"Microsoft Killed My Pappy" 742
theodp writes "A conversation with an angry young developer prompts Microsoft Program Manager Scott Hanselman to blog about 'Microsoft Haters: The Next Generation.' 'The ones I find the most interesting,' says Hanselman, are the 'Microsoft killed my Pappy' people, angry with generational anger. My elders hated Microsoft so I hate them. Why? Because, you wronged me.' The U.S. and Japan managed to get over the whole World War II thing, Hanselman notes, so why can't people manage to get past the Microsoft antitrust thing, which was initiated in 1998 for actions in 1994? 'At some point you let go,' he suggests, 'and you start again with fresh eyes.' Despite the overall good-humored, why-can't-we-get-along tone of his post, Hanselman can't resist one dig that seems aimed at putting things into perspective for those who would still Slashdot like it's 1999: 'I wonder if I can swap out Chrome from Chrome OS or Mobile Safari in iOS.'"
Re:Change (Score:2, Insightful)
You'd have to be some kind of fucking moron to just throw up your hands and pretend that Microsoft doesn't deserve its reputation. Or, you know, a shill. Or of course both.
Guess which kind of person wrote this article?
Re:Change (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. I thought the introduction of user forums would finally help MS to close the gap with the the users. But it didn't. Threads gets deleted. Bugs get labeled as "features". Botched OSes gets released.
fake premise (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody actually cares about the anti-trust case.
The general public doesn't like Microsoft because their Windows decides to reboot their computer for updates with no warning while they are working or giving a presentation.
The user experience for Microsoft products is generally pretty terrible.
Re:Change (Score:5, Insightful)
"I know he used to beat me, but this time he's really changed."
Bundling + monopoly is the issue (Score:5, Insightful)
*Fuck*. Why, after apparently 20 years, are we still having to explain this! So-called professional, intelligent people can't seem to grasp the fact that *bundling* is not problem. Bundling AND being in a monopoly position to enforce that bundle *is*. It's a logical AND. We're not talking mental gymnastics here, and you've had 20 years to understand, I would have thought a MS employee would especially be wanting to understand this. Jesus.
And don't think Google are somehow immune from this, Chrome on ChromeOS is fine since it's not in any way in a dominant position on operating systems, but using search monopoly to push their own products does have them currently in trouble with the EU.
Re:Change (Score:3, Insightful)
Guess which kind of person wrote this article?
The landscape has changed. And some people want to be optimistic about it.
But. Before it was MS vs. the world. And we thought it was bad. But right now it is effectively MS vs. Google, which might be much worse. Because duopolies generally are worse than monopolies.
You know you have a problem when an Apple iDevice out of box has *more* features than that of competitors.
P.S. To mess it all up, I think that Facebook should release their own (mobile) OS. That's probably the reason why Samsung tries hard to bring another open OS on the market: to prevent duopoly in the mobile market.
Re:Change (Score:5, Insightful)
Hear hear. I can "get over" the German complicity in the Holocaust because the people that actually committed the atrocities are mostly dead, and the country has gone to great lengths to reduce the chances it will ever happen again.
Microsoft on the other hand is still mostly the same people continuing to act in mostly the same way, including going far out of their way to attempt end-runs around any attempt to limit their potential abusiveness, even at the risk of great societal costs in unrelated areas (Completely undermining the integrity of the IEEE Standards Association to get OOXML approved springs to mind)
Seventy years (Score:5, Insightful)
Germany and Japan haven't invaded anybody in seventy years. Meanwhile, Microsoft is, even as we speak attempting to ram home an opaque, binary blob document format, OOXML (hilariously called "Open") as a standard over Open Document Format to cement MS Office's lock on office suite software.
Windows 8 (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows 8 shows MS has not changed one bit.
They still try and stuff crap down the throats of consumers and break stuff for developers and call it great.
Hmm wonder is any ex-Microsoft execs work for Dice.
Re:Change (Score:3, Insightful)
http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
You're right...Microsoft really has changed.
They've learned a lesson? Would that be buy more political power so this doesn't happen again or just don't get caught?
I have no dealings with MS except as an end user but from my perspective they've not changed at all and almost every decision they seem to make reinforces that.
Re:Interesting (Score:2, Insightful)
Are we pretending Windows 8 didn't happen? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it just happened... Like... just now.... so... What is this "they did something a long time ago" nonsense? They're still doing it.
Stop dicking with the core operating system, causing our programs to not run, and radically altering the GUI so its practically unrecognizable.
Offer us choices and try to empower users. Stop springing things on people that they might not want and taking away features we enjoyed.
That makes us feel powerLESS. You change things and we have no control over it. That doesn't make your users feel good or in control of their devices.
Re:Change (Score:5, Insightful)
Compared to whom
Compared to an honest, responsible person.
I don't really give a fuck if the Nazis killed more people or whatever. That doesn't absolve Microsoft.
Never forget. (Score:5, Insightful)
To forgive is foolish. Always be mindful of past actions, as history has proven its tendency to repeat.
I have not forgotten how MS came by its MS DOS, and how it tried to ensure incompatibility with DR-DOS. I haven't forgotten the stagnation and needless standards adoption of IE6 which stalled us on HTML4.01 for half the age of the Internet. I haven't forgotten UEFI, while Coreboot or a simple ability to flash the firmware with an OS loader stub would have sufficed and not required implementation of their patent encumbered FAT systems.
Speaking of which, I haven't forgotten their suits over FAT against companies employing Linux (with and without GNU). I haven't forgotten their extortionist patent threatening and pressuring Android device makers to pay MS for contributing nothing at all but "protection" from the MS threat. I haven't forgotten MS's part in the SCO debacle. I haven't forgotten the terrible anti-progress internal politics of MS which prevented us from having ClearType due to infighting from the MS Office team who wanted to be credited with it themselves -- despite sub-pixel rendering not being a novel thing, and yet MS applying for patents on it.
I haven't forgotten the long look down their noses at us users from MS W8 User Interface designers. I haven't forgotten the MS W8 app store who takes a 30% cut of application maker profits that they never needed before when they were focusing on their core competencies -- A cost which developers like myself will pass onto the users instead of eating ourselves, thus allowing MS to double dipping from their install base.
I haven't forgotten the needless inability for XBox Live games (Like Halo2) to not play online anymore, even though both XBoxes know we have the game in our consoles -- I could see it on the friends list of my peer whom I'm chatting with -- all to force players to move onto newer products and much later repurchase the artful games if they want to keep playing. A doubly needless cost since Hamachi or a VPN allows "system link" across the web without XBL fees, proving the XBL fees and game repurchasing are pointless forced obsolescence. I haven't forgotten the advertizements that showed up in the online non-services and in the OS that users PAY Microsoft for.
I haven't forgotten the bug riddled APIs and the less than helpful MSKB archives wherein users document said bugs themselves in the comments. I haven't forgotten the single constant byte value in Windows that needlessly limits the number of concurrent TCP connections so that MS can sell a Windows Server version. I haven't forgotten MS screwing over device partners over Surface. I haven't forgotten my MSDN subscription becoming worthless as I would not get early access to their OS for testing my products before release to end users -- the better to ensure MS's own software and distribution strategies become further entrenched vs competition.
I won't forgive humans that are actually remorseful, and you think that I'd forgive generations of abuse or that new generations would become instantly ignorant of reality? Go fuck yourself Microsoft, you're just feeling the tip of our ice berg. Have a nice death in obsolescence. Much in the same way the Internet you actively worked against by pushing your own business network protocol instead of supporting sees censorship as damage and routes around it, the market too sees oppressive non-features as damage and routes around such vendors given enough time. Even the most powerful of tyrants die, and when they do we tell tales of their evils ever after as a warning to any upstart of what end awaits evil.
Still happening (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's not forget the ODF debacle where MS stacked committees around the world to pass their "standard".
Re:Change (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... [theregister.co.uk]
This is has happened recently.
Microsoft hasn't changed, they just get caught less, and have currently have incompetent(ballmer) Leadership.
Until Microsoft stops trying to kill everything that's not microsoft and actually adopt open standards they will be horrible. Apple is just as bad but apple has to use more open standards in order to compete.
Re:fake premise (Score:5, Insightful)
As a developer / designer, I hate MSs dominant position in the corporate world. Why? Sharepoint, that's why. I see good products and good developer/support teams being pushed out in favour of a "solution" that looks good on paper but is utter crap in practise, and rather expensive to run as well. The competent teams who used to support the products replaced by Sharepoint are being pushed out; in their place we get hordes upon hordes of so-called consultants. We have SP implementation consultants, IM consultants, Data consultants, ABCDE consultants; I have kind of lost track but I have yet to find someone remotely competent amongst them. Meanwhile the required server infrastructure is much larger, and our users have lost functionality compared to our old Wiki, forum and document management systems, some of which ran on software designed over 10 years ago. At this point we're solidly in the "throwing bad money after good" stage. It is almost (but not quite) as bad as SAP, and at least SAP does deliver on the backend and management layer.
So why hate MS for pushing out such a flawed product? I don't hate them for the product itself, but for the fact that it's almost impossible to make management see past the fact that it's "ohhhh Microsoft", past the fast-talking consultants, and the idea that it'll "integrate nicely".
Re:Change (Its worse now) (Score:5, Insightful)
Its everyone now. Its every device, every OS except SOME versions of linux. I hate not just Microsoft, but Apple, Samsung, Sony and many many others. In todays software and hardware OVER 50% OF THE BUDGETS FOR EVERYTHING ELECTRONIC, is spent researching and implementing systems and technologies that keep me from being able to use my devices in any way other than a way that generates revenue., They are not even satisfied with one time revenue stream, but now even cripple THINGS so they can sell them back as a service to generate a continuous revenue stream. The days of geeks owning their devices/computers is over and I resent that beyond belief. There really isn't any single place that anyone can go and get rid of this completely, so I can't even truly vote with my pocketbook. I just simply have to buy the electronics that are LEAST riddled with any technology that exists for the sole purpose to limit my capability/creativity in some way. When Microsoft become less concerned about Metro walled gardens or killing the video stream if something looks fishy to THEM on MY computer then I'll go back to using Microsoft or other vendors.
Re:Change (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know. Watching Microsoft's blatant attack on open standards was really informative of how nothing there has changed other than they do attempt to stay under the radar when they can. If you don't understand how we have a problem with this Corporation trying to destroy open standards I can only describe you as a rabid MS-shill.
Re:Change (Score:5, Insightful)
The subverting of ISO to get the atrocious OOXML made a standard was just five years ago. Hardly ancient history.
Re:Change (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I do have some knowledge of industrial history. Just because others did murder in the past is no excuse for MS to steal and cheat now. And they are doing it, right now. No, MS has not gone straight, not turned over a new leaf in the past few years. This is not a matter of let bygones be bygones.
That brutal industrial history is a mark of shame for the entire system of capitalism. Every time one might think the bad old days are gone, we get another reminder. Another coal mine "incident" kills dozens of minors. The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The most deadly of all, so far, is what Union Carbide did in Bhopal in 1984. How about the story of the Radium Girls? The management knew radium was dangerous, and kept themselves clear, but not their workers.
Maybe communism wouldn't have been so attractive if not for the excesses of the capitalists. What kind of system leads rich tycoons to become so callously indifferent to the lives of "little" people? Then our court system fails to adequately punish and deter this kind of behavior.
Re:Change (Score:2, Insightful)
Comparison breaks down (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's skip over the hilarious hyperbole of comparing a business story to the prosecution of aggressive war (yes, managers love to *talk* about "crushing" opposition and evisceration and all that...all of which is hilarious hyperbole, too).
Taking it at face value - Japan had its whole regime torn down, warmongers mostly shot for war crimes, replaced with a whole different government and became a whole different culture that now votes heavily against any significant degree of aggressive militarization. If MS had *lost* that antitrust case and been broken up, managers scattered, their whole corporate culture changed, that would have been equivalent.
It wasn't just one thing - attempting to monopolize web browsers and make MS products the default choice for any web application was only a part of it. It was MS wanting to see all your product designs under non-disclosure before they'd offer to buy your company...and then the offer would be comically low and if you didn't take it, your general ideas would appear (badly) in a new Microsoft product that automatically took all your market share because...it was Microsoft.
Columnist "Robert X. Cringely" had a good term for it: "sharp trading" - always on the edge of illegal, but hard and expensive to prove as such. Nobody does business with the sharp trader twice....unless they're over a barrel.
Microsoft's *power* to do this has been reduced, but not their business model and inclinations. I have no choice but to use Office at work, and so I'm an enthused Excel VBA programmer, you make the best of what you've got. (And besides, writing a large critical application as a glorified spreadsheet macro is rare; it's just great for one-shot solutions.) But the very idea of basing a larger business system around SharePoint, their various Visual programming languages, their C# ripoff of Java, strikes me as comical; I'd go with platforms they don't control every time. MS has a long and continuing history of using their most-deeply-engaged customers the way shepherds use sheep - by which I mean "keep shearing them every year" of course. Honest.
Once sociopathic always sociopathic, that's why. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't we put it behind us? Simple: it's not really behind us. Microsoft is still a corporation run by hyperambitious sociopaths who care only for themselves and their "circle" and nothing for the common good. (I'm not saying MS is unique in this.) That hasn't changed as a result of the antitrust action or anything more recent. Microsoft is still "evil", they just haven't been [i]caught[/i] being evil in a while. It's a natural effect of the human condition that sociopaths rise to the top of all hierarchies, and then the rest of us suffer to degrees.
Re: Change (Score:2, Insightful)
i lied, cheated, stole, and killed to get to where i am now. but now that i have clawed my way to the top, i am a nice guy. forget about history. love me now.
Re:Bundling + monopoly is the issue (Score:5, Insightful)
*Fuck*. Why, after apparently 20 years, are we still having to explain this!
Because he is literally a shill from Microsoft. He's getting paid to confuse the issue.
Re:Change (Score:2, Insightful)
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish Plus FUD (Score:4, Insightful)
It realy goes back to the strategy of vendor lock in, Microsoft just can't pull it off like they used to because open source is so readily available and more viable than it's ever been.
The Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt propogated by Microsoft spans generations, and also can't make as strong a case as it used to because people know that there are alrternatives available.
Not so much about having a monooly on the desktop or bundling a browser, so much as it was about trying to leverage that to alter standards and control the source such that other browsers can't render what was made for IE 6, other office suites can't quite display a .DOC file like Office can. It was about making it so that things couldn't interact or be compatable.
Nothing has changed, MS just can't sell their FUD like they used to, and there's enough good open source alternatives that trying to extend something to control it just makes users loose interest. What's really sad is they still try to use this strategy even though it will no longer work, and this is why windows phone can gain no traction.
Best thing to do is use opensource, and let MS continue their downward decline into insignificance.
Re:Change (Score:5, Insightful)
This whole discussion is pretty bogus.
Microsoft of itself is neither evil nor benign. It is the people who have shaped Microsoft's corporate culture and policies who can be judged in that way.
Microsoft's behavior became somewhat less obnoxious when Bill Gates stepped away from the daily management of the company. That still left the potty-mouthed, chair throwing, murder threatening, monkey dancer in charge. But he is now going away, too.
So maybe Microsoft will become respectable, at some point. Or maybe not-- there are deeply rooted corporate cultures that can make it impossible for good persons to survive long enough to make a difference.
Re:Seventy years (Score:1, Insightful)
even as we speak attempting to ram home an opaque, binary blob document format, OOXML
No need to make up shit just to take it out on Microsoft. The above is simply wrong, and the "proof" is in your own sentence. OOXML... Wonder what format it is. Binary blob or... you know... perhaps... maybe... XML? When participating in a discussion, having the facts clear is an advantage. Once you spout nonsense as fact your credibility goes down the drain. Oh, you've looked at it you say? It was binary? Yes, it was zipped. Makes sense. XML is overly verbose and lends it self perfectly to zipping up. Makes total sense. It's optional though, you don't have to.
Re:Change (Score:5, Insightful)
With a monopoly everybody know where they stand. You either with them - or against them. And if the monopolist is really bad, then opposition would form in the industry.
Duopoly creates illusion of competition. It also sets the false perception of the choice and that anything beyond the two choices is not possible. The simulated market saturation also makes investors nervous about investing into alternatives. That allows participants of the duopoly to slow the innovation: there is no danger of competition; the only competitor is very likely thinking the same as you and also tries to maximize the profits by cutting the costs. Throw in the patent cross-licensing deals, and you literally have no way to crack the duopoly. For as long as they do not openly cooperate, you can't prosecute them under anti-trust laws.
Re:Change (Score:5, Insightful)
The landscape has changed, but not enough. Microsoft have engineered a situation where the majority of people have little chance of finding a PC without Windows, thus ensuring Microsoft an income which they can spend a percentage of to maintain status-quo. And based on previous stories, it appears Microsoft is even getting subsidized from the sales of certain devices with no Microsoft software on them.
Until deciding not to pay anymore money to Microsoft is a real option for consumers, I am going to see Microsoft as a problem, that needs to be solved.
They may have been fined for their practices. But the fines are not nearly as large as the value of the position they gotten themselves through those practices.
I disagree. I believe things would have looked much worse today, if MS had not been having competition from Google.
It is much easier for a consumer not to pay any money to Google than it is for a consumer not to pay any money to Microsoft. It is also not hard to use another search engine than Google. But every time I try, I find that both the search results and the UI tend to be worse. So I always come back to the Google search engine, just because it really seems to work better for me. As long as it is that easy to switch to another search engine, I am not worried about Google being able to maintain their position simply by making a better product than their competitors.
Sure Google makes moves, I disagree with. But not enough to put them behind their competitors. I am actually more worried about Yahoo and bing getting too close, leaving us with one less competitor for Google.
Re:Change (Score:5, Insightful)
own some MS stock there, shill-boy?
IE browser breaks formerly compliant sites with each release.
almost no one wants a windows phone, Android and Apple dominate the market. Micosoft lost the mobile space because they don't innovate.
ribbon is garbage, layers have unrelated random things, it is not designed to do any work or have a workflow. it is not discoverable. only simpletons who do very menial work find ribbon suitable.
GNU C++ runs on over a dozen architectures, microsoft C++ only a few
Microsoft owns the ecosystem of mediocrity and pandering to morons. those that want true functional operating system run alternatives.
Micsoft does not innovate, they are reactionary and make inferior alternatives. example of powershell instead of usable real OS shell.
Re:Change (Score:4, Insightful)
They're less arrogant and more flexible because they have lost power, not because they have learned any lesson or changed in any way. If they find themselves in a position of power they will abuse it again, and if they can screw you and gain from it when nobody's looking, you're going to get screwed.
Not forgetting how they will behave with power and keeping track when the company's nature rears its head again is part of keeping them from doing it again.
Maybe once they've kept their nose clean for half a century, but this far they haven't even managed two days.
Re:Change (Score:5, Insightful)
I was a long-term MS hater but google has taken spot #1 for my big company mistrust and hate.
I know what MS is up to. they sell software and I'm their customer.
google does not consider me a customer and so I am not part of the 'sales cycle' at all, I have no say in what happens and I can't even get any support if google fucks my shit up.
if you are the product, you are the lowest down on the food chain.
consumers were never the product with MS. that counts for a lot, actually.
MS is shady and I would not trust them very far, but my trust level with google is a solid flat ZERO. MS is, at least, more than zero, even if not by all that much.
apple, while we're at it, is even less trustworthy than MS, these days. its anyone's guess what info they want to mine from your i-devices and the totally closed ecosystem is a huge turn-off to many of us.
funny thought: if I had to pick a tee shirt from the 3 companies mentioned - and wear it at least a few times to work - it would probably be an MS shirt. google and apple can go fuck themselves, I would not be caught dead advertising them. strange thought from a hardcore unix guy like myself, but the times HAVE changed and what was the big evil guy before is not the worst one on the block anymore.
Re:Change (Score:5, Insightful)
The Microsoft of old doesn't seem to be any worse than the Apple of today. Windows at least lets you run anything you like on it, while iOS is locked down to only run Apple approved apps. Microsoft abused their position to crush Netscape by integrating IE into Windows, but Apple doesn't even allow other non-Apple rendering engines and keeps the highest performance code exclusive to Safari. Microsoft tried lock people in with its proprietary formats, Apple has proprietary formats (e.g. iTunes database) and locks out non-approved 3rd party peripherals.
Microsoft tried to pack in their own services like MSN, Apple packs in its own services and excludes others (e.g. the app store). It's like Apple got all their ideas from Microsoft and improved on them.
mod parent up (Score:2, Insightful)
Wish I had some points for you. Apple's walled garden model scares me WAY more than MS ever did.
Re: Change (Score:5, Insightful)
The funny thing is, Ubuntu was poised and could have taken the desktop, but they brought out their own version of Metro before Microsoft did.
We are a victim of the "Designer". The "Designer" isn't a critical thinker who solves problems. They're not a project manager who understands the needs of the people doing the work. They're not process improvement specialists.
They're fucking ARTISTS.
Here's their job:
In these stories, there is always an executive. He makes the decision if things will go ahead. But, he never sullies his hands with tools like ordinary people, and has no real understanding of how things get done or what qualities a tool should have. He's completely ignorant as to what SHOULD be done, like the designer, and he's too full of himself to learn what he needs to know. So, if he can, he green lights the project that was brought to him by a slutty blonde, and if there's no slutty blonde, he green lights the pretty looking project and goes home.
That's how these things work.
So, when you're looking at Metro, and Unity, and Gnome3, and wondering what the hell happened to the powerful tools you rely upon and used to love...
Go take it out on a designer.
The base problem for technologists... (Score:4, Insightful)
The base problem for technologists is that the action perverted the course of future technology, and, having been altered, no amount of reparations will restore it to the course it would have taken had the event never happened.
We always ask ourselves where we would be today, if only...
Re:Never forget. (Score:4, Insightful)
You should create a website documenting this history. When someone asks what's so bad about MS, we could just point them to the website.
Re: Change (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Change (Score:5, Insightful)
Since no one has mentioned it: Word was awesome. I remember when people bought Macs (classic) to run Word. For all the geek love for WordPerfect, it wasn't the one with mainstream appeal.
Also, Windows95 was some amazing technology. Sure, every geek in the world had and has good reason to hate it, as it was just so terrible to administer. But it was exactly the product needed to bridge the gap between the segmented memory, non-multi-tasking, no memory protection model that was the norm before it to the true 32-bit, flat memory model with process boundaries and pre-emptive multitasking world that only existed on servers at the time. It was such a crap OS to maintain and administer precisely because it could run freaking 16-bit device drivers written to a no-memory-protection world inside a 32-bit (relatively) modern kernel. There were better options, but none of them would run the existing world of DOS, too
People act like it's MS's monopolistic practices that they hate but seriously, it's the fact the we geeks collectively had to support Win95 that's the raw emotional core of the hate. And it won because it solved the right problem: it was backwards compatible instead of good.
Re:Change (Score:5, Insightful)
You're comparing Microsoft Windows to iOS? Why aren't you comparing Windows to OSX?
How locked down was Zune, how locked down is RT, how is it that the PC platform is becoming more locked down than Apple hardware?
We'd be in much better shape in a world where PPC and Alpha desktop computers were competing with ARM for marketshare, with OF still a relevant standard (rather than just having remnants left behind in the Linux kernel), rather than the total hash that's x86, BIOS, MBR, EFI.
The Apple partition map presaged GPT, OF (which Apple embraced) presaged EFI, all of it quite open. A large part of OSX is open source, and the documentation of everything is superb (I remember when the big criticism of MacOS was that you needed THREE VOLUMES of documentation to cover everything! I still have the phonebook version).
Yeah, iOS and iTunes is not very open, I'll give you that.
Re:fake premise (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad design, but when you hear a chorus of people complaining about the same thing, it's highly suggestive that it is. Both Windows and Ubuntu tried the crazy menu thing and elimating the start menu. Both had to relent and go back. That's a pretty shitty design, and shows both of them weren't thinking.
IMO the UI architects have become too radical for desktop UIs. Many complain the deskop UI hasn't changed in 20 years.... as if that's a bad thing. The UI to my car hasn't changed either. Steering wheel, brake, accelerator, ignition, gearshift all in standard locations. Headlight switches move around, which seems to serve little purpose, but it's a relatively minor complaint. A stable UI isn't necesarily a bad thing, but if you look at how much UIs have changed in MS products, you'd think they change it more often than hairstyles.
Meanwhile 20 years ago I learned shell programming and some simple unix piping output between standard programs, and I've gotten quite good at manipuating the command line. I don't have to re-learn it all every 5 years because someone thought of a "better" way to do it. At the same time I don't really want to go back to manipulating endless system config files with a text editor, or using freaking tar/zip as a package management tool. If a UI improvement solves an actual problem I'm all for it, it's just the stuff MS has done lately doesn't seem to solve any problems, only create them.
To me moving around the UI components is sort of like re-arranging furniture. It might help a bit, but if you want a happier user there's better ways to go about that. If you want to keep the system up to date... instead of forcing the damn machine to restart, why not just re-engineer your system so you don't have to restart? Email really stinks.. mostly because it's a big box with different time requirements for different emails. Why not address that problem instead of putting a fancy ribbon on everything?
Re:Change (Score:5, Insightful)
You can pretty much assume every company is collecting as much information from you as possible. Just because you're also giving them money doesn't change anything. At least with Google they tell you what they collect and what they do with it. And unlike most companies, Google doesn't sell this information.
Not that you should trust Google, but the "they're spying on me so X company is better" logic just doesn't hold up.
Re:Change (Score:4, Insightful)
So today MS is not perfect. But we can conclude their products are
1. More standard compliant
2. More reliable
3. Better quality
4. MS is innovating more and copying less
5. Competitors now exist
There are still enough reasons to hate Microsoft. I generally try to avoid Microsoft products, but Microsoft still impacts me in various ways:
Microsoft hate is not just about products. It's about the whole system. Microsoft is harmful and evil.
Re:Change (Score:5, Insightful)
No, and you're an idiot. Win95 was bad, but it was a long time ago, and most people who hate Microsoft consider that simply among the many sins committed.
Did you get IE11? Did you notice how the "Developer Tools" are now "Tablet user semi-tools"?
Have you upgraded to VS2012? Did you notice how your workflow is now *harder* unless you use a touch device?
Have you tried to change the color of bullets when you paste something in Word? Fuck me, the Word editor is probably the definition of torture. If you use your keyboard at all, it will fuck your eyeballs with a cactus.
Do you have something after Windows 7? Did you notice how Windows is designed around touch users, despite the fact that business desktops are a huge part of both Microsoft's current user base as well as future upgrades due to subscriptions? Server 2013 using the same touch-optimized interface?
Now we get the "Spring" update for Windows 8.1, which supposedly addresses the 90+% of the market still using desktops but that they completely forgot about during design, and it's named for a season which, while correct for most of the inhabited world, still disregards anything outside of their immediate vision.
Microsoft does not see existing customers. It sees future markets. Bundling IE and lying about it was certainly about future markets.Claiming IE was part of the system, and forcing Active Desktop on users, was about future markets.
90% of the user base that uses a desktop is not in their scope until it threatens the sales numbers. We get a token "start button" that does not do what we obviously wanted. Later, we get promises of a "start button". The timing of this pretty much says it all. The customer is paid for, the future customer is not. The current customer sometimes has to be appeased, but they will be shat upon if the future consumer base demands it.
I have used Windows all of my life. I am stupid in that way, apparently. My reasons were based around popularity and market share, and my understanding of its internals was so precipitated. I suffered through having a half-assed 32-bit OS thunked to the Windows 95 and 98 kernel. I used Windows 2000 at home because XP used unnecessary eye candy. I upgraded to a faster computer, and XP3 phoned home even as a paid customer.
I suffered through unpaid license fees to Dinkumware, meaning my code broke until I traced it to broken STL includes that would never be included in a service pack update. That was 1999. Yet I built a good career on Microsoft technologies, precisely because my knowledge and experience make me more valuable than the average Microsoft worker.
I have seen my rapist many times. Do I love him now, and forget him now? While I see the same tricks played over and over? Do I forgive the company for its past wrongs even though I see the exact same behavior? Do I forgive the alcoholic who reaches for another drink? The crack addict with a burning pipe to its lips?
No, I fucking well don't. And all of this went well beyond Windows 95.
Re:Change (Score:2, Insightful)
With a monopoly everybody know where they stand. You either with them - or against them. And if the monopolist is really bad, then opposition would form in the industry.
Duopoly creates illusion of competition.
Oh, you mean like the REPUBLICANS and the DEMOCRATS? Now I get it---Thanks!