Slashdot Mirror
Is It Wrong to Love Microsoft?
vd writes "Given most comments on Slashdot, it would appear that anyone with even a slight knowledge of computers hates Microsoft. An article on CoolTechZone, though, argues that not everyone should dismiss Microsoft outright. According to Varun Dubey, Linux is over-rated, Macs aren't worthy and Windows deserves respect and some love. From the article: 'What has Microsoft given us? It has given us Windows, sure, it was buggy earlier and a lot of things didn't work like they were supposed to (plug and play springs to mind) but it was a pioneering effort. No one was even close to the ease of use that Windows offered. Sure, Mac OS was a lot prettier but then it cost the moon and the stars along with both your arms and legs.'"
2 almost pro-MS posts on
someone please hit me...
"most of the people developing Linux probably sit at night writing up malicious code for windows!"
This guy really must not like open source developers.
Why is this in apple.slashdot.org?
Kool-Aid sales up substantially.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Illegally destroyed competition in the OS space.
Suppressed or destroyed competition in the app space.
Dictated an artificial (e.g. unnecessarily expensive) software replacement cycle.
Empowered unscrupulous businesses to spy on your every web surfing move.
I hear people say that things aren't so bad with the current state of desktop computing. After all, Windows rarely crashes anymore and you can surf the web, play games, read email, etc. What else is there? To be quite frank, a lot. It is difficult to quantify all of the software development that hasn't been done because of Microsoft's oppressive control over the desktop. I estimate we are at least three generations of software development behind because most businesses would not risk competing with Microsoft. Just 5 years ago I can remember reading stories about companies that decided NOT to compete in a particular area because they feared Microsoft would crush them. Forget the companies put out of business or the people who had to find a new job. The loss of advancement in software technique is incalculable.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Yes, it is.
Next on the agenda: is genocide really that bad of an idea?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
You obviously don't read at threshold: -1.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
What a worthless article. If it were a Slashdot comment, it'd be moderated to -1, Overrated.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
First of all, the writing is less than stellar. Second, all of it is opinion based without any sort of facts to back it up, or in depth explanation of his point.
And then there's this: Lets be fair and honest about this. Here is a company that single handedly created the market for Personal Computers, brought computing to ordinary folks like you and me, made it affordable by encouraging mass acceptance and constantly strives to provide us ease of use in every sphere it touche
Gee, I remember something called the Apple II doing this long before microsoft was the force it was. What a maroon.
Windows is NOT easy to use *correctly*.
This "ease of use" includes people running as Admin with all the services running and basically wide open to the universe. That's "ease of use".
I won't pretend that Linux or BSD is any easier but I really don't think this "ease of use" label is meaningful.
"Chainsaws are easy to use!" -- Said the current reigning king of the one armed people.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I think it's the most over rated piece of software ever built and survives simply out of spite and not because it is terribly good at doing something because it is not!
This is the greatest sentence ever written in the history of man. Thank you for your penetrating insight.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Yes, absolutely it is wrong to love Microsoft. For that matter, it is wrong to love any company that you are not directly a part of, and even then loving a company is fraught with pitfalls. Love is something that must be reciprocated in order to have any meaning. It is a shame that English has evolved to the point where we "love" or "hate" things that we enjoy or dislike.
Microsoft has done a lot of things, some good, some bad, some neither. Businesses are just that way. Is Microsoft worthy of respect? Sure. They have done something that other computer companies only dream of: they own several of the markets that they are part of. But does that mean we should hate them? Does it mean we should love them? Of course not.
People who feel strong emotions towards companies that they have very little part in (having neither worked there nor been part of the founding and building of it) are misdirecting their emotions. Save your love for your neighbor, don't waste it on Microsoft.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Plug and play was by no means a pioneering effort by Microsoft, the Macintosh has had it forever, so long in-fact that it had no name on Mac OS, not until it was a new feature in Windows did Microsoft give it a name. We Mac users just knew it as "stuff working when I plug it in just like it should"
Also I would argue (and I know there are many on both sides) that the Mac OS was prettier, cost more, and was easier to use as well.
Good things cost more, it's a fact
If you want a good car, you'll pay more than if you just want a cheap car...
Dubey doesn't get why MS is hated, that much is obvious from the "article". Rather than providing arguments, he publishes a load of fanboy drivel that's as inane as any Linux or Mac zealotry I've seen.
IOW: Nothing to see here, move along.
Okay, if you insist:
FTA: It is about time we stopped being hypocritical and appreciated a job really well done.
But it isn't. Popular or not, most of their products are mediocre hack-jobs that thrive despite their quality, not because of it.
Finally, an article that actually gives Microsoft an objective look not skewered by the linux and mac trolls on the net
To say that Windows was a "Pioneering" effort is like saying Columbus "Discovered" America, when there were already people living here.
Give me a break. Why do people insist on re-writing history?
kulakovich
Is this just me? I really think he's missing what Linux is all about. It's not supposed to be the most user-friendly environment. There are people that WANT to have to "recompile the kernel if [they] want to so much as change your modem" because they're looking for that kind of option and flexibility.
I'm not even a hardcore Linux user (I've had Fedora Core for only a few months now) and even I can see this. Am I entirely wrong?
The cat's in the bag and the bag's in the river.
People don't hate Microsoft because of their products; they hate Microsoft because of their business practices.
;)
Microsoft isn't buggy, it's evil!
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
One small flaw in the argument: Microsoft wasn't always hated. During the 1980-1990 time period (approximately), they were seen as one of the "good guys". In particular, during the movement of PCs into large corporations in the 1984-1990 period, Microsoft was viewed by many as a strong supporter of personally-directed computing resources against the tyranny of the Data Processing Department. While their technology was never the best, it had its good points (MS-DOS 3.3; even Windows 3.1), and as Steve Gibson has pointed out its openness allowed a huge industry of improvements to spring up, which formed the basis for today's software industry.
So, my question to Microsoft fans is, what happened between 1990 and 2000 that turned Microsoft from hero to goat? You be the judge.
sPh
and this article is an absolute disgrace to our cause.
Clearly there are flaws in windows, including security, which this guy just brushes under the carpet. And he clearly hasn't used linux in a while -- I can't remember having to recompile my kernel too recently to get things working.
This isn't even an article! I've seen slashdot posts that are more insightful (and better structured).
There are pros and cons to both OSes, and I personally feel there are more pros on the side of Windows. But this article is the kind of drivel that gives us windows fanboys a bad name.
Personally I started respecting Microsoft a whole lot more when the developers started blogging on a large scale. Few people can possibly have missed Raymond Chen's excellent blog Old New Thing which really explains a lot of the things that Slashdot would consider "cruft" and "archaic design" in Windows. For those who missed it I would recommend the post about file-system tunneling. On one hand it is a downright revolting workaround to make old apps work and behave as one would expect, but on the other hand one has to respect the obviously huge amounts of thought and effort that went into it.
To some part this also goes back to a bit of a reaction against Slashdot and similar places obsession with hating Microsoft. They are a lot better than they were in say, 97. With NT under the hood Windows is an a lot more agreeable operating system. Slashdot may scoff at Microsofts security effort, but in all honesty it seems to be going fairly well form my perspective. Updates are quicker and more plentiful (also most vulnerabilities seem to be announced because the fix showed up on WindowsUpdate than because an exploit was found). Recompiling large part of the system with automatic buffer checks (where possible, this is C/C++ we are talking about) has helped the severity of a lot of exploits. The new low-rights IE seems to be a good approach to insulate any problems further (borrowed from UNIX daemons granted, but the OS-level security infrastructure is sound, and applying it in a useful way to desktop applications really is a new thing), check out the IE teams blog for information about that work by the way: IEBlog. They may not have had the best place to start from, but it does seem to be going the right way (I mean, hey, just getting a working software firewall in place was a huge leap forward), which I would think everyone can agree is a good thing.
Another popular blog is Michael Kaplan's blog dealing with internationalization stuff like character encoding and input support.
Overall I could link blogs for quite a while, pretty much all major Microsoft products have developers blogging. It can be interesting to have a read, they are often well written, have a nice technical content and give a bit more understanding for how things work (and may help cure some of the more irrational hate for Microsoft :).
Wow. Talk about your flamebait. Posting a pro-MS story on /. is just asking for trouble. But posting it in apple.slashdot.org is really over the top.
Now... addressing the , "is it OK to love Microsoft" question. It all depends on who you are and what your point of view of technology is. Let me explain:
1. There are people who love certain company/technology just because they are told the technology is good. Non-technical Sun Microsystems fans tend to be an example of this. They are told that Sun Microsystems is a good company to buy stock in, so they assume that the products Sun produces are good. But this is not the case. Trust me, I've worked with a few really bad Sun products for the past five years and I welcomed HP-UX with open arms where support and reliability are concerned.
2. There are people who love a technology because of it's status symbol ranking. Notable in this arena is Apple. Apple produces decent products, to be sure. But they are extremely expensive for what they are. They've been making a break with this as of late, so this isn't the ideal example, but there are plenty of products out there that fall into this realm. Think Adobe Photoshop vs. everyone else. Depending on your needs, Adobe Photoshop might be financial overkill. In many cases Paint Shop Pro or even GIMP might be enough. Especially where you don't need professional print features. But there are people out there who won't touch anything but Adobe Photoshop even to the extent of pirating it.
3. There are the people who actually know technology well. They might be programmers or engineers. To them, there are two possible divisions. The first one are the people who came up with the technology first. I know quite a few people who worship the DEC Alpha. Even to the extent of passing around unsubstantiated rumours that Itanium 2 is really a DEC Alpha in disguise. They hate everything else that has come along since the Alpha because their battle cry is that they had 64-bit RISC processing back in 1992.
4. The second group are those who know even more about technology than the people in example 3 above. These people usually have a really good clue about what constitutes good technology. They've usually been around a long time and have seen fads come, go and return as "new" again. They usually quitely shake their heads and take the more pragmatic view of choosing the most well designed technology. (They tend to be OpenVMS and Unix users)
5. Then there are the retarded suits who base what makes a technology company good on their stock portfolio. This group is the least well informed and are the most likely candidates to love Microsoft. When they get mailings from various tech companies, they'll ditch anything from smaller companies (even if the technology is superior to larger companies) and only go with big name brands. Dell, HP, Oracle, Sun, Microsoft, IBM, etc... To them, these are the only options. They even tend to eschew companies like Epson, Gateway, Corel, Redhat even though there might be some very good technology coming out of these companies.
So, the question, "is it OK to love Microsoft" is really a non-starter. Security and reliability issues aside, Microsoft has done very little in the way of creating new and useful technologies. They just buy up technologies rather then developing them from the ground up. The company is not run by engineers, it's run by businessmen. The approach is to do just enough to make their technology usable, but not to make it superior. Where they want real performance is in their profits. And that is completely counter to excellent software engineering. For someone like me, I can't love a company that doesn't engineer things properly. Of all the companies I've had to deal with, DEC was probably THE best technology company out there with a real eye on great engineering. When they got taken over by Compaq, a good deal of that got shitcanned. When HP took over Compaq even more got given away, sold off and
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
What a load of tosh! It would appear you get a
:-) Lets see...
story submitted on slashdoty now simply by stating
an option which is controversial!
What's next?
"SCO's a really great company!"
"Osama bid Laden's a really nice guy!"
"The Twin Towers needed to be demolished!"
"Windows Viruses are a good thing!"
Anyway, as a Windows programmer... the reason why Microsoft should be hated is because:
1) Microsoft's anti-competitive (illegal) practises.
2) Windows over complicated and badly designed architecture(s).
There's no doubt that Microsofts office suite is currently unriveled (Sorry OOo lovers!), but that's mainly becuase Micosoft have squashed all the opposition.
P.S. I recently bought a Mac mini for my mother-in-law. Wow! What a really lovely little computer! And MacOS X is _really_ nice. I've just bought some books on programming Cocoa... just got to buy a Mac now
return 0; }
A good accomplisment? Probably not. Yeah it let in some innovation but not much. Mainly it sowed confusion and prevented the establishment of standards that would have moved the industry along faster. Where it did establish standards it mainly were undesirable ones. Witness all the legacy crap like parallel ports, old fashioned serial ports, and Bioses. How long did it take just to get something sensible like USB to be implemented?
On the other hand apple was a pioneer, though not always the inventor of PC methods. First (working practical) use of dynamic memory. First widepread use of memory mapped video (yes we have gone back to graphics cards but for anyone who used CGA you now what I mean), first integration of post script, First affordable Graphical user interface, first affordable mouse system, cut and paste between applications, Firewire, first consumer freindly unix desktop. first extensible files system (HFS+), metadata in file system, long liberal file names, Application oriented message passing scripting language (apple script). Self discovering local networks (first appletalk, now bonjour) If we include NeXT then we can include an OS based on Object oriented programming, Display postscript, First use of optical drives...,
Pioneering, but not settling. Not always inventing but perfrecting. They drove innovation by adopting it early and creating needs for it. Look at the first affordable desktop publishing. That required a Gui, and the ability to edit graphics as objects, and thus a mouse.
Microsoft...hmmm what can we say... they did settle the land and run on cheap hardware. Of course Cheap is why it was also so shitty. Macs were all configured at a high level. You didnlt need a pile of add on cards or figure out the interrupts and ports the card conflicts created. When you did need cards they were autoconfigured by the OS. macs had true plug and play from the day the mac II came out. Windows never really mastered plug and play till the PXI bus.
Linux on the other hand plays to a different market. Wheras macs were at the maximally configured end of the spectrum. linux allowed you to diassemble everything and configure it exactly how you wanted. Not a shrink wrapped solution like widows that tried to do it for you and consequently invented horrors like the registrtry, incompatible DLLs, and resource conflicts. Instead Linux is a tinkerer's toychest. Of course that's why it comes in third for desktop and ease of use. But it's also starting to become an innovator in software ideas as more tinkerers get linked together.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
2) the lowering of expectations for the reliability of computers.
put down the crack pipe and step away from the keyboard. Are you kidding? Apple had long filenames on Windows disks long before Windows 95 did. How did they manage that? It was pretty easy, and in fact the same way windows 95 later copied. they just wrapped the old 8.3 names with a layer that looked up the short name as was actually stored on the DOS disk.
What do you think would happen to the world economy if Microsoft only would release longhorn for PPC?
Uh dude, apple has switched many times and many processors and never left their currentusers behind. I was playing crystal quest, a game from the mid 90's on my OSX computer, just yesterday. When apple switched to intel they are still going to be compiling apps for my present computer.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'd say this guy is merely a pro-MS zealot, exactly like the anti-MS zealots here on Slashdot that he bashes.
Let's look at the article piece by piece:
Recap on alternative/joke names for MS.
States explicitely that "I love Microsoft. Absolutely adore it and what's more, I hate Linux. I think it's the most over rated piece of software ever built and survives simply out of spite and not because it is terribly good at doing something because it is not!". He's clearly already marked out his opinion as essentially content-less uninformed flaming, exactly what he complains about when it happen to MS.
Calls Windows a "pioneering effort". Now, I'm no Linux or Mac fanboy, but I was under the distinct impression that Windows had very little innovation compared to the Mac. IIRC various Microsofties have even admitted as much before, albeit off the record.
Regurgitates the long-disproven "popularity => more successful breakins" argument. More popularity equals more cracking attempts, I'll grant you, but that's not the same as successful security breaches. And anyway, haven't we already disproven this whole argument?
"Considering the fact that everyone who knows how to write two bits of code dreams of hitting windows with a virus, the guys at the "Redmond Giant" are doing a spectacular job."
Bwaaaaahahahahahaaaaaa! As everyone knows, the two main groups who write viruses are security professionals offering a "proof of concept", and script kiddies. The overwhelming majority of coders/developers have never written (or certainly released) a virus in their lives.
In addition, given it's mostly VBScript kiddies - who are almost universally poor programmers - the runaway success of most Windows viruses is even more damning.
"XP is such a joy when it comes to simply connecting a device and watching the pretty little bubble detecting it and saying "its installed and ready for use" makes the slightly high price absolutely worth it."
Dunno what version of windows he's using, and not to deny Windows has got better over the years, but I still have plenty of issues even these days with unrecognised hardware, pieces of hardware detected twice, crashes due to dodgy device drivers, etc.
"In Linux, you have to recompile a kernel if you want to so much as change your modem!"
Now, I'm not that au fait with the low-level Windows or Linux processes, but I understood that they both used monolithic kernels (ie, drivers not in userland). Surely this means that Windows also has to "recompile" the kernel when the device drivers change? If so it might be hidden behind a pretty user-interface, but it's the same damn architecture and the same design problem.
Tackles the anti-trust cases. Totally ignores Microsoft's documented illegal behaviour and instead blames it on jealousy from competitors. Riiiiiight...
Suggests Sun and Oracle's business models are based around sueing Microsoft. Is he confusing "Sun" with (the Microsoft-backed) SCO, and "Microsoft" with Linux?
He's actually suggesting these companies sue Microsoft because they see it as an easy revenue-earner, rather than a highly risky attempt at redress against the richest organisation (with the most expensive and persuasive legal team) in the world. Mind-boggling.
"Microsoft made some products which it would like to ship together with its OS, no where in the EULA does it say that "you are not authorized to install other software" If Mr. John Doe thinks media player is the worst piece of software he has ever used, he is free to go and download Winamp or Musicmatch Jukebox (neither of these offer free full versions)."
Yeah, they don't write it into the EULA where anyone could see it, but you don't need to do that when you've got the CEO of Dell's balls in your office drawer. It's harder to prove, and leaves less obvious marks for the next lawsuit.
Oh, and the key thi
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
W95 was also the debut of the Registry with all it's attendant obfuscations and encrypted entries. No more of this human readable
Then there were the help files. I taught myself how to use Win3.11 to quite a high level purely from the bundled helpfiles. W95 seemed a lot less helpful. However I think the nadair was reached with WinME when I was tryng to troubleshoot my wife's PC and suddenly though "all these halp files are, are a lit of reason's why the problem is not MS's fault".
Then there was Stacker - where MS bough out just enough of the company to squash the product. Everyone has their favourite MS unfair competition story - that was the one that made me realise these guys were not playng fair
And there was the chap on USENET - demon.local - who posted a message subject "Bastards! Bastards! Bastards!". Apparently he'd found a bug in 95, reported it and was told he'd be given 30 days free credit while they looked into it. He was outraged - he spent his own valuable time tracking down a bug for Microsoft to improve their product, and in return they threatened to charge him money if they couldn't replicate it in 30 days. How to alienate your techically adept userbase in one easy lesson...
The final straw for me, was finding that getting a copy of office for my dad's new XP machine doubled the cost of the computer (which we'd already bought) and that we'd need a new printer and scanner. None of which was advertised, of course.
These are some of the landmarks on the journey from me as a MS enthusiast c.1990 to a Linux evangelist in 2005. It's not that I woke up one day and thought "linux looks cool", MS had to work long and hard before I started to think of them as the enemy.
There's a line, arguably a subtle one, between wrtiting novice-friendly software and treating your users as idiots. Further on in the same directin there's another one markign the start of treating the user with contempt. As far as I'm concerned, MS crossed first one, then the other, and have not so much as looked over their shoulder the whole time...
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
I think that quote from your article says almost all. You adore Microsoft. Good for you. You hate [L]inux (it's not capitalized). Good for you. That's really about the only objective part of you article. You don't think linux is good at doing something? You're opinion... It's misguide at best, but it's really wrong. Did you know at Microsoft for the longest time their e-mail servers were Unix machines? That was because their e-mail applications weren't up to the task. This I know because I worked there. Haven't checked recently, so I don't know if they're still using unix for e-mail.
Also, some of the world's largest, most complex, and savviest applications are running on linux platforms. Do you ever use Google? Google (last time I checked) is up over 40,000 linux servers running the show. Ever shop at Amazon? Amazon runs almost exclusively on linux and Solaris (Sun) boxes under the covers.
Sad, unfair and uncompetitive? Maybe you're only fifteen years old. If you were older and had any sense of history and knew what Microsoft has done in the past you'd understand better. Microsoft has gotten where it is, become what it is, with blatant disregard for fair and competitive business practices. (Not sure what "agreeing on a constitution" has to do with anything in your thesis.)
Continue to love Microsoft, it's a warm fuzzy world from your view. You obviously are part of the target demographic.
You're probably going to get hammered for your column. You deserve it.