Toshio

> "most(more than 80%) of your comments are on [...]"

I'm impressed.

You really took the time to perform an in-depth study of my submission/comment history, even figured out the 80% stat.

Slightly creepy but well-researched, kudos.

> "strongly negative feeling toward it appearing here"

This isn't about feelings, I'm just adding a data point to HN ranking algorithm.

The reason I enjoy being on HN is because of this community's mindset of "let's disrupt the big, established, old players". Seen from that angle, this submission is irrelevant because it's not about disrupting a big player, it's about perpetuating a harmful monopoly.

> Are you honestly saying that [...]

It looks like you are putting words in my mouth.

All I'm saying is that I follow a subset of news that's related to tech and startup. Which means I don't have an informed opinion on:

> how smart people with excellent computing could possibly do anything to help with significant problems such as HIV/AIDS or world hunger or food insecurity

or:

> the latest cat-photo startup

> they may be interested in using the 'most used office suite' again

Interesting twist, but I disagree.

If anything, startups would be interested in disrupting, not aiding, a staid, old, established player's contraptions.

Huh. I don't follow news about India/AIDS or BTC, but Tesla is a startup IIRC.

I don't follow the Samsung-vs-Apple news, so I don't understand its relevance to the topic at hand.

I cringe at the thought that some people consider this to be startup-relevant news (or even hacker-relevant news, for that matter).

I flagged this submission, I hope the usual complainers understand why.

If you don't, by all means, please elaborate.

Breaking news: the Haskell Platform exists.

Stop teaching noobs to use Hugs, ffs.

> "Linkbait."

You are being very generous. OP is obviously either a PR hit piece paid for in full by microsoft, or indistinguishable from one.

> "why wouldn't you?"

Maybe because of my UNIX-influenced worldview which says that the things I'm using should be streamlined, do-one-thing-but-do-it-very-well, and should be "composable" as in ... via UNIX pipes, if we're talking about software utilities, and by putting them on the same network, if we're talking about computing devices.

Ahem, your post sounds so enthusiastic about a product that has proven to be a dud with consumers, that I'm missing some kind of disclosure from you. Therefore, let me ask you this: are you in any way affiliated with microsoft? As in, you know, employee, freelance evangelist or member of a benefit program such as MVP.

LATER EDIT: Yeah I looked at your profile, my suspicions were confirmed.

Or perhaps it could just be that we find anything made by microsoft mind-numbingly uninteresting. Just like anything made by SAP, IBM, Oracle, CA and other old-guard tech companies. Seriously, why are there e.g. no SAP employees on HN wondering whether HN is really that anti SAP?

I'll take your word for it. But you have to be careful with your enthusiasm, because microsoft and satellites are known for their aggressive astroturfing, and you might sound like a paid shill.

Nokia also ran.

See what I did there? I summarized the entire PR exercise in 3 words.

This kind of what's-a-good-word-for-it behavior is what makes me wish upon a star that microsoft would slide into irrelevance already and leave the software industry alone.

Oh. I know what a good word for it is: douchey.

Open letter to the CEO of HTC

Hello,

I am very excited that you plan to offer more choice to me as a consumer, but ...

... why stop at two mobile OSes?

Why not also load WebOS, Blackberry OS, and every other failed, also-ran mobile OS that ever existed?

That way, if you ship smartphones with 256 GB of flash, when all is said and done, I will still be left with 3 KB to store a few contacts of mine.

Sincerely, Yours truly, Joe Average Consumer

> "have been producing some incredibly popular software"

Whoa, Koolaid much?

I'll stop you right there.

You can call your employer's contraptions "ubiquitous". Popular they are not.

> "There are a lot of rabid anti-Microsoft developers on HN"

Intellectual laziness test: Have you spent some time considering that maybe there is a good reason for that? Or are you just simplistically dismissing it out of hand as uninformed hatred?

I fail to understand how this belongs on Hacker News.

microsoft should understand that mobile is a battle they can never win, they should count their blessings and focus entirely on the enterprise side of their business.

> "What comments bother you the most?"

Mindless evangelism of proprietary technologies, disguised as an attempt at an insightful comment (microsoft's mvps and evangelists are particularly guilty of this).

To me the problems with microsoft are manifold, and they are not at all related to ballmer's professional competencies, but to his complete lack of ethics, which ends up trickling down through the ranks (see employee infighting/politicking), trickling out to users of their software (see the not-having-a-choice-about-preinstalled-software-on-generic-laptops), trickling out to other tech companies (see the bullying microsoft subjects Android manufacturers to), and trickling out to competitors (see microsoft unfairly dictating standards to the marketplace and the infamous corruption of ISO standards in 2008).

microsoft's core expertise isn't technology or even marketing, it's bullying, and it's defending / extending an existing monopoly. When you look at microsoft today, what you really notice is that they're still going by the same old playbook, pretending that it's still 1997, which is proving to be a very ineffective approach. It won't make a difference whether Ballmer stays or goes, as long as the new CEO is going to be someone whom bill gates has specifically picked based on their allegiance to microsoft's old playbook.

These slides may be of some help.

http://yogsototh.github.com/Category-Theory-Presentation

I disagree. The real reason that microsoft is having so many problems today is karma. Their past is beginning to catch up with them. People are no longer willing to give microsoft the benefit of the doubt.

> "I have news for you; every large company has been and is doing this type of astroturfing all over the internet for well over a decade now."

I'd have to agree, but Samsung's flavor of astroturfing is pretty gentle and benign compared to the viciousness of microsoft' attack dogs.

This sounds more like a domain-specific framework thingy, and not so much like a programming language.

You must be new around here.

> "Design" is becoming more and more obsolete as the use of design frameworks becomes more ubiquitous.

That's visual design you're thinking about. Real design is hard because real design is UX design. It means solving problems. It requires empathy. I suggest googling terms like "information architecture", "content strategy", "affordance" etc.

> "What should I do next?"

Become an enlightened developer by learning a functional programming language.

> "Microsoft is doomed, but first it’s going to make a ton of money" ...

... by milking the trapped, a.k.a. raising the price of client access licenses here and there - which incidentally explains why it still looks like a profitable company on the enterprise side of the equation.