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Ask HN: Will Microsoft ever become cool again?
- rbanffy 8y agoNo.
- Finnucane 8y agoAgain?
- rbanffy 8y agoXenix on the Lisa was kind of cool.
- CyberFonic 8y agoReally? People forget that Microsoft sold more copies of Xenix (A UNIX operating system) for both PDP-11 and PCs than all the other Unix boxen suppliers of that era. But then marketing decided that they didn't need a real OS, so they sold it SCO and then later bankrolled them into suing Linux suppliers, etc. That was all Steve Ballmer's watch, during which MS shares also lost half their value.
- rbanffy 8y agoThe thing is that Microsoft could not corner the market with Xenix the same way it could with DOS and Windows. They wanted a monopoly they could abuse.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoWhen IBM went to the PS/2 architecture, and the OS/2 software, to try to kill the PC clone market and lock up the PC hardware and OS market for themselves, Microsoft was the champion of freedom and openness. Really. Windows 95 and 98 were when the GUI became cool. Well, cool and available - it was cool on the Mac, but nobody had Macs.
- Finnucane 8y agoYeah, I could see how finally getting their GUI system more or less working a decade after everyone else could be seen as cool. And yes, keeping the corporate drone market away from a technically better product, also cool.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago"After everyone else"? Well, there was the Mac. And there was TopView. And there was... who, exactly, is "everyone else"? There were workstations like Silicon Graphics, but they didn't even pretend to be available (affordable) for the average user. They weren't competition for the PC. On commodity hardware, it was Windows and TopView, and TopView was... not very useful, to put it charitably. The PS/2 was a technically better product. It was also IBM's attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, so that it could sell hardware at prices considerably above the commodity level. Technically better? Cool. Not having to pay several hundred dollars more for your hardware? The market thought that was even more cool.
- ConceptJunkie 8y agoDespite what people around here (including me) might think, when you have the Rolling Stones advertising for you and people are lining up to buy your product at midnight, you're pretty cool.
- erik_seaberg 8y agoOS/2 was a partnership in which Microsoft betrayed IBM when they realized they could frighten OEMs into refusing to sell any competing OS.
- mongol 8y agoMicrosoft Basic on C64 was cool
- api 8y agoMS hasn't been cool since the 80s and even then its coolness was debatable.
- marketgod 8y agoDoes cool matter? They were under $40 a share 5 years ago.
- akulbe 8y agoThey're doing a hell of a lot more cool things than Apple, these days. Windows is moving. macOS is terrible. (Says the guy who's been a Mac user for >15 years and bought every new product Apple has come out with.) Apple is doing this to themselves. As a dev platform, their appeal is waning. (Stop making shit laptops, and make your macOS stable again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) Microsoft, under Nadella, is making the right moves, listening to their userbase. It was enough to get me to switch back.
- agitator 8y agoI agree that they are moving, but they seem to be innovating without focusing on the user. It's like a bunch of enginerds working on cool projects that they are coming up with. Yeah they might be cool, but will people buy/use them? Maybe it's still too early to tell, and all of these moonshot concepts will result in useable devices, but so far I feel like the device ecosystem and interoperability of devices just isn't at all at the level of apple or even google for that matter.
- akulbe 8y agoUmmm... YES. Lots of folks who have been unsatisfied with the current Mac lineup, and High Sierra, have switched. I did. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If you need a UNIX-y workflow the Windows Subsystem for Linux makes all the difference.
- Something1234 8y agoThat subsystem is too slow. It just feels kludgy. I want my things in my home directory, I don't want 2 or more locations to have files. That is why I will always run Linux.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoYet out in the real world Mac sales are continuing to grow while the rest of the industry is in decline.
- sghiassy 8y ago
- bsvalley 8y agoAgain or for the 1st time? They're focusing on the entreprise business and moved away from the consumer business. So my guess is that it's pretty hard to be "cool" in the entreprise world... Look at salesforce has been trying so hard, it doesn't change the fact that their products don't mean anything to the majority of people. So my answer would be... maybe?
- wilsonnb2 8y agoMicrosoft does plenty for the consumer or the non-enterprise ddeveloper. Visual studio for free, VS Code, Typescript, Surface Pro, Surface Book, Windows subsystem for Linux, etc.
- mindcrime 8y agoSure, as soon as they open-source Windows, Office, and Sharepoint and make the XBox platform Open Hardware.
- Finnucane 8y agoOpen source Sharepoint? Why would anyone want that?
- mindcrime 8y agoThey wouldn't, it's just the principle of the thing!
- whatsstolat 8y agoFor the DailyWTF fodder
- wilsonnb2 8y agoSo only open source software can be cool? I don't really get that perspective.
- Something1234 8y agoI want to be able to know what my machine is actually running. It gives me some nice warm fuzzy feeling knowing that I have that option. I probably won't but still, I like having that option.
- nullpunkt 8y agoThe option of spending a lifetime reading the Windows code in order to 'know what your machine is running'? it's such an old argument but no one ever talks about how fucking cumbersome is to read code, even in work itself, moreso outside of work, unpaid.
- Something1234 8y ago
- BjoernKW 8y agoHas it ever really been? I think that, as of today, Microsoft is cooler than it’s ever been before.
- eddof13 8y agoI agree. To me, out of the 'big 4', they are the coolest currently.
- nitwit005 8y agoIf someone is on a windows machine, using the pre-installed IE11 or Edge browser, I tend to assume it's a 70 year old these days. Or possibly someone at a firm with some dated internal ActiveX page that needs IE. That kind of association is extremely difficult to break. Car manufacturers have struggled with similar impressions. You can make the greatest, and cheapest, car in the world, and people won't buy it if it has that kind of negative association.
- CyberFonic 8y agoTalking of cars, Porsche sell stripped out, weekend racer versions for more than the more luxurious ones. But it is a niche market. Same with computers for nerds - we know what we are doing, but for the average consumer - which is certainly MS's target market - the more bells and whistles the more impressive it is in the showroom.
- handbanana 8y agoI see what you’re trying to get at. But your example is not correct. What Porsche model is a stripped down version of another? Porsche Turbo S —> GT3/2 RS? Cayman GTS —> GT4? Because in those 2 examples, there’s no stripping down.
- LyndsySimon 8y agoEdge is superior to anything I’ve tried on a tablet. I don’t use my Win10 tablet anymore, but it is what it is.
- NVRM 8y agoNo fucking way.
- CyberFonic 8y agoCool to whom? As a nerd, I would like them to do what Apple did: release a new, clean, robust OS (based on OpenBSD would be smart, worked for Apple) and then provide a shim for backward compatibility. That is, allow all existing programs to still run but have a clean platform for future apps. Like ChromeOS I would prefer this to be truly secure, robust and updated with minimal intrusion. As a consumer, I want systems that are reliable, robust, secure, free from malware, impossible to hack into, cheap and fast. In other words everything that Windows currently isn't.
- Yetanfou 8y agoThe lower levels of Windows 10 are probably the least problematic so basing a 'new, clean, robust OS' on OpenBSD (which, by the way, Apple did not do, they used parts of the FreeBSD userland on top of a Mach-inspired kernel) would not do much good as they'd still have to include support for Win32 for it to be considered a replacement for Windows. It is there Windows really shows what it is made of: glue, tape, rubber bands, hastily erected scaffolding around sassing facades, heavy structures built on top of unstable foundations. Microsoft tries (and tries, and tries) to replace all that with something new but they have a hard time making up their mind what the replacement should be and where the focus should lie. In this sense a good successor to Windows would be a lightweight VM host running one-off instances of older Windows versions to support the host of software made for that platform, allowing those instances to communicate with each other. That might be good for users but it does not offer a path forward for Microsoft. In truth, there probably is no way forward for Microsoft in this space. Windows is a dead end, the 'information at your fingertips' idea which Gates spouted has come true but not by way of Windows.
- wilsonnb2 8y agoI think they're cool. The Surface Pro and Surface Book are the only computers since the iPad first came out that I actually wanted to buy. They also put Linux in Windows, released visual studio for free, created one of the most popular text editors ever, and created 3 programming languages that are generally well liked (C#, F#, and typescript). I'm not sure how cool they are compared to Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and Facebook but I personally tend to compare them to enterprise companies like IBM and Oracle. Microsoft wins that coolness contest easily.
- 0x4f3759df 8y agoYou left out that .NET Core is just as fast as Node.js [1] and .Net runs on linux. Its pretty cool that I can write Linux programs now even though I am terrible at c (to my neverending shame). 1 https://stackoverflow.com/a/44093694/73804 https://stackoverflow.com/a/44093694/73804
- Yetanfou 8y agoBeing bad at C (and family) does not mean you can not write 'Linux programs', just pick any other language of choice and start writing. Recently the .Net family has been added, before that Mono made a valiant attempt at supporting it but those have been preceded (and might be succeeded) by a lengthy list of languages in which 'Linux programs' can be written, from BASIC to Haskell, from Python to Ocaml, from Fortran to Lisp, take your pick.
- ggregoire 8y agoVSCode and the whole open source organization around it is super cool in my opinion. TypeScript and C# are great tools too.
- fizzbuzzbazz2 8y agoI was reading a comment stection of a win xp pirated edition. It had los of bug reports. 3-10 min after each there was a developer comment of the kind "thats terrible!" 10-30 min after that a comment containing a patch was posted. Am i to understand this kind of service is impossible for a multibillion company? You dont have any questions, you dont have any problem and we are certainly not going to fix anything.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoNo, they are another dull corporation just like IBM, Oracle, Apple, Google, etc. Don't fall for the PR of any of these companies. They aren't your friends.