> a lot of us have bad, bad memories of old Microsoft software
I'm getting the same impression. It seems like all the accusations of "evil" come from the 3.x and 9x era; there's not much in the past five years. I chalk the problems back then up to "we learned how to do business from IBM", and "we had to figure out how else we could do business". And since I agreed that Microsoft was a right bastard of a company right up until about 1998, and remained massively disapproving of them through about 2002, I'm not learning a lot about why Microsoft is considered evil *today* except that some people can't drop a grudge.
Which is still worth learning, but I'm more interested in things we could conceivably fix. We can't change our past. Microsoft Bob is always going to be in there, no matter what we do.
> (*cough* IIS *cough* *cough*)
I love ASP.
That's all I have to say about that.
You can probably read between the lines.;)
> a lot of techies KNOW that microsoft is big enough > that the entire computing industry pays the price > for their mistakes
What should we do about this?
I mean, I'm of the opinion that the answer here is that some group of companies need to step up and collectively seize 30-40% market share on the desktop. I don't care if that's split 20/20 or 10/30 or 10/10/20 or whatever. But fundamentally, the problem with Microsoft's bigness is that nobody else seems even remotely competent to do that.
If I ever have the political clout to be taken seriously, I may actually go to Microsoft and say "let's auction a snapshot of the current Windows source to the highest bidder". I think Microsoft has to take the lead and actively *create* a viable competitor. This notion is, of course, dangerously insane (as an informal survey of my immediate colleagues confirms). But since I have roughly the same clout as the average intern, it's not going to reach anyone important anyway. Yet.
> the biggest ones I see are the Activation, the DRM, and > the transparent look they ripped off of apple.
Vista's benefits are mostly under the hood. It's dogs that aren't barking. You sort of have to wait a while before you can tell.
> Honestly, unless Microsoft makes a concerted effort to > make me feel like it's putting my *personal* needs above
You want a company with hundreds of millions of customers to demonstrate to you that it cares about your personal needs?
Doesn't that strike you as a little unrealistic?
I recently had an argument about someone here regarding PowerPoint. He wanted a particular feature. He didn't understand why we didn't immediately shove it into the product. I explained that it wouldn't work in most circumstances, and he replied that he didn't care.
Well, we don't get to say that.
Microsoft isn't allowed to not care. When a feature goes into Office, we're not allowed to say "this isn't what millions of people want, but those five guys in Nebraska will sure appreciate it". We have to care about those millions of people. And increasingly, what those millions of people want is not to see any new buttons that do things they don't want done.
So when we say "this feature is not good enough", that isn't Microsoft not caring about your needs. It's Microsoft caring about millions of other people's needs. And the evidence of that is a dog that doesn't bark: you *don't* see a new button on the toolbar that does something you never do. Every time we release a new version of Office, tens of thousands of bad ideas DIDN'T get into it.
Of course, it's probably not very reassuring to say what amounts to "hey, I know you think Vista sucks, but it was GONNA suck a WHOLE LOT WORSE!";)
> I think you will find most people who poopoo > MS have slightly different reasoning than the > Klan.
Yes, but their logic is still often contradictory.
> 1. Microsoft has broken the law, and a fairly > major one, and avoided punishment.
Weren't we handed a whole stack of injunctions and requirements? That's not avoiding punishment.
> 2. Microsoft has leveraged their immense wealth, > and corporate/social impact, in trying to avoid > laws in Europe
Isn't that business as usual in Europe? You bribe this official, and bribe that official, and hire this official's nephew, and donate to that official's fundraiser - or else they enforce a completely ludicrous requirement that locals don't have to follow? That's the way I remember it.
> 3. Microsoft has a history of dealing in bad > faith, and using destructive and vindictive > business practices.
Isn't that business as usual in America? "Do unto others before they do unto you"? It's not like much larger and richer companies weren't laughing at us and calling us stupid when we were starting out, then using the very same destructive and vindictive techniques against us when we actually started to succeed.
> 4. Microsoft has a history of offering unready, > ill conceived software to the market
Isn't that at the heart of the open source model? Release early, release often?
From the right perspective, your argument looks self-contradictory. Just like the Klan; when they claim black men are lazy welfare jockeys *and* take white people's jobs, you sort of have to scratch your head.
However, I'll accept that you consider the company worthy of rebuke and bad. I understand that. It's the "evil" part I don't get.
You don't want to make more money than your neighbor?
You don't want a bigger TV set? A nicer car? A prettier girlfriend? MORE girlfriends?
If not, how much of that is because you actually don't want it, and how much is because you simply don't think you can get it, or would rather have something else?
I mean, my neighbor has a BMW. I don't. It's not that I wouldn't like having a BMW, but it's largely that there are other things I would like more. I'll happily drive my Oldsmobile, which is hardly a piece of garbage, and use my money to buy guitars and computers instead. My neighbor with the BMW doesn't have a guitar. My other neighbor does; in fact, he has a really nice one. But mine is nicer, and I like that.
> No. Visual Studio is tied to windows to prop window sales
Who the hell buys Windows to run Visual Studio?
> getting users hooked on Office back in the day, and then > vigorously seeking to modify the file format to make it > harder to work with.
We don't score any points for recently releasing that format to a standards body, huh? So we lose for what we did ten years ago, but what we did last year doesn't count. Real fair and balanced, there.
> using proprietary undocumented file formats,
(like everyone else)
> exploiting internal API functions,
(like everyone else)
> purposefully messing existing apps
(like everyone else)
> not supporting industry standards
If your standards weren't so implicitly predicated on a 32-bit operating environment with a flat memory model, we might have been able to implement them on a 16-bit processor with a segmented memory model. But they were, so we really couldn't.
> Why doesn't IE follow the W3C standards?
It does. There are only a few minor incompatibilities. Firefox has some, too.
> I'm holding my breath until Office can open > StarOffice documents.
That will probably happen sometime after someone sends me a StarOffice document I need to open. Which will be, hmm, roughly... never.
Nobody uses StarOffice. That's why it sucks, and has always sucked, and will always suck. It's a dancing bear - it isn't that it dances well, but it's just amazing that it dances at all. Every time I've ever opened StarOffice to try and do something, I've generally realised that I could do it faster and better in vi, which would also be a lot less likely to crash.
> it's the fact that it is *forced* on many of > us is the real problem
What is the alternative?
A company must standardise on a platform so its IT department can specialise. That platform should be something that people are comfortable using, that is interoperable with other companies, and for which support staff are readily available.
What else qualifies? The Linux and Mac communities are just too small. Not enough rank and file office workers can use them. Not enough other companies are standardised on them. Not enough available IT staff can support them. The choice of Windows has effectively become a tautology: people choose Windows because people choose Windows.
> improved engineering had little to do with it > in the mid-1990s when this monopoly was > carefully being built.
How careful did we need to be in a market where there was no serious competitor? UNIX in its official form was up to a hundred times the cost. FreeBSD engineers were in short supply and quite rightly demanded massive salaries. Linux was still effectively a toy. DOS was dead. OS/2 was dying. BeOS was barely trying.
And as I recall, Windows 95 was a quantum leap in quality over Windows 3.1, where we were still being criticised for requiring DOS underneath it. Of course, once we welded DOS and Windows tightly together, we were criticised for not really getting rid of DOS - the new system still inherited many of its limitations - and for not allowing people to choose DOS alone without Windows.
Because we can't win. Every advance closes a door through which someone thinks we should have gone.
> someone should have been jailed for the > so-called School Agreement
Licensing! My specialty. *cracks knuckles* Probably the wrong rhetorical move.
The School Agreement is one of THREE licensing options available to K-12 institutions. (The Campus Agreement is applicable to higher education, but is grouped with the same two other options.) The other two are Academic Open and Academic Select. If you're looking at the School/Campus Agreement (which requires at least 300 machines), you probably want to compare with Academic Select (which requires at least 250 machines). Academic Open has no minimum, but the price break isn't as big.
> To paraphrase, if I donated 100 Linux / > OpenOffice PCs to my local school, Microsoft > would still get an annual fee for each of > those PCs, even though Microsoft did nothing > to earn that money.
Wrong.
1. Your school owes NOTHING for those 100 PCs unless and until they renew the School Agreement, which may have a term of one or three years.
2. Your school receives licenses for those 100 PCs at no additional cost under the terms of this agreement.
3. At the conclusion of the agreement, if you do not want to pay for licenses on those 100 PCs, you may at your option switch to the Academic Select program - which does not require you to license every eligible PC.
This is precisely why you SHOULD NOT (RFC 2119) try to make licensing decisions without the advice and guidance of someone properly educated in the appropriate licensing options.
> You wouldn't be so confused if you had been working > for Digital Research
Digital Research faced a massive threat. They refused to acknowledge, accept, or handle that threat. They died. It's a damn shame - I liked DR, I consider them the originators of DOS as we knew it, and DR-DOS 6 was IMO far superior to the MS product - but that's how the market works.
> if you'd ever had to actually pay your money to > upgrade perfectly good software because Microsoft > was foisting another incompatible memory dump file > format on the world.
Could you tell me more about this? I don't really have enough information to respond intelligently.
I *might* have a good answer for you: Borland once demanded that I pay $120 plus shipping to upgrade to Borland C++ 3.1 when I lost my 3.0 install disk, and when I explained that I needed 3.0 disks so I could produce 16-bit binaries - they told me I couldn't have them unless I first upgraded to 3.1 and then paid for a support ticket. That seems like a similar situation. However, rather than pay their extortionary fees, I simply switched to Watcom, which is the beauty of competition.
But sometimes there is no competition, in which case this little anecdote is meaningless.
> if you had to pay for a copy of software that you'd > never use
I do that pretty much every time I set up a Linux box. I think I have two white-box Linux machines, and all the rest of them (about two dozen) have the little MS license key attached to them. None of them are running Windows, and the Windows license these keys represent is only good on that hardware, so it's useless to me elsewhere.
However, when I compare the price of this commodity hardware on a shelf at Best Buy to the price of white-box components plus shipping plus waiting two weeks for delivery, I find that I actually save money. Roughly $200, last time I did the math.
I am not willing to spend $200 over the principle that I should actually be saving $340. I agree that there is a principle there; but I caution you that the actual savings of not getting that OEM license are nowhere near the retail price. So it's not even really about $340. It's more like $220, for the big box retailers who buy lots of licenses.
> You'd probably had a clue if you had worked at BeOS
I was one of the early registered BeOS developers. Do you actually want my analysis of what went wrong there, or are you just betting I don't know about it?
> You can't see the the evil because you have your > head up your managers butt
I'd expect that in an evil company, that's where the evil would be most visible.
I think the video game industry needs to stop bankrolling projects off a few blockbuster titles, and instead bankroll them from a massive library of reliable inexpensive titles.
> Why is the IDE so desperately tied to the > platform and compiler?
Because tight coupling reduces surface area, and reduced surface area increases security, reliability, and performance.
That's a valid design decision. You might not like it - I certainly don't - but it's a valid decision.
> MSFT does only what's best in interests AT > THE EXPENSE of what is actually good for the > end users.
How exactly are you *worse* off now that Microsoft has released Visual Studio? Nothing was removed from the market. You were not forced to change compilers, or platforms, or IDEs. You remain just as well-off as you already were.
What has changed is your understanding of what you COULD have. You look at Visual Studio, and you say "I want that for Linux and GCC", and there is a massive open source community whose job it is to give you that. When they don't do it, it isn't Microsoft's fault.
It takes a truly twisted mind to claim that when Microsoft makes things better for one class of users, they're really making things worse for another one. Why not just forbid Microsoft to do anything?
> it isn't like MSFT internal standards are any > easier. They're just easier
> People accept "ugly and ineffective" with computers and that's a shame
I would actually argue that people seek out ugly and ineffective tools in a classical confusion of cause and effect: they believe that by using an ugly and ineffective tool, they will appear to be brilliant and experienced users. Conversely, they avoid pretty and elegant tools because they don't want to look like dumb novices.
Instead, they get an ugly and ineffective tool they don't understand, and have no hope in hell of doing a decent job with it. This makes them look like dumb novices to everyone except... dumb novices. The learning curve is steep, so they look like that for a much longer time. Meanwhile, the dumb novice who got the pretty and elegant tool has rapidly outgrown it, moved on to the ugly and ineffective tool - and recognised the other guy for the dumb novice he is.
The Mac commercials are not helping this phenomenon. Indeed, they are encouraging it.
> The reason people hate Microsoft is because > [...] Microsoft seems completely unphased.
I'm somewhat surprised at this.
We threw our cash-cow codebase out the window and started from scratch. We rebuilt our entire design, code, test, and review structure. We constructed an entire operating system on the fundamental pillars of security, networking, and usability.
And we seem unphased?
What, exactly, isn't good enough about throwing everything out and starting from scratch? That's exactly what I was saying needed to be done ten years ago. The biggest motivator for me to reconsider Microsoft's place in the world was when I saw them actually... well, let's be honest, agreeing with me. They were doing what I thought they should do. I liked that. It's one of the reasons I came to work here, which I would never have done five years ago.
But I'm honestly curious. What was the Right Thing in *your* opinion? How should Microsoft have responded to the court decisions? What should we have done?
> May it be that you look upon Microsoft in > a way that is more positive than they > actually earn?
I doubt it. I was pretty viciously anti-Microsoft for years before I started noticing the changes, and remained skeptical for a few more years before coming to work here. I still question pretty much everything we do.
I do give Microsoft credit for things the outsider doesn't see. When I first got here, I got in an argument with somebody over standards support in IE7. I went to see if the IE team had any documentation on the issue at hand, and I found a massive archive of email discussion among the team about standards.
While I can't talk about the specifics, due to confidentiality and all that, I got to see what was important to the team and why they made the decisions they did. So while I might not agree with a particular decision about a particular part of the standard, I'm a lot more accepting of it because I can see why that decision was made and that my concerns were taken into account.
I think a lot of people, being unable to see that, will bring up some issue and think Microsoft simply never thought about it. Within the company, we can see that the issue was hotly debated for an extended period of time, but we can't explain precisely what was debated or why we made the final decision - so we're stuck saying "no, really, we thought about that... we just didn't end up doing it". And that's not very convincing.;)
> People think msft is evil because they rarely > do things in the customers best interest.
You're confusing the consumer with the customer. The customer is someone who already buys and uses our product. The consumer is anyone who MIGHT buy and use our product.
Porting applications to another O/S is not for our customers. Our customers don't use another O/S exclusively. They have ours available; they'll run the applications there. No problem. The person who wants them ported is a consumer, who might become a customer if we port the applications. That would increase our market share.
But consumers who are well-served by open standards and commodity applications are unlikely to become our customers. If they have an alternate operating system and a suite of tools there that they want to stay compatible with their documents, they're probably not going to buy our application anyway. They probably have some alternate application already.
I don't like the standards process, myself. It's too long and convoluted and produces design-by-committee guidelines. If you want some radical new feature, you have to either break the standard, or wait forever while the committee thinks about it. It's just so much faster to shove it in a product and see what people think; if they like it, THEN we can move it to the standards track. This is what agile methodology and open source development are all about; scratch the itch, iterate rapidly, and gather user feedback.
I'm seeing a lot of apparent confusion where people's mindset seems to be "selfish = evil". That's enlightening. It also feeds right back into the charitable contribution thing where "unselfish = good". I wonder how much of this is a cultural perception that the Self is evil while the Other is good? Do for yourself, evil; do for others, good. Hm. Worth considering.
I actually understand that Real is doing okay with the mobile thing. They certainly have a strong presence there, and they don't seem to be on the way to bankruptcy anytime soon.
I liked RealAudio. I was sort of sad when I had to go over my website converting all the large sound files to MP3. I've often been the last holdout of an obsolete technology when everyone else has switched.
> No matter how hard you try, GMail will not be > as fast, as secure or as stable as a local, > native, mail client.
What about on a public terminal? A local, native mail client isn't an option. GMail is then a hell of a lot better than nothing. What would you propose instead?
There *are* times that AJAX is a good solution. Just because you don't run into them doesn't mean they don't exist.
Yeah, the price has been going up. When I signed up, it was $99. It's still a hell of a bargain; they've added a lot of software to it since the early days.
> Software is fundamentally different than hardware. > There is a real benefit to one-size-fits-all.
Putting DOS on the machine doesn't make it not fit other things. It just makes it not NEED other things. I still wiped a lot of machines to install Coherent.
> The other major reason is that MS started > out with a monopoly in the PC market.
Okay, so the second reason we should have handled the software differently was because we didn't. Pardon me if I don't find that logic compelling.
> Microsoft, like all other companies, tries > to maintain and even increase its marketshare. > To us, that is effectively an effort to spread > the use of shitty software.
What I see over here is that we have software with quality X, and we build a new version with quality Y, such that X Y. If you define "shitty" as Z, and Y Z, then the software is still shitty. But doesn't it count for something that it's now LESS shitty?
If not, doesn't that essentially mean that Microsoft can't do anything right short of producing Microsoft Linux, which would be a massive failure along the lines of a "First Satanist Church of Christ"?
Criticism is useful when you can do something about it. If we can't do anything about it, why keep criticising?
I don't believe this is true. Consider RealNetworks. When they led the pack in streaming audio with the RealAudio format, they made a deal to put that technology in Windows Media Player. They were going to make a lot of money from that deal. Microsoft, in turn, were going to get a great popular format supported in Media Player.
Hearsay follows. I have no proof or inside information on this; I was just living in the Seattle area when it happened, and everyone was talking about it. Some or all of it may be apocryphal.
When the time came to integrate the RA support into MP, Real supposedly delivered a crippled version of the technology that only worked at low bit rates and advertised Real's own Media Player replacement when higher bit rates were encountered. Microsoft rejected the submission, demanding that they provide a version that played all bit rates and didn't advertise the Media Player replacement. Real complied, sort of - they linked their logo to the web site for their Media Player replacement instead of their home page, and fixed the player to downsample high bit rates instead of refusing to play them. You still couldn't get the higher bit rates without paying Real and replacing Windows Media Player.
When Microsoft went back and complained, Real smugly observed that they were the 800-pound gorilla in the streaming audio space, and Microsoft should already know how that works. So Microsoft told them where to shove their technology, and built their own WMA format. Now Real is an also-ran, doing most of their business in the mobile market.
Is this because Microsoft is intolerant of competition, or because they are intolerant of being cheated? More to the point, wasn't Real trying to cheat *us*, too? Didn't Microsoft also make the choice that was best for us, siding with the consumer instead of with their business partner?
I've not always been on Microsoft's side in this argument, but I've seen a pattern: Microsoft, since the DOJ debacle, *appear* to be making an honest effort to do the Right Thing. They also appear to be getting pretty good at figuring out what the Right Thing is. I'm wondering why the rest of the world doesn't see this.
The fundamental confusion for me is that when you say something is "evil", you don't just mean that its effects are bad, you mean that the effects were INTENTIONALLY bad.
So to use the "bad for the environment" example, Microsoft would only be "evil" if someone were sitting in a room somewhere saying "With the release of Vista, millions of components containing toxic chemicals will be thrown away and damage the environment, MUAHAHAHAHA!!!!!" - because if that doesn't happen, any detrimental effect that happens isn't evil; it's just bad.
I'd take issue with the idea that Microsoft is a "bad" company, too, but at least I'd understand the reasoning. My company had a great email client in development, and then every email client on the planet decided to be free. Waste of time and effort to bring it to market now. I can understand that this might be called "bad", although I can also understand that if you want an email client, having all the available options drop from $40 to free is far from being a "bad" thing.
But when you propose that Microsoft was being "evil" and made its email client free because it wanted to ruin everybody else's business, I get a little skeptical.
> they are guilty of misdeeds which have not > and cannot be corrected
If they cannot be corrected, then why does it matter if they have not been? Indeed, why does it matter at all? Guilt only has relevance when there's something that can be done to correct it. Once it's beyond that point, it's just history.
> Some lost $50 by being forced to buy Dos or > Windows.
Oh, please. How many times have I been forced to buy features I didn't want or need on my motherboard? I have a SCSI RAID box and don't need IDE on my machine, but that's too bad. I never use floppies and don't need a floppy drive, but that's too bad. I'm building a server and don't need graphics or sound, but that's too bad. I buy things I don't need on my machines all the time, because if you put it on everything, it gets cheaper for everybody. Why should the software have been handled differently?
> Others lost their livelihoods by daring to > compete on a rigged playing field.
The field is always rigged. If you can't handle the competition, don't play.
Slashdot Mirror
> a lot of us have bad, bad memories of old Microsoft software
;)
;)
I'm getting the same impression. It seems like all the accusations of "evil" come from the 3.x and 9x era; there's not much in the past five years. I chalk the problems back then up to "we learned how to do business from IBM", and "we had to figure out how else we could do business". And since I agreed that Microsoft was a right bastard of a company right up until about 1998, and remained massively disapproving of them through about 2002, I'm not learning a lot about why Microsoft is considered evil *today* except that some people can't drop a grudge.
Which is still worth learning, but I'm more interested in things we could conceivably fix. We can't change our past. Microsoft Bob is always going to be in there, no matter what we do.
> (*cough* IIS *cough* *cough*)
I love ASP.
That's all I have to say about that.
You can probably read between the lines.
> a lot of techies KNOW that microsoft is big enough
> that the entire computing industry pays the price
> for their mistakes
What should we do about this?
I mean, I'm of the opinion that the answer here is that some group of companies need to step up and collectively seize 30-40% market share on the desktop. I don't care if that's split 20/20 or 10/30 or 10/10/20 or whatever. But fundamentally, the problem with Microsoft's bigness is that nobody else seems even remotely competent to do that.
If I ever have the political clout to be taken seriously, I may actually go to Microsoft and say "let's auction a snapshot of the current Windows source to the highest bidder". I think Microsoft has to take the lead and actively *create* a viable competitor. This notion is, of course, dangerously insane (as an informal survey of my immediate colleagues confirms). But since I have roughly the same clout as the average intern, it's not going to reach anyone important anyway. Yet.
> the biggest ones I see are the Activation, the DRM, and
> the transparent look they ripped off of apple.
Vista's benefits are mostly under the hood. It's dogs that aren't barking. You sort of have to wait a while before you can tell.
> Honestly, unless Microsoft makes a concerted effort to
> make me feel like it's putting my *personal* needs above
You want a company with hundreds of millions of customers to demonstrate to you that it cares about your personal needs?
Doesn't that strike you as a little unrealistic?
I recently had an argument about someone here regarding PowerPoint. He wanted a particular feature. He didn't understand why we didn't immediately shove it into the product. I explained that it wouldn't work in most circumstances, and he replied that he didn't care.
Well, we don't get to say that.
Microsoft isn't allowed to not care. When a feature goes into Office, we're not allowed to say "this isn't what millions of people want, but those five guys in Nebraska will sure appreciate it". We have to care about those millions of people. And increasingly, what those millions of people want is not to see any new buttons that do things they don't want done.
So when we say "this feature is not good enough", that isn't Microsoft not caring about your needs. It's Microsoft caring about millions of other people's needs. And the evidence of that is a dog that doesn't bark: you *don't* see a new button on the toolbar that does something you never do. Every time we release a new version of Office, tens of thousands of bad ideas DIDN'T get into it.
Of course, it's probably not very reassuring to say what amounts to "hey, I know you think Vista sucks, but it was GONNA suck a WHOLE LOT WORSE!"
> I think you will find most people who poopoo
> MS have slightly different reasoning than the
> Klan.
Yes, but their logic is still often contradictory.
> 1. Microsoft has broken the law, and a fairly
> major one, and avoided punishment.
Weren't we handed a whole stack of injunctions and requirements? That's not avoiding punishment.
> 2. Microsoft has leveraged their immense wealth,
> and corporate/social impact, in trying to avoid
> laws in Europe
Isn't that business as usual in Europe? You bribe this official, and bribe that official, and hire this official's nephew, and donate to that official's fundraiser - or else they enforce a completely ludicrous requirement that locals don't have to follow? That's the way I remember it.
> 3. Microsoft has a history of dealing in bad
> faith, and using destructive and vindictive
> business practices.
Isn't that business as usual in America? "Do unto others before they do unto you"? It's not like much larger and richer companies weren't laughing at us and calling us stupid when we were starting out, then using the very same destructive and vindictive techniques against us when we actually started to succeed.
> 4. Microsoft has a history of offering unready,
> ill conceived software to the market
Isn't that at the heart of the open source model? Release early, release often?
From the right perspective, your argument looks self-contradictory. Just like the Klan; when they claim black men are lazy welfare jockeys *and* take white people's jobs, you sort of have to scratch your head.
However, I'll accept that you consider the company worthy of rebuke and bad. I understand that. It's the "evil" part I don't get.
You don't want to make more money than your neighbor?
You don't want a bigger TV set? A nicer car? A prettier girlfriend? MORE girlfriends?
If not, how much of that is because you actually don't want it, and how much is because you simply don't think you can get it, or would rather have something else?
I mean, my neighbor has a BMW. I don't. It's not that I wouldn't like having a BMW, but it's largely that there are other things I would like more. I'll happily drive my Oldsmobile, which is hardly a piece of garbage, and use my money to buy guitars and computers instead. My neighbor with the BMW doesn't have a guitar. My other neighbor does; in fact, he has a really nice one. But mine is nicer, and I like that.
What's wrong with that?
> No. Visual Studio is tied to windows to prop window sales
Who the hell buys Windows to run Visual Studio?
> getting users hooked on Office back in the day, and then
> vigorously seeking to modify the file format to make it
> harder to work with.
We don't score any points for recently releasing that format to a standards body, huh? So we lose for what we did ten years ago, but what we did last year doesn't count. Real fair and balanced, there.
> using proprietary undocumented file formats,
(like everyone else)
> exploiting internal API functions,
(like everyone else)
> purposefully messing existing apps
(like everyone else)
> not supporting industry standards
If your standards weren't so implicitly predicated on a 32-bit operating environment with a flat memory model, we might have been able to implement them on a 16-bit processor with a segmented memory model. But they were, so we really couldn't.
> Why doesn't IE follow the W3C standards?
It does. There are only a few minor incompatibilities. Firefox has some, too.
> I'm holding my breath until Office can open
> StarOffice documents.
That will probably happen sometime after someone sends me a StarOffice document I need to open. Which will be, hmm, roughly... never.
Nobody uses StarOffice. That's why it sucks, and has always sucked, and will always suck. It's a dancing bear - it isn't that it dances well, but it's just amazing that it dances at all. Every time I've ever opened StarOffice to try and do something, I've generally realised that I could do it faster and better in vi, which would also be a lot less likely to crash.
> it's the fact that it is *forced* on many of
> us is the real problem
What is the alternative?
A company must standardise on a platform so its IT department can specialise. That platform should be something that people are comfortable using, that is interoperable with other companies, and for which support staff are readily available.
What else qualifies? The Linux and Mac communities are just too small. Not enough rank and file office workers can use them. Not enough other companies are standardised on them. Not enough available IT staff can support them. The choice of Windows has effectively become a tautology: people choose Windows because people choose Windows.
> improved engineering had little to do with it
> in the mid-1990s when this monopoly was
> carefully being built.
How careful did we need to be in a market where there was no serious competitor? UNIX in its official form was up to a hundred times the cost. FreeBSD engineers were in short supply and quite rightly demanded massive salaries. Linux was still effectively a toy. DOS was dead. OS/2 was dying. BeOS was barely trying.
And as I recall, Windows 95 was a quantum leap in quality over Windows 3.1, where we were still being criticised for requiring DOS underneath it. Of course, once we welded DOS and Windows tightly together, we were criticised for not really getting rid of DOS - the new system still inherited many of its limitations - and for not allowing people to choose DOS alone without Windows.
Because we can't win. Every advance closes a door through which someone thinks we should have gone.
> someone should have been jailed for the
> so-called School Agreement
Licensing! My specialty. *cracks knuckles* Probably the wrong rhetorical move.
The School Agreement is one of THREE licensing options available to K-12 institutions. (The Campus Agreement is applicable to higher education, but is grouped with the same two other options.) The other two are Academic Open and Academic Select. If you're looking at the School/Campus Agreement (which requires at least 300 machines), you probably want to compare with Academic Select (which requires at least 250 machines). Academic Open has no minimum, but the price break isn't as big.
> To paraphrase, if I donated 100 Linux /
> OpenOffice PCs to my local school, Microsoft
> would still get an annual fee for each of
> those PCs, even though Microsoft did nothing
> to earn that money.
Wrong.
1. Your school owes NOTHING for those 100 PCs unless and until they renew the School Agreement, which may have a term of one or three years.
2. Your school receives licenses for those 100 PCs at no additional cost under the terms of this agreement.
3. At the conclusion of the agreement, if you do not want to pay for licenses on those 100 PCs, you may at your option switch to the Academic Select program - which does not require you to license every eligible PC.
This is precisely why you SHOULD NOT (RFC 2119) try to make licensing decisions without the advice and guidance of someone properly educated in the appropriate licensing options.
> You wouldn't be so confused if you had been working
> for Digital Research
Digital Research faced a massive threat. They refused to acknowledge, accept, or handle that threat. They died. It's a damn shame - I liked DR, I consider them the originators of DOS as we knew it, and DR-DOS 6 was IMO far superior to the MS product - but that's how the market works.
> if you'd ever had to actually pay your money to
> upgrade perfectly good software because Microsoft
> was foisting another incompatible memory dump file
> format on the world.
Could you tell me more about this? I don't really have enough information to respond intelligently.
I *might* have a good answer for you: Borland once demanded that I pay $120 plus shipping to upgrade to Borland C++ 3.1 when I lost my 3.0 install disk, and when I explained that I needed 3.0 disks so I could produce 16-bit binaries - they told me I couldn't have them unless I first upgraded to 3.1 and then paid for a support ticket. That seems like a similar situation. However, rather than pay their extortionary fees, I simply switched to Watcom, which is the beauty of competition.
But sometimes there is no competition, in which case this little anecdote is meaningless.
> if you had to pay for a copy of software that you'd
> never use
I do that pretty much every time I set up a Linux box. I think I have two white-box Linux machines, and all the rest of them (about two dozen) have the little MS license key attached to them. None of them are running Windows, and the Windows license these keys represent is only good on that hardware, so it's useless to me elsewhere.
However, when I compare the price of this commodity hardware on a shelf at Best Buy to the price of white-box components plus shipping plus waiting two weeks for delivery, I find that I actually save money. Roughly $200, last time I did the math.
I am not willing to spend $200 over the principle that I should actually be saving $340. I agree that there is a principle there; but I caution you that the actual savings of not getting that OEM license are nowhere near the retail price. So it's not even really about $340. It's more like $220, for the big box retailers who buy lots of licenses.
> You'd probably had a clue if you had worked at BeOS
I was one of the early registered BeOS developers. Do you actually want my analysis of what went wrong there, or are you just betting I don't know about it?
> You can't see the the evil because you have your
> head up your managers butt
I'd expect that in an evil company, that's where the evil would be most visible.
I think the video game industry needs to stop bankrolling projects off a few blockbuster titles, and instead bankroll them from a massive library of reliable inexpensive titles.
Just a thought.
> Why is the IDE so desperately tied to the
> platform and compiler?
Because tight coupling reduces surface area, and reduced surface area increases security, reliability, and performance.
That's a valid design decision. You might not like it - I certainly don't - but it's a valid decision.
> MSFT does only what's best in interests AT
> THE EXPENSE of what is actually good for the
> end users.
How exactly are you *worse* off now that Microsoft has released Visual Studio? Nothing was removed from the market. You were not forced to change compilers, or platforms, or IDEs. You remain just as well-off as you already were.
What has changed is your understanding of what you COULD have. You look at Visual Studio, and you say "I want that for Linux and GCC", and there is a massive open source community whose job it is to give you that. When they don't do it, it isn't Microsoft's fault.
It takes a truly twisted mind to claim that when Microsoft makes things better for one class of users, they're really making things worse for another one. Why not just forbid Microsoft to do anything?
> it isn't like MSFT internal standards are any
> easier. They're just easier
Oh, I see. They're not easier - just easier.
Wait, no, I don't see at all.
> People accept "ugly and ineffective" with computers and that's a shame
I would actually argue that people seek out ugly and ineffective tools in a classical confusion of cause and effect: they believe that by using an ugly and ineffective tool, they will appear to be brilliant and experienced users. Conversely, they avoid pretty and elegant tools because they don't want to look like dumb novices.
Instead, they get an ugly and ineffective tool they don't understand, and have no hope in hell of doing a decent job with it. This makes them look like dumb novices to everyone except... dumb novices. The learning curve is steep, so they look like that for a much longer time. Meanwhile, the dumb novice who got the pretty and elegant tool has rapidly outgrown it, moved on to the ugly and ineffective tool - and recognised the other guy for the dumb novice he is.
The Mac commercials are not helping this phenomenon. Indeed, they are encouraging it.
> The reason people hate Microsoft is because
> [...] Microsoft seems completely unphased.
I'm somewhat surprised at this.
We threw our cash-cow codebase out the window and started from scratch. We rebuilt our entire design, code, test, and review structure. We constructed an entire operating system on the fundamental pillars of security, networking, and usability.
And we seem unphased?
What, exactly, isn't good enough about throwing everything out and starting from scratch? That's exactly what I was saying needed to be done ten years ago. The biggest motivator for me to reconsider Microsoft's place in the world was when I saw them actually... well, let's be honest, agreeing with me. They were doing what I thought they should do. I liked that. It's one of the reasons I came to work here, which I would never have done five years ago.
But I'm honestly curious. What was the Right Thing in *your* opinion? How should Microsoft have responded to the court decisions? What should we have done?
> May it be that you look upon Microsoft in
;)
> a way that is more positive than they
> actually earn?
I doubt it. I was pretty viciously anti-Microsoft for years before I started noticing the changes, and remained skeptical for a few more years before coming to work here. I still question pretty much everything we do.
I do give Microsoft credit for things the outsider doesn't see. When I first got here, I got in an argument with somebody over standards support in IE7. I went to see if the IE team had any documentation on the issue at hand, and I found a massive archive of email discussion among the team about standards.
While I can't talk about the specifics, due to confidentiality and all that, I got to see what was important to the team and why they made the decisions they did. So while I might not agree with a particular decision about a particular part of the standard, I'm a lot more accepting of it because I can see why that decision was made and that my concerns were taken into account.
I think a lot of people, being unable to see that, will bring up some issue and think Microsoft simply never thought about it. Within the company, we can see that the issue was hotly debated for an extended period of time, but we can't explain precisely what was debated or why we made the final decision - so we're stuck saying "no, really, we thought about that... we just didn't end up doing it". And that's not very convincing.
> People think msft is evil because they rarely
> do things in the customers best interest.
You're confusing the consumer with the customer. The customer is someone who already buys and uses our product. The consumer is anyone who MIGHT buy and use our product.
Porting applications to another O/S is not for our customers. Our customers don't use another O/S exclusively. They have ours available; they'll run the applications there. No problem. The person who wants them ported is a consumer, who might become a customer if we port the applications. That would increase our market share.
But consumers who are well-served by open standards and commodity applications are unlikely to become our customers. If they have an alternate operating system and a suite of tools there that they want to stay compatible with their documents, they're probably not going to buy our application anyway. They probably have some alternate application already.
I don't like the standards process, myself. It's too long and convoluted and produces design-by-committee guidelines. If you want some radical new feature, you have to either break the standard, or wait forever while the committee thinks about it. It's just so much faster to shove it in a product and see what people think; if they like it, THEN we can move it to the standards track. This is what agile methodology and open source development are all about; scratch the itch, iterate rapidly, and gather user feedback.
I'm seeing a lot of apparent confusion where people's mindset seems to be "selfish = evil". That's enlightening. It also feeds right back into the charitable contribution thing where "unselfish = good". I wonder how much of this is a cultural perception that the Self is evil while the Other is good? Do for yourself, evil; do for others, good. Hm. Worth considering.
I actually understand that Real is doing okay with the mobile thing. They certainly have a strong presence there, and they don't seem to be on the way to bankruptcy anytime soon.
I liked RealAudio. I was sort of sad when I had to go over my website converting all the large sound files to MP3. I've often been the last holdout of an obsolete technology when everyone else has switched.
> No matter how hard you try, GMail will not be
> as fast, as secure or as stable as a local,
> native, mail client.
What about on a public terminal? A local, native mail client isn't an option. GMail is then a hell of a lot better than nothing. What would you propose instead?
There *are* times that AJAX is a good solution. Just because you don't run into them doesn't mean they don't exist.
Yeah, the price has been going up. When I signed up, it was $99. It's still a hell of a bargain; they've added a lot of software to it since the early days.
> Kind of proves the point.
It's *insightful* to say that when someone else is evil, that proves Microsoft's evil nature, because surely Microsoft was going to be evil anyway?
You people are on crack.
Ooh! Ooh! Is it something daleks say? ;)
I'm a registered Microsoft Software Advisor. It's my business to know about licensing.
So with that out of the way: what he said.
This isn't rocket science, people. Read your licenses. If you don't like them, complain.
> Software is fundamentally different than hardware.
> There is a real benefit to one-size-fits-all.
Putting DOS on the machine doesn't make it not fit other things. It just makes it not NEED other things. I still wiped a lot of machines to install Coherent.
> The other major reason is that MS started
> out with a monopoly in the PC market.
Okay, so the second reason we should have handled the software differently was because we didn't. Pardon me if I don't find that logic compelling.
> I'm just not going to mince words about it.
That's actually appreciated.
> Microsoft, like all other companies, tries
> to maintain and even increase its marketshare.
> To us, that is effectively an effort to spread
> the use of shitty software.
What I see over here is that we have software with quality X, and we build a new version with quality Y, such that X Y. If you define "shitty" as Z, and Y Z, then the software is still shitty. But doesn't it count for something that it's now LESS shitty?
If not, doesn't that essentially mean that Microsoft can't do anything right short of producing Microsoft Linux, which would be a massive failure along the lines of a "First Satanist Church of Christ"?
Criticism is useful when you can do something about it. If we can't do anything about it, why keep criticising?
> I also think that you are a little evil
;)
> because, when you went looking for a job,
> you didn't care that MS was considered evil
I wouldn't say I didn't CARE, I'd say I didn't AGREE. Five years ago I had a different perspective.
> And, against my will, I am starting to see
> MS in a more positive light.
Our open source lab is hiring for the Linux interoperability project with Novell.
You know, just in case you're looking.
> desire to dominate the industry
Isn't this normal?
> complete intolerance of competition
I don't believe this is true. Consider RealNetworks. When they led the pack in streaming audio with the RealAudio format, they made a deal to put that technology in Windows Media Player. They were going to make a lot of money from that deal. Microsoft, in turn, were going to get a great popular format supported in Media Player.
Hearsay follows. I have no proof or inside information on this; I was just living in the Seattle area when it happened, and everyone was talking about it. Some or all of it may be apocryphal.
When the time came to integrate the RA support into MP, Real supposedly delivered a crippled version of the technology that only worked at low bit rates and advertised Real's own Media Player replacement when higher bit rates were encountered. Microsoft rejected the submission, demanding that they provide a version that played all bit rates and didn't advertise the Media Player replacement. Real complied, sort of - they linked their logo to the web site for their Media Player replacement instead of their home page, and fixed the player to downsample high bit rates instead of refusing to play them. You still couldn't get the higher bit rates without paying Real and replacing Windows Media Player.
When Microsoft went back and complained, Real smugly observed that they were the 800-pound gorilla in the streaming audio space, and Microsoft should already know how that works. So Microsoft told them where to shove their technology, and built their own WMA format. Now Real is an also-ran, doing most of their business in the mobile market.
Is this because Microsoft is intolerant of competition, or because they are intolerant of being cheated? More to the point, wasn't Real trying to cheat *us*, too? Didn't Microsoft also make the choice that was best for us, siding with the consumer instead of with their business partner?
I've not always been on Microsoft's side in this argument, but I've seen a pattern: Microsoft, since the DOJ debacle, *appear* to be making an honest effort to do the Right Thing. They also appear to be getting pretty good at figuring out what the Right Thing is. I'm wondering why the rest of the world doesn't see this.
No. They're selfish. There's a difference.
The fundamental confusion for me is that when you say something is "evil", you don't just mean that its effects are bad, you mean that the effects were INTENTIONALLY bad.
So to use the "bad for the environment" example, Microsoft would only be "evil" if someone were sitting in a room somewhere saying "With the release of Vista, millions of components containing toxic chemicals will be thrown away and damage the environment, MUAHAHAHAHA!!!!!" - because if that doesn't happen, any detrimental effect that happens isn't evil; it's just bad.
I'd take issue with the idea that Microsoft is a "bad" company, too, but at least I'd understand the reasoning. My company had a great email client in development, and then every email client on the planet decided to be free. Waste of time and effort to bring it to market now. I can understand that this might be called "bad", although I can also understand that if you want an email client, having all the available options drop from $40 to free is far from being a "bad" thing.
But when you propose that Microsoft was being "evil" and made its email client free because it wanted to ruin everybody else's business, I get a little skeptical.
> they are guilty of misdeeds which have not
> and cannot be corrected
If they cannot be corrected, then why does it matter if they have not been? Indeed, why does it matter at all? Guilt only has relevance when there's something that can be done to correct it. Once it's beyond that point, it's just history.
> Some lost $50 by being forced to buy Dos or
> Windows.
Oh, please. How many times have I been forced to buy features I didn't want or need on my motherboard? I have a SCSI RAID box and don't need IDE on my machine, but that's too bad. I never use floppies and don't need a floppy drive, but that's too bad. I'm building a server and don't need graphics or sound, but that's too bad. I buy things I don't need on my machines all the time, because if you put it on everything, it gets cheaper for everybody. Why should the software have been handled differently?
> Others lost their livelihoods by daring to
> compete on a rigged playing field.
The field is always rigged. If you can't handle the competition, don't play.