11 ms·

I hate to go negative. I really do because, usually it doesn't improve the discourse whatsoever. However, I feel like it needs to be said: Microsoft makes bad

I hate to go negative. I really do because, usually it doesn't improve the discourse whatsoever. However, I feel like it needs to be said: Microsoft makes bad products[1]! They're overpriced, insecure, slow (it's astounding to me how slow their web properties are), and hard to use. Easily some of the worst UI I've ever seen and, what's worse, they've been like that my entire career. They keep slapping lipstick on the same pigs and claiming to have reinvented themselves. Their support is so ungodly bad that it literally took one of their reps over a day to figure out what timezone I'm in. Meanwhile, two of my employees' emails were being randomly CC'd to the CEO for no apparent reason. The cause? Nobody knows. It just stopped happening. Even Microsoft couldn't tell me why it happened. With a $2.5 trillion market cap, it may seem like they're killing it but, I really think they're riding on momentum just like IBM did. Twenty years ago, IBM's market cap was double what is is now and, in my experience, their products are every bit as bad (admittedly, I have almost no exposure to their big iron products). So, what are our alternatives? I know many people who don't like Apple for various reasons. Linux on the desktop has been promised for 20 years. It's closer than it has ever been to being a solid replacement but I don't know that it's quite there yet. It saddens me to say, I don't know what the answer is. I just know that we need to get away from Microsoft products and fast. 1: In my experience, the only two exceptions are VS Code and SQL Server.

mschuster91 3y ago
> With a $2.5 trillion market cap, it may seem like they're killing it but, I really think they're riding on momentum just like IBM did. Twenty years ago, IBM's market cap was double what is is now and, in my experience, their products are every bit as bad (admittedly, I have almost no exposure to their big iron products). People are only not shitting on IBM so much anymore because they sold off Lotus Notes...
- fatfingerd 3y ago
  I don't see Lotus Notes as all that different than other Offices products developed by big Tech. I think it would be similar to Google's business platform with some more legacy automation but not unlike SalesForce or ServiceNow. Having used Microsoft recently, after Google for work, I'm absolutely flabbergasted at how terrible Word, Teams, Outlook, etc are. I would describe the average Microsoft product as a zombie in its own feature set, at war with a different version of itself, and attempting to steal organs from other products to try to transition to every possible entirely different role in the suite. Attempting to use a Microsoft product is like watching developers capitulate to some kind of bizarre internal political war between Product managers.
mozman 3y ago
I have always believed that MS products are designed in a way to maximize the value of commercial support, certificates, etc. It's walled garden for lack of a better time and solving problems easily and quickly dilutes the value of MSCE and the army of paid consultants that exist. It is a completely different universe from Linux
- Zelphyr 3y ago
  I've had to get their certifications. They're just as much garbage as the rest of their offerings. The courses they provide are nothing but marketing material. They don't improve your understanding of the products at all. I found out later that they use their certs as filters for resellers to help Microsoft identify which ones are serious players. What a waste of time and money.
  - traceroute66 3y ago
    > I found out later that they use their certs as filters for resellers to help Microsoft identify which ones are serious players. If I understand what you are saying correctly, this is not exactly true. The IT industry is a box-shifting industry, and therefore Microsoft, like all other vendors, differentiate their resellers primarily on dollar-volume. So the REAL reason a Microsoft reseller is Gold is primarily because they have shifted more product than other resellers on lower tiers. Sure, to actually get the Gold badge, you need to have X sales-reps who've passed the course and Y technicians who've passed that course. But bodies-with-certs are by comparison a very minor secondary criteria. The key criteria is always that your company has sold $big_number per year. Your entire organisation can be hiring exclusively Microsoft certified people, but you ain't getting the badge unless you're shifting the product no matter how many certified people you have on staff. And that is why Gold certified is meaningless. Because all it tells me as a customer is you've got good sales-reps on team.
MrDresden 3y ago
After spending 5 years of corporate work having to wrestle with Azure (in a ci/cd capacity) I would never recommend Microsoft's cloud offerings to anyone. Problem is that there is no other provider I would rather recommend. They are all bad in one way or another.
- whynotkeithberg 3y ago
  I like the Azure bash cli... That's about the only thing I like from Azure.
  - Jochim 3y ago
    I moved from Azure to AWS. App Insights, DevOps pipelines, and WebApp slots look like future tech when compared to codepipelines and x-ray. DevOps in particular feels so close to being a really great tool. Not having to jump between 8 different UIs to deploy something is magical. If only they'd polish the rough bits and invest a bit more into it.
    - silverbax88 3y ago
      We use DevOps for pipelines, but AWS for our prod cloud environment.
      - Jochim 3y ago
        I'm hoping to push us that way, some hurdles with getting buy in from the whole team though. That's why I wish DevOps made it a really clear cut choice. There's some really low hanging fruit and silly decisions that spoil the initial impression: YAML pipelines have been the "official" option for at least 4 years now but when I create a new project, every issue has a "deployments" section that tells me it only supports classic releases. Classic pipelines/releases can now be disabled at the project level at least. They're introducing a new widget that shows open pull requests across repositories but for an absolutely insane reason it's limited to 10 repositories, just why... Environments still have no support for resources other than VMs and AKS. The mandatory "sprints" backlog is just stupid as well. It's a clear artificial limitation rather than one necessitated by the platform. Another issue is that Microsoft have done a poor job at communicating the potential longevity of the platform. The Github acquisition is the first thing that gets mentioned when DevOps is brought up as an option, which is a shame because DevOps feels much more capable/cohesive/advanced than GitHub. Despite these problems it's still been the tool with the absolute least friction and most potential when it comes to organised development work. The alternatives I've used come nowhere close.
navigate8310 3y ago
> So, what are our alternatives? I know many people who don't like Apple for various reasons. Linux on the desktop has been promised for 20 years. It's closer than it has ever been to being a solid replacement but I don't know that it's quite there yet. When most people hear the word "Microsoft," their initial thoughts typically revolve around Windows and, at most, Office. However, it is important to note that a significant portion of Microsoft's profits actually comes from their Dynamics 365 offerings.
orangepurple 3y ago
Linux on the desktop is here. Go all-in on KDE. Everything is seamless and just works.
- azinman2 3y ago
  This has nothing to do with large scale enterprise email security.
  - sudosysgen 3y ago
    It does. Outlook is where it is for email because of Windows.
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      What does Outlook have to do with Windows? Outlook is a web app. Outlook became popular because it was tied to Windows 20 years ago, but today this just isn't the case.
      - sudosysgen 3y ago
        No, Outlook isn't a webapp in a lot of entrenched corporate set ups. Many are relying on outlook plugins that only work on the executable, or don't have Azure AD and use their own local domain controllers, or local mail servers, etc... And besides, it's far easier to migrate between two webapps than it is away from a native app full of infra.
- naikrovek 3y ago
  > Everything is seamless and just works. I have zero confidence in that testimonial, given my own experience with open source desktop environments, and KDE. zero confidence whatsoever.
  - mikrotikker 3y ago
    I'm 12 years into Linux on the desktop. It's amazing. Converted my non computer friend to it. My partner freaked when windows 10 tried to install itself years ago, and she switched. I play triple A games on it via steam. Our TV PC runs it. The experience is so much better I really don't get this mentality.
naikrovek 3y ago
what does this have to do with the article, though? You just had a rant ready for when you saw a Microsoft-is-at-fault story came up?
- throw10920 3y ago
  It's unrelated to the article, and blatantly violates the HN guidelines: > Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I flagged it - I suggest you do, too.
azinman2 3y ago
I’d go with Gmail…
- genmud 3y ago
  Their pricing has become bonkers over the last few years. Most people in traditional businesses need o365 for word/excel/powerpoint, and you effectively get email for free, so for many companies its a no brainer.
  - azinman2 3y ago
    Until this happens
giancarlostoro 3y ago
> It saddens me to say, I don't know what the answer is. I think the answer is a company willing to put in the work to force GPU manufacturers to provide high quality hardware drivers for a commercial Linux Distro. I mean all out partnership with the various vendors. Then sell prebuilts, maybe someone like System76 has come close, or has the capacity to do so. The Linux issues for me always seem to be hardware specific. Then its just making sure whatever the default DE is, has enough necessary polish.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  people making massive income from the system exactly the way it is, do not care about doing this
- taeric 3y ago
  I'm curious on the non-sequitur to GPU stuff? At large, running machine learning code has been easily doable in linux for a long time. Frustratingly hard, yes, but no harder than in Windows. Often more repeatable and cheaper to fan out to a fleet of machines, to boot. Is there another aim of GPU that I'm ignoring? Microsoft makes fine enterprise software, sadly. To know and believe that, though, you have to see what the alternatives are in the enterprise world. It is atrociously bad. I do think Chromebooks are an interesting use case showing you don't need massive software. Schools have taken to those very well and are almost certainly competing with most enterprises for number of users and use cases.
  - bun_at_work 3y ago
    I think it's because of game development. Many devs target Windows for DirectX, since it's easier and cheaper to target one platform, and Windows dominates desktops, so you won't get gamers to migrate without that support. There are various ways to get Windows games working on Linux or Mac, but they aren't out of the box, which is significant enough to prevent wide scale adoption.
    - taeric 3y ago
      Steam has done an amazing job at attacking this. Though, large studios don't target linux largely because they have very little financial incentive to do so. And it is more than installed userbase, which is very real. For the major distribution targets, the devkits have a ton of resources poured into them that major studios can't ignore. That said, still feels like a non-sequitur? I can't imagine "gaming as a target" is a concern for cloud customers. Certainly not the government?
_a_a_a_ 3y ago
MS SQL dev here, and I disagree because it's been going downhill in terms of code quality and especially documentation for a long while. Absolutely classic example why https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/3074/use-caution-with-sql-servers-merge-statement/ https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/3074/use-caution-with... but there are others
formerly_proven 3y ago
> However, I feel like it needs to be said: Microsoft makes bad products[1]! They're overpriced, insecure, slow (it's astounding to me how slow their web properties are), and hard to use. Easily some of the worst UI I've ever seen and, what's worse, they've been like that my entire career. They keep slapping lipstick on the same pigs and claiming to have reinvented themselves. Some think tank should make an analysis how many billions of dollars are lost in productivity across the globe if you compare the current MS Office stuff to an alternate of "the Windows 2000-era stuff, but with security patches" or "the FOSS office stack, with more money behind it". Anyone wanna estimate how many digits that number has? (Teams, while being ungodly slow, at least has the value proposition of being an integrated product - persistent chat, file sharing and voice / video calls - that really didn't exist in 2000)
yoyohello13 3y ago
It's even more hilarious because Microsoft are always loudly exclaiming telemetry is necessary for software improvement but based on how buggy and terrible most of their software is telemetry doesn't seem to be helping.
sharts 3y ago
Microsoft exists to make money. If it made good products, it would not make money.
- prepend 3y ago
  Good products are not required to make money.
petemir 3y ago
One anecdote I have about Microsoft is that I once set up in Hotmail my birthday 5 months in advance to what it was, probably to bypass some 18yo check. Eventually (5 months later, probably) I set it back to normal. Since then, for a couple of years, my father got a notification saying that it was my birthday (and he even obliged to congratulate me, once; he was -- and luckily is -- old :) ). That setting was not available anymore anywhere, and my birthday was set to the correct date, but the problem still happened. I contacted Microsoft, but it was like they had no idea what I was talking about nor what could be the problem. So yeah, I don't trust them nor like them either.

mschuster91 3y ago

> With a $2.5 trillion market cap, it may seem like they're killing it but, I really think they're riding on momentum just like IBM did. Twenty years ago, IBM's market cap was double what is is now and, in my experience, their products are every bit as bad (admittedly, I have almost no exposure to their big iron products). People are only not shitting on IBM so much anymore because they sold off Lotus Notes...

fatfingerd 3y ago
I don't see Lotus Notes as all that different than other Offices products developed by big Tech. I think it would be similar to Google's business platform with some more legacy automation but not unlike SalesForce or ServiceNow. Having used Microsoft recently, after Google for work, I'm absolutely flabbergasted at how terrible Word, Teams, Outlook, etc are. I would describe the average Microsoft product as a zombie in its own feature set, at war with a different version of itself, and attempting to steal organs from other products to try to transition to every possible entirely different role in the suite. Attempting to use a Microsoft product is like watching developers capitulate to some kind of bizarre internal political war between Product managers.

mozman 3y ago

I have always believed that MS products are designed in a way to maximize the value of commercial support, certificates, etc. It's walled garden for lack of a better time and solving problems easily and quickly dilutes the value of MSCE and the army of paid consultants that exist. It is a completely different universe from Linux

Zelphyr 3y ago
I've had to get their certifications. They're just as much garbage as the rest of their offerings. The courses they provide are nothing but marketing material. They don't improve your understanding of the products at all. I found out later that they use their certs as filters for resellers to help Microsoft identify which ones are serious players. What a waste of time and money.
- traceroute66 3y ago
  > I found out later that they use their certs as filters for resellers to help Microsoft identify which ones are serious players. If I understand what you are saying correctly, this is not exactly true. The IT industry is a box-shifting industry, and therefore Microsoft, like all other vendors, differentiate their resellers primarily on dollar-volume. So the REAL reason a Microsoft reseller is Gold is primarily because they have shifted more product than other resellers on lower tiers. Sure, to actually get the Gold badge, you need to have X sales-reps who've passed the course and Y technicians who've passed that course. But bodies-with-certs are by comparison a very minor secondary criteria. The key criteria is always that your company has sold $big_number per year. Your entire organisation can be hiring exclusively Microsoft certified people, but you ain't getting the badge unless you're shifting the product no matter how many certified people you have on staff. And that is why Gold certified is meaningless. Because all it tells me as a customer is you've got good sales-reps on team.

MrDresden 3y ago

After spending 5 years of corporate work having to wrestle with Azure (in a ci/cd capacity) I would never recommend Microsoft's cloud offerings to anyone. Problem is that there is no other provider I would rather recommend. They are all bad in one way or another.

whynotkeithberg 3y ago
I like the Azure bash cli... That's about the only thing I like from Azure.
- Jochim 3y ago
  I moved from Azure to AWS. App Insights, DevOps pipelines, and WebApp slots look like future tech when compared to codepipelines and x-ray. DevOps in particular feels so close to being a really great tool. Not having to jump between 8 different UIs to deploy something is magical. If only they'd polish the rough bits and invest a bit more into it.
  - silverbax88 3y ago
    We use DevOps for pipelines, but AWS for our prod cloud environment.
    - Jochim 3y ago
      I'm hoping to push us that way, some hurdles with getting buy in from the whole team though. That's why I wish DevOps made it a really clear cut choice. There's some really low hanging fruit and silly decisions that spoil the initial impression: YAML pipelines have been the "official" option for at least 4 years now but when I create a new project, every issue has a "deployments" section that tells me it only supports classic releases. Classic pipelines/releases can now be disabled at the project level at least. They're introducing a new widget that shows open pull requests across repositories but for an absolutely insane reason it's limited to 10 repositories, just why... Environments still have no support for resources other than VMs and AKS. The mandatory "sprints" backlog is just stupid as well. It's a clear artificial limitation rather than one necessitated by the platform. Another issue is that Microsoft have done a poor job at communicating the potential longevity of the platform. The Github acquisition is the first thing that gets mentioned when DevOps is brought up as an option, which is a shame because DevOps feels much more capable/cohesive/advanced than GitHub. Despite these problems it's still been the tool with the absolute least friction and most potential when it comes to organised development work. The alternatives I've used come nowhere close.

navigate8310 3y ago

> So, what are our alternatives? I know many people who don't like Apple for various reasons. Linux on the desktop has been promised for 20 years. It's closer than it has ever been to being a solid replacement but I don't know that it's quite there yet. When most people hear the word "Microsoft," their initial thoughts typically revolve around Windows and, at most, Office. However, it is important to note that a significant portion of Microsoft's profits actually comes from their Dynamics 365 offerings.

orangepurple 3y ago

Linux on the desktop is here. Go all-in on KDE. Everything is seamless and just works.

azinman2 3y ago
This has nothing to do with large scale enterprise email security.
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  It does. Outlook is where it is for email because of Windows.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    What does Outlook have to do with Windows? Outlook is a web app. Outlook became popular because it was tied to Windows 20 years ago, but today this just isn't the case.
    - sudosysgen 3y ago
      No, Outlook isn't a webapp in a lot of entrenched corporate set ups. Many are relying on outlook plugins that only work on the executable, or don't have Azure AD and use their own local domain controllers, or local mail servers, etc... And besides, it's far easier to migrate between two webapps than it is away from a native app full of infra.
naikrovek 3y ago
> Everything is seamless and just works. I have zero confidence in that testimonial, given my own experience with open source desktop environments, and KDE. zero confidence whatsoever.
- mikrotikker 3y ago
  I'm 12 years into Linux on the desktop. It's amazing. Converted my non computer friend to it. My partner freaked when windows 10 tried to install itself years ago, and she switched. I play triple A games on it via steam. Our TV PC runs it. The experience is so much better I really don't get this mentality.

naikrovek 3y ago

what does this have to do with the article, though? You just had a rant ready for when you saw a Microsoft-is-at-fault story came up?

throw10920 3y ago
It's unrelated to the article, and blatantly violates the HN guidelines: > Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I flagged it - I suggest you do, too.

azinman2 3y ago

I’d go with Gmail…

genmud 3y ago
Their pricing has become bonkers over the last few years. Most people in traditional businesses need o365 for word/excel/powerpoint, and you effectively get email for free, so for many companies its a no brainer.
- azinman2 3y ago
  Until this happens

giancarlostoro 3y ago

> It saddens me to say, I don't know what the answer is. I think the answer is a company willing to put in the work to force GPU manufacturers to provide high quality hardware drivers for a commercial Linux Distro. I mean all out partnership with the various vendors. Then sell prebuilts, maybe someone like System76 has come close, or has the capacity to do so. The Linux issues for me always seem to be hardware specific. Then its just making sure whatever the default DE is, has enough necessary polish.

mistrial9 3y ago
people making massive income from the system exactly the way it is, do not care about doing this
taeric 3y ago
I'm curious on the non-sequitur to GPU stuff? At large, running machine learning code has been easily doable in linux for a long time. Frustratingly hard, yes, but no harder than in Windows. Often more repeatable and cheaper to fan out to a fleet of machines, to boot. Is there another aim of GPU that I'm ignoring? Microsoft makes fine enterprise software, sadly. To know and believe that, though, you have to see what the alternatives are in the enterprise world. It is atrociously bad. I do think Chromebooks are an interesting use case showing you don't need massive software. Schools have taken to those very well and are almost certainly competing with most enterprises for number of users and use cases.
- bun_at_work 3y ago
  I think it's because of game development. Many devs target Windows for DirectX, since it's easier and cheaper to target one platform, and Windows dominates desktops, so you won't get gamers to migrate without that support. There are various ways to get Windows games working on Linux or Mac, but they aren't out of the box, which is significant enough to prevent wide scale adoption.
  - taeric 3y ago
    Steam has done an amazing job at attacking this. Though, large studios don't target linux largely because they have very little financial incentive to do so. And it is more than installed userbase, which is very real. For the major distribution targets, the devkits have a ton of resources poured into them that major studios can't ignore. That said, still feels like a non-sequitur? I can't imagine "gaming as a target" is a concern for cloud customers. Certainly not the government?

_a_a_a_ 3y ago

MS SQL dev here, and I disagree because it's been going downhill in terms of code quality and especially documentation for a long while. Absolutely classic example why https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/3074/use-caution-with-sql-servers-merge-statement/ https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/3074/use-caution-with... but there are others

formerly_proven 3y ago

> However, I feel like it needs to be said: Microsoft makes bad products[1]! They're overpriced, insecure, slow (it's astounding to me how slow their web properties are), and hard to use. Easily some of the worst UI I've ever seen and, what's worse, they've been like that my entire career. They keep slapping lipstick on the same pigs and claiming to have reinvented themselves. Some think tank should make an analysis how many billions of dollars are lost in productivity across the globe if you compare the current MS Office stuff to an alternate of "the Windows 2000-era stuff, but with security patches" or "the FOSS office stack, with more money behind it". Anyone wanna estimate how many digits that number has? (Teams, while being ungodly slow, at least has the value proposition of being an integrated product - persistent chat, file sharing and voice / video calls - that really didn't exist in 2000)

yoyohello13 3y ago

It's even more hilarious because Microsoft are always loudly exclaiming telemetry is necessary for software improvement but based on how buggy and terrible most of their software is telemetry doesn't seem to be helping.

sharts 3y ago

Microsoft exists to make money. If it made good products, it would not make money.

prepend 3y ago
Good products are not required to make money.

petemir 3y ago

One anecdote I have about Microsoft is that I once set up in Hotmail my birthday 5 months in advance to what it was, probably to bypass some 18yo check. Eventually (5 months later, probably) I set it back to normal. Since then, for a couple of years, my father got a notification saying that it was my birthday (and he even obliged to congratulate me, once; he was -- and luckily is -- old :) ). That setting was not available anymore anywhere, and my birthday was set to the correct date, but the problem still happened. I contacted Microsoft, but it was like they had no idea what I was talking about nor what could be the problem. So yeah, I don't trust them nor like them either.