6 ms·

Only losing market share and power has made Microsoft produce software with reasonable quality, flexibility, and interoperability. A lot of the credit for that

by ploxiln 11y ago

Only losing market share and power has made Microsoft produce software with reasonable quality, flexibility, and interoperability. A lot of the credit for that goes to Apple's crazy climb in popularity. But at least some of it also goes to technologists involved in networking, the internet, and the web, many of whom decided never to deal with any Microsoft stuff ever again. If you knew the frustration of Microsoft's combination of lock-in and incompetence, back in 1995 - 2006 (my entire computing life at the time!) you wouldn't blame them.

ckozlowski 11y ago
>Only losing market share and power has made Microsoft produce software with reasonable quality, flexibility, and interoperability. And that, in my opinion, is the way it's supposed to work. Vendor's products gettin' ya down? Not being responsive to your needs and lacking in quality? Move elsewhere! Money talks. A good kick in the ass can be a humbling experience, and a good opportunity for the open-minded. It was a long time in coming, but I'm glad to see MS is starting to take some of these lessons to heart. If they keep it up with actions such as these, there's a good chance they'll stand to be rewarded for it.
- simoncion 11y ago
  > If they keep it up with actions such as these, there's a good chance they'll stand to be rewarded for it. And -quickly enough- they'll go back to being the old MSFT we all knew and loathed from top to bottom, and these olive branches will vanish quicker than a pile of shaved ice on a summer day. For many of us, this isn't our first rodeo. :)
  - th0waway 11y ago
    Embrace Extend Extinguish - many of us have seen that happen over the years. MS will not garner my personal support until the release code under the GPL.
  - thebaer 11y ago
    At least now we'll have a decent editor we can continue to run ourselves when that happens. :)
  - dbattaglia 11y ago
    Honest question: how many people from the embrace-extend-extinguish era are still at Microsoft? Once they are all gone, and the market has shifted several times since then, you would think that era would be over for them. Or, is it just deeply engrained in their corporate culture, which lives in longer than any individual employee? I kind of doubt it but it's interesting to think about.
    - cicero 11y ago
      The computer technology world has changed a lot since then, and I expect that intelligent people at Microsoft know that the old ways won't work again.
      - simoncion 11y ago
        > ...I expect that intelligent people at Microsoft know that the old ways won't work again [because] ... [t]he computer technology world has changed a lot since then ... I'm not nearly as confident as you seem to be. People with purchasing power can still be swayed by FUD. Less-technical bosses are not-infrequently swayed by marketing copy from glossy mags and giveaways from salesman rather than sound technical advice from technical staff. It's abundantly clear that shadowy back-room deals and front-room exclusionary deals based on tremendous price cuts on widgets that have a near-zero unit cost are still tremendously effective. I expect that within five or ten years, after this new crop of programmers have happily been making Microsoft software a critical part of their workflow, Microsoft will return to its traditional MO. As I said earlier, for many of us this isn't our first rodeo, and isn't the first time Microsoft has played the nice guy for a little while. :)
        nojvek 11y ago
        I disagree. Before the game plan was to keep everyone in windows. Now with iOS and android killing things it's no longer about just windows. Satya's vision is very different from Ballmer. The big money makers are now shifting to Azure. This means if open sourcing tools that didn't make money will attract more Devs to azure. That is very valuable in the long term in business sense. This also gives Microsoft a good rep and gives a broader reach.
  - DasIch 11y ago
    Why would they go back? That strategy seemed promising in the beginning but clearly it caused massive damage to their reputation and simply doesn't work in the long term.
    - wstrange 11y ago
      I think that strategy reaped them billions, and continues to do so (the Office franchise is still a money printing press).
      - simoncion 11y ago
        Yep. It's abundantly clear that their slimeball strategies worked very well for them for at least twenty years. In the computing industry, twenty years is a very long time. :)
  - jevgeni 11y ago
    It's interesting that you don't make assumptions about future "evil" behaviour of their competition.
    - simoncion 11y ago
      Why is it interesting? The topic is Microsoft and Microsoft's past and present behavior. While it is next to impossible to truly consider a topic in a vacuum, it is very common practice to focus on a particular single topic or set of topics when engaging in discussion. This practice tends to promote productive discussion by allowing the conversants to momentarily disregard issues that are largely or completely unrelated to the topic at hand.
      - jevgeni 11y ago
        So, where's the criteria how the subject is constrained? Why are we talking about Microsoft and not the particular responsible Microsoft business division?
        simoncion 11y ago
        > Why are we talking about Microsoft and not the particular responsible Microsoft business division? Because -as the US DoJ inquiry showed us- Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior has been a strategy that was pursued because of directives from C-level employees. Historically, it hasn't been low-to-mid-level minions spontaneously deciding to do great violence to the computer industry, it has been directives (either express or implied) from the top that caused them to behave in this way.
- ms013 11y ago
  > > Only losing market share and power has made Microsoft produce software with reasonable quality, flexibility, and interoperability. > And that, in my opinion, is the way it's supposed to work. Vendor's products gettin' ya down? Not being responsive to your needs and lacking in quality? Move elsewhere! Money talks. Exactly. That's what got Apple where they are today as well. Pre-Rhapsody, MacOS was largely a joke in the developer community, but that changed drastically when they ditched the archaic MacOS for the Nextstep derived OSX. When that happened, suddenly there was a reasonable alternative to Windows or the various Unices out there. It seems entirely natural that, like the shift that pushed people towards Apple, we would see similar shifts in other OS's that would entice people to think more broadly than seeing Apple as the dominant desirable dev platform. That seems like a healthy thing with respect to avoiding a stagnant monoculture.
yoz 11y ago
I remember it very differently. It's particularly interesting that you start with 1995, since that's the year of Bill Gates's "Tidal Wave" memo. A large chunk of MS suddenly devoted itself to getting Really Good At The Internet, and within a few months produced the best web browser on the market (IE 3, the first mainstream browser to implement CSS) and the best JVM (far faster than Sun's own at the time). IE continued to be the best browser until Firefox came out. (Yes, you can argue for Seamonkey, but it took years for it to be usably stable.) Every version of IE up to and including 6.0 was more standards-compliant than the equivalent Netscape release. I was doing all kinds of web development on both Linux and Windows NT back then. I never got used to Windows for web hosting, but I far preferred developing against MS SQL Server than any other DB, due to its features and documentation.
- ploxiln 11y ago
  I'll admit I didn't really get started until 2000, and I'd also push the end-range to around 2009. And I did use the Mozilla Suite back then (pre Seamonkey naming). The main problem with IE, regardless of how good it is, is that it is windows only. This was true of all of Microsoft's stuff (particularly crappy mac versions don't count) (I also wasn't a fan of Mac OS 9 ... but there was bsd and linux for a number of years by then...) They used their own formats, which were not publicly documented or even really designed. If you had to use any single Microsoft thing, you practically had to use it all. Samba and later OpenOffice changed the situation but were really a lot of reverse-engineering and bug-for-bug-compatibility work, and of course Microsoft kept moving the goalposts with new versions and new bugs. The resentment comes from the lock-in. You had to pay a lot of money and deal with licenses (or pirate and deal with cracks) just to experiment. You had to deal with the surprisingly flaky file sharing and dhcp client etc. You had to deal with the fact that there wasn't a good terminal or shell, that the compiler was not trivial to download and install and invoke from a script, etc. If you have the freedom to choose the "convenience" of the Microsoft user-oriented products or not, it's not such a big deal that Microsoft everything sucked for networking related development. But if the lock-in gets you somehow, you really resent it. EDIT: and I almost forgot! microsoft calling linux a "cancer", funding lawsuits over linux kernel code, trying to make it harder for linux to support ACPI based systems - more underhanded lock-in to their crap
spotman 11y ago
While I certainly shared your frustration, I do think that MS had some extremely talented folks there. Some of the brightest people I have ever had the pleasure of working with came from MS. Incompetence was far from the problem. Priorities out of order would be one diagnosis.

by ploxiln 11y ago

ckozlowski 11y ago

>Only losing market share and power has made Microsoft produce software with reasonable quality, flexibility, and interoperability. And that, in my opinion, is the way it's supposed to work. Vendor's products gettin' ya down? Not being responsive to your needs and lacking in quality? Move elsewhere! Money talks. A good kick in the ass can be a humbling experience, and a good opportunity for the open-minded. It was a long time in coming, but I'm glad to see MS is starting to take some of these lessons to heart. If they keep it up with actions such as these, there's a good chance they'll stand to be rewarded for it.

simoncion 11y ago
> If they keep it up with actions such as these, there's a good chance they'll stand to be rewarded for it. And -quickly enough- they'll go back to being the old MSFT we all knew and loathed from top to bottom, and these olive branches will vanish quicker than a pile of shaved ice on a summer day. For many of us, this isn't our first rodeo. :)
- th0waway 11y ago
  Embrace Extend Extinguish - many of us have seen that happen over the years. MS will not garner my personal support until the release code under the GPL.
- thebaer 11y ago
  At least now we'll have a decent editor we can continue to run ourselves when that happens. :)
- dbattaglia 11y ago
  Honest question: how many people from the embrace-extend-extinguish era are still at Microsoft? Once they are all gone, and the market has shifted several times since then, you would think that era would be over for them. Or, is it just deeply engrained in their corporate culture, which lives in longer than any individual employee? I kind of doubt it but it's interesting to think about.
  - cicero 11y ago
    The computer technology world has changed a lot since then, and I expect that intelligent people at Microsoft know that the old ways won't work again.
    - simoncion 11y ago
      > ...I expect that intelligent people at Microsoft know that the old ways won't work again [because] ... [t]he computer technology world has changed a lot since then ... I'm not nearly as confident as you seem to be. People with purchasing power can still be swayed by FUD. Less-technical bosses are not-infrequently swayed by marketing copy from glossy mags and giveaways from salesman rather than sound technical advice from technical staff. It's abundantly clear that shadowy back-room deals and front-room exclusionary deals based on tremendous price cuts on widgets that have a near-zero unit cost are still tremendously effective. I expect that within five or ten years, after this new crop of programmers have happily been making Microsoft software a critical part of their workflow, Microsoft will return to its traditional MO. As I said earlier, for many of us this isn't our first rodeo, and isn't the first time Microsoft has played the nice guy for a little while. :)
      - nojvek 11y ago
        I disagree. Before the game plan was to keep everyone in windows. Now with iOS and android killing things it's no longer about just windows. Satya's vision is very different from Ballmer. The big money makers are now shifting to Azure. This means if open sourcing tools that didn't make money will attract more Devs to azure. That is very valuable in the long term in business sense. This also gives Microsoft a good rep and gives a broader reach.
- DasIch 11y ago
  Why would they go back? That strategy seemed promising in the beginning but clearly it caused massive damage to their reputation and simply doesn't work in the long term.
  - wstrange 11y ago
    I think that strategy reaped them billions, and continues to do so (the Office franchise is still a money printing press).
    - simoncion 11y ago
      Yep. It's abundantly clear that their slimeball strategies worked very well for them for at least twenty years. In the computing industry, twenty years is a very long time. :)
- jevgeni 11y ago
  It's interesting that you don't make assumptions about future "evil" behaviour of their competition.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    Why is it interesting? The topic is Microsoft and Microsoft's past and present behavior. While it is next to impossible to truly consider a topic in a vacuum, it is very common practice to focus on a particular single topic or set of topics when engaging in discussion. This practice tends to promote productive discussion by allowing the conversants to momentarily disregard issues that are largely or completely unrelated to the topic at hand.
    - jevgeni 11y ago
      So, where's the criteria how the subject is constrained? Why are we talking about Microsoft and not the particular responsible Microsoft business division?
      - simoncion 11y ago
        > Why are we talking about Microsoft and not the particular responsible Microsoft business division? Because -as the US DoJ inquiry showed us- Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior has been a strategy that was pursued because of directives from C-level employees. Historically, it hasn't been low-to-mid-level minions spontaneously deciding to do great violence to the computer industry, it has been directives (either express or implied) from the top that caused them to behave in this way.
ms013 11y ago
> > Only losing market share and power has made Microsoft produce software with reasonable quality, flexibility, and interoperability. > And that, in my opinion, is the way it's supposed to work. Vendor's products gettin' ya down? Not being responsive to your needs and lacking in quality? Move elsewhere! Money talks. Exactly. That's what got Apple where they are today as well. Pre-Rhapsody, MacOS was largely a joke in the developer community, but that changed drastically when they ditched the archaic MacOS for the Nextstep derived OSX. When that happened, suddenly there was a reasonable alternative to Windows or the various Unices out there. It seems entirely natural that, like the shift that pushed people towards Apple, we would see similar shifts in other OS's that would entice people to think more broadly than seeing Apple as the dominant desirable dev platform. That seems like a healthy thing with respect to avoiding a stagnant monoculture.

yoz 11y ago

I remember it very differently. It's particularly interesting that you start with 1995, since that's the year of Bill Gates's "Tidal Wave" memo. A large chunk of MS suddenly devoted itself to getting Really Good At The Internet, and within a few months produced the best web browser on the market (IE 3, the first mainstream browser to implement CSS) and the best JVM (far faster than Sun's own at the time). IE continued to be the best browser until Firefox came out. (Yes, you can argue for Seamonkey, but it took years for it to be usably stable.) Every version of IE up to and including 6.0 was more standards-compliant than the equivalent Netscape release. I was doing all kinds of web development on both Linux and Windows NT back then. I never got used to Windows for web hosting, but I far preferred developing against MS SQL Server than any other DB, due to its features and documentation.

ploxiln 11y ago
I'll admit I didn't really get started until 2000, and I'd also push the end-range to around 2009. And I did use the Mozilla Suite back then (pre Seamonkey naming). The main problem with IE, regardless of how good it is, is that it is windows only. This was true of all of Microsoft's stuff (particularly crappy mac versions don't count) (I also wasn't a fan of Mac OS 9 ... but there was bsd and linux for a number of years by then...) They used their own formats, which were not publicly documented or even really designed. If you had to use any single Microsoft thing, you practically had to use it all. Samba and later OpenOffice changed the situation but were really a lot of reverse-engineering and bug-for-bug-compatibility work, and of course Microsoft kept moving the goalposts with new versions and new bugs. The resentment comes from the lock-in. You had to pay a lot of money and deal with licenses (or pirate and deal with cracks) just to experiment. You had to deal with the surprisingly flaky file sharing and dhcp client etc. You had to deal with the fact that there wasn't a good terminal or shell, that the compiler was not trivial to download and install and invoke from a script, etc. If you have the freedom to choose the "convenience" of the Microsoft user-oriented products or not, it's not such a big deal that Microsoft everything sucked for networking related development. But if the lock-in gets you somehow, you really resent it. EDIT: and I almost forgot! microsoft calling linux a "cancer", funding lawsuits over linux kernel code, trying to make it harder for linux to support ACPI based systems - more underhanded lock-in to their crap

spotman 11y ago

While I certainly shared your frustration, I do think that MS had some extremely talented folks there. Some of the brightest people I have ever had the pleasure of working with came from MS. Incompetence was far from the problem. Priorities out of order would be one diagnosis.