"Microsoft Killed My Pappy"

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.'"

Comments

Change

[amiga3D]

People can't get past MS's sins because MS never really changed. They still bend the rules until they're warped and often just snap. They are still they same company in many ways.

Re:Change

[Anonymous Coward]

People can't get past MS's sins because MS never really changed. They still bend the rules until they're warped and often just snap. They are still they same company in many ways.

I work for a software company that need to relate to/work with MS, and Apple, and Google. And from our end they have definitely changed, and that is what I'm hearing from others in the industry as well. They have learned a lesson and are much easier to work with, more flexible and communicative, less arrogant. Apple and Google on the other hand, from an industry perspective they have really taken over the "my way or the highway" arrogance leadership MS used to have, are difficult to work with and can do things that torpedo partners, without communication or remorse. The stuff MS used to do. Not an end-user perspective, but still, a major change of hats.

Re:Change

[Immerman]

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)

Re:Change

[Sponge Bath]

The landscape has changed. And some people want to be optimistic about it.

The same people are waiting for Kim Jong Un to make reforms in North Korea. His uncle is skeptical.

Re:Change

[amiga3D]

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

[MightyMartian]

The subverting of ISO to get the atrocious OOXML made a standard was just five years ago. Hardly ancient history.

Re:Change

[Anonymous Coward]

Another coal mine "incident" kills dozens of minors.

Holy shit! What were they even doing in the mine? Was there a field trip or something?

Re:Change

[kasperd]

The landscape has changed.

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.

But right now it is effectively MS vs. Google, which might be much worse. Because duopolies generally are worse than monopolies.

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

[rubycodez]

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

[TheGratefulNet]

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

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re: Change

[ShieldW0lf]

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.

Re:Change

[Bite The Pillow]

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.

Ye Gods

[Anonymous Coward]

"People can't seem to get past the antitrust trial"? The one where Microsoft forged evidence and pissed off the first judge so bad that she was replaced on account of the bias they had created? The one that ultimately said, clearly, YES microsoft's business practices are bad for both the individual and the nation?

Yeah, poor Stalin! People never could get past those purge-things he got famous for.

Seventy years

[Chris Mattern]

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.

Are we pretending Windows 8 didn't happen?

[Karmashock]

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.

Never forget.

[VortexCortex]

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.

Well, why should we NOT hate Microsoft?

[hey!]

People understand that corporations are amoral. The rational position towards a large, powerful corporation is distrust. That's the baseline from which a corporation has to work up from.

On top of that most people don't get a *choice* of Microsoft or something else; Microsoft is chosen *for them* by the corporate IT department or by the IT departments of people they have to work with. That's raises the bar for user experience, somethign MS is not particularly good at. It's like the food you get on a college meal plan. The fact you're forced to eat it means that if you're assigning it a letter grade you automatically deduct two letter grades: an A becomes a C and a B becomes a D.

Now consider Apple. There's a lot to dislike in their trying to position themselves as content gate keepers especially. But there are offsetting virtues: innovation, design, and build quality. On top of that most people who use Apple products choose to do so, which means they get a better evaluation.

Unfair? Maybe; but that's reality.

Now this is not to say that Microsoft has no virtues as a corporation, it's just that those virtues aren't experienced by *users*. Microsoft has consistently provided a mediocre user experience in its core products, and undermined the main value of their products to the user -- familiarity -- by pointless fiddling with user interfaces.

Microsoft's big sin was abusing its market position to achieve a monopoly with a mediocre product. To be forgiven of that sin, they've got to start producing products people love and look forward to, and don't feel let down by.

why-can't-we-get-along and let go?

[dtjohnson]

Okay, I'll burn what's left of my karma and point out the reason why we can't get along...because Microsoft HAS NOT CHANGED. They are still the price-gouging, competition stifling, astro-turfing, anti open standards, monopolizing enterprise that they have always been. What HAS changed is the rise of Mac OS X, iPad, Google Chrome, etc. that have created some real alternatives to Microsoft.

Still happening

[CODiNE]

Let's not forget the ODF debacle where MS stacked committees around the world to pass their "standard".

Re:fake premise

[JaredOfEuropa]

The hate comes from MS being a dominant player, a position that often leads them to become complacent or makes them behave like the school bully. The latter is what that antitrust case was about, but we have more recent examples as well. Windows 8, for starters. They pushed through with their almost universally hated paradigm for a unified desktop / tablet experience. Then came Windows 8.1 which "brought back Start" in the sense that it really didn't; MS pretty much cheerfully flipped us all the bird on that one. "We know better, and you have no choice".

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".

Once sociopathic always sociopathic, that's why.

[macraig]

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:Bundling + monopoly is the issue

[phantomfive]

*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.

Stop extorting open source with software patents.

[andydread]

Hey Microsoft people don't like you coming up and demanding payment for FOSS code that they wrote that you have nothing to do with.
People don't like the fact that you spoke out against software patents when you had none yet you lobby to kill a bill reforming software-patents now that you have a ton of obvious software-patents. now you are one of the biggest supporters of software-patents.
Using the BSA in a draconian manner. See Ernie Ball.
Calling the hard work of people who write open source software a "cancer"
Corruption of standards committees in order to push a standard that not even you microsoft can honor
Constant lying and spreading FUD and misinformation in the marketplace.
Funding and aranging for additional funding for the SCO attack on Linux
Funding a book spreading lies that Linux was stolen from Minix
There is many many many more reasons.