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Why Doesn't Microsoft Have A Cult Religion?
rs232 writes "'Apple has one. So does the Java community, Oracle, IBM, and Google. Lord knows anyone who uses Linux or free and open source software is dedicated to spreading the gospel of St. Linus Torvalds and St. Richard Stallman. But does anyone really worship the Gods of Redmond?' While many Microsoft employees are pumped to work there, article author Michael Singer explores why even enthusiastic Microsoft-watchers acknowledge that customers and product developers are unenthusiastic about the software giant. He theorizes that it comes down to passion: Microsoft lost that a long time ago, he says, and so passionate people gravitate to other projects and products."
Part of the definition of "cult" is (from Wikipedia): ..., term designating a cohesive group of people..., devoted to
beliefs or practices that the surrounding culture or society
considers to be outside the mainstream . In that
context it would seem self-fulfilling Microsoft not have a
cult... like it or not (I don't), Microsoft is mainstream.
As for the question,
I don't recall anyone ever worshipping the GoR. Heck I even worked there, and it was about being smart, it was about being competitive, but I don't ever remember it about being about customers. Microsoft's idea about good products has typically been:These attributes are hostile for creating cult followings, there is hardly anything there -- just a juggernaut of an industry bully.
I assume the author has never had any experience with a small ISP attempting to sell microsoft small business server. In that market you will find the people that worship the juggernaut.
Here ya go.
True, it's not for Windows, but you take what you can get.
but it is a Hate Cult.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I know plenty of really passionate Microsoft fanbois. In fact they are the only people I know who have copies of Vista Ultimate.
Even Satan has devoted followers. Perhaps Satan is lesser Evil :')
It is always better to be a first grade version of yourself than a second grade version of someone else.
The answer is obvious: Microsoft isn't the underdog and Microsoft doesn't require a positive choice.
Chances are you're running OS X, Linux, Solaris, etc. because you made a decision to do so.
They called it MSCE. You got one, and you got yourself a $20+/hr job. Then the suits engineered a surplus of techs and outsourced every job they could, and that $20+/hr job became a $9.50 an hour job, and low and behold people weren't so happy with Microsoft anymore. Especially since a lot of them where still making payments on student loans.
Yeah, some of the blame goes to paper MSCEs, But not nearly as much as you think. And besides, paper MSCEs don't really care enough to bother proselytizing. OTOH, those ninnies do drive down the value of real techs.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
When He extended a Noodly Appendage to Bless Microsoft with his Divine Wisdom an unbeliever cut it off and shaped it into the form of Clippy, the Anti Christ.
One day He will Overcome the Satanic Forces at work by dripping his Holy Meatball Sauce onto Clippy, softening what was once hard and Unyileding. And Lo, Microsoft shall become as like IBM and One True Followers of the Way.
Thus it is written.
Beep beep.
Microsoft is like America. They are forever telling everybody else what to do, their latest escapade was a complete disaster and they are very likely to implode up their own arse. And everyone hates them for it.
Man! Was that trolling or what?!
Slasdot is obsessed with MS, everything they do or say is subjected to unending speculation here, albeit negative. Outside of Slashdot I dont know a soul who really gives a rats ass what MS do and would never in a million years even consider discussing MS in the sort of emotive language used here.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Yes. I am a good example of that. I like microsoft products. They are much better and easier to use than Linux and Apple products.
3 31685
One of my comments:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=226327&cid=18
(Sorry I'm not a subscriber anymore so I can't find any of my older comments... I've just given up on saying MS is good since no one will read my comments when they are rated at -1).
Bill Gates killed a potential hobbyist movement pro-Microsoft on its very beginning, just look at his open letter to hobbyists. Apple and Linux, on other hand, since their foundation had a big appeal with the amateur/hobbyist audience. The first place Woz showed his first machine was a Homebrew Computer Club, and Linus posted his newborn kernel in a newsgroup, for public evaluation.
That's how you get cult followers, appeal to the hobbyists, coders, enthusiasts, people that understand what is going on behind the scene.
You cant need a "cult" when you are the dominant entity by far. There is no function for that sort of entity to the current "winners".
It's also true in religion. The only reason the major religions arent called cults is they have established themselves at high enough #'s. Still same religion, ideology, etc. The only difference? #'s.
So, the massively dominant group of people that run windows/MS products sort of "are" the cult... but have already reached critical mass.
In some other reality where apple became dominant... then you could see a MS cult. But not happening... most of apples success if playing to the idea they are somehow an underdog little comapny that is cool.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Once absorbed into the corpus of Microsoft, the need for religion is extinguished. The only goal is to assimilate.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Uhhh ... you've never been to a PDC (Professional Developers Conference)???
... it's too negative. If you want to find the faithful throngs, go right to the developers.
You've never heard a gillion programmers chanting "cool"?
"Cult" isn't quite the right word
Microsoft does have a cult religion, it's just that it's so large and pervasive that nobody notices it, and think it's just normal. It's kind of like Catholics during the Inquisition. Nobody would have thought that the truly evil organization was the one that was so pervasive, nobody even thought about it as a cult.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
That's the best you could find? Then consider what MSN's store is selling. NOW you know why nobody talks about it... ...if they know what's good for them.... Bwahahahahahahaha!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If you had had the fun I had last week with Exchange 2003 I don't think you would be calling MS the "best". It certainly wasn't an adjective that could be found in my vocabulary at that point in time.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Ever notice how those that have religion are very weak about their belief in it? It's as if a word spoken against it so threatens them that they must defend it vocally and almost violently. In fact, some get very violent about it. Their religion apparently cannot stand up on its own, it always needs the believers to prop it up.
Religionists want their religion to change their world, and they want to change the world to force it to accept their religion.
Many religions have missionaries. Most of them, the missionaries are as obnoxious, if not more so, than the religion itself. And, in many cases, the religion seems to survive in spite of their missionaries.
Now, that was about the OS wars. But, the same could be said about the theological religions as well.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Bill Gates Centerfold.
> In fact, I used to feel the same way about Linux until nothing ever came of the "year of Linux on the desktop" claims every year.
Linux got on my desktop a couple of years back.
Dell (the company that always only ever sell Windows to get better contracts with Microsoft) are now selling Linux to home users.
Last Thursday Uruguay started distributing Linux computers to kids.
So when will your Linux on the desktop be?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
At the risk of sounding like a troll, it comes down to: fanboy cults develop around the underdog, not around the big 800 pound gorilla who is winning anyway. Or rather, fanboys/zealots/cultists seem to have this need to, pretty much, save the world. Or at least they need something to defend, some cause to champion against all odds, some us-vs-them theme where "them" can be perceived as a credible threat. They have to be the (messiah of the) minority, even in a perverse minority-inside-a-minority way, or at least the unsung defenders against the barbarian hordes. They have to feel persecuted, looked down upon, but know in their heart that they're the Luke Skywalker against the might of the Empire, or one of the outnumbered hoplites at Thermopilae against the Persian hordes.
This isn't just about tech fanboys, but a more general phenomenon. You don't get many zealots when you're the one religion, you get them when it's 12 apostles vs the whole world. When it's the mainstream religion _and_ under no credible threat, you just get sheep and wolves in sheep skin. To get people all worked up there has to be a threat, a battle against all odds, where they're the few saving the world from a(n imaginary) threat it doesn't even acknowledge.
You can see that in Christianity too. Most of the spark it retained past a point was not because it was already the winner, but because it fragmented and ended up its own enemy. Arians vs Catholics vs Nestorians, Orthodox vs Catholic, Catholic vs Cathar, Catholic vs Protestant, and protestant factions against each other. That's what got people rallying to be the bleating champions of it: the credible us-vs-them setup, where "them" might just win if someone doesn't gather a (self-)righteous mob against it. When it didn't have such a challenger, it just ended up a court intrigues game where noone really gave a damn about the church. And occasionally it had to invent its own challenge, e.g., the Crusades.
It may sound like rehashing your first paragraph, but it's not. The definition of cult you give, is pretty much cult as opposed to religion. You're a cult if you're non-mainstream, you're a religion if it's mainstream. That's really all that that definition says.
But look at it this way: all mainstream religions got there by first being a cult. You don't get a religion directly formed around the mainstream thing in the first place. If something is already the undisputed 800 pound gorilla without a credible challenger, it already lost the chance of getting its own army of zealots. That's what I'm saying.
And Microsoft simply happens to be at that point, really. Apple is an underdog, it gets zealots. AMD used to be a major underdog, and it had some very rabid zealots, but then it became mainstream and now noone cares. Intel was always the big dog in CPUs, and it pretty much never really had zealots, it at most had some mild fans. IBM didn't use to have zealots either as long as it was _the_ big gorilla. Microsot is _the_ big gorilla and it has no zealots. Whop-de-do, big surprise there.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Oh, and kudos on thinking up "winDOS" and "M$" -- BRILLIANT!! Man, that really shows those bastards whos boss!
have a historical reputation for fleeing battles once things start getting ugly. I believe this was cited as a significant factor in early American wars where oponents employed German mercenaries, but it has been a while since I studied all that.
As a developer who primarily targets MS platforms I can tell you that most of my peers are in it for the money just like the mercenaries. More tellingly, I know many MS developers who get as far away from tech as possible during their weekends/time off. Doesn't sound like a recipe for inspiration or the creation of products that inspire cultish fandom.
As for me? I am into MS because I am a niche programmer, and most all of my customers are locked in with proprietary niche market apps. They couldn't just switch accounting systems and migrate to Linux... they would have to identify and migrate to numerous small specialty apps to match their current level of functionality.
BTW, I was really pissed about the mudslinging directed toward the Mono project on a recent thread. There are plenty of us out here who want to see Linux make inroads in small markets where MS has ruled for years, and Mono is the best hope we have.
Regards.
I know plenty of really passionate Microsoft fanbois. In fact they are the only people I know who have copies of Vista Ultimate.
I know lots of less passionate Microsoft fanboys. They are like drunk people who don't know they are drunk. The very idea of anything but M$ on their networks is unpossible to them. They don't know how anyone can get along without M$ and treat them suspiciously like a witch or nija. Because M$ is closed source, you have to take it on faith, but they confuse M$ with science. Their OS and software choice is a constant source of irritation and dissaster for them but they refuse to seek alternatives. They consider themselves perfectly rational and normal. These are more dangerous than those who realize their own passions and irrationality.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Because us Amiga zealots took 'em out behind the barn and "Old-Yellowed" them 20 years ago with pre-emptive multitasking, amazing graphics, and low-overhead. Poor bastards were gone before they could even get a good start. Though rumor has it that their zombified bodies helped flesh out Microsoft's initial Marketing department.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
expects the Spanish Inquisition!
I got to disagree with the idea that Microsoft never produce anything really good.
Excel might be an exception as its interface at least used to be considered very good.
2 years ago at least one HCI researcher at kth.se admired Excel wrt her field.
I am using OO Spreadsheet nowadays as it is good enough and comes with Ubuntu, but it is still not as good as Excel was 10 years ago.
But then, I guess, 10 years ago there existed more of a Microsoft cult.
"Can you name any fully-featured file systems for Unix that provide transparent compression?"
ZFS on Solaris10
"How 'bout any Unix that provides transactional file system behavior?"
ZFS on Solaris10, again
"Alternate streams/extended attributes that can be read and written as files?"
Do you work for Sun or something? ZFS... it does that.
"How many versions of Unix have case insensitive file systems? (Personally, I feel that case sensitive file systems should be considered a dated practice.)"
All of them can use FAT32, but case-sensitivity is eminently useful, and only ancient operating systems ignore case, so we keep it.
All that, plus it's open-source
>Microsoft does have a cult religion, it's just that it's so large and pervasive that nobody notices it, and think it's just normal
Would that be like Opus Dei?
I guess not. Opus Dei encourage self flagellation, while Microsoft does it to the rest of us.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Nooooobody expects the MCSEs! Our chief weapon is uncertainty. Uncertainty and fear. Fear and uncertainty. Our two weapons are fear and uncertainty... and doubt. Our three weapons are fear, uncertainty, and doubt... and an almost fanatical devotion to Steve Ballmer. Our four, no, amongst our weapons, amongst our weaponry are such elements as fear, uncertainty... I'll come in again.
Lord knows anyone who uses Linux or free and open source software is dedicated to spreading the gospel
This is such bull. For every Linux fanboy there are 10 regular joes using Linux to just get stuff done so they can go home and play with their kids. The zelots just draw more attention to themselves.
In fact, it is my experience that the guys spreading Linux / OSS religion know LESS than the guy just getting stuff done. They don't work in large environments where Linux is really put to work. They know nothing of Kerberos or pxe booting or anything like that. They take one look at KDE and declare Windoze obsolete but have never worked in an environment where you need to manage 20,000 desktops.
That's +5 insightful?
Umm..can I borrow your computer? My two sisters are a major PITA!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Dude. You have positive karma. I bet you got most of it from posting those goddamn "I know I will be modded down for this, but" comments that are so insanely popular around here.
Because PenIsland and PenisLand are two very different ideas that should not be confused.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Can you name any fully-featured file systems for Unix that provide transparent compression?
For writing: None, since it is a pretty bad idea with regard to performance, fragmentation and reliability. For reading, there are several. One is used by Knoppix for example. Also note that the Linux kernel is usually loaded in compressed form.
How 'bout any Unix that provides transactional file system behavior?
Again a very bad idea. If you need that, use a database, not a filesystem.
Alternate streams/extended attributes that can be read and written as files?
And again, a very bad idea. In fact extended attributes are a bad idea, since they break compatibility.
How many versions of Unix have case insensitive file systems? (Personally, I feel that case sensitive file systems should be considered a dated practice.)
So the filesystem should understand case semantics? Very, very bad idea. Especially if you allow Unicode filenames.
I think these features were though about by the Unix and Linux crowd numerous times and rejected every time because they are dangerous and break more than they fix.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
> It's kind of like Catholics during the Inquisition.
I think you mean "like the christians during the inquisition".
The inquisition was far from catholic-only. On the catholic side you had the initial enablement via the papal bull of 1484 and it was executed primarily via their secular lawyer and monk (first dominican then jesuit) proxies.
But as far as the protestants go:
- luther said that witches should be burnt
- luther believed in incubus, sucubus, witches flying at night, etc, etc, etc
- calvin said the bible teaches us that that there are witches and that they must be slain
- calvin said that God expressly commands that all witches and enchantresses shall be put to death
- lutheran preachers brought the witch hunt to denmark, germany, sweden, etc
- calvinist missionaries brought it to transylvania, scottland, england, etc
- the catholic-protestant religious wars vastly increased the witch-burnings
So, while the catholics started the ball rolling, the protestants were equally guilty of keeping it going.
Father Ted: It's not as if everyone's going to go off and join some mad religious cult just because we go off for a picnic for a couple of hours!
Father Dougal: God, Ted, I heard about those cults. Everyone dressing in black and saying our Lord's gonna come back and judge us all!
Father Ted: No... no, Dougal, that's us. That's Catholicism.
Sorry. Someone had already done the relevant Python quote. I'll get me coat.
Insightful enough for me. Not uncommon for me to be labeled a troll when the moderator loves Microsoft and I express my heartfelt opinion that Microsoft has always shoddily produced "good enough for the masses" versions of last year's technology by other people. You can start with an example like Dr. DOS in the 80s. Look at Dr-DOS and those would be the features in next year's MS-DOS. And work forward in time example by example. How can anybody form a _techno_ cult based on that sort of track record? It would be like a gastronomical society that worships McDonalds.
On the other hand, Bill Gates didn't eat Sunday dinner on the Hare Krishna's dime when he was young so he obviously didn't learn the techniques for mindfucking his employees like Jobs did.
Yup, linux user here. Not crazy about either of them.
Yes, as a matter of fact, Windows back when it used DOS as a kernel was considered an ugly kludge. WinNT has a rather nice well formed kernel, and I do indeed know people who are fans of it!
.NET stuff), they are generally easy to use and have a much nicer, more modern orthogonal feel to them. Well except in places that they are forced to fall back on conventions set by older APIs, and then things get ugly.
I also know people who hate the NT kernel and love Unix-ish kernels, and people who hate Unix-ish kernels.
Now the APIs that are built on top of the kernel, yah, that is very ugly at times, but you are comparing an API that was largely designed in the 80's and early 90's to what? A modern API like KDE? Instead compare it to something of the same vintage. The original X16 API is not exactly a work of art either, simpler at least, but doing anything complex with it... well, that is why KDE was made! KDE is a lot newer than the most heavily used of Microsoft's APIs, and thus is a lot nicer to use.
If you use any of Microsoft's newer APIs (Windows Forms, the
Backwards compatibility comes at a price.
Are there particular niggles that piss people off? Yah. But in general, MS software undergoes a ton of usability testing, and their UI is amazing in the places it is used most often. You don't even need a mouse to use Windows, everything is keyboard accessible. This includes mandating a key that is used for "right click" operations. I have used a fair variety of other systems where developers occasionally just forget to include a key sequence that allows for a feature to be accessed! Or they don't put an element in the tab ordering at all, or make one of any other million UI design mistakes.
I would argue that Windows ME (and to an extent XP, until you beat it upside the head and restore things to their proper place) are regressive in terms of usability, but Windows 2000 is wonderful. Though violating Fitt's law in terms of button and menu placement is annoying...
Nice blanket statement.
Some departments at MS needed to have their heads beat in (and I think by now that they have!), others have done an excellent job on security. It is not like open source doesn't have similar stories. I recall a certain widely used compression library awhile back... not to mention the 1000 and 1 BIND vulnerabilities...
When the internet sprung into popularity, MS was horribly unprepared, and did some stupid things, but on the flip side, they have ACLs, easy to setup security rules for a system, and easy to configure user auditing.
MS has two primary file systems. FAT, which served its original purpose very well (and I might add that the majority of other Microcomputer OS vendors used a similar type of lazy file system!), and NTFS, which is a very reliable file system with decent performance that can stand up to user stupidity quite well.
:-D MS never has been able to make a good file system based search engine, which is funny, because a dozen companies have released good search engines for Windows, you figure Microsoft would just buy one of them up and release the damn thing! :)
As for search, yah, you got that one right.
Read your history. Unix is the original "good enough" OS.
You mean aside from making PCs usable for everyone? Aside from making
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Microsoft does have followers/fans, and I'm one of them. So, the article & comments that folks like me don't exist is just wrong. Folks are just not looking in the right places. I founded and run the New York [Microsoft] Exchange User Group http://www.nyexug.com/ . It's over 2 yrs old as well. We meet monthly at Microsoft's NYC office, have about 175 people on the mailing list and all we talk about is Exchange Server. Yes, Microsoft Exchange Server. We are not alone. The same night there's a Microsoft Excel User Group. Yes, you heard that right, Excel! I couldn't handle one of those meetings, so I would consider that a cult of Excel. There's also Small Business Server and Enterprise Windows User Groups. See NYPC for more information on those other groups. http://nypc.org/sigs.php So, there are Microsoft fans out there, you just need to know where to look.
Using "Visual Basic" doesn't make you a programmer, sparky.
Yes.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Nothing quite like burning screaming young women alive to get a foreign populace to believe that you mean fucking business and submit to your theological tyrrany!
How does one perform self-flagellation on another?
It's complicated, kinky, and illegal in 12 states.
You're deluding yourself if you think that America isn't involved in colonialism? Initially, America simply didn't have enough resources to pursue an imperialist policy, so they tried to gain an advantage over Europe by opposing colonialism. Once America got sufficiently developed, it started an imperialist policy of its own. Just read up on the histories of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. If that's not imperialism then I don't know what it is.
Although, you do have a point that European colonialism did fuck the world up pretty bad. Although I wouldn't simply the Gulf/Middle East saga as a simple product of imperialism. There is a lot more to it, from global phenomena like the rise of fundamentalism to local phenomena such as Israel.
Who gives a flying fuck what George Washington said. Americans need to stop caring about the 'founding fathers'. Their thoughts are irrelevant in today's world.
"Easiest target" is so right - but the "biggest" is not the "best", and the majority need not be a "cult" in itself; rather, it embodies a lack of one.
The cult is where the choice is. On the desktop side of things, Mac users chose to split with the "I use it because everyone's using it" majority, and now have a much better (and safer!) OS to be proud of. For the 'behind the scenes' cults, it all depends on trade: the *nix 'cults' know they're the majority in everything web and server - but the strength of their unity relies on the sheer weight of their knowledge (they almost have their own language for lord's sake) - quite the opposite of the 'collective delusion' sentiment of the Microsoft masses.
If you're still a Microsoft 'militant', you're either ignorant, working for the company or just plain cherry-picking mad. The Microsoft 'movement' is ignorance - forced or feigned.
Microsoft owes its fortune to ignorance. Gates saw a way to 'educate' first-time computer users to 'his' (not his own work, actually) platform through selling it to computer manufacturers - something the other 'cults' did not do. I would have no bone at all with this were Microsoft the best product out there - if they were, they would even qualify for a justifiable 'cult' status of their own (by those who chose to use it for its qualities) - but theirs has never been the best and, if they don't change their strategy, it never will be. Even if many tecnologically advanced countries may be wising up to the existence and quality of 'altrenate OS's', I don't see Microsoft changing anytime soon because of the fortune waiting in the hundreds of developing countries awaiting conquer in exactly the same way - through first-time user ignorance.
Microsoft is a culture of lemmings. The choice, thus the 'cult', lies elsewhere.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader