10 ms·

Microsoft has made a bunch of very good products: - Windows 3.0 and 3.1 clearly hit exactly the sweet spot between DOS and OS/2 - Word and Excel were legitima

• CWuestefeld 16y ago
  Mostly you're right, but I object to the claim about Excel being better. While Word was better than anything else I had found to use at the time (Word Perfect was a buggy mess). However, I claim that there were better spreadsheet products available. Certainly the one I used, Enable, was quite robust, and was more capable than Excel.
  • bad_user 16y ago
    Office 95 bundled Excel along with Word, Access and Powerpoint. When people make choices they also look at convenience and price ... having these products packaged and nicely integrated with each-other was genius.
    • stcredzero 16y ago
      There is a lesson here for language designers!
  • coin 16y ago
    Excel for Windows was much better than Lotus 123 for Windows. Lotus basically took the DOS version of 123 and added some menus for it. It never did feel like a fist class GUI app.
    • rbanffy 16y ago
      Lotus took Microsoft's word seriously when Gates proclaimed OS/2 was the future and Windows was an interim step. Lotus invested a lot in 123 for OS/2 (123/G, IIRC) and, when the IBM/Microsoft divorce made evident they chose the wrong side, they had to port it to Windows all over again (with lots of different and conflicting APIs). Microsoft had no such problem.
• gaius 16y ago
  Add to the list SQL Server 2000 and above, and Visual Studio.
• ido 16y ago
  Almost all releases of the NT line were good (including Win 7). Was there any OS contemporary to NT 3.51 that was better than it at anything (beside win 95 when it comes to compatibility with more software & hardware)?
  • sprout 16y ago
    Not on the desktop, though when it comes to the server pretty much all of them beat and still beat NT on stability and filesystem support.
  • Luyt 16y ago
    I quite liked NT 3.5 as a development platform back then. I came from WfW 3.11 and used Borland C++ 4.5, and nasty programming bugs would hang 3.11, but not NT 3.5.
  • hga 16y ago
    Perhaps; I thought it peaked in quality of releases after 3.51 SP1. Better than SCO Unix of the period as a desktop.
  • rbanffy 16y ago
    Solaris 2.5 was a very solid OS and better than NT 3.5 in most respects unless a defining criteria for "better" is "runs well on PCs", which it didn't. OS/2 was also a good OS for x86 PCs. At least as good as NT, unless, again, you want it to run software designed for Windows.
    • ido 16y ago
      I wasn't really into OS/2 but I concede that it was probably about as good as NT at the time. I would, however, much rather use NT 3.51 as a desktop OS than Solaris 2.5 with CDE and its 80s-style command line utilities (luckily it seems they are using GNU stuff nowadays?).
      • rbanffy 16y ago
        You always could get the GNU stuff and compile it yourself. My own installs felt very GNU-ish at that time.
• walkon 16y ago
  I agree, when you consider when products were released and compare it to similar offerings at those times, many Microsoft products are (or were) "decent". I would add these: - Windows 95: Not perfectly stable or technically very groundbreaking, but a good enough combination of usability and features to be considered decent in my mind and millions of others at the time. - IE6: great at the time. Some of the standards it doesn't support didn't exist when it came out. Also, IE5 introduced the Microsoft.XMLHTTP ActiveX control, which was the foundation for XMLHttpRequest. If that wasn’t created by Microsoft at the time, AJAX almost certainly wouldn’t be as ubiquitous as it is today. - SQL Server 20xx: Perhaps RDMS's aren't your thing, but they're very much needed for now, and Microsoft's can certainly handle most relational db needs. - .NET 3.5+ and C# 3+: If you want a statically typed language and platform, anything .NET 3.5 or greater are at least ok. - ASP.NET MVC 2+: Not quit the same as a dynamically-based ROR or Django and they also don’t give you a default ORM; you pick it, but its solid and improving. Source code is available; contribs aren’t. - Visual Studio 2008+: Again, not some crazy vim/emacs setup, although plugins can somewhat help simulate that, but these definitely don’t suck at all. - IIS7+: Just because it’s not Apache doesn't mean it isn't decent. It is quite powerful and secure. - Windows Server 2003+: Never had bad experiences with these. - Microsoft Security Essentials: Very good and free antivirus. I’m sure there’s more, but it is an exaggeration to say Microsoft hasn’t made any decent products. Certainly some of these don’t seem as good overall when accounting for the licensing costs and associated culture/stigma that comes with working in Microsoft shops, but many of products in and of themselves are decent.
  • mcosta 16y ago
    "decent" is the perfect name. Better than the crap the anterior version was is a better description. Perfect for milking the cash cow. -Windows 95? Come on, your memory fails. It was utterly usable and crashed hard everyday. Any other OS of the time was better. It was so basic... paint? notepad? a big pile of shit. And they have been budling the same crap more than 10 years until Windows 7. -IE6 was good at the time. It's sad it was so many time without new versions. -The first usable SQLS was the 2000, and sincerely, until 2003 oracle ran circles around it. -.NET and C# is OK, fine lenguage. -ASP.NET I do not know. -Visual Studio is OK, but almost because it has no competition. -IIS7+: I do not remember the last version I touched, but I had to clean my hands with bleach after. Oh! and it came with W2000, and obligatory for some SQL Server stuff, for no aparent reason. -Windows Server 2003, better than the 2000, yes. And grey. -Microsoft Security Essentials: no please.
• MrRage 16y ago
  > Windows 2000 and XP were very good operating systems I by no means am some Microsoft hater, but I'm amused about this tinted rose glass nostalgia for XP. It's easy to say XP is a good system now with the maturity of three service packs and the bad taste of Vista still in our mouths, but I remember all those years ago much dislike of XP around the internet. Among other things, it was a security nightmare that wasn't even fixed until SP2. You put release day XP on your machine and put it on the internet and you're machine will be probably hacked within the hour. On the other hand not to many people stuck with Vista. A fully patched Vista installation works just fine nowadays. It still has higher system requirements, but those requirements are now 4 year old systems.
  • megablast 16y ago
    You are remembering it backwards. 2000, and XP (because it was the consumer version of 2000) were much better than Windows 98, Windows ME and NT. This is why the poster says they were good OS, they were so much more stable, you could actually leave your machine on for a while. Vista is and always will be a dog.
  • zenocon 16y ago
    who cares? you can say this about any major release number OS. go ahead and throw out netbsd stats all you want. no one tries to hack that b/c no one cares. stats are a funny game, my friend.
  • seunosewa 16y ago
    I remember really loving XP when it first came out. It was much better than 98 and Me and faster than 2000.
• narrator 16y ago
  Win2k being released was a huge blow to Linux at the time. Redhat 9 was so awful in comparison. I remember how a lot of developers I knew who had been Linux users actually switched back.
  • rbanffy 16y ago
    IIRC, the Linux of the time had trouble with multiprocessors and ran on ext2. Nevertheless, I cannot imagine someone giving up a fully functional Unix environment to go back to a Windows box. Lots of mouse clicking for much less power.
• philwelch 16y ago
  Windows 3.0 and 3.1 were pale imitations of the Mac OS of the time. 95 was the first "good enough", and it was still not the equal of System 7. For commodity hardware, they might have been the best available, but that's an adequacy criterion, not a "very good" criterion. Most of the others I have no disagreement with.
  • kabdib 16y ago
    The /Mac/ was a pale imitation of itself, by those standards. Developing a Mac app was just as gnarly as developing a Windows 3.1 app, but by 1995 Microsoft had Visual Basic (to Apple's HyperCard, which was virtually moribund at that point) and MS took off and /owned/ the database client market. Apple never really believed in its development tools group, and the market share they lost in the 90s shows that. They are still paying for lost opportunity.
  • ido 16y ago
    I used System 7 (and OS 7.x & 8.x after that) as well as win 95, and IMO win 95 wasn't just equal but in fact better than system 7.
• joe_the_user 16y ago
  Nice list. Continuing the "Microsoft and Apple are different" theme, the thing that's worth considering is that the "goodness" of these products is the goodness of well engineered compromises. Current Word is actually a fusion of DOS word and the original Windows Word and while it has a huge feature set, this set is not terribly consistent. It's an achievement to make thing feel as good as it does. Similarly for the others and very different from producing a clean, "just works" app from the ground up (not necessarily a better or worse achievement imho).
  • eru 16y ago
    Maybe a "Worse is better" achievement? (Not meant derogatory. Just in the sense of http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html)
• duck 16y ago
  And made so many other competitor products better too. We wouldn't be where we are now without them.
• stan_rogers 16y ago
  Word? There are still things that were a piece of cake to accomplish in WordPerfect (5.1 for DOS; I never used WPWin) or AmiPro[1] (3+ for Windows) that are impossible, or extremely difficult, in Word. [1] I say this despite having once written a piece (c. 1993) based on a Dr. Suess book that featured the lines "I could not merge 'grneggs' with 'ham'. I do not like you star dot sam."
• Paulomus 16y ago
  Their Macintosh products tend to be really great. I really loved IE5 for Mac and was sorry when they discontinued it. MS Word on the Macintosh always seemed well designed too. I assumed this was because their Macintosh division was long established and very good at what they did, or designing for a platform they did not control brought Microsoft's true design talents.