10 ms·

In the 90s-00s, when I was a younger, (even) more arrogant nerd, I looked down on Microsoft and their stupid technologies: Visual Basic, Access, Word, and more.

In the 90s-00s, when I was a younger, (even) more arrogant nerd, I looked down on Microsoft and their stupid technologies: Visual Basic, Access, Word, and more. Simple, limited tools that I only saw ugly, half-broken systems built with. Until I saw a something by Steve Ballmer (I think), explaining that their strategy was to provide tools for those "99% developers". The ones who don't read HN, the ones who don't code for fun. Everyone for whom coding is something that gets in the way of their real objective. No wonder they produced bad code! But that's not the point: they're solving something else. They're not spending effort making bug-free maintainable code, they've got more important things to do. They're doing the accounting for their small company, point of sale for the shops in their city, all the kind of things that may not be glamorous but that's all around us (for better or for worse) So while I puttered around in my self-congratulatory ivory tower of unix, Microsoft understood what the real world needed, for the 99% of developers...

mro_name 5y ago
I think it's much more profane - Microsoft didn't understand what the real world needed, they just leveraged a monopoly (that IBM let them establish) to frame what a computer looks and feels. They shaped the world to their liking and now it looks like a match. duh.
- math-dev 5y ago
  Basically this
- just-tom 5y ago
  I'd argue the opposite. All Microsoft did was understand what the world needed. Were they successful because of their great marketing or their flawless coding? No. Was Windows spread like a wildfire because it solved real world problems? Yes. Is it one of the most, if not the most, influencial software ever made? Yes, no matter how dull and incompetent people might say it is. For the accountants out there, school teachers and doctors, it was magic.
  - mro_name 5y ago
    it was the only thing they could get. No wonder it looked magic.
    - js8 5y ago
      Macintosh, OS/2, WordPerfect, WordStar, Ami Pro, Quattro Pro.. to name just a few alternatives.
      - mro_name 5y ago
        you don't believe accountants care about anything but the market leader, do you?
        juliendorra 5y ago
        Microsoft wasn’t the clear market leader in the 70s and 80s. Look for example at the spreadsheet. Multiplan was loosing against Lotus 123. (123 being the VisiCalc killer itself) Microsoft first launched Multiplan as its spreadsheet software on Macintosh (1984), it was something like the 22th or 23rd port of Multiplan! Then in 1985 very first version of Excel (Macintosh only) It was an incredible step up from text-screen spreadsheet softwares, but only on Macintosh so Lotus didn’t cared. Then Excel 2.0 got released (1 year before windows, using the windows window manager underneath!) and as people who saw it at the time remember thinking: "lotus was toast" I studied the spreadsheet applications design history to Create my class History of Tech Design [0] and got a totally new perspective on how good the excel team was at getting things right. [0] https://workflowy.com/s/strate-history-of-te/a4ID6kKtznLwQC7C https://workflowy.com/s/strate-history-of-te/a4ID6kKtznLwQC7...
        mro_name 5y ago
        They were the market leader for PC operating systems since they entered the market with MS-Dos and managed to preserve that monopoly after the transition from TUI to GUI. And later they expanded into applications as we know today and built monopolies for email, texts, presentations, spreadsheets and browsing the information superhighway. All prior art, indeed, near zero innovation. The accountants love it.
- durnygbur 5y ago
  Even nowadays go to electronics shop and try buying a laptop without Microsoft tax (without spyware which OEM Windows is). Since their beginnings they used predatory monopolistic market practices and as a result they could fart out miserable things like their entire development ecosystem.
ownagefool 5y ago
So, the thing is, I'd argue a focus on outcome with good technical skills to deliver it, makes you the 1% developer. Take the POS example. You're helping real people be more efficent, and you've litterally got better things to do than be a software purist ( no offense, have same problem ). People are relying on you. Meanwhile, serving the hospitality environment where multiple devices might be ran around a restaurant, and end up down a beer garden, all the whilst being expected to have every order on every device, because a table may call a wandering staffer, whilst having spotty AF network connectivity, processing trillion of transactions a year. Suddenly you have a real life use case where your DS&A knowledge is useful, a real reason to be efficent on the wire, the device, and the server, and improvements in architecture can remove bad states, bugs, and improve the lives and fortunes of real people. If being a 1% dev means profiling people and serving them ads, or writing pure code that nobody uses, then I'm quite happy in the 99%. Disclaimer: I'm a CTO of one of those POS startups. :)
- jl6 5y ago
  99% programmers need to pick up stuff, carry stuff, and throw stuff. 1% programmers are like circus jugglers - the same basic thing, but taken to a breathtaking extreme. They are skilful and impressive, but the scenarios where you need them are rare.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Those scenarios are rare if you have gotten used to what 99% can and can't do and therefore just dismiss many solutions without thinking since you know the 99% can't do those thing. Of course your competitors will do the same, you can't scale up an organization of top 1% professionals, so you don't really need them to compete in the market but you do really need them to solve a lot of problems. Just that today those problems aren't being solved in most places.
    - Dudeman112 5y ago
      >can't do and therefore just dismiss many solutions without thinking since you know the 99% can't do those thing Is that assessment accurate to reality? How would we know if the bottleneck for most business is "my employees aren't good enough to solve hard technical problems" or "most of our problems aren't hard technical problems"?
vasco 5y ago
Your argument suffers from the fact that Ballmer almost tanked the company, so perhaps this rosy look back isn't the whole story, and you need to focus a bit on "get things done" and a bit on "maintain it for the future", it's not as simple as FAANG=good or FAANG=bad. Unless you're happy that all those 99% developers have created towers of COBOL that run the world and they can't touch or upgrade.
- democracy 5y ago
  Should've they been waiting for Javascript or Scala to be invented? The most laidback, humorous and mature developers I've met were Cobol developers. (probably older people are like that haha)
piokoch 5y ago
Partially I agree, partially I don't. I would say the long list of failed operation systems versions (Vista, Windows 98 ME) that were causing a lot of issues for users hit in a unwanted way all those small companies. Not that there was anything better at that time, Linux on desktop is still very problematic, but releasing crappy software will cause issues one way or the other.
bob1029 5y ago
The latest Microsoft stack is easily one of the most productive development ecosystems that exists today. Just look at the default contents of .NET6 vs everything else out there and it doesn't even seem fair anymore. We build a product for financial institutions that serves interfaces to multiple classes of devices and integrates with 15+ different 3rd party systems. It has to address concerns of multiple lines of business and regulatory regimes simultaneously. Guess how many non-Microsoft dependencies we need to get this job done? I'll give you a hint- it's less than 5. Any sort of ideological hang-ups are dashed to the rocks in my mind when I see how amazed the customer is with the final result. All of that principled idealism melts away after receiving their sentiment.
- ithrow 5y ago
  What do you mean by "default contents"?
mrtksn 5y ago
Greatly successful projects often have horrible(from developers perspective) codebase that barely doesn't fall apart. They call it technical debt and fix il later when things stop moving fast. I think it's happening because successful projects focus on the product delivering on the reason it exists(i.e. facilitate file transfer in the most intuitive way possible) and to do that quickly as possible for the lowest cost possible engineers hack together solutions derived from the existing tools without focusing on the technical or ideological perfection. Also, they cannot focus on the technical stuff anyway because to needs and direction change all the time, therefore it's not possible to crystallise an optimised and well built solution anyway. What Microsoft or other companies do is to built versatile tools that that engineers can bend and stick together to accomplish the tasks in hand very quickly and if it looks like the thing is here to stay they can design and implement an optimised and elegant solution later on. At first it may look ugly but it is usually an original work done by domain experts who are exploring technical solutions to the problem in hand. Once the solution is found, experts in computer programming and architecture can step in and make it elegant but that last step is not needed for the wast number of solutions. An example for this is UK's covid case tracking early on. Apparently they quickly implemented a central Excel spreadsheet that would collect the CSV data sent from the test centres. Unfortunately, the solution they implemented was way too hacky and they lost data once they reached the limits of the spreadsheet format they have chosen. Had they chosen a better format, their solution would have worked up until much higher scale and once they have a better understanding of the nature of data collection etc. then they could have implemented a clean sheet solution with "perfect" code and scalability, maybe years later for the future pandemics and write blog posts about the enormous challenges and their ingenious solutions. They couldn't have start by firstly building the perfect data collection solution because they wouldn't know how things will pan out and if they tried to force their way(i.e. mandatory formats by the tests centres) it would have been too big of a projects.
- stevesimmons 5y ago
  > An example for this is UK's covid case tracking early on. Your choice of the UK's Covid tracking spreadsheet debacle to illustrate your point is curious, to put it politely. As The Register [1] (and many others) pointed out at the time, it was the wrong tech choice, executed slowly and at huge cost, by the wrong people with little knowledge of better choices, and directed by management and government leaders with track records of lying and incompetence. > They couldn't have start by firstly building the perfect data collection solution because they wouldn't know how things will pan out and if they tried to force their way(i.e. mandatory formats by the tests centres) it would have been too big of a projects. I have a different view on every part of this sentence! [1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/05/excel_england_coronavirus_contact_error/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/05/excel_england_coronav...
randomsilence 5y ago
In other words, does a16z ask for startups to attack MS on their home turf? There can be a niche for the product creation stage. But how does a company scale in MS's market? Sooner or later, it's a Slack vs MS Teams situation.
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  To be fair, slack kinda messed up themselves. I am still astonished that they never built video calling. Like MS did use their existing sales channels to stop slack growing, but if slack at least had feature parity with Teams then it would have been a harder sell.
  - nightpool 5y ago
    Slack launched video calling in 2016. You can say whatever you want about their UX or ease of use, but you can't say they never built it.
    - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      Huh? That kinda proves my point though, as I've never seen or hear anyone using it. It just boggles the mind, but fair enough seems like a marketing failure rather than a technology one.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    Microsoft also tried to M&A Slack before building Teams. As far as exits go, Slack may go down in history as a particularly not-smart one: they were allegedly quite rude in refusing the M&A offer for what might have been a "golden" exit, encouraging Microsoft to build a competitor in a hustle, and then their later exit to Salesforce was a lot less "golden" and at a lesser valuation due in part to the competitor they helped create through their alleged rudeness. (ETA: Of course, easy to spin things the other direction and read Microsoft's offer as a bully move "join us or we'll build a better you without you". The reality is somewhere in the middle of the two extreme perspectives.)
sersi 5y ago
As a kid, Visual Basic allowed me to write my first shareware, ship it and get sales (not a huge amount, but I think I made about 6000 USD total, which was great as an high school student). I'll agree that it was not a great tool, there were many limitations, very stupid bugs (Visual Basic had very weird behavior in non English Windows) but it got the job done and introduced me to programming.
3pt14159 5y ago
> they've got more important things to do. Well, fine. They feel that way, but it isn't really true. Their going to be the ones maintaining that software for a while and even a basic Google like "Visual Basic best practices" would save them mountains of time in the long run.
pjmlp 5y ago
A good way to dive into this is to do consulting for non tech industries, where 100% of IT is a cost center, no matter what.
- urthor 5y ago
  "I did my job well, everything was running smoothly." Too smoothly. We got 20% layoffs for doing a good job! Cost savings.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    That is why one should value the team, not the employer.
ignoramous 5y ago
Reminds me of: > Here's my point: yes, the whole Internet runs on Unix philosophy. But businesses sure don't. The big problem comes up in my description of pipelines up above: they only parse about 99% correctly, which is fine for your idiotic comments about YouTube videos, but pretty nasty when you mangle critical business data. And when the business dudes get involved, they'd rather do anything than mangle their critical business data. You hear me? Anything! > If it keeps the data from getting mangled, they'd happily sacrifice searchability. Or developer hours. Or the ability to use off-the-shelf software. Or millions of dollars in licensing fees (because at least they'll accurately know how many millions). > Pay attention, because that attitude is exactly why Windows is so strong, why the vast majority of developers prefer to develop on Windows, and why the vast majority of users prefer to use Windows. It may be gross, and adding new features or libraries may be a lot like stabbing yourself repeatedly with a fork (which, tragically, is not itself included in Win32), but Windows works consistently. So does SOAP. But not Unix or microformats or REST. > It would be awesome if someone could find a way to satisfy both camps (the Internet people and the Enterprise people) at once. Then maybe one or the other set of technologies could finally die. But I'm not counting on it. Until then, one or the other technology is effectively dead, but which one it is depends who you are. From: Novel, yes; widespread, no (2006), https://apenwarr.ca/log/20061201 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20061201
- urthor 5y ago
  ...we fixed this, right? Good ole fellas at Red Hat yeah? And by kicking and screaming until corporate sent us some Macbooks. ...right?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dangerface 5y ago
  This makes no sense to me, if business types care about their business data and thats why they use windows, why does the argument start off by pointing out that all the mission critical stuff like email and customer facing sites run on unix? Even Microsoft runs its mission critical stuff on unix. Windows isn't popular because its good at anything its popular because windows it meets the bare minimum and has a huge marketing budget unix doesn't.
_448 5y ago
Steve Ballmer talk at the Oxford Union related to this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMb_4OBgWIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMb_4OBgWIY
democracy 5y ago
>> 99% of developers Not 99% of developers, but 99.99% of problems that need to be solved.
raxxorrax 5y ago
> Everyone for whom coding is something that gets in the way of their real objective. While tech is (allegedly) evolving as fast as ever, the problems to be solved often do not. Sure, scale is always an issue and you want to reduce maintenance. But how many project do you have that have to scale to millions of users? > Visual Basic, Access Very true, but those tools have evolved as well. Sure, everyone laughs about people not using SAP or Salesforce and instead use a self-made CRM. I have seen terrible things here, but also good ones with more features than both other tools could provide. And it made working far more efficient. Of course Access is only used as a front end today, but the fact that there are no real alternatives is a certificate of failure of those that criticise these tools the most (I did so as well). And it is surprisingly adaptable to new feature requests.
- oblio 5y ago
  Can you hook Access up to SQL Server? If so, yeah, most of its problems go away and you give regular users a ton of power.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    Yes, that is the usual way how it is used today. It is used as a frontend to quickly generate queries against a backend SQL server and make some fancy pivot tables. Very rarely is the data stored in the Access file itself.
throwaway984393 5y ago
Nobody gets kudos for being practical rather than cool. You often have to hide the practicality and hype the cool or many users will avoid it.
ksec 5y ago
>Visual Basic, Access, Word, and more. And Visual FoxPro. Perhaps the most underrated tools for SME. And possibly one of the reason why CRM and ERP have a hard time breaking into those market. And this is going to be rant-ish.. Then somewhere along the line came Google. Yes I absolutely blame them ( In terms of mentality ). Instead of Microsoft which at the time was the ultimate evil company, providing tools ( not even programming or code, but "tools" ) to 99% of developers. We got Google, representing "real nerds" on the opposite side of spectrum telling you these technology are utter piece of crap and ours are the greatest. The proper way to do it. Embrace complexity to its maximum. And of course a lot of people were sold. Nerd could finally get rid of all the ugliness from computing. Visual Basic? Ugh. Learn a proper programming language. PHP? ROFL. And of course there is Resume Driven Development. The actual technology in itself doesn't matter. What matter is if MAMAAN are using it. So you have a better chance or joining them. There is no fun in computing anymore, not for the 99% developers, and even more so for those who only wants to be 99% developers.
synergy20 5y ago
Isn't that called no-code or low-code these days? To make software for the generic public who does not have a CS/EE/Physics/Math degree?
kirso 5y ago
Someone gives this person a medal! I think there is really not much to add to this, I just wanted to say thank you for this, a lot of people need to read this and wake-up call, that markets hammer on your. The true feedback loop has no feelings, no compliments - just pure and direct feedback by either using the product, or not, irregardless whether its Kubernetes, Solana or <script>
goodpoint 5y ago
If you think Microsoft produces user-centric and pain-free tools for developers you clearly don't have experience around Microsoft stuff. Most companies, not just FAANGs, use Linux extensively and this is not out of masochism.
- drekipus 5y ago
  don't worry, the Microsoft brigade will relax soon :P
chernevik 5y ago
Those tools were targeting business users, not developers. They were trying to make computing accessible to business needs. Some (Excel) were wildly successful while also introducing anti-patterns. Some (Access) were just anti-patterns.
armchairhacker 5y ago
Honestly i think more than 1% of developers code for fun, understand at least basic unix, and can clearly see when a system is shoddy and dumbed down. Maybe a majority don’t, and my experience is definitely biased. But i’ve met many programmers of diverse backgrounds, and a lot are very passionate and research the newest and best technologies on their own. They probably don’t read Hacker News, but I think “hacker” programmers are more common than you realize.
mbrodersen 5y ago
Yep the world is full of in-experienced, arrogant, self-congratulating developers who thinks they know it all while having zero clue on what is really going on. They are easy to identify. The moment they say things like “all X developers are crap” or “all software developed by super successful company X is crap” or “developers using technology X are stupid” or “smart developers who gets it use X” you know you have identified one. Run (don’t walk) away from them. They are toxic and should be avoided at all cost.

mro_name 5y ago

I think it's much more profane - Microsoft didn't understand what the real world needed, they just leveraged a monopoly (that IBM let them establish) to frame what a computer looks and feels. They shaped the world to their liking and now it looks like a match. duh.

math-dev 5y ago
Basically this
just-tom 5y ago
I'd argue the opposite. All Microsoft did was understand what the world needed. Were they successful because of their great marketing or their flawless coding? No. Was Windows spread like a wildfire because it solved real world problems? Yes. Is it one of the most, if not the most, influencial software ever made? Yes, no matter how dull and incompetent people might say it is. For the accountants out there, school teachers and doctors, it was magic.
- mro_name 5y ago
  it was the only thing they could get. No wonder it looked magic.
  - js8 5y ago
    Macintosh, OS/2, WordPerfect, WordStar, Ami Pro, Quattro Pro.. to name just a few alternatives.
    - mro_name 5y ago
      you don't believe accountants care about anything but the market leader, do you?
      - juliendorra 5y ago
        Microsoft wasn’t the clear market leader in the 70s and 80s. Look for example at the spreadsheet. Multiplan was loosing against Lotus 123. (123 being the VisiCalc killer itself) Microsoft first launched Multiplan as its spreadsheet software on Macintosh (1984), it was something like the 22th or 23rd port of Multiplan! Then in 1985 very first version of Excel (Macintosh only) It was an incredible step up from text-screen spreadsheet softwares, but only on Macintosh so Lotus didn’t cared. Then Excel 2.0 got released (1 year before windows, using the windows window manager underneath!) and as people who saw it at the time remember thinking: "lotus was toast" I studied the spreadsheet applications design history to Create my class History of Tech Design [0] and got a totally new perspective on how good the excel team was at getting things right. [0] https://workflowy.com/s/strate-history-of-te/a4ID6kKtznLwQC7C https://workflowy.com/s/strate-history-of-te/a4ID6kKtznLwQC7...
        mro_name 5y ago
        They were the market leader for PC operating systems since they entered the market with MS-Dos and managed to preserve that monopoly after the transition from TUI to GUI. And later they expanded into applications as we know today and built monopolies for email, texts, presentations, spreadsheets and browsing the information superhighway. All prior art, indeed, near zero innovation. The accountants love it.
durnygbur 5y ago
Even nowadays go to electronics shop and try buying a laptop without Microsoft tax (without spyware which OEM Windows is). Since their beginnings they used predatory monopolistic market practices and as a result they could fart out miserable things like their entire development ecosystem.

ownagefool 5y ago

So, the thing is, I'd argue a focus on outcome with good technical skills to deliver it, makes you the 1% developer. Take the POS example. You're helping real people be more efficent, and you've litterally got better things to do than be a software purist ( no offense, have same problem ). People are relying on you. Meanwhile, serving the hospitality environment where multiple devices might be ran around a restaurant, and end up down a beer garden, all the whilst being expected to have every order on every device, because a table may call a wandering staffer, whilst having spotty AF network connectivity, processing trillion of transactions a year. Suddenly you have a real life use case where your DS&A knowledge is useful, a real reason to be efficent on the wire, the device, and the server, and improvements in architecture can remove bad states, bugs, and improve the lives and fortunes of real people. If being a 1% dev means profiling people and serving them ads, or writing pure code that nobody uses, then I'm quite happy in the 99%. Disclaimer: I'm a CTO of one of those POS startups. :)

jl6 5y ago
99% programmers need to pick up stuff, carry stuff, and throw stuff. 1% programmers are like circus jugglers - the same basic thing, but taken to a breathtaking extreme. They are skilful and impressive, but the scenarios where you need them are rare.
- Jensson 5y ago
  Those scenarios are rare if you have gotten used to what 99% can and can't do and therefore just dismiss many solutions without thinking since you know the 99% can't do those thing. Of course your competitors will do the same, you can't scale up an organization of top 1% professionals, so you don't really need them to compete in the market but you do really need them to solve a lot of problems. Just that today those problems aren't being solved in most places.
  - Dudeman112 5y ago
    >can't do and therefore just dismiss many solutions without thinking since you know the 99% can't do those thing Is that assessment accurate to reality? How would we know if the bottleneck for most business is "my employees aren't good enough to solve hard technical problems" or "most of our problems aren't hard technical problems"?

vasco 5y ago

Your argument suffers from the fact that Ballmer almost tanked the company, so perhaps this rosy look back isn't the whole story, and you need to focus a bit on "get things done" and a bit on "maintain it for the future", it's not as simple as FAANG=good or FAANG=bad. Unless you're happy that all those 99% developers have created towers of COBOL that run the world and they can't touch or upgrade.

democracy 5y ago
Should've they been waiting for Javascript or Scala to be invented? The most laidback, humorous and mature developers I've met were Cobol developers. (probably older people are like that haha)

piokoch 5y ago

Partially I agree, partially I don't. I would say the long list of failed operation systems versions (Vista, Windows 98 ME) that were causing a lot of issues for users hit in a unwanted way all those small companies. Not that there was anything better at that time, Linux on desktop is still very problematic, but releasing crappy software will cause issues one way or the other.

bob1029 5y ago

The latest Microsoft stack is easily one of the most productive development ecosystems that exists today. Just look at the default contents of .NET6 vs everything else out there and it doesn't even seem fair anymore. We build a product for financial institutions that serves interfaces to multiple classes of devices and integrates with 15+ different 3rd party systems. It has to address concerns of multiple lines of business and regulatory regimes simultaneously. Guess how many non-Microsoft dependencies we need to get this job done? I'll give you a hint- it's less than 5. Any sort of ideological hang-ups are dashed to the rocks in my mind when I see how amazed the customer is with the final result. All of that principled idealism melts away after receiving their sentiment.

ithrow 5y ago
What do you mean by "default contents"?

mrtksn 5y ago

Greatly successful projects often have horrible(from developers perspective) codebase that barely doesn't fall apart. They call it technical debt and fix il later when things stop moving fast. I think it's happening because successful projects focus on the product delivering on the reason it exists(i.e. facilitate file transfer in the most intuitive way possible) and to do that quickly as possible for the lowest cost possible engineers hack together solutions derived from the existing tools without focusing on the technical or ideological perfection. Also, they cannot focus on the technical stuff anyway because to needs and direction change all the time, therefore it's not possible to crystallise an optimised and well built solution anyway. What Microsoft or other companies do is to built versatile tools that that engineers can bend and stick together to accomplish the tasks in hand very quickly and if it looks like the thing is here to stay they can design and implement an optimised and elegant solution later on. At first it may look ugly but it is usually an original work done by domain experts who are exploring technical solutions to the problem in hand. Once the solution is found, experts in computer programming and architecture can step in and make it elegant but that last step is not needed for the wast number of solutions. An example for this is UK's covid case tracking early on. Apparently they quickly implemented a central Excel spreadsheet that would collect the CSV data sent from the test centres. Unfortunately, the solution they implemented was way too hacky and they lost data once they reached the limits of the spreadsheet format they have chosen. Had they chosen a better format, their solution would have worked up until much higher scale and once they have a better understanding of the nature of data collection etc. then they could have implemented a clean sheet solution with "perfect" code and scalability, maybe years later for the future pandemics and write blog posts about the enormous challenges and their ingenious solutions. They couldn't have start by firstly building the perfect data collection solution because they wouldn't know how things will pan out and if they tried to force their way(i.e. mandatory formats by the tests centres) it would have been too big of a projects.

stevesimmons 5y ago
> An example for this is UK's covid case tracking early on. Your choice of the UK's Covid tracking spreadsheet debacle to illustrate your point is curious, to put it politely. As The Register [1] (and many others) pointed out at the time, it was the wrong tech choice, executed slowly and at huge cost, by the wrong people with little knowledge of better choices, and directed by management and government leaders with track records of lying and incompetence. > They couldn't have start by firstly building the perfect data collection solution because they wouldn't know how things will pan out and if they tried to force their way(i.e. mandatory formats by the tests centres) it would have been too big of a projects. I have a different view on every part of this sentence! [1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/05/excel_england_coronavirus_contact_error/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/05/excel_england_coronav...

randomsilence 5y ago

In other words, does a16z ask for startups to attack MS on their home turf? There can be a niche for the product creation stage. But how does a company scale in MS's market? Sooner or later, it's a Slack vs MS Teams situation.

disgruntledphd2 5y ago
To be fair, slack kinda messed up themselves. I am still astonished that they never built video calling. Like MS did use their existing sales channels to stop slack growing, but if slack at least had feature parity with Teams then it would have been a harder sell.
- nightpool 5y ago
  Slack launched video calling in 2016. You can say whatever you want about their UX or ease of use, but you can't say they never built it.
  - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    Huh? That kinda proves my point though, as I've never seen or hear anyone using it. It just boggles the mind, but fair enough seems like a marketing failure rather than a technology one.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  Microsoft also tried to M&A Slack before building Teams. As far as exits go, Slack may go down in history as a particularly not-smart one: they were allegedly quite rude in refusing the M&A offer for what might have been a "golden" exit, encouraging Microsoft to build a competitor in a hustle, and then their later exit to Salesforce was a lot less "golden" and at a lesser valuation due in part to the competitor they helped create through their alleged rudeness. (ETA: Of course, easy to spin things the other direction and read Microsoft's offer as a bully move "join us or we'll build a better you without you". The reality is somewhere in the middle of the two extreme perspectives.)

sersi 5y ago

As a kid, Visual Basic allowed me to write my first shareware, ship it and get sales (not a huge amount, but I think I made about 6000 USD total, which was great as an high school student). I'll agree that it was not a great tool, there were many limitations, very stupid bugs (Visual Basic had very weird behavior in non English Windows) but it got the job done and introduced me to programming.

3pt14159 5y ago

> they've got more important things to do. Well, fine. They feel that way, but it isn't really true. Their going to be the ones maintaining that software for a while and even a basic Google like "Visual Basic best practices" would save them mountains of time in the long run.

pjmlp 5y ago

A good way to dive into this is to do consulting for non tech industries, where 100% of IT is a cost center, no matter what.

urthor 5y ago
"I did my job well, everything was running smoothly." Too smoothly. We got 20% layoffs for doing a good job! Cost savings.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  That is why one should value the team, not the employer.

ignoramous 5y ago

Reminds me of: > Here's my point: yes, the whole Internet runs on Unix philosophy. But businesses sure don't. The big problem comes up in my description of pipelines up above: they only parse about 99% correctly, which is fine for your idiotic comments about YouTube videos, but pretty nasty when you mangle critical business data. And when the business dudes get involved, they'd rather do anything than mangle their critical business data. You hear me? Anything! > If it keeps the data from getting mangled, they'd happily sacrifice searchability. Or developer hours. Or the ability to use off-the-shelf software. Or millions of dollars in licensing fees (because at least they'll accurately know how many millions). > Pay attention, because that attitude is exactly why Windows is so strong, why the vast majority of developers prefer to develop on Windows, and why the vast majority of users prefer to use Windows. It may be gross, and adding new features or libraries may be a lot like stabbing yourself repeatedly with a fork (which, tragically, is not itself included in Win32), but Windows works consistently. So does SOAP. But not Unix or microformats or REST. > It would be awesome if someone could find a way to satisfy both camps (the Internet people and the Enterprise people) at once. Then maybe one or the other set of technologies could finally die. But I'm not counting on it. Until then, one or the other technology is effectively dead, but which one it is depends who you are. From: Novel, yes; widespread, no (2006), https://apenwarr.ca/log/20061201 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20061201

urthor 5y ago
...we fixed this, right? Good ole fellas at Red Hat yeah? And by kicking and screaming until corporate sent us some Macbooks. ...right?
deleted 5y ago
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dangerface 5y ago
This makes no sense to me, if business types care about their business data and thats why they use windows, why does the argument start off by pointing out that all the mission critical stuff like email and customer facing sites run on unix? Even Microsoft runs its mission critical stuff on unix. Windows isn't popular because its good at anything its popular because windows it meets the bare minimum and has a huge marketing budget unix doesn't.

_448 5y ago

Steve Ballmer talk at the Oxford Union related to this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMb_4OBgWIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMb_4OBgWIY

democracy 5y ago

>> 99% of developers Not 99% of developers, but 99.99% of problems that need to be solved.

raxxorrax 5y ago

> Everyone for whom coding is something that gets in the way of their real objective. While tech is (allegedly) evolving as fast as ever, the problems to be solved often do not. Sure, scale is always an issue and you want to reduce maintenance. But how many project do you have that have to scale to millions of users? > Visual Basic, Access Very true, but those tools have evolved as well. Sure, everyone laughs about people not using SAP or Salesforce and instead use a self-made CRM. I have seen terrible things here, but also good ones with more features than both other tools could provide. And it made working far more efficient. Of course Access is only used as a front end today, but the fact that there are no real alternatives is a certificate of failure of those that criticise these tools the most (I did so as well). And it is surprisingly adaptable to new feature requests.

oblio 5y ago
Can you hook Access up to SQL Server? If so, yeah, most of its problems go away and you give regular users a ton of power.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  Yes, that is the usual way how it is used today. It is used as a frontend to quickly generate queries against a backend SQL server and make some fancy pivot tables. Very rarely is the data stored in the Access file itself.

throwaway984393 5y ago

Nobody gets kudos for being practical rather than cool. You often have to hide the practicality and hype the cool or many users will avoid it.

ksec 5y ago

>Visual Basic, Access, Word, and more. And Visual FoxPro. Perhaps the most underrated tools for SME. And possibly one of the reason why CRM and ERP have a hard time breaking into those market. And this is going to be rant-ish.. Then somewhere along the line came Google. Yes I absolutely blame them ( In terms of mentality ). Instead of Microsoft which at the time was the ultimate evil company, providing tools ( not even programming or code, but "tools" ) to 99% of developers. We got Google, representing "real nerds" on the opposite side of spectrum telling you these technology are utter piece of crap and ours are the greatest. The proper way to do it. Embrace complexity to its maximum. And of course a lot of people were sold. Nerd could finally get rid of all the ugliness from computing. Visual Basic? Ugh. Learn a proper programming language. PHP? ROFL. And of course there is Resume Driven Development. The actual technology in itself doesn't matter. What matter is if MAMAAN are using it. So you have a better chance or joining them. There is no fun in computing anymore, not for the 99% developers, and even more so for those who only wants to be 99% developers.

synergy20 5y ago

Isn't that called no-code or low-code these days? To make software for the generic public who does not have a CS/EE/Physics/Math degree?

kirso 5y ago

Someone gives this person a medal! I think there is really not much to add to this, I just wanted to say thank you for this, a lot of people need to read this and wake-up call, that markets hammer on your. The true feedback loop has no feelings, no compliments - just pure and direct feedback by either using the product, or not, irregardless whether its Kubernetes, Solana or <script>

goodpoint 5y ago

If you think Microsoft produces user-centric and pain-free tools for developers you clearly don't have experience around Microsoft stuff. Most companies, not just FAANGs, use Linux extensively and this is not out of masochism.

drekipus 5y ago
don't worry, the Microsoft brigade will relax soon :P

chernevik 5y ago

Those tools were targeting business users, not developers. They were trying to make computing accessible to business needs. Some (Excel) were wildly successful while also introducing anti-patterns. Some (Access) were just anti-patterns.

armchairhacker 5y ago

Honestly i think more than 1% of developers code for fun, understand at least basic unix, and can clearly see when a system is shoddy and dumbed down. Maybe a majority don’t, and my experience is definitely biased. But i’ve met many programmers of diverse backgrounds, and a lot are very passionate and research the newest and best technologies on their own. They probably don’t read Hacker News, but I think “hacker” programmers are more common than you realize.

mbrodersen 5y ago

Yep the world is full of in-experienced, arrogant, self-congratulating developers who thinks they know it all while having zero clue on what is really going on. They are easy to identify. The moment they say things like “all X developers are crap” or “all software developed by super successful company X is crap” or “developers using technology X are stupid” or “smart developers who gets it use X” you know you have identified one. Run (don’t walk) away from them. They are toxic and should be avoided at all cost.