Then it's a poorly designed vehicle and you shouldn't buy it in the first place. That is your right as a consumer, I assure you there are other companies who'd love to sell you their versions, find one that suits you. And remember, the issue being discussed isn't impossible to replace functionality, it's that somehow one of these other companies thinks the ability to replace, or the way it's replaced, or something (the info is a bit vague) should be made more to their needs.
But to turn it around and be equally extreme, if the car is just an engine and some axles, because you must choose the rest, and the auto-maker can't provide defaults (people might just use them, and not look at competitors), do you really want every buyer to cobble together their own regardless of skill level and needs? Is that honestly how you'd build your system for users?
Regarding raindrops and floods, you'd be surprised. Work some weekends because partners need help, or because someone dropped the ball and Ops needs support. Yell at the architects until they listen and look at your results to build into the next version, push for features because they're what you want in your product when you use it. You get that responsibility feeling as a matter of course, if you're doing the job right. Of course, I can't speak for the company overall, maybe it's different over in Windows. But hey, evil, remember? I'm eating babies for you*, the end users!
* - given/., maybe not. Feel free to replace the you* with a competing word of your choice
First, let me say that I'm evil. I'm a corporate code tool for Microsoft, because they pay me money to play with lots and lots of their servers. Flame away, I've heard it all before.
I always find the reaction to stories like this one interesting... I know all about what my camp thinks and how we see these issues. I wasn't present for the netscape/IE thing, and during school I was a pretty serious linux user for four or five years (as a freshman, the ability to play half life was more important). I use Firefox because IE7 still sucks. Google search was my home page for a long time, and frankly their search still does a great job... it's not what I use every day, but it is where I go when Live is being slow or I want to get a different view of the same search.
For me, if I go out and pay an arm and a leg for Vista (don't like the pricing, but they don't ask me about these things), it should be great out of the box, and it should have all the basics (a browser to get online, a file system I can use to store and browse, the ability to play a CD, etc). I'm not paying for a skeleton system that's only done enough to let me DIY the rest... when it's finished installing, I should be able to reasonably use my computer right away. It's like buying a new car... I should be able to drive it off the lot, not need to go buy tires that aren't included (because I might develop a bias towards those tires?). For the average users out there (ahem, my computer hating mom), who want their computer for every day, uncomplicated tasks, it's even more important that it just works.
So in a nutshell, I guess what I see day to day is that if there are features a user will reasonably expect out of the product, and we have time and budget, shouldn't we build them in? It seems more evil to me to leave them out.
MS does have to play by difference rules, of course, because we're all evil, money hording devil worshipers who eat babies (delicious with a nice cayenne hot sauce), etc, etc. But I'm really curious for you on the outside world, do you design your products with defenses against users becoming biased toward them? Or were you us, and it's your product that people say is unfair, how would you balance "justice" with usability? Especially for something as basic-functionality as searching a file system? If it becomes jammed with ad-supported semi-functional competing products (by which I mean parties other than, and less scrupulous and skilled than Google), because competitors need the right to install random crazy software that will run under the name of your-product-name-here, did you make a good choice?
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Then it's a poorly designed vehicle and you shouldn't buy it in the first place. That is your right as a consumer, I assure you there are other companies who'd love to sell you their versions, find one that suits you. And remember, the issue being discussed isn't impossible to replace functionality, it's that somehow one of these other companies thinks the ability to replace, or the way it's replaced, or something (the info is a bit vague) should be made more to their needs.
But to turn it around and be equally extreme, if the car is just an engine and some axles, because you must choose the rest, and the auto-maker can't provide defaults (people might just use them, and not look at competitors), do you really want every buyer to cobble together their own regardless of skill level and needs? Is that honestly how you'd build your system for users?
Regarding raindrops and floods, you'd be surprised. Work some weekends because partners need help, or because someone dropped the ball and Ops needs support. Yell at the architects until they listen and look at your results to build into the next version, push for features because they're what you want in your product when you use it. You get that responsibility feeling as a matter of course, if you're doing the job right. Of course, I can't speak for the company overall, maybe it's different over in Windows. But hey, evil, remember? I'm eating babies for you*, the end users!
* - given /., maybe not. Feel free to replace the you* with a competing word of your choice
First, let me say that I'm evil. I'm a corporate code tool for Microsoft, because they pay me money to play with lots and lots of their servers. Flame away, I've heard it all before.
I always find the reaction to stories like this one interesting... I know all about what my camp thinks and how we see these issues. I wasn't present for the netscape/IE thing, and during school I was a pretty serious linux user for four or five years (as a freshman, the ability to play half life was more important). I use Firefox because IE7 still sucks. Google search was my home page for a long time, and frankly their search still does a great job... it's not what I use every day, but it is where I go when Live is being slow or I want to get a different view of the same search.
For me, if I go out and pay an arm and a leg for Vista (don't like the pricing, but they don't ask me about these things), it should be great out of the box, and it should have all the basics (a browser to get online, a file system I can use to store and browse, the ability to play a CD, etc). I'm not paying for a skeleton system that's only done enough to let me DIY the rest... when it's finished installing, I should be able to reasonably use my computer right away. It's like buying a new car... I should be able to drive it off the lot, not need to go buy tires that aren't included (because I might develop a bias towards those tires?). For the average users out there (ahem, my computer hating mom), who want their computer for every day, uncomplicated tasks, it's even more important that it just works.
So in a nutshell, I guess what I see day to day is that if there are features a user will reasonably expect out of the product, and we have time and budget, shouldn't we build them in? It seems more evil to me to leave them out.
MS does have to play by difference rules, of course, because we're all evil, money hording devil worshipers who eat babies (delicious with a nice cayenne hot sauce), etc, etc. But I'm really curious for you on the outside world, do you design your products with defenses against users becoming biased toward them? Or were you us, and it's your product that people say is unfair, how would you balance "justice" with usability? Especially for something as basic-functionality as searching a file system? If it becomes jammed with ad-supported semi-functional competing products (by which I mean parties other than, and less scrupulous and skilled than Google), because competitors need the right to install random crazy software that will run under the name of your-product-name-here, did you make a good choice?