8 ms·

Even as a longtime Apple fan and inveterate Microsoft-hater, I have to hand it to Satya Nadella and Microsoft as a whole. Their success is deserved. I work with

by Bud 10y ago

Even as a longtime Apple fan and inveterate Microsoft-hater, I have to hand it to Satya Nadella and Microsoft as a whole. Their success is deserved. I work with basically the full range of Microsoft products in my job and what I see is that everything has improved lately. Windows is better, Office is better, their cloud offerings are better, and even the Surface is better. Now, if they would only improve the licensing process for Windows so that it doesn't drive people insane, that would be amazing.

aswanson 10y ago
Visual Studios integration with so many other non-microsoft languages and packages is excellent. As a former msft hater, I have to agree with the parent.
mattnewton 10y ago
I was with you until the "windows is better part" Windows 10 has been the worst desktop experience I have ever encountered. From day 1 I have had driver issues, forced updates, no matter how I configure the time zone resets to GMT (which is great because it uses 3am as a time to restart and force installing updates). To say nothing if the awful UI. I had none of these issues with Ubuntu and I paid Microsoft for this headache so I could play games. I can't wait for more AAA Linux support, please take it home Valve.
- euroclydon 10y ago
  Windows 10 is more like a new product than not. It's going to take some time. I think that's okay, as long as the fundamental features of the OS are good, the compatibility and stability will catch up.
- elcct 10y ago
  Maybe you are the unlucky one. I wouldn't trade windows 10 for anything else.
  - criddell 10y ago
    Windows 10 is 90% great for me. The 10% that annoys me is mostly around the way update works. If you have long running processes (like security camera DVR software, big render jobs, etc...) having the OS decide to reboot in the middle of the night is a bit of a headache. I know you can disable the update service, but it would be nice if they just put that in the windows update UI. The other part that bugs me are the re-appearing bloatware apps like 3d builder, weather, contacts, xbox, groove music, etc.... The flipside of the reappearing apps issue is Microsoft uninstalling my VPN client. They don't think it's compatible with W10, but it works perfectly for me so I have to reinstall it every time. To get back on topic though, Microsoft's Azure is fantastic. The earnings boost is well deserved.
    - elcct 10y ago
      I agree about the updates. Regarding the apps I think I developed app blindness - I just don't notice them, my brain ignores it completely.
    - mtgx 10y ago
      > I know you can disable the update service No, you can't in Windows 10.
      - h1srf 10y ago
        IIRC if you have pro/enterprise you can disable it through a group policy.
      - criddell 10y ago
        This worked for me: http://www.trishtech.com/2016/01/how-to-quickly-enabledisable-windows-updates-in-windows-10/ http://www.trishtech.com/2016/01/how-to-quickly-enabledisabl...
      - madiathomas 10y ago
        I disabled Windows Update service on my laptop which is using Windows 10. Search for Services, scroll down to Windows Update, disable the service. I live in a country with very expensive data bundles. I simply can't afford to keep Windows Update service on.
- Agustus 10y ago
  Ah, to be young. Bad Desktops: Windows Vista, Windows 8, Windows ME, Windows 3.1, O/S 2 Warp Good Desktops: Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows NT
  - StillBored 10y ago
    The difference is that those (well maybe not ME) got better as they aged due to bug fixes. 10, seems to create more bugs than it fixes with every update.
    - rbanffy 10y ago
      I have to assume that, with a codebase this large and entangled, when you fix one bug, you add a couple elsewhere. Plus, they are adding features, not only fixing stuff.
- StillBored 10y ago
  Windows 10 seems to be degrading rather than getting better. It seems to have reached windows ME levels of stability on most of my devices. Leaving the win7/8 machines looking pretty good. The cool kids are always messing with it, so the stodgy maintenance programmers never get a couple years to fix all the crap they break. Plus, the non stop UI "quirks" are probably worse than I can remember. The whole OS has turned into the windows file copy dialog. This is what I always hated about linux on the desktop, 1/3 of the crap doesn't work right.. For example, last night I was sitting in bed with my 9Y/O daughter when she pressed the battery saver icon on the tablet, and the estimated time dropped from 9 hours 31 mins to 8 hours 50 mins. To which I responded it seems like pressing the battery saver icon forced it to recompute the estimated time remaining, where before it had been showing a stale value. Pressing it on and off a couple more times we got it to shift up to 10 hours some minutes. Its like they can't smooth the power consumption for longer than a few seconds, and the recompute timeout is longer than the smoothing, so the value has large jumps instead of smoothing changing. I could go on and on but its pretty obvious that no one is actually testing the UI, they are just letting some random people throw crap into it, and ship it. Worse its like their user metrics come down to, if less than 50% of the installs are using something then its ok to remove it (say classic mode).
  - criddell 10y ago
    According to Reddit, Microsoft laid off all their QA people in November of 2014: https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/3s14un/just_a_reminder_that_one_year_ago_microsoft_fired/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/3s14un/just_a_remi...
    - 0xFFC 10y ago
      This is bad. This is really really bad. This completely matches my personal experience. Microsoft QA under Nadella is only part of company I think underperforms. As far as I can remember from "How Google tests software" , Google doesn't have whole QA division too (other than a elite kinda testers) and testing is integrated to developers job(SDET). This was not true for Microsoft for long time. It would take a lot of time for Microsoft to become on par with Google in testing.
- Jnnz 10y ago
  I'm in the opposite camp. I haven't had any problems with W10. It's an improvement from W8 and way faster than W7. The only thing that was annoying me was the updates, but I disabled those with a tool.
- hbosch 10y ago
  I have worked mainly on OSX for my career, and recently had to switch to Windows for VR work. I started on Windows 7 and absolutely hated it. I hated the visual style of it, the awful UX of it, and just found it to be painful all-the-way-around. Sitting down at my desk in the morning, I'd almost always utter a small sigh of frustration just logging in. When we finally got cleared by IT to go ahead with Windows 10 I was cautiously optimistic but after using it for a few months I was totally bought in. I will/would never go back to any pre-10 release. I'm back on OSX now (new job) and still miss Windows 10 most days. I'm going to be building a personal machine soon, and unless the new MacBook Pro's can astound me it'll be a Windows 10 rig – no question.
  - FT_intern 10y ago
    >I was totally bought in. why?
    - NetStrikeForce 10y ago
      I can't answer for Op, but I've been a Linux user at work for many years and OSX at home. I sold my last Mac in 2013 and used Linux for a couple of years until I tried Windows 10. I never used (or plan to use) Windows for servers. I had interest in Nano Server, then I realized it's not free and although running in the cloud I could probably feel no big difference in spending, I just don't have expertise (or will to learn maybe). I was making a list of things I like from Windows 10, but some are as good in Linux and OSX. To be honest I'm not entirely sure why I'm sticking to Windows 10. I think it is comfortable to use and I have no reason to leave it either. It is installed in the computer, it gets big updates every now and then. It looks stunningly beautiful compared to any other Windows before. In any case here's a list of things I like right now: - It just works - PowerShell and PowerShell ISE - Office and especially Outlook (with an Exchange server) and OneNote - I've got Bash now, which runs Linux binaries, with apt-get and in a terminal that sucks less than cmd. I had a tingling feeling the other day compiling a Go app in my WSL window. I know Go is multiplatform, but it was fun to compile a Linux binary in a Windows OS and run it. It feels a lot how OS X used to make me feel years ago. It just worked. The difference is that here I've got all the Windows software and I can choose laptop from Macbook-like stuff to a £149 Lenovo Ideapad 100S, passing through tablets of all sorts. The OS is the same. I don't feel like I'm tied to a platform when I'm working on my laptop. I guess having multiple putty sessions to Linux servers opened helps a lot :) I'm not so sure about Cortana and Edge. I want to like both, but so far my feelings are just "meh". On the other hand, the updates are definitely more insistent than before; but I don't think I ever got an ultimatum without prior notice of pending updates. I too defer many times (after all, if I'm looking at the computer means I'm probably busy), but it helps me keep up to date. Now that I think about it, I think I've found my computer restarted and installed updates overnight a couple of times in the last year.
- RyJones 10y ago
  The forced updates have really screwed with our CI process, as well. We have one choice of cloud provider for Windows 10 SKUs - Azure - and it's been brutal.
- mtgx 10y ago
  Their Q&A for Windows also seems to have taken a big dive, despite all the feedback Microsoft is getting now with the permanent "preview" version of Windows 10 - or perhaps because of it, as a way for Nadella to cut costs with Q&A.
- paulddraper 10y ago
  Yeah, windows peaked at 7
- joshjje 10y ago
  Strange, I see many people saying the same thing, but Ive hardly had any issues at all, though it was/is undoubtedly less stable than Windows 7. I decided to just let it auto-update though, perhaps that or other different config/usage is why.
mattnewton 10y ago
I was with you until the "windows is better part" Windows 10 has been the worst desktop experience I have ever encountered. From day 1 I have had driver issues, forced updates, no matter how I configure the time zone resets to GMT (which is great because it uses 3am as a time to restart and force installing updates). To say nothing if the awful UI. I had none of these issues with Ubuntu and I paid Microsoft for this headache so I could play games. I can't wait for more AAA Linux support, please take it home Valve.
floopidydoopidy 10y ago
I disagree that anything is better. They're incrementally keeping up with technology. In fact, from my perspective, it feels like they hold us all back by leveraging their hold on offices.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
I disagree. Windows is more awkward than ever. VS is more bloated than ever. All[0] of their developer solutions are geared towards the Enterprisifacation[1] of everything. [0] I love generalizations. [1] IE: Overengineered for the sake of developer resumes everywhere.
- petra 10y ago
  "over engineered for the sake of developer resumes " ?
wslh 10y ago
In some aspects Microsoft has changed for the best (e.g. open source, developer community relationship) and in others it is changing for the worst. This is my list: - Skype protocol centralization and crashing all the time - Surface Book Issues - Updates and malware detection that can't be turned off - Windows 10 leaking information to Microsoft that you can't control. - Windows Phone (down) - Azure changing their price all the time and an admin console that is subpar - We were trying to renew our MSDN Premium subscription for the last three months and they cannot do that because we are from Argentina and they are changing the internal system. - State of the art notebooks like the latest Dell XPS with driver issues and lack of support for high DPI screens in Microsoft Office.
- peterkshultz 10y ago
  What have been your problems with the Surface Book?
  - wslh 10y ago
    Please check https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/search?q=surface+book+issues&restrict_sr=on https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/search?q=surface+book+issue...

by Bud 10y ago

aswanson 10y ago

Visual Studios integration with so many other non-microsoft languages and packages is excellent. As a former msft hater, I have to agree with the parent.

mattnewton 10y ago

I was with you until the "windows is better part" Windows 10 has been the worst desktop experience I have ever encountered. From day 1 I have had driver issues, forced updates, no matter how I configure the time zone resets to GMT (which is great because it uses 3am as a time to restart and force installing updates). To say nothing if the awful UI. I had none of these issues with Ubuntu and I paid Microsoft for this headache so I could play games. I can't wait for more AAA Linux support, please take it home Valve.

euroclydon 10y ago
Windows 10 is more like a new product than not. It's going to take some time. I think that's okay, as long as the fundamental features of the OS are good, the compatibility and stability will catch up.
elcct 10y ago
Maybe you are the unlucky one. I wouldn't trade windows 10 for anything else.
- criddell 10y ago
  Windows 10 is 90% great for me. The 10% that annoys me is mostly around the way update works. If you have long running processes (like security camera DVR software, big render jobs, etc...) having the OS decide to reboot in the middle of the night is a bit of a headache. I know you can disable the update service, but it would be nice if they just put that in the windows update UI. The other part that bugs me are the re-appearing bloatware apps like 3d builder, weather, contacts, xbox, groove music, etc.... The flipside of the reappearing apps issue is Microsoft uninstalling my VPN client. They don't think it's compatible with W10, but it works perfectly for me so I have to reinstall it every time. To get back on topic though, Microsoft's Azure is fantastic. The earnings boost is well deserved.
  - elcct 10y ago
    I agree about the updates. Regarding the apps I think I developed app blindness - I just don't notice them, my brain ignores it completely.
  - mtgx 10y ago
    > I know you can disable the update service No, you can't in Windows 10.
    - h1srf 10y ago
      IIRC if you have pro/enterprise you can disable it through a group policy.
    - criddell 10y ago
      This worked for me: http://www.trishtech.com/2016/01/how-to-quickly-enabledisable-windows-updates-in-windows-10/ http://www.trishtech.com/2016/01/how-to-quickly-enabledisabl...
    - madiathomas 10y ago
      I disabled Windows Update service on my laptop which is using Windows 10. Search for Services, scroll down to Windows Update, disable the service. I live in a country with very expensive data bundles. I simply can't afford to keep Windows Update service on.
Agustus 10y ago
Ah, to be young. Bad Desktops: Windows Vista, Windows 8, Windows ME, Windows 3.1, O/S 2 Warp Good Desktops: Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows NT
- StillBored 10y ago
  The difference is that those (well maybe not ME) got better as they aged due to bug fixes. 10, seems to create more bugs than it fixes with every update.
  - rbanffy 10y ago
    I have to assume that, with a codebase this large and entangled, when you fix one bug, you add a couple elsewhere. Plus, they are adding features, not only fixing stuff.
StillBored 10y ago
Windows 10 seems to be degrading rather than getting better. It seems to have reached windows ME levels of stability on most of my devices. Leaving the win7/8 machines looking pretty good. The cool kids are always messing with it, so the stodgy maintenance programmers never get a couple years to fix all the crap they break. Plus, the non stop UI "quirks" are probably worse than I can remember. The whole OS has turned into the windows file copy dialog. This is what I always hated about linux on the desktop, 1/3 of the crap doesn't work right.. For example, last night I was sitting in bed with my 9Y/O daughter when she pressed the battery saver icon on the tablet, and the estimated time dropped from 9 hours 31 mins to 8 hours 50 mins. To which I responded it seems like pressing the battery saver icon forced it to recompute the estimated time remaining, where before it had been showing a stale value. Pressing it on and off a couple more times we got it to shift up to 10 hours some minutes. Its like they can't smooth the power consumption for longer than a few seconds, and the recompute timeout is longer than the smoothing, so the value has large jumps instead of smoothing changing. I could go on and on but its pretty obvious that no one is actually testing the UI, they are just letting some random people throw crap into it, and ship it. Worse its like their user metrics come down to, if less than 50% of the installs are using something then its ok to remove it (say classic mode).
- criddell 10y ago
  According to Reddit, Microsoft laid off all their QA people in November of 2014: https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/3s14un/just_a_reminder_that_one_year_ago_microsoft_fired/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/3s14un/just_a_remi...
  - 0xFFC 10y ago
    This is bad. This is really really bad. This completely matches my personal experience. Microsoft QA under Nadella is only part of company I think underperforms. As far as I can remember from "How Google tests software" , Google doesn't have whole QA division too (other than a elite kinda testers) and testing is integrated to developers job(SDET). This was not true for Microsoft for long time. It would take a lot of time for Microsoft to become on par with Google in testing.
Jnnz 10y ago
I'm in the opposite camp. I haven't had any problems with W10. It's an improvement from W8 and way faster than W7. The only thing that was annoying me was the updates, but I disabled those with a tool.
hbosch 10y ago
I have worked mainly on OSX for my career, and recently had to switch to Windows for VR work. I started on Windows 7 and absolutely hated it. I hated the visual style of it, the awful UX of it, and just found it to be painful all-the-way-around. Sitting down at my desk in the morning, I'd almost always utter a small sigh of frustration just logging in. When we finally got cleared by IT to go ahead with Windows 10 I was cautiously optimistic but after using it for a few months I was totally bought in. I will/would never go back to any pre-10 release. I'm back on OSX now (new job) and still miss Windows 10 most days. I'm going to be building a personal machine soon, and unless the new MacBook Pro's can astound me it'll be a Windows 10 rig – no question.
- FT_intern 10y ago
  >I was totally bought in. why?
  - NetStrikeForce 10y ago
    I can't answer for Op, but I've been a Linux user at work for many years and OSX at home. I sold my last Mac in 2013 and used Linux for a couple of years until I tried Windows 10. I never used (or plan to use) Windows for servers. I had interest in Nano Server, then I realized it's not free and although running in the cloud I could probably feel no big difference in spending, I just don't have expertise (or will to learn maybe). I was making a list of things I like from Windows 10, but some are as good in Linux and OSX. To be honest I'm not entirely sure why I'm sticking to Windows 10. I think it is comfortable to use and I have no reason to leave it either. It is installed in the computer, it gets big updates every now and then. It looks stunningly beautiful compared to any other Windows before. In any case here's a list of things I like right now: - It just works - PowerShell and PowerShell ISE - Office and especially Outlook (with an Exchange server) and OneNote - I've got Bash now, which runs Linux binaries, with apt-get and in a terminal that sucks less than cmd. I had a tingling feeling the other day compiling a Go app in my WSL window. I know Go is multiplatform, but it was fun to compile a Linux binary in a Windows OS and run it. It feels a lot how OS X used to make me feel years ago. It just worked. The difference is that here I've got all the Windows software and I can choose laptop from Macbook-like stuff to a £149 Lenovo Ideapad 100S, passing through tablets of all sorts. The OS is the same. I don't feel like I'm tied to a platform when I'm working on my laptop. I guess having multiple putty sessions to Linux servers opened helps a lot :) I'm not so sure about Cortana and Edge. I want to like both, but so far my feelings are just "meh". On the other hand, the updates are definitely more insistent than before; but I don't think I ever got an ultimatum without prior notice of pending updates. I too defer many times (after all, if I'm looking at the computer means I'm probably busy), but it helps me keep up to date. Now that I think about it, I think I've found my computer restarted and installed updates overnight a couple of times in the last year.
RyJones 10y ago
The forced updates have really screwed with our CI process, as well. We have one choice of cloud provider for Windows 10 SKUs - Azure - and it's been brutal.
mtgx 10y ago
Their Q&A for Windows also seems to have taken a big dive, despite all the feedback Microsoft is getting now with the permanent "preview" version of Windows 10 - or perhaps because of it, as a way for Nadella to cut costs with Q&A.
paulddraper 10y ago
Yeah, windows peaked at 7
joshjje 10y ago
Strange, I see many people saying the same thing, but Ive hardly had any issues at all, though it was/is undoubtedly less stable than Windows 7. I decided to just let it auto-update though, perhaps that or other different config/usage is why.

mattnewton 10y ago

floopidydoopidy 10y ago

I disagree that anything is better. They're incrementally keeping up with technology. In fact, from my perspective, it feels like they hold us all back by leveraging their hold on offices.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

I disagree. Windows is more awkward than ever. VS is more bloated than ever. All[0] of their developer solutions are geared towards the Enterprisifacation[1] of everything. [0] I love generalizations. [1] IE: Overengineered for the sake of developer resumes everywhere.

petra 10y ago
"over engineered for the sake of developer resumes " ?

wslh 10y ago

In some aspects Microsoft has changed for the best (e.g. open source, developer community relationship) and in others it is changing for the worst. This is my list: - Skype protocol centralization and crashing all the time - Surface Book Issues - Updates and malware detection that can't be turned off - Windows 10 leaking information to Microsoft that you can't control. - Windows Phone (down) - Azure changing their price all the time and an admin console that is subpar - We were trying to renew our MSDN Premium subscription for the last three months and they cannot do that because we are from Argentina and they are changing the internal system. - State of the art notebooks like the latest Dell XPS with driver issues and lack of support for high DPI screens in Microsoft Office.

peterkshultz 10y ago
What have been your problems with the Surface Book?
- wslh 10y ago
  Please check https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/search?q=surface+book+issues&restrict_sr=on https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/search?q=surface+book+issue...