Why Does Everyone Hate Microsoft? 1540
MrSplog asks: "I'm doing a short project on Microsoft and its impact on society. A considerable part of this project has been looking into people's perceptions of Microsoft and the heavily negative bias of that perception. Since Slashdot is one of the world's forefront leaders on Microsoft hatred, I wanted to know: just why do you hate Microsoft? Please be as descriptive and as thorough as you like. Counter arguments and positive comments are also appreciated."
I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Saying all that, I actually had a pretty good Micron PC running Win 95 that was remarkably stable. Of course upgrading it to Win98 was a unmitigated disaster. Win NT was a very stable OS, that was just cryptic to use and administer. Win2000 was pretty decent, and it almost made me switch my home system from MacOS to Win200, but like most products they have simply used their monopoly status to make the right changes very late in the game if ever. How long did it take them to adopt all characters for file names?
Where I really started getting disgusted with their business was after I saw company after company run out of business due to business practices that bordered on illegal and in some cases blatantly crossed the legal line. I always tended to prefer the MacOS, but was fairly platform agnostic (using Windows, Solaris, Linux, Irix, MacOS) for whichever task needed the appropriate platform, but with the advent of OS X, I've become a strong advocate for the Macintosh platform which brings up another issue entirely.... Microsoft has for decades now used Apple as their R&D lab. It's an obvious and well known joke, but if you are familiar with OS X, just wait until you get to play with Vista. Come on now, there are some very smart folks at Microsoft, so why can't they come up with ideas and products on their own? My take on it is that it is an efficiency issue combined with a management issue with too much oversight at the early and mid stages of the game. For instance, how many programmers are there on the Windows development team? Its in the thousands for sure, perhaps tens of thousands all told. For OS X, the number of full on programmers numbers in the hundreds. Under 300 for sure last time I checked a couple of years ago. The whole Quicktime team numbers around 30-40 whereas the Microsoft Media Player team is well into the hundreds. We could go on and on here, but to answer your question, this scientist at least does not hate Microsoft. I've just watched the company for years, purchased some of their products and have found a product from another company (Apple) that meets my needs and does not get in the way of my work the way Microsoft products tend to do.
There's no reason to hate Microsoft anymore. (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides which, they'll be gone in 10 years anyways. That's not a rimshot. Shit, it's not even an original thought. It's just the way things are going.
Microsoft has an agenda (Score:2, Interesting)
It's no different than any other corporation except it has become extremely successful, and has not exercised the highest standards of business practices. However, given the nature of the business, it's not doing anything that any other corporation would not do. Using all it's resources to be the most profitable it fan be.
I also think that a lot of people bash Microsoft because it's easy, and because they sound smart doing it. It's easy to sound smart when you are saying why things are bad. The more forceful you sound, the more reaasonable your argument. Most people don't understand/know/care enough to refute the argument.
Other people think that MS charges too much for product. Well, if you don't like it don't buy it. It's not my fault your on welfare.
Lack of humility? NIH? (Score:5, Interesting)
When NT was first announced, I thought it was the coolest thing since bottled beer. The protected mode subsystems looked like a way to consolidate the APIs of multiple systems. As smoebody who'd already programmed Unix, PDP-11 (RSX), VAX-VMS, MVS, Univac, CDC, etc in the years prior, I thought NT was going to totally rock. It had the potential to subsume everything around it.
Little by little, the OS/2 compatibility evaporated, X-Windows was declared "brain dead", it went beyond embrace and extend, it became Microsoft's way or the highway.
I still wonder - if MS had supported POSIX / UNIX APIs in a protected mode subsystem, would Linux have really "happened"?
Alan.
People hate their ____ providers (Score:2, Interesting)
Criticism of Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I think most of the slimy stuff is due to business decisions. I know a lot of people that work there, and they are generally hard working, intelligent people that sincerely want to impact people's lives for the better, and see Microsoft's large market share as a way to actually make a difference. If the devs were in charge, or if they had scrupulous and competent businessmen, it would be a much different company. The fish rots from the head.
The recent change in leadership is promising, but I'm definitely in the "wait and see" camp. You know, the "buy a mac while I wait and see" camp. Hey, Disney is turning around. It could happen.
What could have been. (Score:2, Interesting)
I liked BeOS, more than Linux, more than Apple. I though OS/2 was better than Windows but was not a fan of IBM at the time. I liked WordPerfect more than Office. In fact for each set of software Microsoft has, the alternative that was destroyed I liked before it died a horrible death due to a monopoly tie in. All because Bill Gates was able to sell DOS to IBM, before he actually bought the program from the developer. But good placement, good timing and there are wonderful things Microsoft has done for computing, but their defense of their market monopoly has destroyed some beautiful what could have beens.
Re:Isn't it obvious? (Score:2, Interesting)
That's exactly it. Apart perhaps from their Office Suite (which is still 50% shit when you throw in Publisher and Access and all that other crap), every alternative to a Microsoft product usually blows it out of the water.
There might be a few guys who really hate Microsft, but most of us are just sick of having to use their crap.
Lack of options (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't really hate them per se... (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't like being crammed into an unnecesarily GUI environment. I like the simplicity of scripting and automation that comes with a real command line environment.
I don't like giving up control of my computer. Microsoft is always pushing one thing after another which all take control away from me, the user, in the name of making things easier or safer or some other nonsense. Things that fall under this category are the following: DRM / Trusted Computing, Hiding of system files, Hiding of file extensions, animated toolbars, the fact that IE takes any web server error (40x, 50x, host not found, connection timed out, etc...) and puts up the same uninformative dumbed down error message up. I really want to know the details, and it hides them.
I don't like their pushing of various fad programming models in their development tools. I remember when I upgraded from Visual C++ 5 to VC6 they had taken the raw win32 calls out of the table of contents, so if you looked things up that way, you'd see the MFC way first, unless you knew the calls already, in which case the index could turn them up. When I upgraded again, they had taken the calls out of the index too, but a full text search of the help turned up some examples... There is NO EXCUSE to EVER hide documentation from users, much less DEVELOPERS. I recognize that they are trying to wean people off of win32 so they can go to a more hardware independent
So, yeah, basicly I have largely negative feelings about Microsoft because they don't do a terribly good job of meeting my needs, which wouldn't be such a big deal, except that as a near-monopoly they try very hard to stamp out competing systems that may actually meet my needs quite well. They aren't stamping them out to keep my dollar, they're just doing it in case any of those competing solutions actually turns out better than Windows and draws mainstream users away. As such, they are definitely pissing on my [figurative] corn flakes.
still be using IBM PC's? (Score:2, Interesting)
First off, it's not 'hate'... (Score:5, Interesting)
...It's contempt. 8^)
Okay, I jest. There are number of very good reasons the like Microsoft - their office automation products do make life easier - but it's just not enough for me. The fundamental problems are threefold:
There's no way to guarantee my work. (This is actually a complaint about proprietary software in general, but Microsoft is the worst about this.) On two or three significant occasions, I have been completely burned after commitments that I made to a client based on technical assurances I'd received that proved to be false. I've been forced into unsustainable situations because there was a huge gap between what the product promised to do and what it actually did. Dealing with the last 20% of any task is difficult at the best of times, but the number of times on Windows that I've been forced to accept that things are never going to run as designed because of shortcomings in the technology... they're too many to count.
Ultimately, the only way I could maintain my professional reputation (and my pride) was to walk away from the Microsoft Windows platform completely and to live with Linux and FOSS. It's not that it's better, per se, but at least I can make things work exactly as they're designed, without being completely at the mercy of someone else's market research and development cycle. In the worst case scenario, I can always keep a client happy by paying someone to provide a patch expressly for them. I may lose my shirt on that contract, but I'll never have a pissed-off client, and in my business, that's golden.
They're holding us back. I did a back-of-the-napkin calculation the other day, to see how much time I'd spent that week dealing with Windows' shortcomings instead of actually improving our systems. It was a fairly direct equation, because I was working on developing a really cool network monitoring toolkit that week. Every hour I spent at someone else's desk cleaning up crap delayed the arrival of this very useful tool by an hour. I calculated that I work 30% slower than I could do if I didn't have to deal with spyware, trojans, spambots etc.
That's insane. Seriously. People who don't know anything besides Microsoft will tell you that exploits happen to everyone, that if it wasn't MS, it would be someone else. But it just ain't so. Today's Word exploit is stunning evidence that Microsoft practices... whatever the opposite of security is. No I don't mean 'insecure'; they're apps are that, but their design is more like 'anti-secure'. I mean, who in their right mind stores pointers for memory move operations in a word processing file?
They are trying to break the Internet. The first points disappointed me, as a geek. But this point makes me angry. For Microsoft, dominance is not sufficient. They don't play to win; they play to destroy. And the tactics they use are bad for everyone. They oppose open systems, protocols - anything that makes it easier for people to share. This selfishness of spirit is manifest in every aspect of their business, and it impacts directly on my ability to do my job.
I don't mind having to explain the relative merits of a FOSS solution to an MS-only one. But when I have to respond to lies that are spread about my stock in trade, I get upset. When I spend more time countering FUD than actually talking tech, I get upset.
This is not competition. This is the opposite. It's playing dirty. It's cheating, and I'm tired of it.
real porgrams don't eat cache (Score:2, Interesting)
the last apple os i used was 7.11. there was no sense in switching to 7.5. at about the same time i started using windows nt 3.5 (not 3.51, that came later). the switch took nothing. i was tired of one app bringing down the whole os.
*anyone* who tells you differently is wrong. try developing web applications in the early 90's on mac; you're toast.
however history since then is another ball of wax. in a parallel universe i would have worked at spyglass before MS licensed the code, and would have made mad cheddar. but no.
ever since that period in time MS's arrogance has made me their eternal antagonist. they don't own their own IP stack, they stole it from BSD. i used BeOS, until such time as it was no longer a viable option, mostly for reasons of drivers.
in short, they say 'innovation', they mean ' IP theft from those not willing to sue us'. they say 'interoperability', they mean 'vendor lock-in'. no matter, and here's why...
in 6-12 months they will be largely irelevant. (oops, am i not supposed to say that?). for at least the past year now, and probably more, the simple truth is that i can live w/o MS, but i can't live w/o google.
sooner, rather than later, the simple fact of that statement will be evident. and at that time i will have a gBox. a device with enough built-in solid-state storage to download the latest google kernel, and then torrent the rest. how much is the rest? a browser and a bunch of codecs. how big is it? no bigger than a large hardcover. what about screen and keyboard, you say? flexible keyboard and ePaper, i say. when you ask? before vista is even a serious consideration.
and thats why its over: don't believe the hype. frankly, don't even listen to it.
vague question (Score:3, Interesting)
- Some people might "hate" MS the way they hate Hitler or Stalin.
- Some people might "hate" MS in the sense that they wish them harm. They'd get a little thrill of pleasure if they saw MS's stock take a nose-dive.
- Some people might "hate" MS in the sense that they hate getting spam from 0wned Windows boxes, or they hate it when their bank's web site only works in IE, or they hate it when people send them Word documents that could just as well have been sent as plain text, or they hate it when they're required to provide a resume in Word format.
- Some people might "hate" MS in the sense that they don't like Windows, but it's the one they have to use at work.
- Some people might "hate" MS in the sense that Windows would be their third or fourth choice of operating system, but they're perfectly happy running their first choice. (That would describe me.)
If the OP had bothered to tell us what this project was about, we might be able to help him more. Is it a school project? A business project? Is the vagueness because the OP didn't bother thinking carefully about the definition of the project, or because he has thought it through carefully, but didn't bother telling us? Are we interested in negative attitudes towards MS from the point of view of someone in the advertising business? Someone in the software business? Someone doing a case study for business school?Re:If everybody truely hated microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
I hate Microsoft's products (except Project), their business practices, their monopoly, their DRM, their lack of ethics, their EULA which forces you to give up your freedom of speech, their proprietary file formats, their Microsoft Word specifically, and perhaps more reasons.
Regular computer users hate Microsoft for making them vulnerable to spyware, spam, viruses, being pwned, and so on.
Business users hate Microsoft for locking them in, for the BSA license compliance audits, the security holes, the endless patch/upgrade cycle, the high maintenance costs of their applications (like extensive downtime when machines need to be rebuilt due to some software failure).
Vendors hate Microsoft for releasing loss-leader products designed to kill the market (think Netscape, Windows Media, and soon antivirus products, BeOS) until Microsoft is the only one left standing.
Investors hate Microsoft (now) because their share price has nowhere to go but down (MSFT will not be able to continue growth unless they can find a new market to be in).
Music fans hate Microsoft for releasing the terminally broken Zune - and inventing the concept of squirting music files to your friends (3 plays or 3 days!);
Developing countries hate Microsoft for raping their economies (to the extent that the software isn't just pirated) because the funds flow to the USA. In many of these countries there's a visible shift towards open source and open standards.
I expect even Microsoft fanbois hate them for some reason, although I'm so different from the typical Microsoft fanboi that I can barely guess why, perhaps they got excited about some feature Microsoft trumpeted would be available in Vista (some feature so new and powerful that it will blow away the competition, like the advanced WINfs file system or the virtual folders) and then broke their promise before release date. I'm sure the fanbois hate when that happens.
Way We Were Raised (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:3, Interesting)
Also I like the fact that Microsoft has offered serious business innovation to the market which have helped to reduce the proces for everyone (along with Phoenix and COmpaq). Of course, Linux out-does Microsoft in this area, so even appreciating MS's contributions doesn't translate in thinking they are the best.
In the end, I think that MS is second-best to Linux. Therefore, it is not so much that I hate Microsoft as much as that I like Linux.
Microsoft suffers from a "because we can" syndrome. They have lots of money, so they hire lots of people to solve problems. The results usually are neither elegant nor have a really polished feel once you get to know them. It is as if they spent millions or billion of dollars developing a project and then decided to release it 90% of the way through. Microsoft products all to often feel incomplete.
Let me give you an interesting example from when I used to work at Microsoft. I was having trouble joining a workstation to a domain. I tried and tried. No luck. I spent an hour on this all by myself. I called tech support, spent an hour on the phone with them. No luck. Then I saw the problem (clock skew).
Now, in a Linux environment, NTP would be separate from Kerberos. The system would sync its clock independant of its status in the realm. But in Windows, it will only pull its time from the KDC automatically once it has joined. And there is *no easy way* to sync before joining. It is small simple things like that which make me conclude that Windows and other MS software were released before they were quite done. Interestingly David Korne made a similar statement about the Windows API.
From a non-slashdot perspective (Score:2, Interesting)
However, the bulk of the population does not have the same perspective - they don't care much about innovation, and are not aware of how much Microsoft has exploited others. but the majority of the population still doesn't like Microsoft.
Why? I'd say the main reason is that their shit doesn't work properly, and it's really expensive. Many are forced into using Microsoft products by their workplace, other believe that there is no alternative. They see glossy Microsoft ads promising freedom, but then they have to use microsoft products every day, and the experience is the opposite of freedom and happiness. It's difficult to use interfaces, and stuff that just breaks. It's losing their work to some inexplicable error. Even if the error is the fault of a third-party application, the whole computer is branded "Microsoft Windows." Literally, even hardware is sold with Windows stickers on it! They know that microsoft is a huge corporation, and can't understand why they make such a shitty thing. After all, the other things they buy - cars, TVs, stereos - mostly work well and fulfill the desired tasks. but there you have Microsoft promising the world, but it's just a pain in the ass, and doesn't make anything easier.
I think that people now just have lowered expectations of Microsoft, to avoid disappointment. It's a survival mechanism. Around the Windows 95 days, people probably thought that Microsoft could bring some small happiness into their lives - far fewer people used computers back then. But now nearly everybody has to use them every day, so they can't be optimistic - they know it's going to be a shitty experience. And they can't do anything about it. If you got a lemon of a car, you could get furious, maybe file a lawsuit, or contact Consumer Reports complaining about shoddy merchandise. But with Windows, that is pointless. Start screaming about microsoft's shoddy merchandise, and people are like "Yeah, that's what Windows is like. Didn't you know?"
Put simply, if Microsoft were a car company, they would have been run out of business years ago.
Microsoft isn't a traditional monopoly (Score:0, Interesting)
On the other hand, in the technology world, because of its low barriers to entry and quick changing situations, the tiniest of companies can challenge the largest of companies. Think about it, IBM was accused of being a monopoly. In fact, the DOJ initiated anti-trust proceedings against it, but eventually dropped it. Why? Because in time, IBM and its model of mainframe computing was unseated by more nimble competitors, such as Microsoft. Microsoft was pretty much started in a garage. Let's also not forget companies like HP as well.
And, let's take a look at some of Microsoft's largest current competitors. Linux? Started by some nerd with virtually no funds and no support. Google? Ditto! How is it possible that these products and companies can arise from virtually nothing and become some of the biggest threats to Microsoft's dominance? Easy, because in the world of technology and the Internet, things move so quickly that if a company doesn't innovate, somebody working on some website or other software product does and steals the market away. Google and Linux are phenomenal examples of that.
That Microsoft has managed to maintain its dominant position is in part due to strong handed tactics and perhaps some abuse of its position. But, for christ's sake, this is the business world. I guarantee you that virtually all of Microsoft's competitors (for instance Apple) would be just as vicious, if not more so, were they in Microsoft's place. I mean, come on, we all know how Apple treats their own fanboys and fanboy websites (remember the endless lawsuits and hardball legal tactics they used on some bloggers that only wanted to bring news to their fellow Apple fans of some of the latest and greatest Apple products?). If that's how they treat friends, think of how they would treat enemies. Can you imagine the uproar if Microsoft did the same thing? I've spent some time with Steve Jobs, and I can tell you he's a meglomaniac, and is far more Machiavellian than Bill Gates.
Microsoft remains dominant because they are relatively quick to react to changing markets. When smaller companies innovate and create a new market, Microsoft jumps in when the market becomes profitable enough. When they jump, obviously their first iteration is a pretty crappy product. The Zune? The Xbox? Pretty lousy. But what Microsoft does is continually improve to eventually, I would argue, create a product that is superior to the original market leader. Wordperfect? Lotus 1-2-3? Playstation? Netscape Navigator? I think Microsoft eventually created products that, overall, exceeded them, and the market listened.
Furthermore, I would also argue that a monopoly in the technology world can be of benefit to consumers. Monopolies can set standards that would otherwise not exist. What if Apple had 50% of the PC market? Remember when Wordperfect and Word were duking things out? I would have documents that were totally incompatible with someone else! If Apple had 50% of the market, they would make their products incompatible with PC's! The only reason that Apple software and products work relatively well with PC's now is because PC's dominate the market. If Apple had 50% of the market, I assure you that iPods would only work with Macs. And, thank God Intel is building 802.11n standards into their new laptops instead of waiting for those idiots at the standards body to debate for another two years what the actual specifications should be. I just want faster Wi-Fi now! What the hell is the delay?
In the end, we must ask ourselves if Microsoft is a monopoly. Perhaps, but I don't think in the traditional sense. Remember the main reason why monopolies should not exist... They are bad for the consume
Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:4, Interesting)
The company meeting was especially interesting. My memories of it are fading, but IIRC, before all the individual product groups made their presentations Ballmer had to get up and say a few words about the ongoing monopoly trial, and how they were getting unduly harassed by the feds. That was followed up by a demo of the brand-new XBox, which was going to crush Sony and Nintendo. And a presentation about CE, and how that was going to crush Palm. And discussion about how Outlook had just surpassed Notes. Etc etc. You just got the impression that every business they delved into they intended to crush the competition. Which is really the rational thing for a business to do-- and individually can you really fault each team for trying to outdo the competition? But on the other hand, you saw them throwing more money than innovation at getting a foothold in the console market, and using the Windows brand to purchase credibility the Palm market.
So do I hate Microsoft? No, because I try not to be a hypocrite. I believe they can dominate markets without even trying, and certainly by being only adequate. In that position, what do you do? Intentionally fuck up? Vista will show that the fuckup threshold is effectively impossible to surmount. But I dislike Microsoft. Microsoft is too powerful. The prevailing attitude these days amongst IT buyers must be "You don't get fired for buying Microsoft" ala IBM. I believe that nothing will break Microsoft's stranglehold on non-distributed computing. The only solution to that is to make that stranglehold irrelevant.
But man do I HATE it when they kill progress like with MSIE. Thank god for Firefox. Maybe they will kill progress with overboard DRM in Vista. That doesn't mean Vista will fail any more than MSIE failed to maintain 80% of the browser market...
Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the parent hit it on the head. However, I would like to add to it. So do comments below like MacOS X running on limited hardware
Microsoft has the market cornered. It is their business practices that most people don't like. For example. Embedding IE into the OS so that it cannot be removed (Windows 98 and newer,) as well of the slow adoption of new ideas. How long was IE 6.0 out before we got an update. And the update is basically Firefox [getfirefox.com] with ActiveX.
Office is just cluttered. Too many things most people don't use. They even made menus hide parts that don't get used so people can find what they do use faster. The problem is, then people don't learn about the other features, or when you're looking for a feature you know about it takes longer to find. A simple setting in options for "Basic", "Intermediate", and "Advanced" layout would allow people that want basic use (my Mother) to find what they want quickly, but I change a setting and get the Advanced user interface when I use her PC, then I can put it back just the way she's used to.
Now for the pros' and cons of Windows (and this will summarize most other products as well.)
Pros
Cons
All said, it's the monopolizing that most people don't like about Microsoft. They're greedy bastards that raise hype about half finished products and can't deliver (WinFS anyone? [msdn.com]) Like the filesystem of the future.
Re:Who did better? (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyways, the whole point of this is that claiming that Windows is better because hardware manufacturers write drivers just for them is a pretty stupid statement.
Short story that always makes me smile: my non-geeky sister (Ubuntu user - I take care of her computer) came back from the first day of her first grown-up job (for a big software company, btw). What were her first words? "Windows sucks". I know quite a few non-geeks who think Linux is ready for them (just not my mom - freecell's clone apparently is worse).
Re:My .02 cents (Score:5, Interesting)
Once upon a time I developed a proprietary solution to connect up com objects to a j2ee server, guess what happens, I get a call from a microsoft goon one day trying to buy full rights to the
code...why? Not because they wanted to use it but because they wanted to bury it.
How about foxpro? oops they bought that out and buried it, best and fastest desktop database ever
made.
How about visual studio, pretty nice tool but if you use it long enough you will start to find the
artifical walls put up to drive you further to their platform. Easy stuff is easy in visual studio, soon as you want to push the edge you run into some bug, or artificial wall put in your way.
Nope, best thing I ever did is remove them from my personal and professional life.
Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:3, Interesting)
There are plenty of fundamental design issues with Linux. Lack of true HID support for one.
Re:Slimey .. Workstation vs Server, you decide (Score:1, Interesting)
http://www.oreilly.com/news/differences_nt.html [oreilly.com]
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/2816
text from first link
For those of you interested in Windows NT, I've got some
interesting news for you. Andrew Schulman, Senior Editor at O'Reilly &
Associates, wrote this interesting article recently:
Differences Between NT Server and Workstation are Minimal
Registry Settings Used to Force Use of Microsoft Web Server
Andrew Schulman
Senior Editor, O'Reilly & Associates
[log in to unmask]
Microsoft recently introduced version 4.0 of NT Workstation (NTW) and NT
Server (NTS), and claims that there are substantial technical differences
between the Workstation and Server products. Microsoft uses this claim to
justify an $800 price difference between NTW and NTS, as well as legal
limits on web server usage in NTW, both of which have enormous impact on
existing NTW users. But what if the supposed technical differences at the
heart of NTW and NTS are mythical?
We have found that NTS and NTW have identical kernels; in fact, NT is a
single operating system with two modes. Only two registry settings are
needed to switch between these two modes in NT 4.0, and only one setting in
NT 3.51. This is extremely significant, and calls into question the related
legal limitations and costly upgrades that currently face NTW users.
Introduction
In the course of the ongoing controversy over its restriction of only ten
web connections in NT Workstation 4.0, Microsoft representatives
have asserted that there are substantial technical differences between
NT Server and NT Workstation. From this, Microsoft draws these
conclusions:
1.that these differences justify the large price difference between
the two products (street prices: NT 4.0 Workstation $260,
Server 4.0 w/ 5 client $730, Server 4.0 w/ 10 client $1080)
2.that third-party web servers such as O'Reilly WebSite or
Netscape Enterprise Server should not be run on top of the
cheaper NT Workstation product, and
3.that customers should instead buy Microsoft's more expensive
NT Server product, which comes already bundled with a "free"
web server, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS). IIS
competes with web servers from third-party vendors such as
O'Reilly and Netscape.
For example, Microsoft spokesman Mark Murray was quoted by
Reuters:
"The crux of this issue is that NT Workstation and NT
Server are two very different products intended for two
very different functions."
In fact, the recent fight between Microsoft and Netscape, including
Netscape's open letter to U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust
Division, was touched off when Microsoft sent email to Netscape,
complaining about a price comparison chart at Netscape's web site.
According to Microsoft's letter (July 30):
If the user wishes to utilize more than the ten [web]
connections, the user must license Windows NT
server.... Microsoft is also concerned
Because they put profit before quality.... (Score:5, Interesting)
For years now that company has gotten away with some of the most slapped together, rushed and verbose code on the planet. (Some VERY good code too, it's not all bad) They flat out abuse us, and take advantage of an uneducated market.
What really started it for me was back in 1996. I was building a website for my company at the time. I was "instructed" to put 3 features on the site that was ONLY supported by IE and not by Netscape. Else risk our M$ relationship, which was critical to us (video cards company).
I was so upset. Not, "only use features support by both" but they must NOT work in Netscape. I was beside myself.
Still bothers me
EULA (Score:3, Interesting)
As a result of reading the EULAs, and a bit of thought, around 1999 I started looking for alternatives. Around 2000 I decided that Linux was the best available option, and began moving. Now I have one MSWind95 computer. It's about to die a slow death, due to lack of support for more recent peripherals. If it's replaced by a computer, that computer will run Linux. It may become a free desk space (which would be, perhaps, more valuable at this time). It WON'T be upgraded to a more abusive license. I don't think I need another Mac. Another Linux is plausible...but un-allocated flat surfaces are also quite valuable.
This is going to cause me considerable hassle, even though I've known this day was coming for quite awhile. One never seems to prepare sufficiently. Their are still captive files, created by some application that didn't document it's file format, and which aren't readily exportable in more than a minimally usable manner. Perhaps I'll get through this bottleneck (i.e., finding a color ink-jet printer that will print to MSWind95 via a centronics port). If I do though, this is just a warning signpost. Obsolescence nears. (The computer isn't obsolete yet...but MSWind95 doesn't handle USB connections. And doesn't handle the CD drive created by VMWare. I can't even re-install the OS in an emulator. [It's GOT to be MSWind95
GPL software goes obsolete just as rapidly...but you can figure out the file formats.
Re:Slimey .. Workstation vs Server, you decide (Score:3, Interesting)
And since Microsoft is willing to do ANYTHING to prevent competiton, they changed how people could legally use the OS in regards to who they were threatened by at the time.
That crap you keep hearing spewing from Microsoft Executives regarding "Customers are asking for X,Y,Z" is and easly lie. And they can easily pay off one or two 'partners' to publicly say they want what shit Microsoft is pushing. but usually, it's all bull and used primarily to push an agenda which protects the MS Windows monopoly.
think MS OpenXML vs ODF...
LoB
Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:3, Interesting)
yeah I hate shoddy products - which is why I stick to MS products even though I know Linux quite well and regularly try compeditors in other apps. I want an OS that isn't in my face - I want it to run tasks without me having to KNOW i am running an OS
I am not one of the 90% who use 10% of MS Office. I miss tonns of features when I've had to use other ones - yeah they are good for plebs that write notes and call them docs - but OO is always plaything catchup. Visio is WAAY more useful than any other product I've tried. but I'm used to the enterprise version with network & NDS discovery etc.
Linux wins hands down on the back end stuff - no worries there. But there desktop OS and apps lead the way, they are NOT following (with the exception of their crappy web browser).
Of course - because I actually evaluate things and dare to end up concluding that MS is fine, this will be modded as a troll - but hell the entire original topic is a troll. The parent is actually quite reasonable compareed to the rest of this crap.
Because many of us have to fix it (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:1, Interesting)
Funny, a hacked version of OS X runs on my PC better than windows ever has.
Because they treat me like an idiot! (Score:2, Interesting)
Because they indent with bullets when I want to move the text 4 spaces to the right.
Because they make it close to impossible to have total control of a document, because suddenly, some intellisense kicks in and overrides it.
Because they encourage lazy web developers to create web content that can be viewed with Internet Exploder only.
Because when I try to save a really simple document as html, they give me a messy html with 85% absolutely unnecessary code, which I have to clean manually before I can do anything useful with it.
Because MSN for Mac can't use a webcam, urging my daughters to use a wintel PC for chats.
Because they give me Windows Media Player, a CPU-sucking mammoth, when all I need is a moth like Win-Amp (or a killer bee, like Itunes)
Because the give me big document processing monster, like Word, when all I need is a typewriter like WordPad.
But I do love Excel, and I applaud Bill Gates' spending habits.
Re:Lack of humility? NIH? (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft's own arrogance has hurt them. I think most of the problem is that they hired geeks who never got laid in college, who suddenly found themselves in a position of power over something and then took out all their frustration and anger on the world by being purposely incompatable and refusing to read any references.
But Microsoft management did strange things, it is obvious that there was a push for Unix compatability in MSDOS 2.0 but all that evaporated and was even removed (one of the few times they have been incompatable with previous versions and it broke software I was working on) in 4.0. Not sure what caused this, but there seems to be anger and hostility toward Unix which is not helping them at all.
Hate is a Strong Word (Score:3, Interesting)
Point 1. Computers are primarily business tools
My View: Computers are very flexible machines that can be used for nearly anything including business tools. Since my background is in the electronic music world, I would have to say that it's nearly impossible to make decent electronic music without computers and software. Microsoft didn't seem to think this was important until Windows XP came around. But by that time, users like me had already been using computers to do electronic music for about 20 years with Macs, Amigas, and Ataris.
Point 2. Anyone who doesn't use a computer for "standard" uses is a "hobbiest" which roughly translates to: "loser living in parent's basement who gets on Ballmer's nerves"
My View: Completely false. We don't go around calling professional carpenters, electricians and plumbers "amateurs" when they work on their stuff at home, do we? Then why should people who work in the tech sector who like having SANs, virtual machines, and heavy duty OSes at home have to be relegated to the "hobbiest" moniker? It's kind of insulting, isn't it? If they lose the attitude about people who like to push the technical envelope and let them have access to deeper parts of the Windows OS to do it with, they'll gain new friends.
Point 3. Revenue is more important than, well... anything else that Microsoft does.
My View: That's not the way it should be. Making money should always take a back seat to satisfying the customer first. Screw the stockholders. As long as their stocks aren't going down, they have no right to expect them to continue increasing. There's only so many people who will buy the products and pushing out stuff that really isn't much different than the previous version in terms of actual functionality and stability is not a good approach. Ever. There is such a thing as being reasonably profitable and it doesn't mean pounding your competitors into the ground.
Just a few points of contention for me. In general, I feel that I should be able to do whatever I want, whenever I want with my computers. No one should be able to limit me in any way as long as I'm not invading other people's systems and causing mischief. If I want to write a software based DVD player (with decryption) then I should be allowed to without worrying about goofy laws that try to make imaginitive thinking illegal.
Re:One could argue this only (Score:5, Interesting)
Of the 118 driver modules currently loaded on my system, 100 of them are (C) Microsoft Corporation. The others are 5 for VMWare, 2 for my nVidia video card, 1 for the nVidia nForce MCP net adapter, 1 for the Realtek 650 sound, 1 for the OpenVPN virtual TAP adapter, 1 for the crappy Macromedia safedisc copyprotection driver, 2 for Daemon Tools, 1 for Process Explorer, and 4 for the cd burning software. Of the non-Microsoft drivers that are supporting real hardware, that's 4 drivers for 3 devices. There are only three devices on my system that Microsoft didn't write drivers for. If Linux were running on this system, I'd want the binary nVidia drivers for video and networking (AFAIK nForce2 networking still isn't supported in the mainline. It definitely wasn't when I built the machine).
Microsoft definitely has a drivers division.
I do agree about Microsoft fixing the wrong things most of the time in their OS, though.
Why I dislike Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
EULA: I may have seen a EULA or two before Microsoft came on the scene but Microsoft pretty much standardized the EULA and lead the entire industry towards using them all of the time. I do not respect EULAs at all. The software is mine once I purchase it and they have no control over what I do with it afterwards.
Reliability: While their operating systems have greatly improved over time, even XP64 (their most stable OS yet) has crashed on me a couple of times. Linux on the same hardware (dual boot laptop) has never crashed. MS Access crashes on me all of the time without error messages.
Performance: I have 2 gigs of ram on my laptops. Why do I need to have 200 megs swapped out? Why does a newly loading program need to write out to swap as it is loading? Since the first version of windows, there has been a starfield screensaver. When it runs, every few seconds or so, you can see it hiccup. All of the stars stop momentarily. What is going on that prevents the computer from running so smoothly even decades later with incredibly more powerful processors?
Control: This a a big one. Why can't I easily turn off the netbios port on my home computer? Why does my computer fail to function without an externally listening RPC port? It is clear that the operating system was designed so that someone other than the person sitting at the keyboard would be in control of the computer. Why can't I tell my computer to stop talking to microsoft.com all of the time? Why are there a dozen ways to start a program running with most of those ways not being easily accessible to me? I own the computer and I own the software. Microsoft only owns the rights to copy it. Stop changing how my computer works when I am supposedly "patching" against vulnerabilities. I can no longer get patches from Microsoft because I know for a fact that Microsoft will change the way my computer works, possibly even shutting it down.
Security: Microsoft sees security as an added cost and therefore will never produce secure software. Microsoft does not even seem to understand security at all. How does clicking on that godawful popup thing in Vista increase security at all? Applications should only be able to write to their own directories and nowhere else. There should not be a need to grant privileges all the time to every program.
Quality: Portions of Microsofts software are written really well. All of those portions seem to be put together in a crappy manner.
Bleh, never mind. This is getting way to long and drawn out. Microsoft sucks and there is no hope for them. They have billions of dollars in reinforcement for their bad behaviours.
strike
A good workman is known by his tools. (Score:2, Interesting)
I am not the first one quoting that proverb in this context. Frederick Brooks opened a chapter in ''The Mythical Man-Month''[1] with the very same quote, a chapter about sharp tools. Neal Stephenson writes about tools in ''In the Beginning was the Command Line''[2]. Tools are important for mankind. They always have been important and they always will be important.
To put it simple -- The Microsoft world is not my set of tools.
It is not hatred. It is ignorance. I do not care about Microsoft because I do not use their products in my everday work.
Furthermore... I am a computer enthusiast, a geek. I like beautiful computer solutions. What is beautiful to me then? Have you thought about the style of this answer? Would you get the same kind answer from your everyday Microsoft user; with literary references? Maybe, maybe not, though I doubt it. The UNIX crowd are fond of words. Once again, it is not an original thought. Thomas Scoville wrote about it in ''The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature''[3].
Yes; you could say Microsoft is a beautiful company from e.g. an economist point of view. I have a great respect for what they have achivied but it is not where my heart lies.
One last thing. History. We like underdogs. Microsoft used to be an underdog when IBM ruled the world. IBM did a lot of good things back then but the grassroots disliked the monopoly. In politics monopoly spells dictatorship. We do not like dictators, we like underdogs. Who is good or who is bad does not matter. We will give our Christmas presents to the underdogs, not to the dictators. I do not say Bill Gates is a dictator, I do not say he is good or bad, but he is not the same underdog he used to be.
/jörgen
--
They've had 20+ years to make a good impression (Score:2, Interesting)
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I was buying a new 'computer.' This is before we only had PC's and Macs in people's homes. I'd grown up with a long line of 8-bits and this was going to be my stepping stone. So, I clearly knew what I was talking about and went and bought an ARM based Archimedes [wikipedia.org]. This was a beautiful 32-bit, sexy little number which would multi-task seemlessly (for the late 80's) and as a young programmer it gave me sweet dreams at night - yes it actually did. It had - and I still miss it - an amazingly intuitive, sophisiticated and visually soothing GUI. A very powerful and novel assembly language. My only obstacles were the older programmers in my family who worked in field. "You should get a 286! This is the standard. Everyone is using it. You should use it. You'll learn something useful. It'll be forgotten and outdated soon. What is the use of learning how to program in ARM assembler anyway?' ;)
I bought it anyway. Not sure if I was rebelling against the status-quo, however at that time, I saw nothing cool, innovative or exciting in owning a PC. My father had one. It was a simple-but-dull bit of kit with an uninspiring OS and interesting, but hardly revolutionary applications. A fun distraction, but nothing to tun my head towards - except for Zortech C - which first exposed me to C.. I used a mac at school and could instantly see that this PC was kind of dull.
So I grew older, learned a lot with my Archi(s) and ended up doing one of my A-levels in computer science. I had a PC emulator on my archie, but it only emultated an XT and now I needed to use applications under windows 3.1. So I got a PC and installed windows. A fun novalty - for a month. RISC-OS [wikipedia.org] was still leagues ahead, but I needed Windows for school. Life moved on it was kind of cool to have a machine, where you didn't need to find so niche a group of people to understand what you were talking about. It was nice to be able to get lots of games, etc, but they were quite poor. PC hardware was always fun and easy to toy with. The OS however was obviously unstable - although I'd often blame myself when life would force me to re-install. Borland turbo c++ was another toy. Still not exactly the OS of my dreams. Microsoft still hadn't sold themselves to me.
Went to UNI with my archie and eventually needed another PC. I was using sun-os predominantly during the day and my archi at home. I sold a subset of my old PC and built a new one. I was running windows 95 and it had trouble supporting old hardware, which I still had. It wasn't my favourite machine, but I had tools for some of the stuff I needed. My home kit wasn't as good, so I lived in a lab. I used my PC mostly when I went home for the holidays, and then, I'd pretty much been living in a terminal dialed into our university servers. Windows was just the glitter around it. It was unstable and occaisonally cool, but Microsoft had failed to impress me.
I didn't yet loath Microsoft. Bill Gates, as embarssed as I am to say it, was my hero. A 'geek,' as I thought then, who had made it. Well, I hadn't heard of Linus or Richard Stallman yet. And then, a friend introduced me to RedHat linux - almost ten years ago. It changed my life. I could truly work at home, contained with my 'own' UNIX environment. It was like buying an archimedes all over. Getting my box running and especially my X Server was a pain, but it was 'FUN!' - after I'd got it working. Lots of my old iso cards worked without major issue and, well, I knew that my life had changed.
Various incarnations of windows passed and I tried them. Windows 2000 struck me as being less likely to blue screen - until it blue screened. As we all do, I'd often have to sacrifice my space time to help countless very intelligent people fix their very unintuitive and temp
Re:Keep It Simple Stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
If people knew there was an OS they could get easily that didn't crash as often, had all the same functionality and games, and didn't have to run antivirus,antispyware,blah blah, they would switch. In fact if they developed Linux for my Wii then that could be my main machine - most of the reason I don't ever stick with Linux is that I want to play the latest games (without any annoying glitches), or even last year's games - I tried for days to get GTA: SA working properly on various versions of Cedega and WINE..
I've not tried Mac OS recently, maybe I should? I think more games are being developed for Mac OS these days, unfortunately I consider a lot of games to not be worth my money these days too [/crabbity old youth]
My Opinion and Story (Score:1, Interesting)
As I learned about the Linux operating system, what a shell script was, and all that software that came with a basic Linux operating system in terms of office suites, development, documentation, the on-line community , etc, I felt I need to be belong to a community and actually use an operating system.
I had been on IRC and we were speaking about Linux and Microsoft. Someone on IRC said to me that I won't be able to play the popular games, have popular and special programs running such as DVD playback, and some other things that will not run as easy in Linux then it does in Windows. "Welcome to Linux."
After that day, It took me two more years to move away from the win32/NTFS platform to a committed Linux platform. I have been using Linux for five years and I am content. Now I am studying for a Information Security degree and building custom Linux servers as well as building a mixed OS network environment.
I feel I could do a lot more in terms of using Linux and the software that it comes with than I can if I were committed to a sole Microsoft solution. The big advantage is I can save myself a lot of money in terms of software and I can also help a business save money by adopting either a Linux backbone or the use of open-source/free software in a Windows environment.
It is my story and I am sticking to it.
Re:Lack of humility? NIH? (Score:1, Interesting)
What happened was that the other half of Microsoft management left. Originally MS was started by two people - Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Gates was the Mac-fan ("No no, I want Mac, but on a PC" - when he saw the first attempt at Windows), Allen was the one interested in Unix compatibility.
Once Allen left the company, and Gates took control, things changed to be all about Windows.
Re:Multiple OSes are good - monopolies are bad (Score:3, Interesting)
I have always had an interest in free software and alternative operating systems. Back in the 1990s, I heard about an interesting innovative operating system called BeOS. BeOS expressed a desire to peacefully coexist with Microsoft. Microsoft applied pressure to computer companies to not sell any computers with BeOS pre-installed, so BeOS went out of Business.
A few years earlier, in the 1990s, a company come out with their own DOS clone. From what I have heard, the Microsoft programmers designed some of the Microsoft products to give error messages when running under the DOS clone even when there really was not a problem.
Once Microsoft gained dominance they tried to squeeze out alternatives my fighting against open standards. They prefer to use proprietary standards instead. On various occasions they have also tried to take open standard and add proprietary extensions to them. That strategy is called extend, embrace and extinguish. Microsoft almost missed the Internet while promoting it's own proprietary alternatives. It almost missed the boat on that and Bill Gates quickly changed course. The Internet was created with open standards such as TCP/IP and HTML. Netscape was the dominate browser back then and the browser, to a large extent, controls what standards are used. If I remember correctly, I once read that Netscape even dared to publicly make some statements about the browser making the choice of operating system less significant. So somehow Microsoft had to destroy Netscape, perhaps, so that they could better influence what standards are used.
According to a website [fuckmicrosoft.com], "Lacking any decent technology of their own, Microsoft licensed the Mosaic web browser from Spyglass which they turned into Internet Explorer." That website then gos on to say "Microsoft royally screwed over Spyglass by licensing their code and then turning around and giving it away for free." By including it for free, pre-installed with Windows they destroyed Netscape and Spyglass. Since then Internet Explorer has become the dominant browser and is the only browser that in not standards compliant.
Sun Microsystems, developed Java a programming language what would allow programmer to create programs that are operating system dependent. Micrsoft bought a license for Java, from Sun, and then tried to add their own proprietary extensions to Java. Sun successfully sued them for violating the terms of the license.
The political fight against the effort to use open-standards such as ODF in Mass [informationweek.com] is another example. Microsoft prefers to keep their Open Office users locked-in with proprietary standards such as Office 12 XML [sun.com] instead.
About 6 or 7 years ago I stated using Linux which is a free open-source Unix clone operating system. There weren't many big advantages over Windows other than that Linux users didn't get computer viruses or infected by email mail attachments. It somehow more like I was more in control of what was installed on my computer and how it was configured. Furthermore, the GPL license allowed me to freely copy Linux and most of my free Linux programs from one computer to another. I no longer felt big brother Bill looking over my shoulder [computerworld.com].
Since then, I Linux has improved to where Ubuntu Linux feels very polished complete and easy to use and install. Whenever I want some new program, I just use Synaptic to choose from the list of thousands of free programs and quickly download whatever free GPL licensed program that I want. I am totally happy with Ubuntu Linux.
Back about 5 or 6 years ago, I was still using Windows ME and Office 2000 on one of my computers. That computer had what I later realized was a slightly bad power supply
Re:One could argue this only (Score:3, Interesting)
Not true. If an operating system is properly compartmentalized, it can merely shut off the offending part while allowing the other parts to continue running.
If my display driver tries to write to illegal memory, I would much rather that the OS shuts the displays off, and then signals an orderly shutdown, permitting applications to terminate (and perhaps auto-save work in progress), and the file system to be properly synchronized before shutdown.
If my sound driver freaks out, I would much rather have the OS continue running silently, allowing me the choices of what to do (since most critical UIs do not require sound).
If one disk driver fails, access to other disks could still continue (permitting work in progress to be saved temporarily to another device.)
If the system runs out of swap space, it should just refuse to allocate more memory, not allocate it and then realize in retrospect that it did not have the resources to do so.
Even if the swap device becomes inaccessible, it may still be possible to perform some reasonably orderly recovery and shutdown by permitting access to processes that are still in memory.
There are, of course, some problems that cannot be recovered from (memory corruption, errors in vital kernel components), but these should tend to be in the minority.
Bingo - Misuse of power (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft was one of the first company to realise that user friendliness may be the single most important aspect of software design in the eyes of the consumer. For example, previously when using various text editors you had to remember loads of different key combinations for each of them to perform common commands like copy and paste.
I remember when I first used MS Edit, I had copied something to the clipboard and was trying to figure out which shortcut keys would paste it. The first one I tried (Shift-Ins) worked. I thought I'd been lucky only to find out a few weeks later that a friend, who was used to using a different text editor had found a different shortcut key to do the same thing. MS had included all the different shortcut keys combinations it could so, whichever software it's users came from, they would feel comfortable in MS Edit.
This is the kind of innovation (aestetic rather than technical) that made MS grow to such a huge size today.
Now, while having such a large percentage of any major global resource controlled by a single company is enough reason to cause a bit of discomfort, in this case of MS there have been many cases of that power actually being misused. Which serves to justify and multiply that discomfort into distate.
Some examples:-
Mis-use of wide customer base:
In the days of MS-DOS 4 it was said that if you wrote exactly the same program in Microsoft C and in Borland C and ran them on an MS-DOS machine, even if they both compiled into the same machine code, the one written in Borland C would run slower. This is becuase each of the compilers sign the executables they create differently. MS-Dos would simply look at the signature and decide whether to slow it down or not. The result would be that, since most people used MS-DOS, people would assume the MS C compiler was better.
Mis-use of deeper pockets:
One tactic that was very popular with MS in the early days of windows was to add "free" software to windows which the competition was already selling. Since every one with a windows operating system will already have the software, only a tiny fraction of users will bother paying for the one the competitor is selling (no matter how much 'better' or 'more efficient' its product was). Once the competitor has been driven out of business, MS can jack up the price of windows to compensate for the price of the new software plus a whole LOAD of extra profit since, as the Parent said, there is no other option left for the consumers.
Mis-use of inside information:
A third party inspection of MS Office 95 and 97 showed that they were using a lot of undocumented functions in Windows. This is the equivalent of a company that built all the roads and roadmaps in a city, opening a pizza delivery company which constantly arrives with hotter pizzas becuase it's drivers use shortcuts which are hidden to other drivers and don't show up on any of the company maps.
This will, of course, give an unfair advantage to it's own pizza delivery company. Not becuase they are better at delivering pizzas, but becuase they have a totally unrelated, and unfair, advantage.
News of breaches like this were all too common in the early days of windows. Now though, most of these have been forgotten but the animosity remains. And it's not helped by the fact that MS seems consistently less interested in producing good software as it does in producing good-looking software.
I don't "hate" them, I expect better... (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't like:
1) predatory, monopolistic business practices -- it shouldn't have had to get to the antitrust lawsuit stage for people in the company to realize that what they were doing was not only unethical, but illegal. It damaged/damages the whole industry, and they still skirt the line. It's obvious quite a few (and often bad) products are deployed purely to undercut the competition.
2) Their OS and applications are generally okay, but sometimes unnecessary features are *amazingly* annoying and misguided. This is practically a hallmark of MS products, and it is all the more astonishing because they are supposed to have some huge "user lab" to screen the product usability before release. Examples:
A) "Personalized menus" -- brilliant! Too many menu options? Let's hide half of them and make the user guess where the rest are. Hello? It's a sign you need to reorganize the program, not obfuscate it.
B) "Autocorrect" and "Autoformat" -- that's great for your average memo. For everything else? It does more damage than good, especially for anything technical, and for novice users who don't know how to turn it off, it is EXTREMELY frustrating for them to type something over and over and have the program spontaneously alter what they typed. It is features like this that *sound* good on paper, but unless they work perfectly (and software isn't *that* smart), they are annoying and hinder people's work instead of help it.
C) Two words: Clippy Sucks. Okay, I'm in my post-clippy stage now, because I've learned not to install the "Office Assistant" at all, but for millions of other users, the HATRED directed at Clippy and his allies is just amazing. It shouldn't take, what, 3 versions of Office for MS to realize this "feature" wasn't helpful.
D) the default Windows XP theme -- who came up with this? A recent hire from Fisher-Price? Thank goodness for "Classic" mode in win 2k and win XP. I know MS wants to show off their latest toys, but why does almost every default have to be a stupid one?
E) There are many more examples. Don't believe me? There are whole books written in the "Windows
3) the constant attempts to rope users and developers into proprietary, Windows-only, potentially dead-end solutions, to the point they introduce incompatibilities into "standards" that break other software, or discourage interoperability (e.g., all those stupid "features" and "bugs" in IE). Why do they do this? What possible excuse is there? They *say* they want the opposite, but everything they do is obviously trying to back people into a situation of complete dependency on the "microsoft way" of doing things.
4) Product activation. Sure, it's bad enough to have it on an application, but to have it on the OS such that the whole system becomes non-functional? That's nuts, and apparently it is only going to be worse in Vista. I'm not a pirate. I know MS has a piracy problem, but treating their customers this way isn't the solution. It's as if they DON'T WANT customers to use their newer products. Well, I won't be. It's why I run win 2k and office 2k on my personal machine. I see no compelling reason to upgrade, and activation discourages me from doing so.
So, I don't "hate" Microsoft, I just think they are doing a shoddy job for the vast amount of money they have to throw at the problem. It's a challenging problem, but, sheesh, other companies seem to do a better job with less resources (e.g., Apple, and many open-source projects do some things better, and those products have almost none of th
Documentation (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Keep It Simple Stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I dont *hate* Microsoft..... (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's have a hypothetical company, Mom And Pop Software (MAPS). MAPS make a simple office suite, CheapOffice, which retails for £50. It's more than good enough for writing letters, doing your day-to-day finances and organising your CD collection. The only black mark against CheapOffice is that it can't import MS Office documents perfectly; however, most of the time it makes a brave attempt.
Now consider a luser, John Thomas, who wants an office suite. His options are:
- Buy MS Office for £500.
- Buy MAPS CheapOffice for £50, saving £450.
- Pirate MS Office, saving £500.
- Pirate CheapOffice, saving £50.
What does John Thomas do? He gets a pirate copy of MS Office, on the basis that it's better to save £500 and get "what everybody else uses" than to save £450 and be legal, and beside which Microsoft can't possibly justify asking £500 for something that does the same as something you can get for £50.The result is that even if nobody ever makes a single pirate copy of CheapOffice, MAPS go out of business in the end -- due to piracy.
Microsoft know this, of course. They have a big enough stack; they can afford not to rake in £500 per copy of Office in the short term, if it means squeezing competitors out of the marketplace in the long term. They don't have to compete on quality as long as they're competing on price.
MS are liars, cheats and thieves (Score:4, Interesting)
Liars:
Bill gates told Paul Brainerd of Aldus to cancel Aldus' nearly-complete "Flintstone" wordprocessor for Windows because, Gates claimed, Word for Windows was about to ship. So Aldus threw away the code, wasted the effort and lost a powerful position in the market: first Windows WP, from the company that produced the excellent PageMaker DTP program. It hasn't been started yet. This is one major corporate CEO personally deceiving another, for personal and corporate gain.
Ask Aldus - but you can't. Its flagship products were bought out by Adobe and it went out of business.
Thieves:
MS stole the code of "DoubleSpace" (later renamed DriveSpace) from STAC's product Stacker. MS had been "evaluating" Stacker for inclusion in MS-DOS 6. Stac rejected the offered licensing terms; MS took the code anyway (MS-DOS 6.0). Stac sued, proved the code was copied, and won $200M. MS remove it (MS-DOS 6.21), rewrote the sections that were shown to be direct copies, renamed the product, and kept on going (MS-DOS 6.22).
Ask Stac - but you can't. It's gone out of business. With an admitted direct copy of its flagship product given away free with MS-DOS 6 and Windows 95, it went under.
Cheats:
MS compelled Central Point to license CP AntiVirus and CP Backup for inclusion in MS-DOS 6, under the sort of terms Stac rejected. (Do it, or we'll write our own versions anyway. No, you don't get any ongoing payment, but you can sell your version as a premium upgrade product.) Low one-off payment, all rights, no royalties, no comeback. It also knocked together an undelete utility, a defragmenter and a basic graphical file manager/program launcher based on IBM's DOSShell from PC DOS 4.0, thus giving away for free all Central Point's main products - Backup, Antivirus and PC Tools.
Ask Central Point how good the deal was for them. But you can't. They've gone under.
Cheats again:
MS hired the same team to write Video for Windows as Apple had used to write QuickTime's code for video playback in a window. The programmers did it the same way. Apple sued. Apple won.
Remember MS' $150M "investment" in Apple a few years back? No investment. That was another lie. It was punitive damages.
Cheats yet again:
MS wrote specific code into Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups to make it generate spurious errors if run on DR-DOS 6. Windows 3.1 actually worked fine on DR-DOS - better than on MS-DOS - but MS wanted to kill the competition, so it wrote routines to detect DR DOS, obfuscated the code and actively hid it in the Windows loader program, WIN.COM. DR sued and proved this in court. An acquaintance of mine, Geoff Chappel, was an expert witness, deconstructing and showing the code and the efforts to hide it.
DR went under. The product rights were sold to Caldera. Caldera continued to sue, and eventually won. But it was too late. Windows 95 included DOS, even though Caldera got it running just fine on DR-DOS in the labs, so you couldn't sell people DOS any more.
And cheats still!
You know what Caldera is doing now? It renamed itself SCO and is suing, well, anyone using Linux. E.g., IBM. Guess who funds this? Microsoft.
You could look at the petty, childish efforts to derail Sun's Java by adding proprietary incompatible extensions to the Windows Java Virtual Machine and then encouraging developers to use them (Visual J ). Then renaming the JVM to the MS VM, then dropping it altogether. This is not a company that cares about its customers. It cares about profits and killing the competition by any means possible, fair or foul, legal or illegal. It can afford to be sued, it can afford to buy off aggrieved competitors, and it's so big and so successful that it knows that the US government daren't touch it or
Re:Keep It Simple Stupid (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure, current-gen consoles cost more than 300$-450$. But take your PC as it is right now, and fast-forward two years from now; Most new games won't run, they'll be slow like molasses, or you'll need yet another 300$ video card and another 300$ for more RAM and a faster CPU; Heck, probably a new mobo for that nifty "Core 8 Quatuor" Intel just released!
Sure, a PC can do more than a console, but we're talking gaming here. Almost any old machine can run Windows XP if gaming not for gaming. (I gave a Pentium II-266 with 256 Mb to a friend with XP on it. It runs a tad slow, but still it runs just fine!)
Whereas your PS3 or XBox360 will run this year's games just fine, and games in 3 years just fine as well. (Actuallly, the games will probably run even better, as developpers get acquainted with hardware that doesn't change every 10 minutes...)
So on the price issue, provided it doesn't die fast (Dreamcast anyone?), consoles win hands-down. And all games work fine all the time...
One thing that could make consoles more appealing is if the makers weren't so cheap as far as functionnality goes. My modded XBox does more stuff than those brand new stations, all of it being legal : Play DivX and XVid Movies I own, emulate old NES games I own, play MP3s.....
Re:Multiple OSes are good - monopolies are bad (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to read even more amazing examples of anti-competitive behavior, go back to the "Findings of Fact" from the anti-trust ruling, back in 1999, I believe. It's 300 pages of in-depth analysis of Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior from the 90's, which they totally got away with. They've had to tone it down a bit since then, but the basic problem is still there.
The most recent example is the allegation that Linux is violating MS patents, and the implication that if businesses use Linux, they open themselves up to IP lawsuits. If they really cared about Linux infringing their IP, they would point to the patent and the code, and the Linux kernel maintainers would find a work-around (assuming a valid patent). As it is, it's much more useful as a scare tactic -- and according to Novell, it's been effective at scaring away big customers. Hence the Novell-Microsoft deal.
Re:Since you asked (Score:3, Interesting)
I would agree with that on some fronts, but there's one major problem with wide-spread adoption of the Gimp in the corporate workplace. It has a politically incorrect name, and having an icon, or even menu item that says "the Gimp" when working in say, a corporate office overrun with politically correct "file a complaint about anything they can" idiots, or a health care office that deals with physically disabled individuals who might see your screen and be offended, is a bad idea. I have actually had someone fly off the handle at me over that entry in my menu, and it took a full five minutes to calm them down, and I was still ordered to remove the program from the computer for "PC reasons".
In summary, unless you work in an area that doesn't have to deal with the public seeing your computer screen _ever_, and have laid back co-workers, The Gimp isn't an option at work no matter how effective it may be.
Re:Keep It Simple Stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Keep It Simple Stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
If you slam any of the 3 major OS choices out there (stretching a bit lumping all Linux together since they are not all created equal, but it will do for this discussion) and have not made a significant attempt to try the others you are arguing from a VERY weak position, but I have so here goes....
Linux is great, and is finally to a point where you don't have to be an extremely technical person to install and use it. If you want to like Linux, try Ubuntu. Put it on a CD and boot it from there to try it out without having to install it on your machine...it is easy, see the website.
OS X is great. I used a few previous versions of the Mac OS and wasn't impressed, but that changed with OS X. The re-engineering they did was needed and successful. If you can handle the higher prices and fewer choices with regard to applications and such (including games) then you won't go wrong by going with a Mac.
The argument that you shouldn't get a machine for gaming, that you should use a console, is a ludicrous suggestion if you understand WHY people game on PC's. The graphics power that can be had from a PC blows away any console (even the "next gen" ones), and that is ALL I will say about games.
I am a computer savy person and do know how to go in and do the various tweaks that are possible with Windows. This is basically because I grew up with it as it has evolved. Because of this I, personally, have never had a problem with the stability of a Windows machine I have had. A lot of my friends HAVE, so I am not stupid enough to say that Windows is perfectly stable. Just that in MY experience this hasn't been a problem.
The PC's I could afford growing up were always Windows machines. This fact (because this is not just MY experience) has led to the widespread use of computers at home. If people had to have the money it took to get a Mac, or the technical knowhow it took to use Linux, in years past then PC's in the home would be years behind where it is now.
Does Microsoft deserve all the credit for this? NO, because they only made the software, and hardware was a big part of this too.
The fact remains, however, that Microsoft played an important role in "regular people" being able to experience a PC at home for whatever use they wanted or needed to put it to. And the applications that Microsoft introduced have allowed MANY small businesses to have "big business like" capabilities from a systems perspective that would not have been possible otherwise.
Today, Linux is probably becoming the better choice for low cost alternatives, and there is even enough Linux based software (hurray Open Source!) to make it somewhat viable for small business. This is a good thing, and is progress toward a better world.
My problem is that people have demonized Microsoft to the extent they have when much good HAS been brought about by them. Are Microsoft products too expensive? YES. Are they sometimes buggy? YES, they USUALLY are at first. Are they the most evil company ever? NO, Wal Mart probably is
They are tools and you should pick the right one for the job. Don't use a hack-saw to try and turn a screw.....
Re:Keep It Simple Stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
The computer that you run your Windows games could just as easily be running the game in Linux, or any other OS for that matter. Your computer hardware is running the game. The problem is the game makers only made it for Windows. So you defend Windows because you have no choice but to use it for PC games. That's a great defense. Think about it. You are defending the company that limits your choices and forces you to use their OS to play your PC games. YOU are defending them for it. Are you getting me?
Re:Keep It Simple Stupid (Score:1, Interesting)
Macs are good for video edititng, publishing. As far as I can tell, Windows still has broken font handling. The fonts are not standardized so you have to bring your document and all the fonts you use on your system to make it look right when you bring it to someone elses computer. Om Macs, the fonts just work.
Windows is good for games and the ubiquitous Word format that actually originated on the Macs. People seem to forget that Word was on the Macs before it came over to Windows. Wrod 2.0 jumped to Word 6.0 on Windows to match the fact that Word 6.0 was just about to replace word 5.0 on Macs.
Linux/Unix are good for servers. Linux, for the cheapskates, and the home admins. Unfortunately, the cheapskate companies don't bother to hire proper admins and their boxes can still get compromised. Solaris is good for the Sunray dumb terminals. Etc...
I have used Windows, Macs, Linux, various unixes(mostly down to Solaris now), and I run all of them at work. At home I stopped running linux and whittled it down to Windwos only. I used to run linux as my firewall/gateway/router until the low power wireless router/firewall gateways got cheap enough. Why do I run windows at home? The cheap and plentiful games. Will I still complain about it? Definitely. Because , they could be better. I will say that Windows 2000 was a vast improvement over any of their previous OS's that had constant memory leaks. Up until then, they only produced crap.
I probably still hate Windows more than I hate the other platforms. Why? It's my main priority every second Tuesday of every month, that I go manually patch and verify(the most important part) that all the patches installed properly and not break some functionality. With unix or linux, I test one box and script the rest. With windows, it's more tedious. I work with dozens of servers and hundreds of workstations, and I will say that Windows is the most tedious and painful system to manage. They used to do this weekly, but too many patches were coming out, so they shifted it to once a month, to make themselves look a little better. Having 12 reboots a year is much less than 52 reboots. A denial of service is a denial of service. It doesn't matter if it's 12 or 52, it is a denial of service. (MS-DOS)
I also hate Microsoft because they train incompetent hordes of MCSE's to use their "point & click", "drag & drop" admin stuff instead of teaching them the nitty gritty details of their resource kit and command line scripting through batch files or with VB. I've been through several of their seminars and they always just skim over the resource kit. "It's there, but we won't cover it." or "It's there, but it's not in the scope of our course." It's no wonder you need 3-4 times the number of Windows admins as Unix Admins for the same number of boxes. If they teach command line items that can be scripted, you'd only need half as many Windows admins. Linux is starting to become no better, since they're sporting lots of fancy new GUI's for the newbie point & click croud. I've been many places where these MCSE, paper admins, were in charge. They do the stupidest things. They don't know how to really administer a system. They waste my time. MCSE training also teaches Microsoft terminology for things the rest of the industry use differently. I wish they would stop that. It's confusing and stupid when you have to deal with two terms for the same thing or terms that mean one thing to one group and another thing to another group. Microsoft should change because they are a Johnny-come-lately.
Scripting in Windows is tedious and painful. Their VB documentation, as with any Microsoft documentation, is crap, so google is the onl
Re:Keep It Simple Stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
Because I am tierd of being called a thief (Score:3, Interesting)
Think of all the ways they use, telling you that they believe that you are a thief:
1. BSA.
2. License activation codes.
2. GWA.
4. DRM.
5. SCO lawsuit (Linux is stealing from us) (paid for by MS)
6. Advertisements in major magazines calling you thieves.
7. Reactivation required whenever you change hardware.
8. Secret interfaces in their OS, because otherwise you'll write software that will steal from them.
etc...
How would you feel if every time you went to work, your boss had you stripped and cavity searched every time you entered and left work, because he assumed you were a thief. That is how windows makes me feel. It's constantly probing you, trying to find any possible reason for calling you a thief.
That's one of the main reasons I prefer Linux. No anal probing.