You can create webparts or other bits of functionality that can be reused but hosted externally on Azure. There is a self-hosted option where the URL is a generated one but has a trust setup already; but there is also the option to use your own azure hosting but you need configure the trust yourself. One other thing I liked is that there is no more need for a SharePoint Designer - there is a new method of designing sites that is way more configurable than in the past. You can configure almost everything, but as it always is, you will find that you need to do quite a bit of research on your own to get things 100%.

All in all though, it is a very solid offering from MS that nobody really talks about. One of the main pain points from the past is that everyone thought it was a CMS when really it was a document management system. Now it actually can be both. There is a talk on YouTube from the unveiling of 2013 that is well worth a watch (although it is over an hour long)

You program "Apps" for it that work very much like Facebook Apps. It's all web standards: get an oath token with sufficient scope from the user and then use the new _api to get data in and out.

.net, Azure and javascript are supported and documented best, but you can use any language and run SharePoint apps on any platform.

Take, for instance, SQL Server. It's become quite an interesting and capable platform over the last decade. It used to be that Microsoft took the stance that hardware improvements were the customer's benefit, so they'd license per socket, full stop.

They used to mock Oracle with their licensing depending on what kind of CPU and how powerful it was.

Latest SQL Server? Yep, you pay depending on the CPU vendor (AMD or Intel) and the type of chip.

Just use something open-source - you'll get the Awesome [1] edition on any kind of chip.

I never understood why some people prefer to buy licensed stuff from Oracle or Microsoft. Do you like pain?

[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/07/oh-you-wanted-aweso...

I never understood why some people prefer to buy licensed stuff from Oracle or Microsoft. Do you like pain?

"nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment"

Right, there is more than one sort of pain. There is the pain your developers feel when they work with something painful, and there is the pain managers feel when they have to justify "not buying IBM" when something goes wrong (something will go wrong regardless, that is the nature of the beast).

So people "buy IBM" because they don't like pain.

The only good open source SQL RDBMS I'm aware of is Postgres.

The moment Postgres has the feature range of SQL Server (SSIS, SSRS, SSAS), supports the same HA features without hassle, and is generally even half as easy to manage, I'll switch. Meanwhile, life's too short for me to want to become a "real" DBA.

SQL Server has some extra tools, as you've pointed out. You can probably find open source tools equally as powerful (and, by definition, more flexible) to perform those tasks. Granted, you may have to invest some time finding and learning those tools - but really, that's just life. Sometimes it's worth putting in the effort [1].

I've found that the main difference is how you work as a developer. If you're happy using a clicky interface to get your work done, more power to you. I need to be able to script everything I do, because I don't like to repeat myself. The rigmarole of restoring a db from a backup in SQL Server is just insane compared to the 4 second command I could issue at the terminal for postgres.

I know it's going to sound like a total exaggeration but I literally can't use MS products for more than a few hours at a time because of the pain I get in my arm from using the mouse. And trust me, it's not just because I don't know my way around - I spent years developing on that platform (and will never go back).

[1] http://xkcd.com/1205/

It feels like using the mouse is the tradeoff for using Microsoft products. I use Visual Studio and SQL Sever at work, and they are such a productivity boost, but I hate how often I have to use the mouse. The problem is many of the benefits of using their products perks would be difficult to navigate around with a keyboard.

At times it's frustrating how often you have to use the mouse, but other times it's so great compared to any alternative ways (that I know of).

Learn the shortcuts, it isn't very hard.

SQL Server gives you both. They have a UI for everything, and everything you do has an option to script. So you might go through the whole wizards for replication, then when done, save off a T-SQL script. To my knowledge, there's nothing that requires the UI; it's there just to make things easier. Then on top of that, they expose an API you can use for further automation, if T-SQL isn't to your liking.

Your example is particularly odd: RESTORE DATABASE bla FROM DISK = 'file.bak' The docs are quite comprehensive, with lots of useful examples[1].

MS deserves some flak for UI-only, but SQL Server isn't one of those products (at least since 2005). MS products in general are also becoming much more scriptable, as Powershell access is becoming a requirement for new products.

I prefer a clicky interface for things I'm not going to do often (like configure a new cluster) or things I don't want to commit to memory or have to look up. Anytime I need to repeat, I either read docs and construct a command, or if it's a complicated thing, I'll use the wizard to generate a base script and modify as needed.

1: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186858.aspx

It's not all roses. Have you ever tried scripting and versioning SSIS for example?

Probably not.

Which is why we use Spring Integration...

Yes one thing that always amused me at microsoft was how often they would talk about how much better their tooling experience is. It's not. Being able to go into roo or ror or whatever else and generate huge amounts of scaffolding and get tons of upfront work down with out only a few keystrokes beats the socks off of an obtuse and clunky sql and ide interface where some portions work well and some portions look like remnants of the early nineties.

After googling all the acronyms, I would like to know what features you believe SSIS, SSRS, SSAS and HA give you can not get from Postgres with drop in replacements.

Except maybe for that everything is already integrated and "just works".

What I'm asking is if you can specify some elements of the stack you mentioned, that is hard to replicated or unique to SQL Server?

Well first, integrated and "just works" are pretty high on the importance scale. Searching for PG clustering gets me a wiki with a matrix of different solutions, with apparently the main suggestion being DRBD. So just to start off, I've got to evaluate a number of third party products or start quizzing community members to figure out which is the most likely to survive or put me in a good position.

They might not be "hard to replicate" or unique, but having great options in-box, that are extremely simple to configure - that's worth a ton. If I was running a large-scale operation and SQL Server was costing me millions a year, things might be different.

Everything is awesome until you stop doing general stuff. Once I started digging into more complex MDX queries in SSAS (calculated fields) the story started to be quite different. I have been doing Win dev since 1993 so I could tell you a lot of stories...

Because there's not an OSS equivalent to Oracle?

That article from codinghorror is absolutely brilliantly written. But it's true, I wish there was a counter somewhere about how many millions/billions were lost by web developers trying to make things look like a webpage inside IE. I will call the new version IE too because I know that it will suck, it will. They have good programmers, they bring pc to the masses, I give them that but they have no clue about design or user experience and intuitiveness, they never have and never will. It's just a coorporation with strict bureaucracy where a good developer gets absolutely nothing done.

I thought it was interesting when Microsoft bought Skype. Skype built their whole backend on postgresql and were one of the major contributors to the clustering and hot failover features as well as putting up some nice management utilities. that's why o think the Skype purchase was so strategic. they not only got cross platform messaging with video and phone, they got the primary developers who were adding top end features to an open source project.

I have cursed at working around IE quirks more times than I can remember, but I don't dump all the blame on Microsoft.

Why is this the top comment, it is just a rant/whine? What other browser released at the same time as IE6 would work well (or at all) with them modern web?

Microsoft has given customers a choice on whether to update their browser or not, and by in large they haven't. Then it becomes Microsoft's fault for not forcing them to upgrade. I don't think people need all their choices made for them. Why is it not web developer's fault for continuing to develop for outdate browsers? or computer manufacturers' fault for not loading a different, more consumer oriented default browser? or the users themselves for not taking a few minutes to update or download an alternative browser?

> What other browser released at the same time as IE6 would work well (or at all) with them modern web?

Not relevant, the problem is that IE6 didn't work with the web back then unless untold amounts of time was wasted and untold amounts of pain experienced to get it to work. When Microsoft got the market leadership they just stopped every investment in it until forced to get back in the game, and GP fears the same will happen again if they're allowed to gain dominant position again.

Exactly. The web had to bend to IE, not the other way around.

The fact that that bending resulted in IE6 still being able to mostly display websites today is not any sort of testament to IE6's quality as a browser.

> Not relevant, the problem is that IE6 didn't work with the web back then

I think you're mis-remembering a little. Or maybe you had a different job than I did.

Back then, the web WAS IE6. There was nothing else. And it really was, for a time, a popularly-praised relief from the previous browser wars. I didn't have a standard but then again, at least I had a standard. You can design for IE6 and be sure it would "just work" everywhere because IE6 was the only option. Market share in the mid 90's IIRC.

The real crime is, as you went on to explain, the utter stagnation. And of course insult was added to injury when Firefox was released. For years then we DID legitimately have the trouble of designing for one modern browser and one curmudgeon who just happened to still have 4/5th's of the market. Lame.

Working as a developer right now, I can tell you that even IE10 has odd, noncompliant quirks. And then there's IE9 and IE8 to support as well.

Yep, a couple that I've found include no support for cursor: none (even though IE9 supports it), and a rendering bug around using gradient backgrounds on tr:hover.

I'm not even doing that much actual web work right now and still I stumbled over Chrome, Opera and Safari bugs in the last year. IE 10 works surprisingly well, the only thing I had less problems with was FF.

I thought the comment was beautiful... many of us have ten years (or more) of pent up aggression towards IE.

These days I am still wary of that browser because it is Windows only and they have poor support for their legacy OS releases.

>Microsoft has given customers a choice on whether to update their browser or not

No. MS links new browser updates to OS releases. You can still run plenty of modern browsers on XP... just not one made by MS. How sad.

Many individual customers you might be able to blame, but as a group, they are best considered as simply a Force of Nature with no capacity to accept responsibility. Many of them can't upgrade because their on old machines with old OSs, or because they're on a work machine and their company has policies about these things (which can probably also be traced back to Microsoft), or because they are just plain technically incompetent (and while one may decide to blame them for that, it's not fair to double-count when it makes them incapable of choosing to not use IE6, or 7, or 8). And those who can and do upgrade have little capacity to make any different in the rest of this enormous group. Since "consumers" as an aggregate are therefore incapable of fixing the problem, it makes little sense to lay all the blame on them.

Microsoft, on the other hand, is in a position to fix everything for the consumers, and they so far choose not to.

I thank your bad mood for brightening up mine!

That was spectacular and joyful to read and I agree wholeheartedly. The sad thing is that when I was "designing for IE" as a young lad, I had no idea that's what I was doing. "The browser" was what came with the computer and that was Netscape and later IE. It took a while to wean myself off of :

  if (document.all) { }

And when I discovered other continents to explore, I realized I was living in a desolate quarter of Antarctica.

That comment reminded me of the Microsoft ad video targeted at web devs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD9FAOPBiDk&hd=1

Interesting and funny video, regardless of if you think anything changed.

If they really did come up with the Karaoke web standard, my opinion of them will likely soften. Until, of course, developers only start developing with the Non Participant variant, in which case, they can all die in a fire!

http://www.collegehumor.com/article/6825830/8-types-of-karao...

My past experience says it will likely be the Old Faded Glory for Firefox and The Unironic Ironic for BB10 with The Clown for Chrome.

Great. Now we have 4 more standards thanks to Microsoft!

Thank you for putting into words exactly how I've felt lately. It's not just Microsoft's past that's turned me off them - patent trolling Android manufacturers and other recent activities have basically solidified in my head that I will not choose Microsoft if I have a choice.

I'd be willing to put the past behind me if they Just Stopped with all of this crap.

They will not stop, they have always been like this.

There's a reason seasoned nerds do not like Microsoft and it is not just because the nerds are raging Linux fanboys. It is because of actual experience dealing with MS over a couple of decades.

Sometimes MS comes out with something good but at a point (usually within 3 years) marketing will take over and run it into the ground.

Agree 100%.

As someone who's been doing web development since 1995, I have wasted an enormous amount of my life dealing with IE-specific bugs. This is enough for me to feel uncomfortable even thinking about Internet Explorer and has tainted me against Microsoft products in general...

When our company decided to stop supporting IE.. I had the best day of my life at work yanking out all of the 'kind of' working IE quickfixes/hacks we had used out of the source code. I couldn't agree more.

Do you remember NS 4.x and JSSS/translated CSS at all? I do. IE was many, many times better and easier to develop for. (And, frankly, their box model, equivalent to border-box, was the right way to go.)

I read about the Netscape "Mariner" cancellation shudder.

Wow. An especially low brow comment. Thought we could do better than this.

This is how I feel not just about microsoft but about all closed-source software. It's great that it exists and wants to compete and keep the open source stuff on its toes but ultimately I prefer the top dogs to be the open source guys because I know if it ever does go off the rails it can be forked.

What you are saying is totally legit. Microsoft is a company, and as engineer/web dev/creative/whatever, choosing to rely on IE for development or anything else implies you trust the Microsoft brand to help you get something out of using their toolset. We've all been burned in the past by MSFT and even if their claims about a modern browser are true, and even if it ships today with the best codebase out of any browser, there is little evidence for any of us to suddenly start trusting the spirit behind this new push.

I feel the same way. I've wasted so many hours on IE specific bugs that they have to really prove themselves before I'll even consider trusting them again.

I feel the same way about everything MS has produced/is planning on producing in the near future. IE, Windows 8, Xbox One, Microsoft Office, the list just goes on.

Everything about Windows 8 to me just feels like a kick in the groin from Microsoft. For many years now they've claimed that .Net was the present and future of Microsoft development; yet it seems they've shoved it into the back seat and likely next into the trunk of deprecation.

How'd you work that out? .Net is the hook to get people to take powershell seriously.

But I'm no Microsoft developer.

There was lots of cool .NET stuff to see at BUILD 2013, not sure what you mean.

There was no cool stuff.

They fixed a load of stuff, threw new versions out and spun it as marketing.

It's not cool if you have to pay for it at a rapidly growing pace.

Visual Studio does have quite a few improvements, specially in what concerns debugging asynchronous code and DirectX.

Unity is now a first class citizen for development of games on Windows.

Windows 8.1 brings quite a few new APIs, better interaction with .NET projections.

JIT, GC and ASP.NET improvements.

The message is, they could have thrown a RSS Reader attitude to .NET, instead they are paying developers to fix those issues.

As for paying for stuff, welcome to the commercial world. Microsoft is not the only vendor selling developer tools, although it looks like that when reading HN.

With MSDN subscriptions you get lots of those things for "free" for the timeframe the subscription is valid.

I am an MSDN subscriber as are the other 100 people we employ. Definitely not free.

Really don't care about Windows 8.1 APIs. The only thing that concerns me is web and WPF Desktop apps in C# as that's what powers my industry.

Compare to the Java EE ecosystem. Costing:

IDE - free (Eclipse/NetBeans)

Server - free (GlassFish/Tomcat on Ubuntu)

Database - free (PostgreSQL on Ubuntu).

Not only that, your profiler, code review, automated build, version control and testing platforms are also 100% free compared to DotTrace, TFS etc.

> I am an MSDN subscriber as are the other 100 people we employ. Definitely not free.

It is a matter of scale.

The type of companies I work for, the MSDN subscription is done at enterprise level. Sure it is expensive, but still cheaper than buying individual products, and gives the liberty to access new software versions.

It feels as if it was free, hence my quotes around free.

> Compare to the Java EE ecosystem.

True, in many things the Java ecosystem is more open source friendly, because the money comes from consulting or selling books, not from direct sale of tooling.

Ever tried to develop Eclipse Ecore plugins without buying the books from Eclipse Foundation?

I am fully aware of it, my employer was a Java/C++ shop until 2009, date when we started delivery .NET solutions additionally.

On the world consulting world my employer targets, there are lots of commercial tools to chose from,

Websphere, Weblogic, Oracle DB, Informix, DB2, Rational Rose, Clearcase, Intel C++, Intel VTune, Portland Group Fortran/C/C++, InteliJ, Delphi, Together, Sybase, HP-UX, Solaris, ...

> For many years now they've claimed that .Net was the present and future of Microsoft development

And then the iPad and post-PC era happened, killing Silverlight in the process and PC sales are still in steady decline.

I'm with you. I've been an aficionado of WPF and WCF since day 1, and am always hoping that with every version WPF would get enhanced just a little closer to the DirectX wire, not completely replaced by that stunted Windows 8 XAML junk.

> They have to make a browser that beats every other browser in it's standards compliance, stability and performance. They have to create the greatest browser that has ever been and ever will be.

Didn't we get that? Wasn't that ie6. What went wrong was the internet didn't go away and we didn't all want desktop software.

No I think we should all know how that story ends by now. The answer has got to be open source or open standards at the very least. We need to be in a place where your browser doesn't matter, there's 50 out there choose the green one if you like green.

You may be cranky, but you're obviously not that old. In ye olden times IE was actually the decent browser (that you didn't have to pay for). It's just that they won the browser wars and let things stagnate. Once they stopped leading they became followers (when they moved at all). This is not recent history. It is lore. But lore that the elder devs should know.

As an ex-'softie I can tell you that the engineers from IE were generally not happy with this situation. Or with all of the acrobatics to support non-standard crap. But I have yet to meet anyone who really understands how the winds of decision-making at Microsoft get their first breaths. Basically, it was situation == nobody happy, even most folks at the borg.

I apologize if my response isn't full of data. I don't understand how a troll post hit the top of the discussion page and thought it deserved a response, even a fluffy one full of hearsay.

This is my position as well. However I expect if IE becomes dominate, Microsoft will revert to monopolistic practices. On those grounds alone I will never accept IE, even if they pass your bar.

> They have to make a browser that beats every other browser in it's standards compliance, stability and performance. They have to create the greatest browser that has ever been and ever will be.

I will add one more thing. They have to make the browser not just for Windows platform, but for all major platforms (Mac and Linux).

I know, how dare they not always follow convention and go out and create things like xml requests/ajax, etc.

Well, the case of Opera's Presto engine being forced to die in the past few years proved that the holy grail of everything being fine and dandy if browser engines and websites follow web standards is a big lie.

Opera is/was known for its standards support, .

Google Service Drops Support for Opera https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4195298

G+ doesn't support Opera... why? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738099

Gmail sometimes shows "Gmail too slow? Switch to Chrome, a faster browser." for Opera uses and a similar message shows up on Youtube Google Docs.

Chrome and Firefox started their own take on HTML beta and experimental features and led to a race of broken standard support. Too many standards are half baked, and are implemented by some browser makers in a half baked manner and are frequently rolled back in an incompatible way, HTML5 storage being just one example.

From "Judgment Day Arrives: Opera Implements the CSS3 Webkit Prefix" http://www.sitepoint.com/opera-css3-webkit-prefix/ "In February 2012, we reported the minutes of W3C meeting where Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft discussed implementing -webkit prefixes in non-webkit browsers. The reason: some developers use only webkit prefixes — their sites look good in some browsers, but broken in others even when they offer the same level of CSS3 support. The issue is especially prevalent on mobile browsers and many developers fail to look beyond their high-end Apple or Android devices." "Opera analyzed stylesheets from 10,000 popular websites to determine which CSS values/properties would receive -webkit aliases:"

Final result? A browser engine known for speed, leanness and standards support killed, because it couldn't keep up with the big browsers' incompatible beta standard support, and the number of websites that go for the latest and greatest and don't care one bit about standards support over cool features.

Take a look at this HN thread about a broken Google site and you see a lot of people defending non-standard HTML because it works on their choice of browser. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4594913

These things are evidence of a currently broken web regardless of IE's involvement, with webkit being the new IE. And it actually explains how some of IE's features and bugs came about in the early 2000s resulted in pain for alternate browsers. Prime example of a great thing: XMLHTTPRequest was not part of a web standard.

Though Webkit is open source, I am a bit wary of Chrome's dominance as Google spends a ton of money to bundle it with everything and promote it at every chance over Firefox/Opera since they don't have to continue paying them hundreds of millions for being default and building a big moat for their search engine in the process against competing and future search engines.

Chrome doesn't use WebKit anymore. They forked it into Blink.

> Chrome and Firefox started their own take on HTML beta and experimental features and led to a race of broken standard support

Personally I'm quite happy that Mozilla is engaging in this feature race, as Google lately is in the habit of pushing technologies that have the potential to fragment the web and break the fragile standards that we do have - and I'm talking specifically about replacements for Javascript, like Dart, PNaCl, but also about things like Web SQL Database [1]. This is why Mozilla is doing an awesome job in bringing balance, with things like asm.js or IndexedDB [2].

If you think about it, this is quite good, since standards aren't development in the vacuum, as you need experiments and prototypes released to the public for useful feedback. XmlHttpRequest itself started as an ActiveX extension. How can you make a standard out of something if you don't experiment? Also WebKit is the new IExplorer, that's why Firefox is so important.

[1] http://dev.w3.org/html5/webdatabase/

[2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis...

> Final result? A browser engine known for speed, leanness and standards support killed, because it couldn't keep up with the big browsers' incompatible beta standard support, and the number of websites that go for the latest and greatest and don't care one bit about standards support over cool features.

It's regrettable really, but on the other hand they were also killed for not being open-source. Really, in this day and age, non open-source browsers don't make sense, unless you're Apple or Microsoft.

lol. This was a joy to read, especially the voldemort reference.