6 ms·

> And then imagine having to stay as true as possible to that rule for 40 years. And then imagine that most of your original decisions were poor ones, you won

> And then imagine having to stay as true as possible to that rule for 40 years. And then imagine that most of your original decisions were poor ones, you won your position by virtue of being an abusive monopoly, and as a result, the majority of the desktop world has been needlessly suffering under the burden of your poor technical decisions for 40 years.

JJMcJ 4y ago
> burden The slow boot and shutdown times, and the interminable upgrades are almost inhuman. It seems like you can upgrade Ubuntu to a new major version faster than Windows can install a month's worth of fixes. Especially when the Windows updates are unannounced and suddenly it's going to take 30 minutes to leave your desk instead of 30 seconds.
- robomartin 4y ago
  > It seems like you can upgrade Ubuntu to a new major version faster than Windows can install a month's worth of fixes. Nobody cares. It is beyond obvious --brutally, massively so-- that this is not important at all. Not even a little. The proof is simple: Billions of users have done just fine for decades. The only people who ever complain about this are technical folks who often view the world from a perspective that is far removed from average-user reality (the billions of people I mentioned before). I think it is extremely important for engineers to be able to understand that they don't often view the world in terms that actually matter. One of my favorite go-to examples for this are the endless (and pointless) arguments about vi/vim vs. whatever.
CamperBob2 4y ago
Microsoft's secret is, and always has been, incompetent competition. If you invent a time machine, don't kill Bill when you go back. Build something that's genuinely better for both users and developers.
- robomartin 4y ago
  > Build something that's genuinely better for both users and developers. When I was much younger I, too, thought this way. Reality, however, does not align with this at all. Better products do not necessarily win. I might even go as far as saying that they almost never win. The vast majority of products --not just software, anything-- are mediocre at best. What they do is solve a problem. One thing engineers, developers have to work hard to get out of their heads is that the actual users of software, operating systems, applications, websites could not care one bit about anything that happens under the hood. Nothing. Not one bit. To put it plainly, they doing give a shit. At all. When someone wants to order a pizza online, write a document on their laptop or play some music, all they care about is that thing. Nothing else matters. You could have a dozen hamsters trained to push buttons behind the scenes for all the care. It truly does not matter. Internalizing that realization, is, in my opinion, an important step in the evolution from being a junior engineer to someone with enough experience to understand reality enough to get the job done. This does not mean creating garbage. It does mean not being a complete pain in the ass about how to deliver a solution that users will, well, use. This argument about the Windows registry is just silly. And the proof is simple: BILLIONS of people are benefitting from what this software does. Billions. The only people complaining about it are engineers not experienced enough to understand what they think is utterly irrelevant when compared to the scale and success of the SOLUTION the software provides. In my forty years of hardware and software development I have yet to find a single piece of technology I could not criticize to one degree or another and, given the opportunity, improve. And yet, with enough experience, you realize this is the wrong metric to focus on. People's needs are served by solutions. Their lives are improved by software and hardware that solves the problems they have. The person in the hospital recovering from a heart attack gives two shits about the Windows registry, even though nearly the entire computing chain that was used to save his life was likely run on Windows computers. That's reality. The rest is geeks not understanding that they don't know what to focus on or how to actually evaluate the value of a solution, which very often turns out to be far less than ideal and can always be criticized from a distance, both in time and space. EDIT: > incompetent competition Serious question: Do you stop to read and think about what you are saying? I am not attacking you at all. I am just trying to understand how you might justify this perspective. "incompetent competition"? This is the company that has f-ing owned home, desktop and enterprise computing for what, FOUR DECADES? Incompetent? C'mon. They have solved problems for people and companies large and small for decades. The world has been running on MS solutions for longer than some of the people reading this have been alive. That is far from incompetent competition. Very far.

JJMcJ 4y ago

> burden The slow boot and shutdown times, and the interminable upgrades are almost inhuman. It seems like you can upgrade Ubuntu to a new major version faster than Windows can install a month's worth of fixes. Especially when the Windows updates are unannounced and suddenly it's going to take 30 minutes to leave your desk instead of 30 seconds.

robomartin 4y ago
> It seems like you can upgrade Ubuntu to a new major version faster than Windows can install a month's worth of fixes. Nobody cares. It is beyond obvious --brutally, massively so-- that this is not important at all. Not even a little. The proof is simple: Billions of users have done just fine for decades. The only people who ever complain about this are technical folks who often view the world from a perspective that is far removed from average-user reality (the billions of people I mentioned before). I think it is extremely important for engineers to be able to understand that they don't often view the world in terms that actually matter. One of my favorite go-to examples for this are the endless (and pointless) arguments about vi/vim vs. whatever.

CamperBob2 4y ago

Microsoft's secret is, and always has been, incompetent competition. If you invent a time machine, don't kill Bill when you go back. Build something that's genuinely better for both users and developers.

robomartin 4y ago
> Build something that's genuinely better for both users and developers. When I was much younger I, too, thought this way. Reality, however, does not align with this at all. Better products do not necessarily win. I might even go as far as saying that they almost never win. The vast majority of products --not just software, anything-- are mediocre at best. What they do is solve a problem. One thing engineers, developers have to work hard to get out of their heads is that the actual users of software, operating systems, applications, websites could not care one bit about anything that happens under the hood. Nothing. Not one bit. To put it plainly, they doing give a shit. At all. When someone wants to order a pizza online, write a document on their laptop or play some music, all they care about is that thing. Nothing else matters. You could have a dozen hamsters trained to push buttons behind the scenes for all the care. It truly does not matter. Internalizing that realization, is, in my opinion, an important step in the evolution from being a junior engineer to someone with enough experience to understand reality enough to get the job done. This does not mean creating garbage. It does mean not being a complete pain in the ass about how to deliver a solution that users will, well, use. This argument about the Windows registry is just silly. And the proof is simple: BILLIONS of people are benefitting from what this software does. Billions. The only people complaining about it are engineers not experienced enough to understand what they think is utterly irrelevant when compared to the scale and success of the SOLUTION the software provides. In my forty years of hardware and software development I have yet to find a single piece of technology I could not criticize to one degree or another and, given the opportunity, improve. And yet, with enough experience, you realize this is the wrong metric to focus on. People's needs are served by solutions. Their lives are improved by software and hardware that solves the problems they have. The person in the hospital recovering from a heart attack gives two shits about the Windows registry, even though nearly the entire computing chain that was used to save his life was likely run on Windows computers. That's reality. The rest is geeks not understanding that they don't know what to focus on or how to actually evaluate the value of a solution, which very often turns out to be far less than ideal and can always be criticized from a distance, both in time and space. EDIT: > incompetent competition Serious question: Do you stop to read and think about what you are saying? I am not attacking you at all. I am just trying to understand how you might justify this perspective. "incompetent competition"? This is the company that has f-ing owned home, desktop and enterprise computing for what, FOUR DECADES? Incompetent? C'mon. They have solved problems for people and companies large and small for decades. The world has been running on MS solutions for longer than some of the people reading this have been alive. That is far from incompetent competition. Very far.