I struggle with changing my perception of Microsoft. I still characterize them by their Halloween documents and efforts to destroy Netscape.
I would recommend the Surface to friends or family, which is a recent change. But I would never use Microsoft products. And not just because I'd be giving up years of Linux folk-knowledge. Childishly, when I watch a youtube video of someone far more skilled than me programming in Windows, I recoil a little.
I strive to avoid bias; I don't want the change in perception to happen merely after people like me die. My bias is fallacious, but it holds like any other deeply-felt bias.
I'm an MSDN subscriber, write C# all day and am sitting in front of Win8.1, writing this in IE11 with a Lumia 640 next to me.
They are still utter bastards and I sleep with one eye open.
Currently the tally of bad stuff is pretty high: Patent wars against competitors, forced bundling agreements, lock in despite the open specification stuff which is mostly just wrong, being fucked over on audits and licensing agreement shuffling repeatedly, collaboration with NSA/PRISM, disregard for privacy, plain arrogance since Windows 8 the repeated termination of developer stacks (silverlight, WF3, AppFabric etc) that people built their entire products on.
The marketing tactic of talking constantly about everything shiny drowns out these things going on behind the scenes. The press doesn't help this.
If there's any advice I can part on people is not to get all mushy and happy about it and always keep that eye open.
Personally, I'll never forgive them for their practices. They deliberately stifled competition, shafted developers, abused their position, and rubbed it in our faces.
There's no coming back from that, and I'll gladly educate newcomers to IT on their ways.
Let them die. The new CEO could be the second coming, you can't fix that cancerous attitude that is entrenched.
They deserve to become obsolete, at the very least.
A lot of the people that were there when practices were at their worse are no longer there.
I don't think I would be able to use any form of technology if I was to hold a grudge for every large company that performed some sort of bad practice, with slave labor to privacy issues.
Luckily people that perform these bad practices will eventually get ousted and replaced, that's when I proceed with caution.
You can wish Microsoft would die, and still use an iPhone.
In fact, much of Apple's success can be attributed to Microsoft fumbling the mobile revolution. In other words, people who use Apple may be doing so directly because of how much worse Microsoft was -- due to Microsoft spending their limited resources on zero-sum tactics like shafting their developer ecosystem.
Compete or die. (Microsoft seems to act like they have a third alternative, monopolize. They're still immensely profitable so it's understandable that their shareholders are comfortable with their current course.)
I personally don't use any iThings. y4mi, do you have concrete examples of what Microsoft has done that has significantly improved end users' ability to run Free Software?
Out of curiosity, is it fair to assume you use hardware and software by a source you consider more ethical then? (your classification above rules out Apple and Google as well since they've both done less-than-stellar things )
I basically do my best yes, whilst having to earn a living in my chosen field. FreeBSD and Linux where I can advocate them.
Part of my current contract is migrating a customer away from SQL Server to Postgres, and it feels good. Automating powershell on aws instances doesn't feel so good, but it's temporary pain.
Do you speak badly of Apple and Google whenever possible though? Forget about tech corporations - do you speak out against other non-tech corporations as much as Microsoft or is your hatred especially reserved for them? What kind of computer hardware do you run?
Typically, if someone hates Microsoft, they love either Apple or Google. That's been my experience at least.
Apple (Worst Offender but also helped Open Source at times)
Microsoft M$ (Middle of the road with it always depending on who you spoke with at the company)
Google (Most powerful of the three in terms of control over people's lives if they wanted it, but I seriously think they stumble ethically not on purpose. I believe they try to follow, "Don't be evil" as a whole)
Why is Apple the worst offender? Many would put them above the rest because of their stance on privacy.
> Google... stumble ethically not on purpose.
Stumbling? When they ripped off Sun, they did so with deliberately and with awareness at the highest levels. There are emails revealed during the trial that leave no doubt.
> Why is Apple the worst offender?
(Top of my head) Lies and more lies (Power PC more Powerful than Intel X86, No malware, no virus, we are the definition of Innovation), Closed Wall Garden, Over Promising and Under Delivering, Patents, The eBook Price Fixing, the Approval Process on iOS, No Competition Hiring Agreement, Amiga Computer was 7 years ahead of the time and Apple lied about it for YEARS, Promising a Color Mac and it would be a simple card upgrade TOOK YEARS, and perhaps the worst of the lot iTunes GUI!!!!.
> When they ripped off Sun
Than why did Sun's CEO congratulate them? Sun also loves to rip off people look at Oracles' Unbreakable Linux AKA Redhat Linux.
I seriously have 30+ years of Apple hatred from before my Amiga days. Amiga community HATED Apple for their business practices and clear lack of innovation. I went to buy a Mac with my dad when released and my dad say the writing on the wall. Lies and more lies and Lisa wasn't more powerful just more expensive and you still sell those?
> Google (Most powerful of the three in terms of control over people's lives if they wanted it, but I seriously think they stumble ethically not on purpose. I believe they try to follow, "Don't be evil" as a whole)
Um I read every word. I fail to see the Lighting Bolt ah ha. Yes Google is in the data collection business. They have stated it since day one and in every product they produce. GMail was a GB of space if we get to send you ads.
That they were HUGELY upset that they would lose a data collection stream? Or that they were trying to figure out what to do? Android as a service has requirements or you can make a Fire Phone like Amazon did with the Open Source code of the product doesn't seem like M$.
You can explain what I am missing but the fact that we have Amazon Fire Phone and Fire Tablets all based on a fork of Android seems to kill the implications of these emails.
Are we really back to calling UI design decisions "evil"? That word used to mean something, and slightly inconveniencing people who use YouTube wasn't covered.
On the other hand, Google+ as a project was an aberration, and the guy mostly responsible for it has left the company. My question is, have Vic Gundotra's superiors learned the proper lessons?
That said, the Google+ real names insanity removed all my trust in the company's products at that level, and I'm only now considering doing business with them due to their low cost of cloud storage and trusting them at the technical and operational levels more than Amazon.
But its attitudes like this that drive people toward Ms. Everybody can see that other companies are doing the exact same thing. For example there is actual proof of Apple conspiring to keeping developer's wages low.
I don't think that's a fair position to take, fair to yourself that is. The company then is not the same as it is now. Enough time has passed since then and now that it's safe to assume that all the people in important positions have been partly replaced, and I'm sure the majority of those who remain are now in different situations than they were back then.
I think it's wrong to withhold fair consideration for MS products (specifically) just because they did something you think is wrong years ago.
You can't forgive a corporation. Corporations aren't people, they have no conscience, no morals and no ethics. The entire concept of forgiving them, or being angry at them or whatever doesn't make sense. It's like forgiving a lion for eating your brother and thinking it won't eat you. It's a lion. It will eat you when it gets hungry. That is its nature.
Microsoft isn't going to die, but their enormous influence has eroded nicely. They're a mature, profitable, mostly boring company and I'm okay with that. XBox is pretty hip, but the reset of the company is about as interesting to the general public as Oracle, Cisco, or IBM.
Microsoft is as hip and alive as Google is. Google is a boring info-utility to most people. The Xbox is absolutely more cool than anything Google has in their pocket, including Android and self driving car experiments.
From a technology point of view, there are things I love about each company. Microsoft's Azure is pretty neat as is Google's Compute Engine. None of that matters to most people though.
Seriously. Microsoft has an unmatched record of screwing pretty much everyone who did business with them, and otherwise abusing their position in the market. Worse than IBM when IBM was in their position.
Are you sure you didn't mean "Oracle"? As far as I know, Microsoft deals with their business partners fairly. They don't try to negotiate a deal directly with a big customer and bypass their partners, for instance.
I'm talking more about "peers" than what I think you're referring to as "partners". E.g. 3Com as I cite elsewhere, Verizon WRT to the Kin, the company they licensed the start of Internet Explorer from (expected royalty payments never materialized when the gave it away for free), the examples go on and on and on.
But I suppose with Balmer the salesman in charge in between Gates and Nadella they'd avoid sales channel betrayals like that.
With regards to the Kin, I think Verizon shafted MS on that one. The device was good for it's time (something with photos and music targeted at teens that didn't have a full web connection), but Verizon forced you to buy a full $30/mo web plan to use those features (this was back when the web options were $30/mo unlimited plans or no web connection at all).
If there was a cheaper connection just for the Kin, it would've done reasonably well as a replacement for the Sidekick.
The lateness of the Kin is supposed to be one of the reasons Verizon did that, the market window had passed. It was also only a fraction of what was promised, heck, what Danger and T-Mobile delivered years earlier (as far as I know you're wrong about what it actually delivered at launch vs. what was promised).
Microsoft's database blunder with the Sidekick less than a year before the Kin's release (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Sidekick_data_loss) also contributed, I'm sure, at that time few were willing to trust them with their data. It's a testament to how far Microsoft has come that that's apparently changed with Azure.
In this case, I view Verizon as replying in kind. Which is part of my point, when you treat your peers like s*, there are consequences.
> Microsoft has an unmatched record of screwing pretty much everyone who did business with them
Could you list instances of this? Don't get me wrong, they have been absolute bastards in some cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I4i is my go-to example). But keep in mind it is a huge company that has done business with thousands of firms over the past few decades, so to substantiate your point, you would have to produce a pretty big list.
While your request is not in principle unreasonable, it's way too much work for me to prove it to your satisfaction, or my satisfaction in a formal, balanced, I'd be willing to publish it way. E.g. I'd forgotten about I4i, despite the prominence of the case.
I'm basically asking you, absent either of us going beyond searches like https://www.google.com/search?q=list+of+microsoft+crimes ^_^, to trust my observations of these businesses since the fall of 1977 when I started in the field. Heck, I was a great fan of Microsoft until NT 3.51 SP2 (and for a while beyond, it was Vista that completed the job). It was a pattern of behavior that became more and more obvious sometime in the late '90s that changed my opinion of the company, capped with their all out illegitimate assault on Linux and FOSS starting in the early '00s. And I of course don't expect you to take my word for it.
I just don't see it in their peers, not even Oracle.
Ah, here's a different angle: name the healthy peers that are willing to work with Microsoft today, beyond what's absolutely required. Yahoo! fails hard on healthy, Mozilla potentially as hard. I don't understand why/how Yahoo! is still in business, but Mozilla sure seems to be in their endgame (one reason I'm avoiding Rust for the time being).
You're acting like you hate the company just because they screwed their competitors. Do you hate other non-tech companies who screwed their competitors or is your hatred in this category especially reserved for Microsoft?
Do you speak ill of banking corporations as often as you do of Microsoft?
Also, if you run Apple hardware at all do yourself a favor and take a look at all the screwed up shit that Apple has done because that company has always been an asshole to just about every entity that they come into contact with.
I don't hate Microsoft today, and only did during the period they posed an existential threat to Linux/FOSS (and it was a relatively gentle sort of hate, made particularly easy by Vista).
I don't run Apple hardware, never have in my life. In part because I count them as worse to users (well, prior to own goals like Vista and Windows 8), but also because as of late they've been behaving particularly bad. Made that decision in 1987, who knew, avoiding particularly closed ecosystems turned out to be a good idea all around in the long term.
I don't "speak ill of banking corporations" because I don't see, well, any that I can think of offhand in the US, being actively, aggressively evil. Stupid in many cases, for sure, but that's a different thing, and not axiomatically akin to Microsoft's crimes.
All this is true; but Nadella has driven real change at the company that was long overdue. I had been a frequent critic of Ballmer's management of the company, and I like a lot of the things that Nadella has been doing.
Ballmer had an attitude that Microsoft needed to dominate every industry they participated in or they would take their toys and go home. That mindset doesn't work in today's technology world, where markets overlap and shift rapidly.
Nadella can't change the culture of the company overnight, but he has pushed through a bunch of great changes to their product strategy -- especially in the consumer space. I mean, Office 2016 finally has a consistent interface on OS X, Windows and Android/iOS. And Microsoft has an enterprise sales partnership with Apple! That would never have happened under Ballmer -- Microsoft is essentially letting Apple use its greatest asset (its partner sales channels) to push iPads so that Microsoft can sell Office and Exchange licenses. Nevermind that its channel partners were already selling their clients iPads anyway; Ballmer would have crammed Surface down the pipeline and wondered why sales numbers were sluggish.
I think toward the end of his tenure, Ballmer started to see why the company was so dysfunctional: it was built for the cutthroat tech landscape of 1998, not the highly fractured-but-integrated market of 2015. His last major moves as CEO were to get rid of the most divisive senior executives to pave the way for a guy like Nadella who could be a peacemaker with the rest of the tech world. Ballmer tore down the silos about a year before putting Nadella in charge of rebuilding the company, which in hindsight was a great move.
All this said, you're absolutely right about keeping one eye open: Nadella is pushing change from the top, but there are a lot of middle managers and junior executives who still do things the old way and will probably never change. You can't change the culture of a company overnight, and they will still continue to be evil in lots of small, subversive ways. If the market lets them get away with being shitty to their customers, they will do it.
I went all in on XNA, and got very, very burned. It taught me a great lesson though: don't be locked into any vendor. I'm very happy about the .NET and Typescript developments as of late, and use Typescript for my web coding. But only because if Microsoft abandons it right now, I can continue on in plain JavaScript.
Have you looked into MonoGame (http://www.monogame.net/)? It is basically a fully open source re-implementation of the XNA framework with support for almost every major platform (iOS, Android, Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox, OS X, Linux, etc.)
Yes, MonoGame is good, but at the time I was trying to salvage my XNA team+IP monogame was 2d only. (I think it can do 3d now?) we ended up moving to Unity but this technical roadblock plus some market related ones ultimately led me to abandon gamedev.
That's fair, I am also like that. However, what you describe is the common practice of pretty much every north-american corporation. My motto is to be with an eye open not matter who is the actor
So I suppose google or apple is more appealing to your ethical tastes?
At least the OP was willing to admit his distaste was based on a personal bias while you're trying to establish microsoft is somehow morally bankrupt in comparison to its competitors.
Youre hating the players when you should be hating the game!
I am not OC's but with a similar position (writting this in W10, working on Windows store apps and with a Lumia 920 by my side)
I have several reasons but mostly subjective preferences. In my previous job I was a fulltime Linux developer, spending all day with an Ubuntu box. Linux is great until you have to patch it or fight with video drivers after an upgrade. I still develop components for Linux on the backend side but I am done with the desktop for a while.
Don't get me wrong that had happened to me in every platform I have worked with (yeah with MacOSX too). I guess my point is, after a while all platforms are more or less the same to me in the core (maybe Windows falls behinds on the console side but cmder is nice enough to make it up) and at the end is just the surface what would make a difference.
To me, Microsoft was the only one doing something different on the mobile side (not anymore though) so that was the candy that brought me to this side for now. I don't know if OC's reasons are more practical but for me are just subjective preference.
Are you an independent developer? or working in a software shop? I am curious about your experience because I am trying (or just starting) to do independent things and your feedback sounds like a nice story to hear.
I'm a contractor/independent currently contracted to a financial company and a telecoms company concurrently. I have about 18 years' experience in total and have been on the contract market for 12 years.
The things that matter when you're starting to work independently (which I screwed up I will add) are building contacts and getting out of the agency system as soon as possible. Also I'm a bad accountant but YMMV if that interests you. If you can, don't work on their site; remote work is far nicer.
I'd go for a few agency jobs for a 2-6 month stint, be nice to people and spend your time working with them not alongside them and gain some reputation. After a couple of positions, return work is usually possible. Then general staff turnover in tech companies will propagate your reputation as well. The first 2 years is the most difficult.
I'm going to add this as well: never work hard. Work out how not to work hard. Life is about what you do when you're not working for me at least.
To cool down some of the optimism in this comment section: Microsoft is still accepting cash for practically every Android phone made because of their patent threats, or did they change their ways in this regard as well?
(I am genuinely curious whether this continues; I tried to google "microsoft android patent threats" but found only news articles from 2013/2014 about the practice.)
I don't exactly understand the objection to this. Microsoft has the patents (and they don't seem to be spurious patents). Google used techniques covered by the patents in Android without paying Microsoft or indemnifying their OEMs. Microsoft is actively competing with Android. They should let the Android OEMs by because... why? Even assuming for a moment that patents are inherently wrong (rather than our current patent system being flawed in execution) and that Microsoft believes it to be wrong... it exists. They gain nothing by unilaterally disarming. Why should they let the Android OEMs use these patents for free?
And the reason they have these patents are because, contrary to the article, they were doing smartphones long before Apple or Google came to the table. MS was actually one of the bigger smartphone players at the time. Sure, these were not the "modern" touchscreen smartphones that Apple popularized, but MS developed a bunch of technologies that, behind the revolutionized UI, are used by modern smartphones to this day.
I can make a case for leaving money on the table for your customers, or your employees, or for some greater social good. I'm not seeing a case for leaving money on the table for your direct competitor in the abstract, though.
"Microsoft and Google are pleased to announce an agreement on patent issues. As part of the agreement, the companies will dismiss all pending patent infringement litigation between them, including cases related to Motorola Mobility. "
Those are just lawsuits between the two, wasn't the nature of the royalties for Android devices that they contacted OEMs and said "we have these patents, you better pay us or we'll sue you", and the OEMs paid up?
That's different than cancelling outstanding lawsuits.
That's how patent licensing works (albeit a comically overaggressive caricature). Do you fundamentally oppose the concept of patents or do you think Microsoft is doing something else wrong by asking to be paid license fees by competitors using their patents?
I don't hold either of those views. I was just pointing out that the parent comment by sz4kerto seems to not be relevant to the question asked by NotOscarWilde.
"Separately, Google and Microsoft have agreed to collaborate on certain patent matters and anticipate working together in other areas in the future to benefit our customers."
Last time I heard that was with Apple and was more like "I won't sue you for this and you won't sue me for that"
Microsoft can still get money from Samsung, as Google produces much less phones and Samsung a lot of them, and simply using Android doesn't mean that Samsung doesn't have to pay for the patents.
> did they change their ways in this regard as well?
Oh, they absolutely did. Now they also threaten companies with lawsuits unless they install their own apps on Android devices [1]. I didn't say it was for the better. How this doesn't immediately alarm the anti-trust bodies for using patents to force companies to buy its products is still a puzzle to me.
Microsoft loves the rigged patent game and it's exploiting every minute of it, while fighting hard to ensure it stays this way [2] and also doing its best to make the copyright system worse, as well [3].
While this is true similar practices around patents and technology is undertaken by every large tech company. Why do you think Google are so interested in self driving cars? Not because they want to be the next Toyota but because they want to own all technology and patents behind it which they will happily let Toyota use for a small (ok very large) fee.
It's leaving a huge amount of money on the table generated by activities unrelated to Google's expertise, such as producing the actual car. Google does a lot of things, but I'm pretty sure running a car factory is not one of their fields of expertise.
But what they did to destroy netscape (bundling a competing app with some other thing) is now a tactic so common that it is taken for granted. I guess what made it scary is that they really did have a strong monopoly and it looked like they might dominate forever. So its not so much the tactics that offend people, but how much power they had when wielding those tactics.
Seems to me like every big tech firm now makes the same sorts of moves Microsoft did in the 80s/90s, but because none of them dominate it all kindof just becomes accepted as the way to compete. But if one of them _did_ become as dominant as MS were, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't hold back.
But what they did to destroy netscape (bundling a competing app with some other thing)
One other point worth remembering: their browser, at least by version 3, was superior in speed and vastly superior in stability. They also ushered in the modern era of web applications by inventing XMLHttpRequest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest).
Netscape destroyed itself as much as Microsoft helped them by incompetence in developing software, server as well as browser. A common pattern in the '90s was Microsoft's competitors losing their ability to develop mostly working software while Microsoft didn't. That sealed the fate of Lotus, WordPerfect, Netscape, and Ashton-Tate (dBASE), and Borland did themselves no favors by buying the latter.
I think a lot of people attribute a lot of Microsofts success to malice. In reality they have invested heavily in improving development methods, and it shows. One only have to read "I.M Wrights Hard Code", to understand exactly how many resources they allocate to improving the development cycle. And mind you this knowledge was distilled into text more than 10 years ago, but was part of the company for far longer.
Re. Netscape, IE on Windows surely helped, but Netscape did the no. 1 mistake and tried to rewrite everything from scratch - I can not think of any working product where it is better to throw everything out and redo everything "the right way", rather than iteratively improving the code. It's knowingly throwing out all business knowledge improvement and bugfixing you have ever done. It killed them, and would have even if IE was never bundled with Windows. In contrast, Windows 10 and Office 2016 contains code that can be traced more than 25 years back, and as evident with Vista development, MS is not afraid to accept when something has gone horribly wrong and throw it out and try again. Note that is not the same as rewriting, it is accepting that you spend a lot of resources making a prototype that ultimately showed no promise.
Not that MS does not do terrible things as a business. They do, exactly as any other business with that size. They have to or they will cease to exist in a few years.
but Netscape did the no. 1 mistake and tried to rewrite everything from scratch - I can not think of any working product where it is better to throw everything out and redo everything "the right way", rather than iteratively improving the code.
This emphasizes a restriction technical debt may place on your company if your starting foundation is sufficiently poor. Lotus did a combination of these two fatal mistakes, they had a small team of 7 or so guys write the first version in 8086/8 assembly language, and I'm not sure exactly what happened to that team, but their EMS memory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_memory) mid-life kicker was unauthorized work done by a couple of guys who had left the company by the time Lotus used it in desperation because their complete rewrite of the code in C was failing so badly.
For that matter, their first Macintosh program, Jazz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Jazz) was fatally flawed in development. They again wrote it in assembly "for efficiency", but without close communications between team members. Instead, every N days each would bring a floppy disk with their updated code and a merge would be done. This resulted in a lot of duplication of functionality and a bloated binary (hitting the platform where it was at its worst); which among other things resulted in user frustration at having to swap floppy disks all the time as the Wikipedia article mentions.
Apple is a partial counterexample: Jobs rode a small team hard in creating the first rather limited assembly OS, software wise they largely wandered around in the wilderness and failed the complete rewrite (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)), then solved their problem by buying NeXT (and, oh, started bringing Jobs back into the fold, one of the very few non-programmers who can manage them), and doing a wholesale replacement with NeXTSTEP.
Not that MS does not do terrible things as a business. They do, exactly as any other business with that size. They have to or they will cease to exist in a few years.
Disagree. Microsoft's terrible things included screwing pretty much everybody who did business with them at the peer level, "You made a mistake, you trusted us," said 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe, quoting an unnamed Microsoft executive." (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2002/pulpit_20020620_0007...). You do enough of this and you run out of healthy companies willing to do business with you, and life becomes prohibitively expensive. Which phone carrier is willing to partner with Microsoft after e.g. the Microsoft Kin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin and I'm sure other stunts?
I can't think of another company at this level like this. Apple and Oracle, like Microsoft companies built on the vision of a single man, share some characteristics, but Apple hasn't screwed over every supplier, and works well enough with phone carriers. Has Oracle tried to screw over big iron competitors after it bought Sun?
Late enough to miss the market window, delivered only a fraction of the promised features, less than the Danger Sidekick which it was supposed to build upon.
The official Windows phone unit was doing its best to kill the Kin, it had to switch to Windows CE, it was required to support Exchange, and a lot of the code supplied to the Kin group, especially for Exchange, was in horrible shape.
Ah, and another example of this sort of bad Microsoft behavior: When they bought Danger, they ignored its contractual responsibilities to T-Mobile and expected to immediately repurpose Danger's technical employees. Oops, T-Mobile refused to put up with that, and those employees had to spend some time developing the last Sidekick models (and all this had a morale crushing effect, above and beyond that of being absorbed by Microsoft with its stack ranking el. al.).
I don't recall that, not even allegations to the effect (there were such for Office competitors), plus I probably would have learned of such while working with a guy who had previous interned at Microsoft on IE of that era.
More directly, I'm not aware of any public Windows APIs that handed out data that tricked your code into doing a general protection fault (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_protection_fault), or in the case of WordPerfect, compel programmers to use their own printer drivers, and write code that regularly drops your tables, figures, etc. to the bottom of your document (unlike the other companies I cited, WordPerfect actually managed to ship a Windows version that didn't GP fault, but that was late, terribly buggy, and prompted all the WP fans I knew to reluctantly switch to MS Word).
All this stuff happened in the Win16 days, Win32 pertains to NT, and for the consumer market, Win 95 and on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_API). Win 95 was released in late August 95, by which time all these competitors had fallen by the wayside.
People were doing Ajax-like things before XMLHTTPRequest with hidden iframes. XHR was more convenient, but it didn't bring new functionality to the table.
People used hidden iframes as a fallback for browsers that did not support XMLHttpRequest, but not before XMLHttpRequest existed. XMLHttpRequest shipped with IE 5.0, which also happened to be the first browser where "DHTML" support was good enough that building anything resembling a modern web application was actually practical.
We aren't talking about modern web applications and all that entails though, we're specifically talking about the ability to load and send content without reloading the page. That was in use in browsers older than Internet Explorer 5.
Netscape Navigator 4 had frustrating limitations once you had the data, but people were doing all sorts with it regardless. More was possible with Internet Explorer 4, but again, you didn't need XMLHTTPRequest. And if you just want to strip it back to the bare-bones of loading and saving data, a few people were even doing that as far back as Netscape Navigator 2 if I recall correctly – by dynamically loading new images with varying query string parameters.
Oh, the tactics did offend people. And still do. But it was always a small number of people that cared about software freedom.
The Microsoft consent decree was about restricting browser choice by shipping their own browser as default and claiming it was unremovable. By contrast, today Apple idevices not only ship with a browser but ban all competing browsers (via the ban on run-time compilation effectively banning JIT compilers). Apple have total control over every application that is allowed to ship on the platform and take a 30% cut.
Google are responsible for Android, which is Free software to the absolute minimum they could get away with by law. It relies on millions of lines of GPL'd code, yet for most phones it's quite hard to get a rebuildable source tree that even includes all the kernel drivers, and if you do it may be prohibited from loading by a locked bootloader.
"The Microsoft consent decree was about restricting browser choice by shipping their own browser as default and claiming it was unremovable"
But it was technically unremovable, in those days you could open a windows explorer and type an URL and then you suddenly have internet explorer right into your window. It was an awful design flaw that costed them lagging apart after the post IE6 era.
The other thing is that wouldn't matter if Netscape were superior. Actually, it didn't matter because that was still the case and once better browsers came up (Firefox, Chrome), Internet Explorer turned in technical debt.
So still now the whole "the browser comes as default" sounds like a whining excuse to me.
Had they succeeded with the IE strategy, ActiveX controls would have the same endemic status as Flash does now, but unimplementable on any browser other than IE.
I am not saying that wasn't the intent. What I am saying is the only real guilty one in the Netscape fail was Netscape.
The situation was still there when Firefox and Chrome came to play (and I suspect also the intent) and it didn't prevent IE to step aside.
The same goes to Flash... it is still there because there still are stuff you can't do in HTML 5 (streaming live video for instance) and without a real alternative we would have to live with it (hopefully that will change soon)
Not to mention with 'SIP' (aka 'rootless'), Apple even has unrestricted control to part of your filesystem.
They promote it as a security feature, but it only protects their own interests. It does very little to protect actual user data (which is what the user cares about), and all to protect their eco-system (and therefore, their finances).
Indeed. Even at the time it seemed like the silliest possible thing you could get upset about. I remember not being able to parse why anybody thought it was bad.
They had the unmitigated gaul to include software with their operating system. Kinda like wordpad, file manager, hearts, calculator and dozens of other things that you'd expect to find on a computer. All those things had (and still have) alternatives that you can replace them with that may or may not cost money and may or may not be better. But somehow having a web browser installed by default was so obviously different as to be completely inexcusable even 20 years later.
As a customer, having a web browser installed on your new computer by default is a Good Thing. Removing it from the install could only possibly make things worse for end users.
This is very much my version of the rant, too. Today it would be absolutely unspeakable for a computing device to boot up for the first time without a web browser installed. Microsoft may have jumped the gun by a half-minute or so, but they saw that future coming.
Of course, I get even rantier about the "antivirus" companies blocking Microsoft from including Defender (nee Security Essentials) out of the box with XP and Vista, under similar reasoning to the Netscape decision. How is antivirus not an Operating System feature (system protection)? I'm glad that decision has finally passed and I really hope that people stop paying for the security theater "antivirus" programs that remain out there as OEM bloatware and those "products" will finally die a long, much deserved death.
I think that's very true. It was also a different environment back then - people affected were a much more homogenous group, so it's not surprising that we as a group identified strongly against what MS did. That fosters strong feelings.
That said, is this all just another EMBRACE from Nadella? ;)
This is just the tip of the iceberg with respect to application compatibility. I could probably write for months solely about bad things apps do and what we had to do to get them to work again (often in spite of themselves). Which is why I get particularly furious when people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure. I spent many sleepless nights fixing bugs in third-party programs just so they could keep running on Windows 95.
I'm actually surprised there hasn't been more complaint about amazon using their hugely dominant position in web retail to get into streaming video. Forced bundling of a bit player video service with prime seems to be a particularly cynical way of pushing yourself into a market.
You dont necessarily need to. I still use MS Windows from time to time and my perception is that fundamentally they still dont know how to write software properly: in windows 10, opening a folder full of large video files takes a painful long time, while all it needs to do is to list some file names. I understand that it must be trying to extract some extra "useful" information from those large files, but the keys is that it shouldnt block your UI from showing the basic stuff. In their outlook, if the network is having connection problem, the UI will become unresponsive. These might be silly easy bugs to fix but it exposed that fundamentally they still couldnt figure out how to separate things properly in software.
"Microsoft doesn't know how to..." is an unfounded disparagement.
Microsoft definitely knows how to write software, okay? They're really good at it. They ship a lot of it. There are many people there who are brighter than you and I and they know their stuff cold.
Microsoft is full of
- legacy stuff that is really hard to change (many, many reasons for this, few of them pleasant but all of them real)
- conflicting priorities (which bugs do we fix? will we destabilize the product if we fix them? are there more important things to do?)
- political bullshit, in the atmosphere of which it is hard to do the right thing
I left Microsoft three years ago, having spent 11 years there. I saw some howlingly bad software written (little of which shipped), and there are definitely groups there that are stronger than others, but I would never apply the phrase "fundamentally they don't know how to write software".
I go so far as to say, starting a bit over two decades ago, that one of the "secrets" of Microsoft's success is their long term ability to write software that basically works. As I mention in another part of this subthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10352022), they beat their "Office" competitors in part by not losing that ability when all else but Borland did. (Borland didn't, but lost at higher levels of management, including buying one of those failed competitors.)
As far as I can tell, general management incompetence, including of course "political bullshit", is most responsible for their post-XP problems (along with becoming too toxic for healthy peer companies to want work with them, but I'm not sure that matters when enough of the people at the top are so bad).
Although ... what would you say was responsible for the failure of Longhorn? Wasn't that in part technical? Or did that derive from higher up?
> what would you say was responsible for the failure of Longhorn? Wasn't that in part technical? Or did that derive from higher up?
Bill Gates actually touched that topic in is Reddit AMA. If I remember correctly, the bar was set up too high (i.e relational file system) and within the constrains it was a big challenge and at some point they had to deliver.
I also remember that a lot of it was going to based on .NET, and it wasn't mature enough/they weren't able to get it mature enough. The whole process was also impacted by security issues reaching a crisis level.
But #1 would seem to be more ambition than Microsoft could deliver at the time.
> I understand that it must be trying to extract some extra "useful" information from those large files, but the keys is that it shouldnt block your UI from showing the basic stuff.
That's weird, all the file-io operations in windows store apps are async for the very reason of not blocking the UI thread. How big was that folder? I'm geniuly curious.
Async ops can still take a long time. (Actually that's probably why they were made async.) GP wants to update the UI, but the data isn't available yet. Even if UI is still responding to mouse clicks, it hasn't yet fulfilled the user's desire to display that data, so it is blocking in a sense.
What explorer will be doing is calling into a shell extension to generate the video thumbnails. Under some circumstances it ends up blocked on the shell extension.
I know but he didn't say he was using explorer to open the folder and inspect the files. I was guessing he must be using an app to show them since is the only dialog that's different (I have multi-gb video folders in my pc and haven't seen the issue). He did say he was using Win10 and the file dialog is back to be the same so my guess would be incorrect anyway.
I've taken a liking to a lot of what Microsoft is doing. I like the open source efforts, I like the RX libraries, the hardware looks great, to my mind the Metro interface is actually better than IOS/Android. I even like Windows 10.
Problem is I could never go back to the DOS command prompt. I only moved to the *nix prompt about 6-7 years ago, and I could never go back. I know I can do cygwin etc but that still feels like a layer on top of something else that is awful.
I think people with this attitude would be really pleasantly surprised by PowerShell and Cmder. Windows makes a very bad UNIX, but it has a great command-line story these days if you'll play with it on its own turf.
Pleasantly surprised by powershell? I don't know what to say. I have to essentially copy and paste fragments of things that work, it's so arcane. Its like writing 90's Java on a command line. Its revolting.
> I have to essentially copy and paste fragments of things that work, it's so arcane.
I have about the same problem when it comes to bash. While bash may very well be described as "arcane" I believe this is mostly a problem of unwillingness to learn something new or different.
Understanding how PowerShell works takes a bit of time and re-thinking. It doesn't help that there's so much downright bad PowerShell code out there that was mindlessly converted from VBScript. Still, it's not that hard and the language is quite consistent and, well, powerful. They made quite a large effort to make sure that the underlying concepts are orthogonal and pervasive throughout. So learning just a few concepts actually make a very large part of the shell and language approachable and easy to understand.
Fair point. PowerShell is three things, actually: An embeddable scripting runtime, a scripting language, and a shell. The latter is (by name, probably) what people see it as, usually. Furthermore, most usage examples throughout the web use it for things that are traditionally done in a shell, e.g. interactive use, or small scripts that mainly do filesystem maintenance stuff.
You're right in that Python may be a more apt comparison, especially in that PowerShell's .NET foundation serves as the equivalent to Python's included libraries.
But that's a discussion that would have to happen every time people try to think of PowerShell as a weird bash. And it is a capable and useful shell, too. It just can do a lot of things much better than bash; they just look different.
When powershell comes up, someone always gripes about how they can't do this or that like they can in bash. I'm not going to deny that grep is nicer to use that the powershell equivalent (Select-String). But you don't configure Windows and other software in the Microsoft ecosystem by messing around with text. For example, if you had a new user and you wanted to set up an account, email address, and phone number (so AD, Exchange, and Lync/Skype for Business in Microsoft land), it wouldn't just be hard using something like Cygwin, it would probably be impossible. There is just no way to talk to those programs text streams or config files.
I guess what I always want to know when people complain about powershell is what they were actually trying to do. I think it's an excellent tool for system administration in a Microsoft environment. When you start moving away from that use case, it gets less and less useful.
the problem with powershell is that it is incredibly stupid if you're not on a full windows stack (desktops, servers and near enough to everything inbetween) and running the most recent version of windows (ever tried getting winrm installed and reliably working on a 2008 box?)
perhaps if they were not too opposed early on to horrible open source things and just one of the languages that already fit fairly well in that area (python for example) they wouldn't have had to go out of their way to make pretty shitty hacks (i really wonder if anyone in the powershell\winrm team did any testing or development with the machines more than 10 metres away)
Yeah, PS remoting is basically a no-go before server 2012, and even then it's just barely functional enough to be occasionally useful. They're planning on adding SSH support though, so I'm cautiously optimistic.
I don't think something like Python would have been a good choice to use instead of PS. While I'm sympathetic to the complaint that PS is more of a programming language than a shell, that's even more true of Python. I use PS as a shell far more often than I use it for complicated scripting, and as much as I like Python, I just can't see using it as a shell.
I suspect you haven't read the documentation or tried using PowerShell for any length of time. PowerShell may be bash-like, but it's not bash, does not try to be bash, and won't reward you if you treat it like bash. But it's very orthogonal, clean, and well documented.
For your particular example:
> help grep
Name Category Module Synopsis
---- -------- ------ --------
Out-File Cmdlet Microsoft.PowerShell.U... Sends output to a file.
Select-String Cmdlet Microsoft.PowerShell.U... Finds text in strings and files.
Okay, so Select-String sounds really promising. Let's take a look.
Most of those command flags seem really straightfoward to me. Can you be more specific about what was unclear to you? I'd be happy to help.
EDIT: BTW, it's a bit annoying to type Select-String, so it'd be nice if it had an alias. Does it have one?
Well, you can get aliases in PowerShell by typing alias. But that'll give you a wall of text; what you want to do is to quickly search for things that are aliased to Select-String.
There are two ways to do this. First, you can pipe to a GUI that allows directly filtering the results:
> alias | out-gridview
Or, alternatively, we can figure out what objects alias gives us:
> alias | select -first 1 | get-member
Note that we've got a Definition field, and query on that:
> alias | Where-Object { $_.definition -contains 'Select' }
which is a long version of
> alias | ? { $_.definition -contains 'Select' }
And notice that Select-String is aliased to sls by default. Note that I can just reference the column by name, rather than going through some awk/cut fun.
You might be annoyed that Select-String is not aliased to grep. While many commands actually do have multiple aliases to both DOS and Unix equivalents (e.g., Get-ChildItem is aliased to gci, dir, and ls, and Remove-Item has ri, rm, and del as aliases), Select-String works differently enough from grep that it's not a default alias so you're not confused.
Fair enough, and I have and will continue to not really want to invest time into learning Microsoft's stuff, based on past experiences (my first being wanting to develop for the platform as a scrub, and they charged thousands of dollars for a dev environment/compiler). I honestly don't think it'll serve me well going forward, when there are better alternatives.
They have had decades now to get on board with developers, and cmd.exe is still their go-to console. They still strike me as a company of greedy corporate business folk, who happen to run a software company, as opposed to a software company that has to suffer greedy corporate drones to survive in our current race to the bottom.
Correct - it has a couple of crippling features, such as wrapping output at 80 characters even if piped to a file (unless you tell it otherwise every time).
Powershell really is powerful. It's just an entirely different paradigm. The unix philosophy is "Everything is a textfile and pipes" - Powershell on the other hand is "Everything is an object and calls", and it's equally powerful, albeit not as simple.
The "UNIX shell" is a simple, clean solution to a text based interface. PowerShell is what a programmer thinks a shell should be like.
PowerShell really is (or should be) obvious to a programmer but the concept isn't as simple to explain to a sysadmin that doesn't know/understand OOP programming concepts.
I see your point, but I think it's increasingly rare to find sysadmins who haven't been exposed to OOP. A little programming has become less and less optional to be successful at the job. At my job, I'm pretty sure even the entry level helpdesk staff have been exposed to a bit of Java, C#, or the like.
You forgot the Direct3D vs OpenGL shenanigans that they were still trying as early as Vista. The fact that no open technology is ever good enough for Microsoft, the fact that whenever they took anything that could be remotely interoperable with anybody else, they applied embrace-extend-extinguish. The name "Office Open XML" which is just so close to sounding like "Open Office XML" and fool people into thinking it will have some interoperability with Open Office. The way they start new APIs and technologies and then abandon them when they stop being the latest and greatest (MFC, Silverlight). The way they push their own proprietary solution to everything.
I guess you must think less of most game devs as pretty much all of them are on Windows? I suppose it's possible they feel the same way when they see someone on a platform with 2nd or 3rd class gpu support.
That's a lot of supposing for a class of developers who write for platforms without an OS, where you must set up your VM tables yourself and program the GPU manually.
Then you should actually skim them; while of course their presentation as "the Halloween documents" is propaganda, they're sufficiently damning in their own right.
They financed a bogus lawfare campaign against Linux, although I doubt they knew it was utterly bogus (The SCO Group never actually owned any rights to UNIX(TM), and knew it before commencing the lawsuits.)
I just transitioned to a new job that uses Exchange for email, and it feels like the old Microsoft. The only way I've found to get Thunderbird to connect to Exchange's IMAP is by using a proprietary add-on. A lot of .doc and .xls files get passed around that I can't modify in LibreOffice without screwing up the formatting. The hardest part of getting work done on a Linux desktop isn't the drivers, it's interoperability with MS Office.
So it is good that MS is been moving in the right direction, but there's still a lot of legacy crap holding back innovation.
Although I do not know why it is successful but you are right; mail is definitely not the reason why it is popular. But I don't think it is for the reasons you think it is popular either. Of all my 25-early 40 year old friends working in enterprises, exactly 0 people like it and they avoid it like the plague when they can. They like it slightly more than Sharepoint, but that's not saying much. To why it is popular still I would wager that's because enterprises just 'have it' and you have no other choice; you are forced to use it. But you were probably going to say 'collaboration' ?
I haven't used Apple's product in Jobs' era, but I've heard a lot of good stories about how solid and easy-to-use their software was. Now I'm on Yosemite, experiencing annoying bugs and unexpected quits/freezes on a daily basis. I don't even dare to update to El Capitan. Yesterday I upgraded to XCode 7.0.1, and all my swift projects failed to compile. If it's not for the touchpad and screen I'd rather go back to my Arch Linux laptop.
Apple isn't bringing any more surprise or delight to me hardware-wise. And their software quality is declining day-by-day. Development wise, just take a look at XCode's newest reviews to learn how bad the dev experience is. Developers are what makes a platform succeed, and Apple doesn't seem to realize that.
However, MS has been amazing since Nadella. My favorite news is open sourcing .NET and making it available for Linux. VSCode is also solid and even feels more polished than Atom to me. Hololens looks cool. Surface definitely lives up to its hype.
Last week I interviewed with MS. At the end I asked about the interviewer's opinion on MS's change and attitude to Open Source, and in his response he had this line: "Because Open Source is the future". I can hardly imagine a MS staff in pre-Nadella era would have such opinions. MS has changed. I think people should put down their prejudice about MS's past and admit that. Going to Redmond next Wed for an onsite. Wish myself good luck.
I think people should put down their prejudice about MS's past
There are some things that people find to be unforgivable. Not sure if anything MS has done qualifies for that for me, but in the area of gun control/the RKBA, which I've been fighting since the early '70s, there are companies like Ruger and Smith and Wesson which I absolutely refuse to do any business with after they betrayed US gun owners.
Sounds like your problem is that OS X has become Apple's red headed stepchild, iOS isn't reported to be having problems of this magnitude last time I checked. Too bad OS X is Apple's development platform of choice (only possible one???) for iOS....
In my eyes the only thing microsoft is uniquely guilty of is being the first dominant software company in a digital age.
Both apple and google have had their turn at the same position and done most if not all of the same dubious actions to end-users and developers as microsoft.
I respect a distrust for microsoft but I dont consider it rational to hate one of these big players more than another.
There's been lots of positive announcements from Microsoft recently, but I think I'll save the applause for when they can do those cool things and actually make money from it, not from extorting cash for patents, office document lock-in, and all their other "bad microsoft" stuff.
I'm on your boat with this. I haven't seen any change that truly 'matters'. I have noticed them trying to increase their presence on technical and social media but the content really isn't anything of substance which leads me to feel that they're purely marketing moves.
They don't change anything software wise. Windows 10 is still being forced as a benchmark of how popular the OS is (and hilariously we heard this first on the MS event), while they didn't have the balls to address the privacy questions regarding data collection upfront and what will they do about it.
My interpretation of the grand parent's comments were that it's nice and all that "Microsoft is changing" but if it doesn't result in a turnaround in their fortunes with consumers and developers it's all for naught. So far I don't see any turnaround happening.
On first read, I was going to ask to get a link to that thesis, thinking it was some Masters or PhD work. Every 10 years you're going to have the 'big-evil'. I'm with you 100% about it being standard practices in big companies, and 110% about users being complacent about accepting the walled garden.
Also re: patents- IBM has a huge patent portfolio. Very little of it is used to patent troll. Those boxed-office Texas shell LLP law-firms setup are nothing like what IBM is doing today (second only behind Red Hat in terms of core Linux kernel commits, IIRC[caveat: source was from a talk I attended in 2013 by one of the 3 upstream-controllers, including Linus]). "Evil 80s IBM" is now actually too stagnant to really exploit the consumer and barely breathing off of old banks and gov't systems that run System/36,360,38,390 on z/OS.
"Evil 90s MS" is now opening up basically everything for the consumer, minus the cash-cows (enterprises). MS Research funds tons of Haskell research, language development that gradually goes from PhD/post-doc work -> "obscure" languages like Haskell/F# -> C# (LINQ is effectively a monad). Python 3.5's new async/await is largely influenced by work Microsoft did (both in semantics and syntax). The CoreCLR is on Github. Inspect, modify, alter, run your F# code on a RS/6000 or 8 dollar ARM if you want to. Visual Studio Community Edition is free, a la the IntelliJ model. I argue they're now a net positive on the community. Just like IBM, they've realized the enterprise is where their money is, so charge for SQL Server licenses (which are really reasonably priced compared to Oracle), Sharepoint, Server, and Dynamics/Biztalk type stuff.
In the 80s it was IBM. In the 90s it was MS. Today, Apple performing so much walled-gardened anti-competitive practices (I can't install my legally purchased copy of OS X on my Intel machine? Really?) that it makes the MS DOJ trial look completely insignificant.
That's a quite old version of OSX (2009), and is meant for people needing to upgrade from OSX 10.5, as v10.5 wasn't upgradable over a network connection.
Clickbate marketing article name with little valuable substance. I tried Windows 10 in tablet mode and I found the whole experience to be disjointed. It felt out of touch with recent UX trends / advancements, the same old thing with a new skin and even more tiles. Everything I wanted to do took more 'clicks' that I was happy with and there's little-to-no consideration to power users. Am I the only one that doesn't see any signs of real innovation here?
They are marketing really hard where the tech nerds and devs are, astroturfing comment sections and sponsored articles everywhere.
Things like Microsoft is changing and giving fuzzy feelings (really?), but the general audience is harder to get. I've seen huge billboards with surface 3 ads, special sections in stores, but I've never seen one in the wild.
I work for a medium sized tech company and the surfaces are absolutely ubiquitous, 1:1 with Mac books easily. People who have them absolutely adore them. I'm considering getting a surface book when the lease on my rmbpro is up.
I don't hate them, I wish they'd become real competition. Competition and diversity in this industry is fundamental to its success. Unfortunately I only see the same old irrelevant, boring products almost no signs of innovation. They're one of the largest companies in the world and the best the best they can do is a tablet with a bendy keyboard running the same old OS with a new theme slapped haphazardly on top? Poor effort.
As mentioned in the introduction, Windows 8 encompasses two UI styles within one product. Windows 8 on mobile devices and tablets is akin to Dr. Jekyll: a tortured soul hoping for redemption. On a regular PC, Windows 8 is Mr. Hyde: a monster that terrorizes poor office workers and strangles their productivity.
I've used it on my mother's Surface Pro (sysadmin stuff), and can't imagine using it on a desktop without major addons etc. The pain of maintaining a Linux desktop is much less for me.
I find more ridiculous the statement "we will never forgive Microsoft" than saying "we will never forgive Germany".
They're a company, not a charity, they're in the business of making money, and if making money implies using "dirty tactics" such as saying phone manufacturers "bundle Office in your phones or we will use our patents against you" it will certainly happen regardless of which company we're talking about.
Also, you should not be angered at Microsoft for collaborating with the NSA, but be angered at America for forcing companies to collaborate with the NSA. If you were in the position of Microsoft would you reject and risk loosing your company? Don't be ridiculous! If Apple is playing to be the victim right now, is because it's more profitable for them after the public outrage that followed Snowden's revelations.
There is a real world outside the Free Software bubble, a real world where companies struggle to survive and any means to survive, even at the expense of the competition, will certainly happen.
People like to anthropomorphize companies as having a conscience, but you're right: they're just autonomous control structures with the goal of making as much money as possible. Sometimes their leaders will make bad decisions prioritizing money now over money later, but ultimately such decisions are often just as bad for the long-term health of the company as they are for the market (even though they may provide a short-term benefit).
And for everyone who says Microsoft should have told the NSA to shove it, just consider how quickly a major CEO can be taken down by the government: Jeff Smisek, widely considered one of the two most powerful men in the airline industry, was forced out of his position as CEO of United Airlines as part of a government corruption scandal with no more fanfare than a tersely worded press release. He has yet to be charged with anything, but criminal charges are inevitably coming. Any company that does business with the US government (as Microsoft does) is likely participating in some form of corruption or another. All they have to do is investigate that corruption and long jail sentences for senior executives will follow. It's essentially the NSA's version of "plata o plombo".
He was convicted of 19 counts of insider trading in Qwest stock on April 19, 2007 – charges he and many others claim are U.S. government retaliation for his refusal to give customer data to the National Security Agency in February, 2001.
Given the iffiness of such charges when it's your own company's stock, we have to at least entertain the proposition that refusing to work with the NSA is a ticket to Federal prison. Qwest is said to have been the only big company that refused.
Yeah; I remember that one too. The Smisek one was just more recent, and Smisek was also a much more visible CEO than Nacchio given United's place in the airline industry. From what I can tell, the Smisek issue may have genuinely involved some wrongdoing, but Smisek may only be involved because the ultimate target is Chris Christie. But he was a titan of his industry, and when he left there was no retirement party or farewell video: just a new guy sitting in his chair and a short press release explaining that a change had been made. Nobody is immune.
But yeah, that's the jist of it. Refusing to comply with an NSA order will likely just end you up in jail on something else because the government has the power to lock you up. So we can't hold the companies who complied with them entirely responsible, as those companies are made up of individuals who have families to think of.
The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague....
He'll have a lot more examples, I'm sure.
So we can't hold the companies who complied with them entirely responsible, as those companies are made up of individuals who have families to think of.
Especially since the Feds have no compunctions against going after your family if they can't pin something on you. E.g. junk bond figure Michael Millikan, who's real crime was creating a market for poorly managed companies.
Part of their survival is depending on consumer perception of their brand.
Microsoft sold us out to the NSA for a big fat cheque. Apple and Google have been fighting doing so every step of the way.
Companies that act like uncompetitive dicks should be shunned and regulated, especially when they do things like abuse the patent system.
There is a real world outside of the Realism bubble. A real world where people struggle for justice, and justice, even at the expense of wasting time talking on the internet, will certainly happen.
Do you understand the concept of "national security"? If you were to invent, for example, teleporting, and you rejected selling your invention to the government, the most likely outcome would be that the government would confiscate your invention and recruit you against your will under threats of being jailed for risking "national security".
There is no such thing as justice other than "abide by the law".
Fine print: laws are subject to change, sometimes with good results by the perception of the majority of people, sometimes not.
It's funny how people will believe that one person, Satya Nadella, can have such a profound impact on a company of hundreds of thousands of people. It's all about crafting a story and offering people an explanation for why the company is changing.
I wish there was some type of bayesian submarine-ometer[1] that took the baseline percentage chance of any "article" being dressed-up PR on a particular website and performed some type of analysis on the company's marketing spend, brand perception, buzzwords, the interests of the article's author, and the article's similarity to other positive articles on the company/product.
I could not help myself, I had to get a surface book, it may end up in the pile of things with great potential but I had to give it a shot. Two devices were in the running for my 2015 tablet HW refresh, the Lenovo Yoga 3 and the iPad Pro. This sort of came out of left field.
It has a lot to live up to, I use my iPad every day and for a variety of things, but something I always wanted to do on my iPad, sketch, wasn't very satisfactory. And while I liked the Surface Pro 3's pen experience, its battery life was a challenge and some key Apps weren't there.
So long battery life, a better drawing experience, and a useful typing experience, and, for bonus, I can stop carrying around a laptop as well? Well if this thing can pull that off its a win for me, and I'll just put vmware workstation on it and run Linux when I'm doing my embedded work.
But the other thing it has done is really highlight the impact of market windows. Had the iPad Pro come out last year, or even in Q1 of this year, I would be using it already and probably not be buying the Surface Book.
For historical reasons the first thing I bought to try to do what I wanted was the "Touchbook" from Always Innovating. Detachable keyboard, touch screen. But not enough battery life, and the screen's resistive touch screen was not very useful. I also have the Illiad 2 from iREX which an an epaper display with a watcom stylus, loved the pen, and the readability of epaper, but very little app support and challenging storage options. For a while I've lived with both a laptop and the iPad. I'm really curious if this new box can meet my expectations.
I for one am curious how much battery life you can really pull out of it. When I see 12 hours on the spec I usually don't get more than 7-8 and that's right there in the 'not enough for a day' zone for me.
Agreed, if it is less than 9 in the "real world" I'll be pretty disappointed. The thing that makes iPads work for me is that they save a lot of power when they are asleep, and they come back instantly when they are woken up (very phone like in that regard). If Microsoft has given W10 that ability on their Surface hardware it could do the trick for me. (the only time I go 8 - 9 hours straight on battery is when I'm travelling)
Their partnership with Google over Typescript and the general openness that they are pushing is fantastic. I really feel they are giving a lot to the developer community.
The Surface Book is an exceptional piece of kit. It is telling that the top end book (16GB/512SSD) was the only one at one point to be sold-out on pre-order. None of the other options include 16GB of ram and I think this is a shame, but you cannot fault what they have done here.
Kudos. Microsoft now gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
This change has actually been brewing for a long time. I was at a summit they held for Open Source project leaders back in 2008, and we got to sit down with the dev teams for IIS, SQL Server, and some of their web dev tools. They were extremely open, helpful, and just wanted to collaborate on cool stuff.
There were only a few pockets of "New Microsoft" back then, but they were there if you looked, and they were working their asses off to change the culture. Clearly their work has paid off.
I think some evangelists ( Phil Haack ( now @ github), Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, ...) were ahead of Nadal when changing perception about Microsoft in terms of opensource and community..
It was a bottom-top approach with Nadal as result. Ballmer couldn't understand the new wave. Just like many "old" CEO's of software companies don't understand.
I know companies who still keep programming in Access and Terminal Server, Asp forms, ... Just because their boss understands that.
Not really. Microsoft has always had two sides, two forces constantly warring with each other internally. Microsoft is and always has been chock full of serious, 100% authentic "hackers". And those have driven the company as much as high level business decisions over the years. Microsoft has long been a proponent for things like open platforms (such as the original PC design) and has long tried to be a good citizen within the computing industry. There was a period of time when those voices were muted compared to the voices of hard-nosed business types but you can see those forces re-asserting themselves in the current iteration of microsoft.
And good evidence for this has been how developer friendly MS has always been. As Ballmer put it "developers, developers, developers!" Even at their most Netscape destroying height of evilness, MS was always great at documentation, code samples, dev events etc
For years the hackers/pundits were telling MS to adopt a more inviting buisness plan with free versions etc. It is possible that this approach could be detrimental even if they hace good products. It is ironic that as consumer Windows has become a more polished product they have removed the premium pricing in favour of app stores and subscriptions.
I am amazed by this observations well. I can't help but wonder if the change was already on the way when Nadella took over as CEO. The change as being pushed from the inside outwards, probably mostly by the MS tech folks. Because it is mostly the tech folks that care about type of transparency.
"The company was so in love with P.C.s (the hub for all things and for all time to come) that it came late to the Internet and much, much too late to mobile phones."
In the early 2000s, Microsoft did try pushing tablet computers, "pocket PCs" based on Windows CE (rivals to Palm PDAs) and even had Windows Phone OS in some smartphones.
That did not gain traction, because the user experience was not captivating, and they had missed the insight that fingers would be the way to go. (I'm not sure if earlier the capacitive touchscreen technology was already available in alternative to the resistive screens that required a stylus.)
I'd say that Apple's post-2007 success would not be possible without learning from Microsoft's expensive failures. But Microsoft did try.
IMHO, it was not about fingers. Palm PDAs were vastly superiors to me in terms of UI because, unlike Windows CE, they did not try to mimic a desktop experience.
Yeah, with the likes of .Net Core it seems very much like Microsoft are on the right track. But you'll still see plenty of, what I call, "Microsoft decisions" that just make things into more hassle or expense than it should be purely for the pursuit of profit. One example is if you want to migrate from Linux to Windows 10 on a few computers you're legally required to buy a Windows 10 license for each machine you run. So for people with a few machines that might be 3 licenses you have to pay for - it's just crazy.
"You have to pay for our software to run it on a machine" is possibly the least crazy example you could have chosen. There's far more strangeness in Microsoft licensing: Terminal Server, the whole business of CALs, the vast number of SKUs with ambiguous names, VM licensing, and so on.
In their defence, we did that to them. They had to make all the N versions of Windows to appease EU courts. What's troubling is that no such restriction is placed on Apple or Google
I think you can license Windows on a per-user basis. Certainly for their higher end products (e.g. Dynamics AX ERP) you can choose device or user CALs and pick whichever one minimizes your license costs.
One of Microsoft's weaknesses is definitely the complexity of their licensing.
A license per machine. How is that wierd? The entire industry of commercial software works that way, one way or another. Either you pay per user, or pay per machine. Note you can run several VMs with Windows without paying for a licens. Honestly, I believe it's a matter of time before Windows is free anyway.
I like nearly everything Microsoft is currently doing, except for their attitude towards privacy, which means that I'll be making efforts to move away from their platform out of principal.
As compared to Apples ecosystem, or Android, or? I simply don't get it. All of it is there to improve the experience for most users, and possible to turn the chatter of such that it shares next to nothing. What more could you ask for, in a system that aims to make is simple and feature rich for the average person?
> "As compared to Apples ecosystem, or Android, or?"
As compared to most/all open-source OSes (Android being only partially open source). This includes mobile OSes.
> " All of it is there to improve the experience for most users, and possible to turn the chatter of such that it shares next to nothing. What more could you ask for, in a system that aims to make is simple and feature rich for the average person?"
Did you not see the stories about Microsoft collecting data even after the settings to disable the features in question were used?
I have seen stories, however, I haven't seen my own Win10 machines being chatty with MS outside of what I ask it to. With that in mind, I have no reason not to trust MS when they say they're not collecting data unless it's enabled.
"Windows 10, however, shakes this up. Instead of two separate systems—one for error reporting, a second for collecting usage data—both have been rolled into one combined setting. This setting has four positions: off; basic error reporting and simple device capability reporting; enhanced diagnostic tracking that extends the basic information with more detailed error reporting, and usage telemetry; and full data, that adds process memory snapshots to the enhanced data. This means that there's no way to participate in error reporting without also participating in usage tracking, and vice versa.
Further, the "off" option is only available in Windows 10 Enterprise. The common home user versions of Windows, Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro, always collect (and report) at least "Basic" level information and no way to turn off the feature entirely.
The genuine privacy implications of this seem slight, but for those who absolutely do not want to send anything to Microsoft, Windows 10 is certainly a regression. Is Microsoft poring over this data, trying to sniff out the details of Windows users' lives and figure out all their secrets? It's highly unlikely—but the removal of the ability to turn off this reporting is nonetheless strange, and there's no clear reason for it."
I was not aware that the off option was only possible on enterprise. That said I, the developer, can completely understand why. That information is integral to successfully determine future work with the system.
But in any case, if that is the only thing one cannot turn completely off for average user, I'd say it's a pretty good compromise between features and still giving power to the powerusers. Still it's odd the off option isn't possible for everyone.
I definitely agree, and get the feeling that the company culture now is more about building the right innovation for users than spinning the same products for more revenue.
I believe so as well. They've switched focus and are going in the right direction now.
A few years ago I actually advised everyone to not use Microsoft's products. Every single product was subpar (Windows, Windows Phone, their laptops etc). Today, I'm happy to advise Surface Pro, Windows Phone, etc to anyone. They're striving more for innovation (e.g. Surface Pro, Surface Book), which is cool and will bring them success.
The app situation is going to change very rapidly in the next few months. It's why Microsoft is making a big deal of the Windows 10 install base. There was a quick slide follow up in the devices announcement that showed that the growing install base has already attracted some big companies to the UWP [Universal Windows Platform] that previously had be meh on Windows Phone.
With Windows 10 on phones in November that platform will light up on phones finally. (Already the UWP Facebook app, as one example, is a leap forward in cross-OS feature parity compared to previous versions and it will be great to see that "day one" on Windows 10 phones.) On top of that you have "Project Astoria" which will mean very easy ports of existing Android apps to Windows 10 Phones for developers looking to leverage existing code investment. (Already somewhat released and being utilized is "Project Islandwood" and we're starting to see some iOS software ported to Windows through it.)
The UWP support on the Xbox One (and the merging of the Xbox and Windows Stores, huzzah) is supposed to light up as soon as November and we now know that a lot more developers will have access to HoloLens (which will also utilize the UWP) early next year. I think that access to Xboxen and HoloLens will encourage more developers to also consider cheaply scaling "down" to people's phones as well. So too should Continuum phones and their ability to offer side-by-side run "desktop-like" versions of UWP apps may drive some interesting apps to Windows Phone moving forward that have ignored it thus far.
While I agree on the app front, which is not really that relevant to me, I still believe that it came a very long way in terms of UI and usability.
The one thing I dislike is the mail application (well, one day when I have the nerve and gumption I'll actually figure out how to attach a PDF, I think it has something to do with OneDrive and compatible applications, but I digress) and that there's not really an alternative to it.
In terms of usability it feels to me snappier and more logical than the IPhone of my girlfriend. Even after almost two years it doesn't feel like the performance is degrading.
If they don't kill the platform I plan to stick with it.
I only use a handful of apps on my phone and the ones I do use, do everything I need out of them. As someone who used iPhones, androids, and now as of this year a Windows Phone, I have to say, the UI is extremely well done. The live tiles give me most of the information I need. Glance is great, I don't have to turn the phone on, I just lift it and it gives me a low light version of date, time, notifications, etc.
I'm definitely going to pick up the Lumia 950XL phone when it goes on sale.
I don't have much feelings towards companies and technology. I use ones as I see fit. Windows has, since 7, been very useful to me. Even 8 (8.1 which I'm on right now). Windows has been my primary OS since 7. I augment it with Total Commander and Babun (cygwin) and that's it. Everything is great, except Babun which could use some more work (or I don't know how to use it). I also use Redhat on other workstation (due to graphics software dictating it) and it's not as usable on desktop as Windows and OSX are. That's not a surprise though. I also use OSX on my macbook air, because that's the best laptop I could've got for what I needed (lightweight, moderately powerful, battery life). I carry around Android Nexus 7 tablet as well, so new Surface Book looks like a good deal to me in order to get rid of macbook air/nexus 7 combo. Microsoft research also does some cool stuff in graphics which I've used (through their papers). I use Word and Excel all the time as well, along with Google Docs. those are just some random thoughts as I perceive them from my POV now.
Microsoft to me has always been good at 'businessy' stuff. Embrace partners, embrace developers, and keep users somewhat satisfied. If you help others make money, they're going to love you. Apple has been good at 'designy' stuff. Wow and embrace users, keep developers and partners somewhat satisfied. This explains why Apple doesn't really care about backwards compat, or communicating/co-coordinating releases with partners, etc. It looks like MS is taking a leaf out of Apples book. I wonder if they can continue to do the other stuff as well.
I'm really surprised it didn't touch on the oncoming xplat-ness of .net in this round up. I feel like this is huge considering how much it connects the technology. To boot, c# is a top 10 language on github even though it's primarily a single platform language (https://github.com/blog/2047-language-trends-on-github)
Microsoft's offerings still seem under-designed to me, on a second look. I still can't order Surface Pro (or Surface Book) with cellular modem; only Surface 3, an older and supposedly lower end device. I can't order Surface Book with 1TB drive, only a Surface Pro 4; despite the former being a more expensive and supposedly higher end device.
Why so? As far as I understand, Microsoft still goes with the templates their hardware OEMs already have: Surface is based on a tablet template, while Surface Pro and Surface Book are supposedly based on different laptop templates and the available options are thus defined by the OEMs. This also explains why the 'Pro' versions 1 and 2 had cameras inferior to the 'non-Pro' versions.
I wish Microsoft got their act together and gave more attention to design, while they are at it. If they are saying this is a tablet that can replace my computer, let it have what those tablets that can't have: cellular module. If it has a non-removable hard drive, let me have it in the greatest available capacity, sepecially while you already offer that on a lower-priced model.
I kind of thought the headline referred to the fact that they did finally release a patch that makes connecting to Exchange servers via Outlook possible again in the latest OS X.
[too snarky, maybe but it was a pretty hilarious situation where both Apple and Microsoft failed fairly hard for a (short) while]
The piece and ars technica video show both the good and the bad of this new MSFT attempt:
Some good ideas, but let's be real - ultimately a total niche product at $1500. Compare that the surface pro 3 has been selling about 3-4 million units in the last year ( q3/2014 - q2/2015 revenue was estimated around $3b, on devices costing about $800 + $130 keyboard), while Apple sells about 20m Mac units in the same timeframe, which is in itself STILL a niche!
www.statista.com/statistics/263444/sales-of-apple-mac-computers-since-first-quarter-2006/
I just don't see how this is going to make any sort of real dent.
I remember using a Windows machine in 2006 that could also double as a tablet. (You could pivot the screen around and then fold it back on top of the keyboard.) It wasn't very good of course, and my point is that this idea is not new by a long shot. So is the enthusiasm for Surface Book coming from the fact that it's made by MS themselves?
Beyond that, it strikes me that the way they talk focuses so much more on narrative than the actual products they're selling. Like "I want you to love MS because you love building things for other people" or whatever.
Wonder how much Nadella really changed vs the changed perception of the company, much of this stuff must have been brewing while Ballmer was at the helm..
I would recommend the Surface to friends or family, which is a recent change. But I would never use Microsoft products. And not just because I'd be giving up years of Linux folk-knowledge. Childishly, when I watch a youtube video of someone far more skilled than me programming in Windows, I recoil a little.
I strive to avoid bias; I don't want the change in perception to happen merely after people like me die. My bias is fallacious, but it holds like any other deeply-felt bias.
Hell, I only recently stopped calling them M$.