Things Microsoft Still Does Well
techland.time.com
techland.time.com
Not coincidentally, they just put the Cloud and Enterprise guy in charge of the company.
What happens when (say) .NET isn't the best tool for a particular job? Just close your eyes and use the inferior tool anyway? Or use the right tool and just throw the hard-won Microsoft ecosystem synergies out the window? I'm constantly using different technologies for different projects; doesn't this come up a lot in the enterprise world, too?
Granted, I'm not an enterprise developer. I've never worked on a code base that more than 20 people were working on at once. But I don't understand what makes large organizations see a walled-in ecosystem like that as a plus rather than a trap.
What made it worse was that prior to this I'd never really programmed anything for Windows.
However, as I've been using it more and more, I'm beginning to see why it is the way it is, how all this abstraction and scaffolding comes together to make programming easier.
Seriously, having everything a developer could ever want accessible through one interface has some nice upsides, and I now completely see how Microsoft makes so much money off this product.
Also, I think one of the things that makes. NET so attractive is that it seems to have features or libraries for everything and the kitchen sink. C# has excellent support for "business-y" things, to a degree that makes worrying about it not a problem for many companies.
This doesn't just apply to Microsoft... look at the money Oracle, IBM, SAP, etc. bring in. As the saying goes "No one has been fired for using X software before".
"What happens when (say) .NET isn't the best tool for a particular job?"
So like when you need to write something in Python (http://pytools.codeplex.com/) or Node.js (http://nodejstools.codeplex.com/)? Yea that is all supported in VS by Microsoft. Most people don't realize at some point over the last few years they changed from the MS or screw off attitude to a more let's support what we can one. They have also started opening sourcing a lot of their stuff.
I came from Unix/Linux/PHP and Perl at the time and once I got the hang of C# and Visual Studio I have not looked back.
.Net itself is the result of Microsoft abandoning (without even an upgrade path) all their previous developers twice, at around 2000 and 2002.
I've not seen any big non-tech company totally dependent on one programming stack. They spread their bets. One can see people sitting next to each other working on Node.js and Visual Basic.
If anything to go by what I've seen and provided competent people are making the decision, they try to use right tools for the right job.
As such it always amazes me to see otherwise intelligent people complain about Microsoft dumping or abandoning them and their Silverlight-based products.
The technologies in Silverlight are in most cases directly portable to WPF, Windows Phone and WinRT. Any Dev that throws out effort based on Silverlight probably deserves being abandoned.
Well... MS was that company, up until they weren't.
Imagine all you've used is Microsoft's products and all of sudden some hotshot programmer comes along and says "we're going to use this software that a bunch of people wrote for free" Now that is a foreign concept.
What else have you tried? IMO, it is very hard to find anyone that worked on the MS stack, moved to something else and wants to go back to Microsoft.
I don't know much about C++ though.
The myth that Eclipse users try to perpetuate that "you must buy Resharper just to be able to work in VS" is just that: a myth.
My team has worked on both C# and Java backends for AAA-games and after we moved to C# we have had people actively threatening to resign if we ever went back to Eclipse (and Java). The debugging capabilities, the speed of the tools, the relative sanity of C# compared to Java ... there is simply no comparison.
For example, how would you compare SQL Server install to Postgres? Did your team have an easy time integrating with AD? Was the team more productive in C# than Ruby?
The IE team deserves credit for their technical and managerial achievements - it's not easy to actually do something on a company that large.
No, we shouldn't. Do you have any reason to believe that if IE became dominant again, Microsoft would not abuse its position once more? I don't. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice ....
(And I wasn't fooled even once, but the Internet at large was).
The onus of proving that they mean well is on Microsoft this time, and they're not living up to it. Ok then, I guess IE11 is an ok HTML5 browser (don't have windows, can't even test). But they fought against introducing WebGL (and lost), and they're still reluctant to introduce WebRTC.
As a browser, MSIE 11 is vastly better than previous versions. They took what was just about the shittiest browser on earth, and made it more or less OK. (Although Firefox and Chrome are both better.) From that limited perspective, kudos to them.
As a corporation, though, Microsoft is still a toxic entity with poisonous effects on the ecosystems it participates in. It actively, brazenly works against the interests of the Internet user community as a whole, and those of its own customers. Microsoft the company is a bad actor on the scale of Oracle, Monsanto, Halliburton. So you're right, too.
Seriously. They drop products faster than Paris Hilton changes her hair color. They are involved in multi million settlements due to throwing their users privacy rights under a bus. Do you really want a browser from a company that is only interested in violating your privacy for a few extra dollars? Why put MS in the same league as Halliburton but give a free pass to Google?
But kudos to Firefox thou, I don't use it normally, but form what I read and little I used, they actually care about the user.
And, from what I can tell, Paris Hilton's hair color is pretty consistently blond: https://www.google.com/search?q=paris+hilton+hair+color&clie...
I'm glad they're finally starting to take some stress off of me as a developer, but there are still too many people running IE8 and 9 for me to like IE with any sort of passion..
Although I hear that neither Sony nor Microsoft has made a lot of money from their console adventures.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_game_consoles_...
What are missing are the japanese weird and arty, or colorful and playable games that are available for Playstation or Wii. The games I remember from my childhood (Mario, Zelda) or some absolutely mindblowing ideas like Journey.
i went through the library again recently, and I could not find a single exclusive worth owning either of the xboxes (although galleon was nice, and jet grind radio eventually got re-released on PSN).
There is an exception to that of course, namely xbox live arcade. There are still a handful of XBLA exclusives that were worth it, but most of those have been re-released on PSN or steam too.
In Brazil, Xbox has sold more than PS3 according to the local game industry association. And with the PS4 prices being 2x that of Xbox One, some are predicting Sony will be too late when it finally can make PS4 cheaper. The same happened with PS2 (people could only get them bringing from Japan) and it essentially boostrapped Xbox here. It's happening again.
Is that the victory they aimed for and planned on?
However, on the consumer path this interested me:
>As the console gaming industry evolves (dies?), Nadella needs to convince America that the Xbox is truly a living room feature, not simply a gaming device. If he can sell that concept, Microsoft will leapfrog Sony and recapture the lead.
Despite the claims of the "living room console" being made for years, I really can't find any evidence for it. I can't see why a $499 console will beat out an $99 Apple TV for OTT entertainment in the larger consumer market. I still think this idea that the gaming console will become "the box" is an idea that has roots in the early 2000s, where people only have 1, maybe 2 televisions at home. If "John Jr." is playing video games for 4 hrs/day, I commonly see he does it in his room, not in the living room where he can impede on "John Sr."'s decision to watch the Netflix. Sure they could buy 2 Xbox Ones, but John Sr. doesn't really need all that gaming power.
Something deep in the Nokia 920 was turning on and spinning the CPU like mad; the unit would heat up and drain the battery by mid day. Nothing I could do fixed it; I waited through two system updates and it was never fully addressed. (AT&T was never very quick about releasing updates, either; separate problem). I finally downgraded to an iPhone a few weeks ago. I can use the iPhone all day without worrying about the battery, but the mail client (which I use constantly) is a lot more clumsy to use than the one on the Windows phone.
Microsoft is at the mercy of bad little code monkeys who write drivers at the BSP (Board Support Package) level, which are usually done at contract houses like BSquare. The code I've seen some out of these places has been . . . marginal. In the cases I've had to use it, I've usually wound up rewriting a lot of it. You get code that passes tests, but that's about the only bar for acceptance; internally the code is usually badly organized spaghetti whose mission is to pass the tests, and that's it.
You want the driver-level code in your system to be ROCK SOLID. If you contract this work out, you're going to need a great acceptance system [code and design reviews, because automated systems like WHQL are inadequate and get gamed anyway], a way to update drivers in the field so that mistakes can be corrected quickly [phone releases seem to happen every 9 months or so, so nope], and you want to be able to get good feedback from customers [looks at AT&T . . . sighs].
A phone is a top-to-bottom thing; blow one level and you've got a bad product. Microsoft hasn't really figured this out yet; maybe with the Nokia purchase they'll have a full stack and finally do everything right.
This is true of other large software comapnies too: Adobe with their Creative Suite and Google with Android - both successful in terms of sales, but arguably very uneven in their usability (in my opinion).
"extremely loyal user base"
Is it really loyalty? Or is it inertia (people learned it once upon a time) combined with lock-in (everyone else is sharing documents in this proprietary format)?
-> Enterprise