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Microsoft Documentation Declared Unfit For US Consumption
anomalous cohort writes "Washington DC judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly announced during the ongoing Microsoft antitrust hearings that their documentation is unfit for US consumption. This is relevant in an antitrust hearing as poor documentation on how to inter-operate with Microsoft's products is seen as an unfair barrier to entry for companies who compete with Microsoft. Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
And still others realize their documentation is probably no crappier than anyone else's.
Slashdot has always been biased towards Linux. As far as I know, they've never even pretended to be a fair and balanced source of IT news. Have you noticed the borg icon that's used for MS stories?
For coders, at least.
If that would only be true. Documentation usually lists _intended_ behavior, not actual behavior. When code is self-documenting it is documenting the actual behavior, or at least, partially.
There is a certain irony that the legal system decides someone else has poor documentation. The documentation of the law requires a graduate degree to use.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but their documentation is ironclad compared to the law. Witness this case, it is only after the fact that it becomes vaguely clear that having poor documentation is wrong (even for a monopoly).
t
Scary thing is, I've always found their doc decent... relative to other companies. This judge needs to attempt to assemble some of the more ornate IKEA offerings - she'll have a new appreciation for MSDN/Technet...
I tend to think of /. as Taco's blog instead of a trusted IT news source. That explains just about everything.
Developers: We can use your help.
Did Judge Kollar-Kotelly actually utter the phrase "unfit for US consumption"? I think not. After TFA and TFALRFTOA (= Linked, Recursively, from the Original Article), all I see is that she scolded Microsoft for claiming that they had provided the documentation -- a condition of the Consent Decree -- and urged them to finish the job.
What would that phrase mean anyway? I don't "consume" documentation, do you? I use it as a tool in the development process, not a repast. And does "US consumption" imply that the documentation is fit for European consumption? Asian consumption? This article title is not worth of Ars or Slashdot, IMO.
But Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who is overseeing the consent decree, ruled that Microsoft still hadn't sufficiently documented some protocols, despite those documents having been due in 2003.
Five years to produce a document? Is it normal to allow a company such lattitude in the courts? If a rank and file citizen were to take that long, I think they'd have been slapped with a contempt of court charge, or they would have been ruled against, long ago. Why the leniency?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
This assumes that they have an internal specification, rather than just telling n00bs to RTFCode.
In many cases this is better than reading the specification if other developers haven't done exactly what the specification says and deviated just a teensy weensy bit for the sake of (performance | expedience | being a n00b themself etc.) . Of course, if lots of people that can read the code do so and care about the specification, this may not be a problem (and is one of the strengths of open source development).
Slashdot has always been biased towards Linux. As far as I know, they've never even pretended to be a fair and balanced source of IT news. Have you noticed the borg icon that's used for MS stories?
/. is one hell of a lot more fair and balanced than pretty much anything out of M$ and their "partners" (gack) web sites. Paid marketers are the worst.
Slashdot is a software nerd website. That means closed source software, i.e. software that cannot be as easily modified, analyzed and understood, is inherently at a disadvantage.
Because they are a convicted monopolist? Convicted is the key word, since you can be a monopolist as long as you don't abuse it. Once you abuse it you can get a punishment ranging from small fines, to having your company chopped up into little bits (Bell, anyone?). This punishment falls somewhere in the middle.
The Microsoft people are making fools of her and the court system and she hardly even knows it. If she did, she'd have ripped them a new hole long ago and imposed sanctions on them instead of letting this drag out year after year.
Isn't it getting to the point of irrelevant in this year of late 2008? After all, interoperability is more of a threat to their business than any court Justice and they know this and spend billions annually protecting that. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Slashdot is about as unbiased and balanced as Fox News.
Microsoft has been responsible for some really enormous fuckups and wrongs in the world of computers. They have some utterly nasty business practices that really are anti-competitive. They did, at one point, have a virtual monopoly, though that is crumbling naturally due to market forces, as more and more people in the market discover just how shitty Vista is, and how good Linux and OS/X are in comparison. That's only part of their monopoly (the other part being their office products, and that will come in time).
The thing being... for all their evils and wrongs, there's been a few good things that have come from them. And while I freely admit to being an idealist, I do like to think that the evil profit-mongering is limited to the upper echelons of the company only, and that at the lower ranks, you find people who really are trying to make the best product they can for computer users.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Why is it Microsoft's responsibility to make it easier for other companies to compete with them?
This is the point of anti-trust litigation. If Microsoft is considered to have a monopoly in their market sector(which they are), they must be prevented from blocking out competitors from their market. If everyone uses their software, and no one can make software to interact well with it, it's impossible to compete with their software, since you must be able to have compatibility with the dominant software standard in order to be able to compete with it. No one will use your word processing software if you can't make a full-featured document that anyone else can open with their software.
A barrier to enabling this competition is Microsoft not properly documenting the most widely used software systems in the world, thus making it difficult to create functionally equivalent software that people will be able to use while having compatibility with Microsoft software, which is necessary in order to compete with them.
It is against this country's best interest to have monopolies controlling important infrastructures like software stacks that people depend on everyday. It becomes an unfair market, which makes our economy mercantilist rather than capitalist. Regulation of this sort keeps the market fair, drives innovation, and makes our infrastructure more secure by not putting all our eggs in one basket(the basket is Microsoft).
If all of Microsoft(people and servers) were to be blown up simultaneously by heavy bombs, and there was no competent replacement for the Microsoft software stack, much of our society would be really really screwed for quite a long time. This is a bad thing. There needs to be more than one option to the services and software Microsoft provides, for the good of our society.
Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon. -Orson Scott Card
>for all their evils and wrongs, there's
>been a few good things that have come from them (Microsoft).
I've been keeping an eye on the shenanigans that Microsoft has been pulling for about 12 years. I would say I'm pretty current on their bad behavior, but to be honest, can you (or anyone for that matter) give me some example of "good things" to come out of Microsoft that were
a) Not hostile to Open Source Licenses, with GPL being the primary victim.
b) Didn't have strings attached, aka, can only be used on Microsoft products, or Microsoft gets a $$ cut of every unit.
I guess the problem is what do you mean by "good things"? Good things *to me* mean things that are friendly to the community, share and share-alike for example. It's why I love the GPL and why I prefer Linux over any proprietary OS no matter how much eye candy it might have.
An obvious example might be the "Bill and Melinda Foundation" or as I prefer to think of it, the "Melinda and Bill Foundation.". There's a couple of problems with it though: 1) It's not Microsoft's charity, it's the Gates' foundation. 2) It has strings attached --- you have to use Microsoft products regardless of whether or not cheaper, better products can be found with the donated money.
Slashdot has always been biased towards Linux.
You must be new here. I'm modded down all the time for insider Unix jokes or expressing a relatively mild opinion of what I feel about Microsoft Windows.
This is not your Father's slashdot.
Oh dear, better call the Waaaaahmbulance.
Are you calling Washington DC judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly a linux hacker ?
Or maybe, just maybe, Slashdot is fair and balanced, and Microsoft really is a nest of black-hearted villains.
"Fair and balanced" is probably never going to mean the same thing to two different people, especially your husband/wife/SO/etc.
I am not a big fan of Microsoft, all of their products had crippling bugs or limitations in them when I first started exploring there (Applesoft BASIC, PC DOS 2.0, etc.). I took a look at Microsoft Windows and OS/2 when they were first released and was unimpressed.
However, I have been impressed with Unix and its descendents since I first encountered them in college. The big Blue and Green books documenting Version 7 Unix were useful for everything Unixy at the time and I've always like the multiuser/multiprocessing aspect of the system. System V/R2 was a disaster on the order of Microsoft Windows XP (so I've read, I only used Microsoft Windows XP/SP2 for about half a year and it was only less stable than System V/R2 with patches), but it was released two decades earlier and since has all the problems worked out.
The Unix model, as first designed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie has withstood the test of time as no other software project ever has. They killed the proprietary O/S model on minis and mainframes. They killed the idea of non-portable OSes, though Microsoft has resurrected that idea. They so excited the minds and hearts of programmers that dozens of reimplemented spinoffs were done ... and survive to this day.
On the other hand, Billg spent more on his two recent TV ads for an O/S that few want to buy than Thompson and Richie made in their lifetimes. Sigh.
The problem is that the upper echelons steer the company. You're arguing that some of the storm troopers on the Death Star were Bo-and-Luke-Duke good drinking buddies, and I have no doubt that they were. The problem is that those good old boys are not the ones deciding where to point the planet-killing death ray.
Does substituting the Empire for Nazi Germany get me around Godwin's Law? :-)
If you want to integrate with non-windows machines just use webservies which are fully documented by MS and various other sources since SOAP and http are both standard protocols.
And if you want to integrate with Windows machines, and you're writing code on the non-Windows side, what do you do?
I refuse to pay attention to any Anti-trust investigations into MS unless Apple is put to the same scrutiny.
Microsoft: you can see the code that implements these dusty proprietary protocols if you sign an NDA.
Apple: We use these standard protocols, and here's a free implementation of this standard protocol that we happen to be the first to get to market, and it builds on Linux with no changes, and here's the source code to our file system and the remaining legacy network protocols we're still using...
what does MS do that Apple doesn't do when it comes to making your OS the dominate platform?
Let's see, Apple doesn't require people who try to interoperate with them to implement extensions to standard protocols that they don't document, and they don't give their own software privileged access to secret kernel APIs... in fact they give away the source to most of them... even most of the ones that they don't need to.
Lord knows Apple has problems - the way they're handling the iPhone is made of frustration - but compared to Microsoft they're angels.
I can understand and appreciate constructive criticism but are you seriously calling the KB and MSDN "crap compared to other vendors?" The vendors with good support/documentation are few and far between, among them Microsoft seems to be doing quite well. Unfortunately that's not the documentation in question but I suppose you just wanted to bash Microsoft.
Meh... Who am I to stop you? Bash away but, well, the only spot on Microsoft's support site that I find lacking is their inability to actually help people resolve update problems easily. Then, on that section, they thoroughly suck.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Yes, good one. Another good database example is PostgreSQL. Apache and its various modules also have excellent docs.
Like you said, the searchability of MSDN leaves a lot to be desired. It's complete, but hard to find anything.