To me, Oracle has achieved the same level of user/customer hostility that Microsoft has, but without the smart people. Yes, they have a good enterprise database product if you are willing to pay for it and deal with it, but in my experience, everything that comes out of Oracle is like a throwback to the 1970s in terms of usability. I found it totally appropriate that they should have ended up with Java.
They'll blunder along like Microsoft continues to do, and they will provide a good litmus test for any future job I might consider (not that I'm looking): If the company deals with Oracle products, I'll stay away. I value my sanity.
Microsoft has always been reactive and conservative. The difference was that back in the 90s they could come from behind and still produce a pretty good product that could compete. Now, they just seem to be flailing.
That's the thing, though. They can use those billions... tens of billions... to throw monkey wrenches at their competitors and will be able to disrupt the industry for many more years. And I don't mean disrupt as in the way the iPhone, iPad or Android disrupted the industry by driving the market into new territories with interesting new products (which Microsoft has utterly and very visibly failed to do despite several attempts in the past few years) but by being their usual evil, monopolistic selves.
The less relevant they become, the more desperate they will become and the more they will be willing to cause harm to their customers, their competitors' customers and the technology industry to regain the relevance they so foolishly tossed away. Microsoft has been a 900-pound gorilla for decades and the industry has eventually managed to survive and innovate despite their stranglehold on marketshare. Now they are an _injured_ 900-pound gorilla. Things are going to start getting ugly.
We know what they were capable of in order to get on top and stay on top... how much more will they be willing to perpetrate in order to try to avoid their inevitable decline?
Yeah, and the unbroken ones... not the "cashew pieces" you can get for a lot cheaper. Still, I recall the excitement when RAM went under $100 a megabyte.
The difference is that we expect not to be able to trust politicians, and not just because they tend to be immoral.
Code is precisely definable and precisely defined. If I give you the source code to my program, then you can reproduce it exactly. And I'm assuming that by "source code", I mean not just the code, but the precise details used to build it.
The only way you get a different binary than me, assuming you build it correctly, etc., is if I'm lying or mistaken about what I give you. It's not a matter of human judgement, information I have that you don't (because source code by definition is all the information), impreciseness of language or any of other uncertainties that govern pretty much every human interaction and enterprise, especially those of politicians.
I'm sure there are very, very few programmers that think that their code should be hard to read. On the other hand, there is a never-ending stream of programmers who think they know what they are doing, but produce the same result. I work with that type's legacy every day.
Like everything else Congress does, this seems like nothing more than another reason for them to pat themselves on the back. What it actually accomplishments is irrelevant.
There's your problem. The government, i.e., those people who make and enforce and review the laws, have decided at some point in the past few decades that nothing is unreasonable.
I'd mod you up if I hadn't already commented. You've hit the nail on the head and each successive national election in the past years has just proven you more right.
Plain and obvious interpretation of the Bill of Rights? Now I know you're some kind of subversive. Please report to your nearest Federal Re-education Center immediately. You're making the rest of us sheep look bad.
I think my 13-year-old had the best comment ever about Windows 8. We were in Office Depot and he still likes to go over and play with the computers. He said he thought it was really stupid that MS got rid of the desktop in Windows 8 (we don't own any Windows 8 machines, and neither of us is familiar with it).
I explained that the desktop is still there; you just need to know how to switch to it. His comment was that he doesn't want to have to know Easter Eggs just to use his computer.
I don't know where this "one second" nonsense comes from. Every Windows 7 machine I've ever used takes from tens of seconds to a minute or more to become usable after hibernate, and sometimes that long when coming out of sleep. I avoid both as much as possible.
The problem with Windows these days is that everything they change about has an immediately obvious reason as to why the change will benefit Microsoft (or at least they hope it will) and often has little or no benefit to the customer.
Metro? It serves no purpose other than to try to create a market of apps from which MS can skim 30% off the top like Apple. Metro also allows MS to do less work because it can be used across different platforms, despite only being (ostensibly) appropriate for a small fraction of them. Microsoft has always tried to work towards the goal of one gargantuan monolithic OS that runs on all hardware, despite the fact that that has never been a good design strategy and probably never will be. Apple never fell into this trap and Linux succeeds by being a rock-solid incredibly flexible _kernel_ but not foisting a massive and bloated application layer on everything from a phone to a supercomputer.
I can appreciate that Microsoft wants to maintain their revenue while having to do as little work as possible, but that seems to be the only thing criterion driving any of their designs any more. The business of propping up the monopoly they created in the 80s and early 90s is running out of steam. Some day, they might realize it.
It's Microsoft's version of the Flower Key, or the Meta key, or whatever you want to call it.
They created it because their mad usability skillz required changing the standard keyboard.
And from what I've read about Windows 8, they've pretty much given up on actually improving the GUI because the first response to anyone complaining about Windows 8 is to rattle off the keyboard shortcuts you need to know in order to actually use it.
Keyboard shortcuts are always good to have, but when they become a primary way of describing how to do something, I think you need to reconsider your GUI design.
I bought that book based on a recommendation the last time I saw a story about this project. It was definitely a fun book, and Stith did a good job extrapolating the effects of his new physics.
The poor treatment of Uhura was strictly a result of the network and not Roddenberry. Roddenberry had his faults, and he was as sexist as they come in many regards, but it was the network that pushed back against the idea of a black, female command officer. As a matter of fact, they specifically allowed Uhura to take command in one of the animated episodes to make up for the fact that they weren't allowed to do so in the live-action series.
And your solution puts the onus on the user to become an expert in software. The whole point of the exercise is to give the user what he wants/needs. If some part of the system is broken, it usually ends up being someone downstream or upstream that gets the blame. After all, if you are refusing to support broken browsers, then you might be encouraging a gigantic company to fix their software (yeah, like that ever happens, short of a world-ending cataclysm), but you are also jeopardizing your users' experience and ultimately your own business. Playing hardball like you suggest, however tempting it may be, and it's _very_ tempting, costs your website users, and that means fewer customers. At some point you might have to decide to cut your losses, but as a website developer, just like any other software developer or anyone providing a service or product, you _must_ bend over backwards to give your customers the best value/most convenient experience/best service possible.
It's an ugly situation, but we should be thankful that Mozilla and other competitors have gained enough ground against the Evil Empire that there _are_ alternatives... and that the Evil Empire has had to react in response to chinks in their monopolistic armor. Unfortunately, that leads to the temptation of "This website works best in $BROWSER."
I guess the ultimate question is: Should we be able to treat browsers like telephones? No matter what kind of telephone you have, at some point it either allows you to call other telephones or it doesn't. Beyond that, they are all essentially identical to the person placing or receiving the call.
Microsoft is never the ones who get bitten. It's all the users who can't use the web apps developed for broken versions of IE, and the developers who have to figure out which dead chickens need to be waved over their sites to get them to work in each different (and differently broken) version of IE that comes out.
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To me, Oracle has achieved the same level of user/customer hostility that Microsoft has, but without the smart people. Yes, they have a good enterprise database product if you are willing to pay for it and deal with it, but in my experience, everything that comes out of Oracle is like a throwback to the 1970s in terms of usability. I found it totally appropriate that they should have ended up with Java.
They'll blunder along like Microsoft continues to do, and they will provide a good litmus test for any future job I might consider (not that I'm looking): If the company deals with Oracle products, I'll stay away. I value my sanity.
Microsoft has always been reactive and conservative. The difference was that back in the 90s they could come from behind and still produce a pretty good product that could compete. Now, they just seem to be flailing.
And that adds up to hundreds of millions of users _not_ using Microsoft or Apple products. That's success by any definition.
"For Microsoft to fold up shop would take at least another decade of consistently bad decisions, and even then it would almost have to be willful."
There, FTFY. I couldn't help myself.
That's the thing, though. They can use those billions... tens of billions... to throw monkey wrenches at their competitors and will be able to disrupt the industry for many more years. And I don't mean disrupt as in the way the iPhone, iPad or Android disrupted the industry by driving the market into new territories with interesting new products (which Microsoft has utterly and very visibly failed to do despite several attempts in the past few years) but by being their usual evil, monopolistic selves.
The less relevant they become, the more desperate they will become and the more they will be willing to cause harm to their customers, their competitors' customers and the technology industry to regain the relevance they so foolishly tossed away. Microsoft has been a 900-pound gorilla for decades and the industry has eventually managed to survive and innovate despite their stranglehold on marketshare. Now they are an _injured_ 900-pound gorilla. Things are going to start getting ugly.
We know what they were capable of in order to get on top and stay on top... how much more will they be willing to perpetrate in order to try to avoid their inevitable decline?
Yeah, and the unbroken ones... not the "cashew pieces" you can get for a lot cheaper. Still, I recall the excitement when RAM went under $100 a megabyte.
The future will be orange and teal according to the movies. Then again, so is the present and the past.
The difference is that we expect not to be able to trust politicians, and not just because they tend to be immoral.
Code is precisely definable and precisely defined. If I give you the source code to my program, then you can reproduce it exactly. And I'm assuming that by "source code", I mean not just the code, but the precise details used to build it.
The only way you get a different binary than me, assuming you build it correctly, etc., is if I'm lying or mistaken about what I give you. It's not a matter of human judgement, information I have that you don't (because source code by definition is all the information), impreciseness of language or any of other uncertainties that govern pretty much every human interaction and enterprise, especially those of politicians.
I'm sure there are very, very few programmers that think that their code should be hard to read. On the other hand, there is a never-ending stream of programmers who think they know what they are doing, but produce the same result. I work with that type's legacy every day.
Like everything else Congress does, this seems like nothing more than another reason for them to pat themselves on the back. What it actually accomplishments is irrelevant.
Well, the first few vehicles might have some glitches. We should probably use Congressmen and Senators until they stop exploding.
There's your problem. The government, i.e., those people who make and enforce and review the laws, have decided at some point in the past few decades that nothing is unreasonable.
And nowadays, most of the electorate agree.
FTFY: "That has ended in tears." ...although it's going to get much worse.
I'd mod you up if I hadn't already commented. You've hit the nail on the head and each successive national election in the past years has just proven you more right.
Plain and obvious interpretation of the Bill of Rights? Now I know you're some kind of subversive. Please report to your nearest Federal Re-education Center immediately. You're making the rest of us sheep look bad.
I think my 13-year-old had the best comment ever about Windows 8. We were in Office Depot and he still likes to go over and play with the computers. He said he thought it was really stupid that MS got rid of the desktop in Windows 8 (we don't own any Windows 8 machines, and neither of us is familiar with it). I explained that the desktop is still there; you just need to know how to switch to it. His comment was that he doesn't want to have to know Easter Eggs just to use his computer.
I don't know where this "one second" nonsense comes from. Every Windows 7 machine I've ever used takes from tens of seconds to a minute or more to become usable after hibernate, and sometimes that long when coming out of sleep. I avoid both as much as possible.
Ballmer wishes he were Jobs? Gee, from his performance I always thought he wished he were Mussolini.
The problem with Windows these days is that everything they change about has an immediately obvious reason as to why the change will benefit Microsoft (or at least they hope it will) and often has little or no benefit to the customer. Metro? It serves no purpose other than to try to create a market of apps from which MS can skim 30% off the top like Apple. Metro also allows MS to do less work because it can be used across different platforms, despite only being (ostensibly) appropriate for a small fraction of them. Microsoft has always tried to work towards the goal of one gargantuan monolithic OS that runs on all hardware, despite the fact that that has never been a good design strategy and probably never will be. Apple never fell into this trap and Linux succeeds by being a rock-solid incredibly flexible _kernel_ but not foisting a massive and bloated application layer on everything from a phone to a supercomputer. I can appreciate that Microsoft wants to maintain their revenue while having to do as little work as possible, but that seems to be the only thing criterion driving any of their designs any more. The business of propping up the monopoly they created in the 80s and early 90s is running out of steam. Some day, they might realize it.
It's Microsoft's version of the Flower Key, or the Meta key, or whatever you want to call it. They created it because their mad usability skillz required changing the standard keyboard. And from what I've read about Windows 8, they've pretty much given up on actually improving the GUI because the first response to anyone complaining about Windows 8 is to rattle off the keyboard shortcuts you need to know in order to actually use it. Keyboard shortcuts are always good to have, but when they become a primary way of describing how to do something, I think you need to reconsider your GUI design.
I bought that book based on a recommendation the last time I saw a story about this project. It was definitely a fun book, and Stith did a good job extrapolating the effects of his new physics.
The poor treatment of Uhura was strictly a result of the network and not Roddenberry. Roddenberry had his faults, and he was as sexist as they come in many regards, but it was the network that pushed back against the idea of a black, female command officer. As a matter of fact, they specifically allowed Uhura to take command in one of the animated episodes to make up for the fact that they weren't allowed to do so in the live-action series.
And your solution puts the onus on the user to become an expert in software. The whole point of the exercise is to give the user what he wants/needs. If some part of the system is broken, it usually ends up being someone downstream or upstream that gets the blame. After all, if you are refusing to support broken browsers, then you might be encouraging a gigantic company to fix their software (yeah, like that ever happens, short of a world-ending cataclysm), but you are also jeopardizing your users' experience and ultimately your own business. Playing hardball like you suggest, however tempting it may be, and it's _very_ tempting, costs your website users, and that means fewer customers. At some point you might have to decide to cut your losses, but as a website developer, just like any other software developer or anyone providing a service or product, you _must_ bend over backwards to give your customers the best value/most convenient experience/best service possible.
It's an ugly situation, but we should be thankful that Mozilla and other competitors have gained enough ground against the Evil Empire that there _are_ alternatives... and that the Evil Empire has had to react in response to chinks in their monopolistic armor. Unfortunately, that leads to the temptation of "This website works best in $BROWSER."
I guess the ultimate question is: Should we be able to treat browsers like telephones? No matter what kind of telephone you have, at some point it either allows you to call other telephones or it doesn't. Beyond that, they are all essentially identical to the person placing or receiving the call.
I say that this is the kind of nonsense up with I will not put.
Microsoft is never the ones who get bitten. It's all the users who can't use the web apps developed for broken versions of IE, and the developers who have to figure out which dead chickens need to be waved over their sites to get them to work in each different (and differently broken) version of IE that comes out.
Microsoft just sits back and laughs.