5 ms·

"Microsoft hasn't had good products or good intentions in a very long time." Apart from: XBox XBox 360 Numerous XBox Games XBox Live Kinect (and co

by sambeau 15y ago

"Microsoft hasn't had good products or good intentions in a very long time." Apart from: XBox XBox 360 Numerous XBox Games XBox Live Kinect (and controversially, perhaps Expression Design now, sadly, no longer developed)

staunch 15y ago
Okay, fine, one good product in 10 years and bad intentions...
- cubeboy 15y ago
  Sun had good intentions
  - staunch 15y ago
    Their products were "bad" (overpriced and mostly technically inferior.) I'm not even sure their intentions were very good except in the very early days. Hard to imagine Google charging $900 for a $90 memory stick like Sun did.
    - sukuriant 15y ago
      Charging for their R&D, maybe? Sun did give out a LOT for free. Those sorts of free come with a cost to someone
- sambeau 15y ago
  I should have made it clearer that I wasn't trying to disprove your greater point, only clarify that one division of Microsoft does make good, very popular stuff.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
rodh257 15y ago
Also... Windows 7, .NET, Visual Studio, Office 2007 (Ribbon overhaul), WP7 (though a way to come yet, but tends to get good reviews, particularly for the UI). Just because they are not your personal preference doesn't mean that they aren't good products.
- chrisjsmith 15y ago
  Visual Studio is an awful product. It's bloated, performs badly, expensive and extremely unreliable.
  - thibaut_barrere 15y ago
    Although I do mainly Ruby these days, I still use VisualStudio from times to times and find it quite enjoyable personally. Which reliability issues did you meet on which version?
    - chrisjsmith 15y ago
      VS2010. Mainly the fact that the user interface is painfully slow[1] (either that or I'm unreasonably fast which is rediculous as Vim can keep up with me) and it just dies about 5 times a day on a good day. It might be the solution size though - it's got about 0.5 million lines of C# in it. Still it should work. [1] On a quad core Xeon with 12Gb RAM, SAS disks and ATI FirePro card.
      - thibaut_barrere 15y ago
        That size of codebase is definitely an issue :) Last time I had 500k of C#+C++ (5 years ago roughly), I split the solution into around 20 solutions, and used binary dependencies (with CruiseControl.Net on top of that [1]). I remember reading similar advices in other places as well (and for other languages/platforms, too). [1] http://mikebroberts.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/enterprise-continuous-integration-using-binary-dependencies.pdf http://mikebroberts.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/enterprise-c...
protomyth 15y ago
Although they bought the program, I have always found Visio to be a great program. Expression Design really had some potential.

by sambeau 15y ago

staunch 15y ago

Okay, fine, one good product in 10 years and bad intentions...

cubeboy 15y ago
Sun had good intentions
- staunch 15y ago
  Their products were "bad" (overpriced and mostly technically inferior.) I'm not even sure their intentions were very good except in the very early days. Hard to imagine Google charging $900 for a $90 memory stick like Sun did.
  - sukuriant 15y ago
    Charging for their R&D, maybe? Sun did give out a LOT for free. Those sorts of free come with a cost to someone
sambeau 15y ago
I should have made it clearer that I wasn't trying to disprove your greater point, only clarify that one division of Microsoft does make good, very popular stuff.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

rodh257 15y ago

Also... Windows 7, .NET, Visual Studio, Office 2007 (Ribbon overhaul), WP7 (though a way to come yet, but tends to get good reviews, particularly for the UI). Just because they are not your personal preference doesn't mean that they aren't good products.

chrisjsmith 15y ago
Visual Studio is an awful product. It's bloated, performs badly, expensive and extremely unreliable.
- thibaut_barrere 15y ago
  Although I do mainly Ruby these days, I still use VisualStudio from times to times and find it quite enjoyable personally. Which reliability issues did you meet on which version?
  - chrisjsmith 15y ago
    VS2010. Mainly the fact that the user interface is painfully slow[1] (either that or I'm unreasonably fast which is rediculous as Vim can keep up with me) and it just dies about 5 times a day on a good day. It might be the solution size though - it's got about 0.5 million lines of C# in it. Still it should work. [1] On a quad core Xeon with 12Gb RAM, SAS disks and ATI FirePro card.
    - thibaut_barrere 15y ago
      That size of codebase is definitely an issue :) Last time I had 500k of C#+C++ (5 years ago roughly), I split the solution into around 20 solutions, and used binary dependencies (with CruiseControl.Net on top of that [1]). I remember reading similar advices in other places as well (and for other languages/platforms, too). [1] http://mikebroberts.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/enterprise-continuous-integration-using-binary-dependencies.pdf http://mikebroberts.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/enterprise-c...

protomyth 15y ago

Although they bought the program, I have always found Visio to be a great program. Expression Design really had some potential.