6 ms·

Almost every person I have ever met who hates Microsoft was either ignorant of the matters (meaning they just read what other people said and never had original

Almost every person I have ever met who hates Microsoft was either ignorant of the matters (meaning they just read what other people said and never had original thoughts) or had a specific beef in one area that they let inform their thoughts about the company as a whole. Lots of web developers, especially those who were not professional developers in the 90s see and hear this horror story of a big mean monopolist who set out to destroy Netscape. It is funny how history chooses the more salacious of headlines, easy to forget that IE4 was a breakthrough browser that ate Navigator's lunch heads up. Certainly the OS integration made a big difference but this picture of an evil lurking monster hoisting terrible code and practices upon us is and never was true. The other thing I think which happens is group opinions get formed. Microsoft is strongest in the enterprise, which is more apt to say - big businesses. Big business and the entreprenuerial hacker/dev dont get along, bigbiz in large part wants and fosters a need for programmers. Their hierarchical and red tape laden structure destroys creative spirit so what you get is lots of people who accept this, learn within that framework and dont really develop beyond the skills needed for their job. They latch onto Access and VB and do it badly because no one with great skills taught them any better and their bosses just need X to work and performance or elegance dont matter at all. This mindset gets associated with Microsoft people and the non-MSFT crowd begins to think anyone who does Microsoft work is some mindless noob with no skills. It is sad really, because Microsoft is years ahead of any other company in the way they treat developers. If you havent used Visual Studio you wont understand that.

msy 16y ago
Web developers don't hate Microsoft because they destroyed Netscape, they hate Microsoft because their proprietary standards and er...unqiue take on w3 standards has and continues to waste a measurable percentages of people's lives and retard the progress of the web.
- iamdave 16y ago
  ritard, in this case.
- ryanwatkins 16y ago
  You might wish to consider that during roughly the same period IE4 came along to destroy Netscape, it was Netscape that was busy inventing proprietary tags - <layer>, <multicol>, <spacer> and the like.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    Someone could have disliked Netscape back then, but dislike Microsoft now.
tjogin 16y ago
For the web development subset of programmers, the Microsoft loathing may be inspired by Microsoft's disdain for web standards. Microsoft are, in a very real and palpable way, making client side web developers' lives a lot harder than they'd have to be. I don't hate Microsoft or anything, just saying that this might serve as fuel for that kind of fire.
chargrilled 16y ago
The reason I dislike Microsoft and actively avoid their platforms is largely because despite their vast resources and obvious talent, their management rarely compete head to head with technology and would rather resort to other practises that, as a tech person make me sad. There are plenty of examples of this. See what they did to companies that wanted to ship dual-boot BeOS systems. See the approach they took to OOXML. See the approach they're currently taking to suing OEMs shipping Android handsets that refuse to pay their license fees. See the copius amounts of misinformation they put out about Linux. A company with Microsoft's resources, I want to see competing for my business with the tech they're obviously capable of producing.
mda 16y ago
Years ago we were writing some code involving windows telephony api. There was something wrong with one of the calls, it was not applying one of the parameters as documented in the api. Because of that we ended up dissembling it and making a binary patch to change a constant in a dll. We lost several weeks in the process. How long does it take Microsoft to fix a problem in an obscure dll that you depend on? Who knows.. This event made me realize if you are binding yourself to an operating system or any application thats is closed source, has opaque processes and almost no competition to make them improve it fast, there is good chance that one day you will end paying very dearly. I have other reasons to dislike Microsoft's attitude and practices but I gave this example because I still vividly remember the suffering and helplessness we lived that time. As for the Visual Studio comment, I used it and don't see anything special about it, If you are a Microsoft shop maybe it is good for you, otherwise, there are comparable - better IDEs out there to do the job.
- kogir 16y ago
  I can't speak to support then, but now they'd handle a problem like that for free and have a hot fix available to you in no time. Microsoft product support services is really top notch.
ajays 16y ago
Microsoft doesn't understand that if you piss off enough people over the years, it's hard to get respect back quickly. If you haven't followed the anti-trust case, you won't understand. For years, Microsoft treated others in the personal-computer space as enemies to be vanquished, instead of colleagues to be collaborated with. They used every trick under the sun to destroy other competing developers' works. And then came the big browser wars, and once again they did the same. On a broad level: Microsoft refuses to "play well with others". While you are playing apologist for them, their minions are busy undermining open-source software, and trying to scare the European regulators into avoiding OSS. On a side note: someone I know just designed this t-shirt; I think he's taking orders: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamp3/4777497224/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamp3/4777497224/
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jdietrich 16y ago
> It is sad really, because Microsoft is years ahead of any other company in the way they treat developers. If you havent used Visual Studio you wont understand that. Microsoft treat developers like cattle. You've just got to look at their corporate structure, where senior developers might be reporting to a dozen different managers. Companies that respect developers give them freedom and autonomy, they trust in their decisions, they allow them to choose their own tools and their own way of doing things. Oh sure, there are plenty of people working on exciting little development projects that never see the light of day beyond a tech demo, but geting so much as a single feature into a major product has become an ordeal. For me, the obvious anecdote is the taboo that surrounded the iPhone at Redmond, with numerous reports saying that Microsoft staff felt the need to hide their iPhone from senior execs[1]. To me, that's the sign of a company in deep trouble. The obvious inference to draw is that Microsoft as a company would rather remain in denial than really confront the inadequacies of their products. Any company that I'd want to work at would have responded to the iPhone by obsessively studying it rather than ignoring it. The really pernicious issue is the obvious distrust and lack of communication between the footsoldiers and their leaders. When staff feel like they aren't allowed to voice an obvious truth - that they prefer the iPhone to any WinMob device - that strikes me as a frightening place to be. It's the stuff of Orwell, the kind of madness you'd expect from a failed state. I don't care how good Microsoft's IDEs are. I hate Microsoft, I loathe Microsoft, I despise Microsoft because they run contrary to everything I feel software should be. Microsoft seems to crush any sense of wonder and joy out of their employees, something which seems self-evident from their products. They favour micromanagement and process over autonomy and craft. They see software as just some crap that they can package up and sell, rather than something beautiful in itself, something intrinsically interesting and wonderful and beautiful. You might say "Why should a corporation care about these things?". If you do, you miss the point entirely. Microsoft are stagnant. They're a zombie company, absolutely incapable of regeneration and growth. They are currently trading at below their post-bubble value and have failed to achieve any meaningful growth in several years. Their market cap has been exceeded by Apple; Google are well on their way to overtaking them too. You can't even make the argument that the Microsoft way is about business, because they're failing dismally at that. Beauty and joy and excitement isn't just good for developers and users, it's good for the bottom line. Microsoft represents the rotten old way of doing things, a way that just doesn't work anymore. Good developers, developers that make stuff that really matters, they don't really care if there is free coke in the fridge, they don't care whether they sit on a Herman Miller or a shipping crate, what matters to them is creating things that matter. As far as I can tell, nobody at Microsoft has done that in a long time; Not many developers on the Microsoft platform have either. It doesn't matter how nice your offices are - if your workplace culture, if the ecosystem of your software feels stifling and ugly and just generally stupid, all the smart developers are going to leave. Think about this - would Microsoft ever have hired a designer like Ive? Would they have ever have given him free reign? How would a developer like Buchheit be treated at Microsoft? That's why we hate Microsoft. [1] http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/16/microsoft-workers-hiding-their-love-for-the-iphone/ http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/16/microsoft-workers-hiding-thei...
bvge 16y ago
It is sad really, because Microsoft is years ahead of any other company in the way they treat developers. If you havent used Visual Studio you wont understand that. You are obviously not referring to Visual Studio 2005 here. It is a half-baked unstable mess, that I still have to use every day. It's the Vista of IDEs. Microsoft also has a tendency to release frameworks before they are stable, or well thought through. They do usually get things right after a few versions, but the unfortunate people who build and maintain software built on the original idea are left stranded.
- nollidge 16y ago
  What sort of development are you doing in 2005? I never had much of a stability problem until doing stuff with WPF under VS2008.
- jeroen 16y ago
  What's keeping you from upgrading to VS2008 or VS2010 and targeting the 2.0 framework?
  - bvge 16y ago
    The web services use WSE3, and there is a lack of will on the part of management to have them ported to WCF.
- aerique 16y ago
  Not only that, once they finally get it right it'll get phased out for their latest framework so you can keep on paying the Microsoft tax. My biggest beef with them is that they chose to make money not through technical excellence but usually through more subversive means.
dinedal 16y ago
> Almost every person I have ever met who hates Microsoft was either ignorant of the matters (meaning they just read what other people said and never had original thoughts) or had a specific beef in one area that they let inform their thoughts about the company as a whole. I don't hate microsoft as a whole. I hate COM+ office interop, and I hate that I'm forced to use this because of an internal dependency on Excel by the company that writes my checks. I hate that I have to have an entirely different approach to read the contents of an Excel spreadsheet then to write to one with office interop. All of that gets shorthanded to "I hate microsoft" when talking to co workers though.
ams6110 16y ago
I think Visual Studio is one of the most painful pieces of software I've ever used.
known 16y ago
I agree. Visual Studio is an excellent product. Now may I know the names of Programmers that developed Visual Studio?
- contextfree 16y ago
  Here's a blog from one of them: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/

msy 16y ago

Web developers don't hate Microsoft because they destroyed Netscape, they hate Microsoft because their proprietary standards and er...unqiue take on w3 standards has and continues to waste a measurable percentages of people's lives and retard the progress of the web.

iamdave 16y ago
ritard, in this case.
ryanwatkins 16y ago
You might wish to consider that during roughly the same period IE4 came along to destroy Netscape, it was Netscape that was busy inventing proprietary tags - <layer>, <multicol>, <spacer> and the like.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  Someone could have disliked Netscape back then, but dislike Microsoft now.

tjogin 16y ago

For the web development subset of programmers, the Microsoft loathing may be inspired by Microsoft's disdain for web standards. Microsoft are, in a very real and palpable way, making client side web developers' lives a lot harder than they'd have to be. I don't hate Microsoft or anything, just saying that this might serve as fuel for that kind of fire.

chargrilled 16y ago

The reason I dislike Microsoft and actively avoid their platforms is largely because despite their vast resources and obvious talent, their management rarely compete head to head with technology and would rather resort to other practises that, as a tech person make me sad. There are plenty of examples of this. See what they did to companies that wanted to ship dual-boot BeOS systems. See the approach they took to OOXML. See the approach they're currently taking to suing OEMs shipping Android handsets that refuse to pay their license fees. See the copius amounts of misinformation they put out about Linux. A company with Microsoft's resources, I want to see competing for my business with the tech they're obviously capable of producing.

mda 16y ago

Years ago we were writing some code involving windows telephony api. There was something wrong with one of the calls, it was not applying one of the parameters as documented in the api. Because of that we ended up dissembling it and making a binary patch to change a constant in a dll. We lost several weeks in the process. How long does it take Microsoft to fix a problem in an obscure dll that you depend on? Who knows.. This event made me realize if you are binding yourself to an operating system or any application thats is closed source, has opaque processes and almost no competition to make them improve it fast, there is good chance that one day you will end paying very dearly. I have other reasons to dislike Microsoft's attitude and practices but I gave this example because I still vividly remember the suffering and helplessness we lived that time. As for the Visual Studio comment, I used it and don't see anything special about it, If you are a Microsoft shop maybe it is good for you, otherwise, there are comparable - better IDEs out there to do the job.

kogir 16y ago
I can't speak to support then, but now they'd handle a problem like that for free and have a hot fix available to you in no time. Microsoft product support services is really top notch.

ajays 16y ago

Microsoft doesn't understand that if you piss off enough people over the years, it's hard to get respect back quickly. If you haven't followed the anti-trust case, you won't understand. For years, Microsoft treated others in the personal-computer space as enemies to be vanquished, instead of colleagues to be collaborated with. They used every trick under the sun to destroy other competing developers' works. And then came the big browser wars, and once again they did the same. On a broad level: Microsoft refuses to "play well with others". While you are playing apologist for them, their minions are busy undermining open-source software, and trying to scare the European regulators into avoiding OSS. On a side note: someone I know just designed this t-shirt; I think he's taking orders: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamp3/4777497224/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamp3/4777497224/

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

jdietrich 16y ago

> It is sad really, because Microsoft is years ahead of any other company in the way they treat developers. If you havent used Visual Studio you wont understand that. Microsoft treat developers like cattle. You've just got to look at their corporate structure, where senior developers might be reporting to a dozen different managers. Companies that respect developers give them freedom and autonomy, they trust in their decisions, they allow them to choose their own tools and their own way of doing things. Oh sure, there are plenty of people working on exciting little development projects that never see the light of day beyond a tech demo, but geting so much as a single feature into a major product has become an ordeal. For me, the obvious anecdote is the taboo that surrounded the iPhone at Redmond, with numerous reports saying that Microsoft staff felt the need to hide their iPhone from senior execs[1]. To me, that's the sign of a company in deep trouble. The obvious inference to draw is that Microsoft as a company would rather remain in denial than really confront the inadequacies of their products. Any company that I'd want to work at would have responded to the iPhone by obsessively studying it rather than ignoring it. The really pernicious issue is the obvious distrust and lack of communication between the footsoldiers and their leaders. When staff feel like they aren't allowed to voice an obvious truth - that they prefer the iPhone to any WinMob device - that strikes me as a frightening place to be. It's the stuff of Orwell, the kind of madness you'd expect from a failed state. I don't care how good Microsoft's IDEs are. I hate Microsoft, I loathe Microsoft, I despise Microsoft because they run contrary to everything I feel software should be. Microsoft seems to crush any sense of wonder and joy out of their employees, something which seems self-evident from their products. They favour micromanagement and process over autonomy and craft. They see software as just some crap that they can package up and sell, rather than something beautiful in itself, something intrinsically interesting and wonderful and beautiful. You might say "Why should a corporation care about these things?". If you do, you miss the point entirely. Microsoft are stagnant. They're a zombie company, absolutely incapable of regeneration and growth. They are currently trading at below their post-bubble value and have failed to achieve any meaningful growth in several years. Their market cap has been exceeded by Apple; Google are well on their way to overtaking them too. You can't even make the argument that the Microsoft way is about business, because they're failing dismally at that. Beauty and joy and excitement isn't just good for developers and users, it's good for the bottom line. Microsoft represents the rotten old way of doing things, a way that just doesn't work anymore. Good developers, developers that make stuff that really matters, they don't really care if there is free coke in the fridge, they don't care whether they sit on a Herman Miller or a shipping crate, what matters to them is creating things that matter. As far as I can tell, nobody at Microsoft has done that in a long time; Not many developers on the Microsoft platform have either. It doesn't matter how nice your offices are - if your workplace culture, if the ecosystem of your software feels stifling and ugly and just generally stupid, all the smart developers are going to leave. Think about this - would Microsoft ever have hired a designer like Ive? Would they have ever have given him free reign? How would a developer like Buchheit be treated at Microsoft? That's why we hate Microsoft. [1] http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/16/microsoft-workers-hiding-their-love-for-the-iphone/ http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/16/microsoft-workers-hiding-thei...

bvge 16y ago

It is sad really, because Microsoft is years ahead of any other company in the way they treat developers. If you havent used Visual Studio you wont understand that. You are obviously not referring to Visual Studio 2005 here. It is a half-baked unstable mess, that I still have to use every day. It's the Vista of IDEs. Microsoft also has a tendency to release frameworks before they are stable, or well thought through. They do usually get things right after a few versions, but the unfortunate people who build and maintain software built on the original idea are left stranded.

nollidge 16y ago
What sort of development are you doing in 2005? I never had much of a stability problem until doing stuff with WPF under VS2008.
jeroen 16y ago
What's keeping you from upgrading to VS2008 or VS2010 and targeting the 2.0 framework?
- bvge 16y ago
  The web services use WSE3, and there is a lack of will on the part of management to have them ported to WCF.
aerique 16y ago
Not only that, once they finally get it right it'll get phased out for their latest framework so you can keep on paying the Microsoft tax. My biggest beef with them is that they chose to make money not through technical excellence but usually through more subversive means.

dinedal 16y ago

> Almost every person I have ever met who hates Microsoft was either ignorant of the matters (meaning they just read what other people said and never had original thoughts) or had a specific beef in one area that they let inform their thoughts about the company as a whole. I don't hate microsoft as a whole. I hate COM+ office interop, and I hate that I'm forced to use this because of an internal dependency on Excel by the company that writes my checks. I hate that I have to have an entirely different approach to read the contents of an Excel spreadsheet then to write to one with office interop. All of that gets shorthanded to "I hate microsoft" when talking to co workers though.

ams6110 16y ago

I think Visual Studio is one of the most painful pieces of software I've ever used.

known 16y ago

I agree. Visual Studio is an excellent product. Now may I know the names of Programmers that developed Visual Studio?

contextfree 16y ago
Here's a blog from one of them: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ricom/