Comment by bengrunfeld | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bengrunfeld | Hacker News Reader

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I feel that many people dislike the idea of him, without exactly knowing what he did during his time as CEO, because the Windows platforms are known as being notoriously buggy and unsecure. XP was a nightmare that caused SysAdmins to cry themselves to sleep until the expansion pack 3 came out, Windows Vista was an unmitigated disaster, Windows 7 was surprisingly decent, and Windows 8 has been hailed as a terrible idea that should have died in its crib.

In the last 13 years, we've all seen the rise of Microsoft, and are now seeing the beginning of it's fall. Ballmer was an extremely important figure in the tech world. I just wish the Operating Systems that came out during his time didn't suck so much.

On the contrary. I'd characterise the fall of Microsoft as beginning around 2000, and I suspect that interesting / good things might be about to happen.

I used to hate MS. Now I feel sorry for them, I hope they can make a go of it in the future. The people who came after them in market dominance were so much worse..

Are you talking about their fall in the idealogical sense, that happened in 2000? I seem to remember at least 10 years after that where their software dominated every office I walked into. Even today as far as private cloud goes, they are a major player. Again, this references my point of Microsoft getting a bad name for releasing buggy and insecure OS's.

>"expansion pack 3"

You mean SP2? Reminds me of "Feature Packs".

hehehehe... sorry, my terminology is a bit rusty. For memory, it was service pack 3 (SP3) that fixed most of the security holes that were destroying networks running XP.

No, SP2 was the big security patch for XP. Most notably, the firewall was on by default. This blocked a whole class of remote-control attacks, because you weren't exposing every single service just by connecting a network cable.

SP3 came four years later, in 2008.

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