4 ms·
I agree with a lot of what you’ve said here but Microsoft might not be the best example. They’re good about some things but not others. They aren’t even close t
by brazzledazzle 5y ago
I agree with a lot of what you’ve said here but Microsoft might not be the best example. They’re good about some things but not others. They aren’t even close to feature parity in every single version of their apps, be it web, windows, macos, ios and android. The windows clients probably have the most features but even they don’t have all of the same features as their web applications. And I’m not even talking about things that don’t make sense on a given platform due to UX or other constraints. You can search your mailbox on macos but not your online archive. So you have to switch to the Outlook web app to do that.
And the web apps... there are a bunch of small issues and differences between using their webapps on macos and windows. Browser standards aren’t perfect but building cross platform web apps in 2021 is way easier than it once was. And that’s not even getting into just how awful they’ve been from the start. When they first announced O365 I was sure they’d use their expertise with their own products like excel to quickly catch up to Google and surpass them. They’ve never come close in features and, more importantly, quality.
My suspicion is that basing their webapps on SharePoint has put them in a spot where they’re iterating on features as much as they are fighting the platform’s limitations and constraints. At one point Teams couldn’t handle more than x number of users per team because they were storing the membership in a SharePoint list which has a obnoxiously small limit to the number of items it can store. This was a major pain in the ass at least as far back as SharePoint 2013 (maybe even 2010) when their on-prem implementation of one drive was based on SharePoint and people would hit the list limit as soon as they did a sync with their local machine.
Microsoft will cripple their own velocity and productivity with some products in order to prop up others. They’re ruthless from a business perspective and leverage their existing enterprise agreements and relationships which allows them to capture large numbers of users by using IT decision makers who care more about budget to force the rest of the enterprise to use it regardless of quality or appropriateness. So I doubt they’re feeling much financial pain from it but there’s a reason people have a lot of hate for some of their products and services. Developing your product around whether or not a sales team can convince a business unit to force it down users throats instead of building something people want to use has resulted in a Microsoft that has a weird lack of consistency across the board.
One thing I will give them is that they put a lot of effort into security, policy and enforcement across products. But ultimately that’s as much good architecture as it is a way to ensure they can leverage those IT teams. Does it really matter that slack won’t let an ignorant but well meaning security team frustrate your entire company by invalidating your session every 5 minutes? No. But since you can do that with O365 it shows up on a security theater checklist.
If you’re still somehow reading this sorry about the rant, went a bit off topic.
- jolux 5y agoI'm not a particular fan of Microsoft products, like I said I'm all-in with Apple stuff. But they have always understood developers better than Apple has, and I think their recent strategic efforts with .NET and Android demonstrate a clearer view of where the puck is going with application development than anything Apple is doing currently.
- pjmlp 5y agoIf only the Windows team shared the same clearer view.