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Comment by quesera | Hacker News Reader

I'd be interested to hear what your other examples are, but that doesn't surprise me at all.

If OpenOffice (etc) ever had comparable staffing (quantity and variety, not even questioning quality) that MSOffice has had for 15-20 years, I'd expect more comparable results.

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Bear in mind, I have no particular love for the company (I'm typing this on my rMBP right now). But I like to acknowledge good work when it happens. I know that all of these can be argued against, and some of my choices below are easy to argue as not great software -- but compared to any other competitor is still better (e.g. if mail and calendars are so easy why aren't there loads of Outlook/Exchange competitors?)

- Remote Desktop is really good. VNC is "ok" but my God I miss Remote Desktop in the Apple world

- Pretty much any MS-Office product, highlights are Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook. (Much better on Windows machines than Macs BTW, in much the same way iTunes is better on Macs than Windows)

- Visio, not without it's quirks but other competitors are all "ok"

- Project - are there any serious competitors?

- OneNote

- Explorer, I've yet to see a file manager as good. It's lightyears beyond the abomination that is Finder for example. I could go on, but it's probably one of the reasons alternative media organizers are not as common on Windows machines as Macs

- Visual Studio - I can see some arguments one way or the other, but it really is a world-class dev environment.

- Online Office apps are easily the best office web apps by far

- SQL Server is actually very good.

- Flight Simulator

now outdated, but top of the game for many years - Midtown Madness as an open world driving game

- Encarta was awesome

- Halo series

and hardware - the Xbox systems

- really nice mice and keyboards

- Xbox controllers

- Kinect

- the surface pro is actually a pretty amazing full fledged portable PC, I'd put one up against an Air anytime, except it has the slight edge of the much more robust Windows software ecosystem

Oh my gosh the days I remember playing Midtown Madness, it was the only game I ever really bought and played endlessly. It was such an addictive game. I can't believe it was made by MS.

Oh, how things change. Time was, that comment wouldn't need to be written.

Let me note that Halo was made by Bungie, a Mac company. It was going to come out for Macs, but it went Xbox after Bungie was bought. Everyone with monopoly money can buy good products late in their development.

My problem with MS is the monopolist strategy. A monopolist need to keep the APIs hard to reimplement on another OS, to lock applications (and their users) to its platform. Complexity is needed for that -- and also to keep the OS API base a moving target with bug compatibility etc.

You see this horror of complexity throughout the whole ecosystem, not only for the suffering heroes working with compatibility with the Office file formats or the virtual file systems.

This extra complexity lowered my personal life quality, when the world was a dinosa... cough, Microsoft world. That makes it personal -- my personal pain.

Visual Studio is probably the best way to write C++. Windows is probably the best operating system for the enterprise and is ahead of OS X and Linux in bringing a desktop OS to tablets and touch laptops. C# is arguably the best language for writing enterprise applications. Xbox arguably won the console war of the current generation. Kinect is the only consumer product like it. Surface Pro is probably the best desktop replacement tablet. (disclosure: microsoftie)

Actually C++ Builder is way much better, thanks to its RAD extensions, that have only now seen similar functionally appear in Visual C++ with their C++/CX extensions.

But Borland/Imprise/Codegear/Embarcadero lost track long time ago and is currently only relevant to a few enterprise customers.

You don't seem to notice that many of the categories you mentioned are irrelevant. Maybe being microsoftie clouds your view?

Windows may be best _desktop_ operating system for enterprise, not _best_ operating system. Subtle difference. OSX and Linux are not bringing desktop OS to tablets and touch laptops, because nobody wants desktop OS there, everybody wants tablet optimized OS. C# may be syntactically best language for enterprise, but it's ecosystem is lacking compared to other languages (for too long, it was use-MS-only-frameworks-and-products-land, so nobody bothers now). It is disputable whether Xbox won the game console war, but even if it did, this is a niche market. Kinect may be very unique, but we are talking niche in the niche. Surface Pro may be the best desktop replacement tablet, but nobody wants to replace desktop with tablets, just like nobody wants to replace truck with sport car.

I find it hard to take a comment seriously that says the console video game market is a niche market. I mean, it's only a what, >$70 billion dollar a year industry (bigger than the entire film industry) and the fastest growing segment of the entire media market globally?

Compared to rest of computing? Yes, it is, we are comparing their relative, not absolute sizes.

By your definition then, "niche" is either meaningless, or can apply to any segment of any size in anything so long as it's not the largest arbitrarily defined segment of something.

Yes, I think it's arguable that MS won the console war.

Could you tell me what you are measuring to reach that conclusion? Last I looked, the only category where the Xbox was ahead is US sales, and even there, they were only marginally ahead of the PS3.

Xbox 360 total sales: 78.2 million units

PS3 total sales: 75 million units

Wii total sales: 100.04 million units

nintendo ds: 153.93 million units

nintendo 3ds: 32.48 million units

sony psp: 76.3 million units

sony playstation vita: 2.2 million units

sony psp go: not many

I question why anyone would think winning a generation (or two) would mean the war is over?

There's pretty much always been multiple competing consoles, and I don't think Sony and Nintendo are ready to throw in the towel.

I would not be surprised at all if we see other competitors enter the market in the next 2 or 3 generations. For example, Samsung or even an unknown. As the hardware is now basically topping out, it will eventually commoditize to the point that even smaller companies can have a go at the market.

if openoffice...

It does not work that way since neither Apple nor Google can beat Microsoft Office with big budgets. Beyond talking about the technical aspects of Office what also matters is the marketing/sales machine. For example, I was present in negotiations between Microsoft and big (non US) state agencies, and you know what? The Microsoft guy was surely at more than 6 degress in the Microsoft organizational chart to Bill Gates but he could negotiate as if he was Bill Gates, he had that freedom.

The agency was pushing open source and the guy said something like: the Office $ XXX price does not work for you? What about $ 5 per license?

>If OpenOffice (etc) ever had comparable staffing (quantity and variety, not even questioning quality) that MSOffice has had for 15-20 years, I'd expect more comparable results.

Isn't that sort of the point, at least from their perspective?

The Microsoft Hardware division in general makes a lot of good stuff. Microsoft makes some of my favorite mice & keyboards, and the Xbox has been an impressive business venture- only one generation to go from brand-new to top-dog.

Windows Media Center was quite good, although it has been allowed to wither on the vine somewhat as market research apparently found it just wasn't used much

Internet Explorer has of course picked up a lot of slack quite quickly. Has not surpassed open source, but they have done a pretty good job with it in recent times. Yes, it's still behind, but they started from behind. They are much less behind now.

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