Comment by devcpp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devcpp | Hacker News Reader

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You make some good points but you lost me there:

>Windows is one of the great engineering feats of CS

Do I have to point out all the lame exploits and bugs which take so long to get fixed, the terrible design, the "things which should have been there years ago but we still don't have" like a decent file manager, task manager, copy utility? And AFAIK Windows made few major contribution to the theory of OSs (semaphores, threads, paging, scheduling and so on) so there's really nothing to be amazed at.

I'll spare you my opinions on Bing. Reinventing the wheel is not worth describing, no matter how beautiful that wheel is, although I'm happy for you to be a part of the team making that wheel. If only Bing had more ambition than just being a clone of Google Search, some people under 70 would actually consider migrating. But if you're happy with your default-search-engine-bundled-with-IE market share at 20%, good for you (eh, it does bring a lot of ad money). You may not call the shots at MS, but you can at least admit all the shortcomings.

You could point out all the lame exploits and bugs, but only if you want to spark a long argument that you will end up losing. There are a variety of things I don't like about Windows, and I avoid using it. But the idea that it's somehow less secure than other operating systems is for the most part a Linux advocacy myth. The fundamental security architecture of WinAPI is just not that different from that of Linux or OS X (which also has a legacy compat issue that complicates its security).

Fair enough, you know much more than me in that domain. :)

Are you going to argue about the famous general instability of Windows compared to its large competitors though? It seems like a good indicator of bad design in low level implementations.

What do you mean by famous general instability of Windows? Windows is perhaps my 3rd choice for OS, but almost all my clients use Windows and among the problems they deal with, instability is not one of them.

What don't you like about Windows? (Prolix comment request)

Hey devcpp, let me see if I have your points right.

* Windows actually sucks.

* Reinventing the wheel is not worth talking about no matter what.

* Bing sucks.

* I should admit the shortcomings of MS.

Regarding the last point, I'm kind of shocked that you think I'm a shill. I feel like I've been pretty honest about my feelings.

re: Windows sucks, that's sort of OT, but if you want to have the discussion, drop me a line. clemmer.alexander@gmail.com

re: Bing sucks, I don't see what your point about market share or unoriginality is, I already conceded that we have a lot of work to do with search relevance. I'm sort of annoyed about the negativity of your post, as from my perspective I've been pretty candid about what I think our strengths and weaknesses are. :(

re: reinventing the wheel, I don't think this is going to be something that we agree on. The way in which engineers here pull together and simply build what needs to be built is nothing short of breathtaking. I don't see how building, e.g., Cosmos shouldn't be considered an accomplishment. Should Amazon's Dynamo? What about Yahoo's Hadoop? What about anything in OSS, for that matter? I think you're not being fair here.

> Bing had more ambition than just being a clone of Google Search

why do you believe this? Have you used Bing and given it a fair chance?

The Bing search you see has differentiated itself from Google in many ways with Twitter/Linkedin/Facebook/Yelp integration.

Bing Image search's format has been copied by Google. Bing search in windows 8 is a different experience to Google Search on android.

> Market Share at 20%

Bing search, with the yahoo searchs that it powers constitutes over 30% of the market share of US market.

Furthermore, Bing serves as the backbone for much of the ML, NLP and IR that occurs across MSFT.

Change your chrome's default search to bing, and you will be suprised by the things it does differently, it changed my perspective (http://blog.samirism.com/experiments/bing-experiment.html)

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