3 ms·

All just personal opinions, but Microsoft products and services are generally good, from my experience. Windows 10 works great (and I seem to be the only person

All just personal opinions, but Microsoft products and services are generally good, from my experience. Windows 10 works great (and I seem to be the only person who actually appreciates their update policy). Office works well. OneDrive used to work well, now it's just "okay", but still fine. My Surface Go is a champ and feels great, despite being silly cheap. My Microsoft Ergonomics keyboard + mouse are still going strong, and is still my all-time favourite Ergo keyboard. Xbox One X is a nice piece of kit. Azure can be kind of overwhelming, but it works well enough and is far less overwhelming than AWS, despite offering mostly similar services. Microsoft still has legacy weirdness all over the place. It's 2019 and it still feels like nobody from Windows talks to anyone in Office, and no one in software talks to anyone doing hardware. And Microsoft botches acquisitions (Skype is still a tire fire, similar for LinkedIn). But generally, the quality of Microsoft products is good, despite their failings. Microsoft consumer support is pretty poor. But I basically never need to use it, and some of competition is so much worse, that Microsoft look good in comparison. (Have a problem with anything Google, for example, and Microsoft Support suddenly looks like mana from heaven).

cferr 7y ago
And Microsoft botches acquisitions Not all of them. They've done well with Mojang.
- maxsilver 7y ago
  Oh yeah, I totally forgot. Their handling of Minecraft has been mostly great, from both a product and software quality perspective. (except for the modding stuff)
- eropple 7y ago
  They have, but they've also been helped by the former center of Mojang's fanbase's cult-of-personality going completely off the deep end. If Notch was still "that quirky dude making little games here and there" instead of a chud screaming on Twitter all the time, I tend to think there would be more (unreasonable, but extant) dissatisfaction with Microsoft's handling of Minecraft.
davemp 7y ago
> Windows 10 works great (and I seem to be the only person who actually appreciates their update policy). I had an annoying problem last weekend trying to get ray tracing enabled in a video game. After searching around I found out that a my graphics driver doesn't auto update and the "windows is up to date" message is a lie. Turns out I was on win10-1803 instead of 1809 and had to download a separate *.exe to upgrade. These types of problems don't happen with a modern (sane) package manager. There's also a few other problems with windows that stop me from thinking it's great: no pseudoterminal, rigid window manager, registry nightmares, possibly more.
- maxsilver 7y ago
  > After searching around I found out that a my graphics driver doesn't auto update It does, graphics drivers do auto-update (unless you've manually disabled it on your system). They just update slowly, you'll get the latest long-term driver from your device manufacturer / OEM, -- you won't instantly get things like "nVidia Game Ready Drivers, now with experimental ray-tracing" that come out every two weeks or so.
- jamesgeck0 7y ago
  Windows has a Pseudoterminal. It's a relatively recent addition. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-line-introducing-the-windows-pseudo-console-conpty/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-l...
  - tracker1 7y ago
    Woohoo! Finally...

cferr 7y ago

And Microsoft botches acquisitions Not all of them. They've done well with Mojang.

maxsilver 7y ago
Oh yeah, I totally forgot. Their handling of Minecraft has been mostly great, from both a product and software quality perspective. (except for the modding stuff)
eropple 7y ago
They have, but they've also been helped by the former center of Mojang's fanbase's cult-of-personality going completely off the deep end. If Notch was still "that quirky dude making little games here and there" instead of a chud screaming on Twitter all the time, I tend to think there would be more (unreasonable, but extant) dissatisfaction with Microsoft's handling of Minecraft.

davemp 7y ago

> Windows 10 works great (and I seem to be the only person who actually appreciates their update policy). I had an annoying problem last weekend trying to get ray tracing enabled in a video game. After searching around I found out that a my graphics driver doesn't auto update and the "windows is up to date" message is a lie. Turns out I was on win10-1803 instead of 1809 and had to download a separate *.exe to upgrade. These types of problems don't happen with a modern (sane) package manager. There's also a few other problems with windows that stop me from thinking it's great: no pseudoterminal, rigid window manager, registry nightmares, possibly more.

maxsilver 7y ago
> After searching around I found out that a my graphics driver doesn't auto update It does, graphics drivers do auto-update (unless you've manually disabled it on your system). They just update slowly, you'll get the latest long-term driver from your device manufacturer / OEM, -- you won't instantly get things like "nVidia Game Ready Drivers, now with experimental ray-tracing" that come out every two weeks or so.
jamesgeck0 7y ago
Windows has a Pseudoterminal. It's a relatively recent addition. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-line-introducing-the-windows-pseudo-console-conpty/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-l...
- tracker1 7y ago
  Woohoo! Finally...