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> 1-Their programmers were terrible designers...Apple. The whole "Apple Good. Microsoft Bad." is really tedious and it couldn't be further from the truth. Appl

> 1-Their programmers were terrible designers...Apple. The whole "Apple Good. Microsoft Bad." is really tedious and it couldn't be further from the truth. Apple is terrible at designing software. Apple couldn't even attempt to handle the size of software projects that Microsoft deals with. They couldn't even build their own OS, they had to buy it from NeXT who stole BSD and Tivo-ized it. Furthermore, if Apple built Office or designed the Office document formats, nobody would get any of the features that they wanted. That's because Apple designs the simplest thing that works for the majority of people and anybody who doesn't fit that mold is screwed. It takes a company with real grit, like Microsoft, to get this size job done. > 2-They were experts breaking formats ON PURPOSE... Oh, give me a fucking break. How about a citation? > 3-There were too much programmers... How much is "too much"? Is 20-40 the proper size then? Please tell us, in your infinite expertise...what is the exact number of programmers that is a good size for building Internet Explorer 1.0 through 6.0? > 4-Perversive incentives. ...Ballmer incentived people to create lots of bad code... Could you be a little less vague? How about an example?

tim333 10y ago
re > 2-They were experts breaking formats ON PURPOSE... there's quite a good discussion in Wikipedia >"Embrace, extend, and extinguish", also known as "Embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
- mohamedattahri 10y ago
  Adding proprietary modules to existing standards is VERY different from willingly breaking a closed format they created in the first place.
- WayneBro 10y ago
  Microsoft created the Office document standard. So "EEE" doesn't really apply here. The person I responded to didn't list one example that was relevant to Office.
hrktb 10y ago
For someone who doesn't want to get into "Apple Good. Microsoft Bad." level of rethoric you seem to have a lot of grudge against Apple. To answer your points, they built their own OS and they had their own Office suite. They threw lots of stuff away afterwards, but from my point of view that's the very reason why I use an Apple laptop right now. Had they stick with the OS9 base, I'd never buy their products, the same way I don't consider buying a windows machine. For your point 2) do you really need a citation about Office versions backward non compatibility? I wouldn't care to qualify if those were done on purpose or not, fact is there's still product managers that green lit the release of products that would break silently compatibility with older versions in small but critically annoying ways (screwing the layout in a word doc is the last step before plain data loss) Point 4) about incentives, I always wonder why we ended up with Office version installing libraries that would affect the behavior of internet explorer. For instance as an intern I built a dynamic form for an intranet dedicated to IE (6 I think?), but it wouldn't properly work if a recent version of Office was not installed on the system. Of course I was writing shitty code, but yet it boggles my mind that Office would install system wide libraries affecting the behavior of so many applications. There was no incentive to prevent this kind of problems, or they were just really bad designers, pick your option.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- izacus 10y ago
  Probably the same reason you need to do a full iOS upgrade just to update Apple Music app.
feld 10y ago
"stole BSD and Tivo-ized it" Please leave your GPL zealotry at home. This is not what NeXT was.
- roblabla 10y ago
  Well it kind of is. A modified BSD kernel (open source, called darwin) that can't run without heavy modifications on non-apple hardware, with lots of proprietary libraries bolted in. So they effectively took an open source software and made it hard to use outside their own hardware. So unless I'm missing something, macOS is basically a "tivoized" BSD. I agree though that NeXT didn't "steal BSD". BSD is liberally licensed, so NeXT was perfectly within their rights to use it. Legally speaking, I don't think they even needed to open source their fork.
  - feld 10y ago
    The XNU kernel is not a BSD kernel, it's a Mach kernel. There may be some BSD code in it (the unfinished net80211 wifi stack for iOS, ipfw/pf firewall, MAC framework, some things bolted on to make it traditional unix-y), but it's not a BSD kernel.
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
> Apple couldn't even attempt to handle the size of software projects that Microsoft deals with. They couldn't even build their own OS, they had to buy it from NeXT who stole BSD and Tivo-ized it. Furthermore, if Apple built Office or designed the Office document formats, nobody would get any of the features that they wanted. Er, you mean like how Microsoft based DOS off QDOS and Windows NT off OS/2?
davidgerard 10y ago
>> 2-They were experts breaking formats ON PURPOSE... > Oh, give me a fucking break. How about a citation? This was their standard practice at the time. Comes v Microsoft was all about this. http://groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2007021720190018 http://groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20070217201900...

tim333 10y ago

re > 2-They were experts breaking formats ON PURPOSE... there's quite a good discussion in Wikipedia >"Embrace, extend, and extinguish", also known as "Embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

mohamedattahri 10y ago
Adding proprietary modules to existing standards is VERY different from willingly breaking a closed format they created in the first place.
WayneBro 10y ago
Microsoft created the Office document standard. So "EEE" doesn't really apply here. The person I responded to didn't list one example that was relevant to Office.

hrktb 10y ago

For someone who doesn't want to get into "Apple Good. Microsoft Bad." level of rethoric you seem to have a lot of grudge against Apple. To answer your points, they built their own OS and they had their own Office suite. They threw lots of stuff away afterwards, but from my point of view that's the very reason why I use an Apple laptop right now. Had they stick with the OS9 base, I'd never buy their products, the same way I don't consider buying a windows machine. For your point 2) do you really need a citation about Office versions backward non compatibility? I wouldn't care to qualify if those were done on purpose or not, fact is there's still product managers that green lit the release of products that would break silently compatibility with older versions in small but critically annoying ways (screwing the layout in a word doc is the last step before plain data loss) Point 4) about incentives, I always wonder why we ended up with Office version installing libraries that would affect the behavior of internet explorer. For instance as an intern I built a dynamic form for an intranet dedicated to IE (6 I think?), but it wouldn't properly work if a recent version of Office was not installed on the system. Of course I was writing shitty code, but yet it boggles my mind that Office would install system wide libraries affecting the behavior of so many applications. There was no incentive to prevent this kind of problems, or they were just really bad designers, pick your option.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
izacus 10y ago
Probably the same reason you need to do a full iOS upgrade just to update Apple Music app.

feld 10y ago

"stole BSD and Tivo-ized it" Please leave your GPL zealotry at home. This is not what NeXT was.

roblabla 10y ago
Well it kind of is. A modified BSD kernel (open source, called darwin) that can't run without heavy modifications on non-apple hardware, with lots of proprietary libraries bolted in. So they effectively took an open source software and made it hard to use outside their own hardware. So unless I'm missing something, macOS is basically a "tivoized" BSD. I agree though that NeXT didn't "steal BSD". BSD is liberally licensed, so NeXT was perfectly within their rights to use it. Legally speaking, I don't think they even needed to open source their fork.
- feld 10y ago
  The XNU kernel is not a BSD kernel, it's a Mach kernel. There may be some BSD code in it (the unfinished net80211 wifi stack for iOS, ipfw/pf firewall, MAC framework, some things bolted on to make it traditional unix-y), but it's not a BSD kernel.

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago

> Apple couldn't even attempt to handle the size of software projects that Microsoft deals with. They couldn't even build their own OS, they had to buy it from NeXT who stole BSD and Tivo-ized it. Furthermore, if Apple built Office or designed the Office document formats, nobody would get any of the features that they wanted. Er, you mean like how Microsoft based DOS off QDOS and Windows NT off OS/2?

davidgerard 10y ago

>> 2-They were experts breaking formats ON PURPOSE... > Oh, give me a fucking break. How about a citation? This was their standard practice at the time. Comes v Microsoft was all about this. http://groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2007021720190018 http://groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20070217201900...