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You can trust Microsoft to make anything they touch suck. This has been a constant for decades at this point. Please give me contradicting examples, if they ex

You can trust Microsoft to make anything they touch suck. This has been a constant for decades at this point. Please give me contradicting examples, if they exist.

leakycap 1y ago
My second job was somehow a cool job for a remote Microsoft office. The people I worked with REALLY tried and cared to deliver what the bigger MS office asked for, but the distributed nature of the organization combined with a lack of unifying vision made delivering something great almost impossible. Even with dedication, the result would be half-baked Wizards and ASP "solutions" that met the punch list requirements
FirmwareBurner 1y ago
>You can trust Microsoft to make anything they touch suck. That's not entirely true. Microsoft is not just the Office and Windows 11 monolith of trash, but is made o dozens or even hundreds of small teams and silos, some making cool shit even though not all of them survived their niches or kept their quality. >Please give me contradicting examples, if they exist. Encarta, Visual Studio, the OG Xbox and 360, windows Phone 10, Zune, Surface Studio, Age of Empires, Flight Simulator, AutoRoute, IntelliMice, trackballs and ergonomic keyboards, Kinect camera systems, Spot Watches, Hololens.
- fortran77 1y ago
  A lot of Office is very good. Nothing beats Excel.
  - IIsi50MHz 1y ago
    Excel is _very_ powerful, …and very buggy and inconsistent, in my experience. Refreshing a QueryTable object or ListObject that has the filldown option enabled to automatically copy formatting and formulæ to all cells in the same column of the object can cause all or part of the object's header row to be copied into the body of the object. There are workarounds of varying ease and varying reliability. There's still no visible indication whether an edit box that accepts cell references or formulæ is currently in the mode where using the arrow keys inserts cell references and has no undo stack, or is in the mode where it acts like a normal textbox. The security model still allows a user to specify that sorting and autofiltering a locked worksheet is allowed, but does not actually implement it. Trying to use those features on a locked sheet fails with a permissions error. Similarly, if a formula returns an array, you cannot use Autofilter or right-click->Sort. Even if the array is 1-dimensional (and thus, your action applies to the entire array), Excel complains that you cannot modify part of an array. There's a workaround, that amounts to re-implementing both Autofilter and Sort using lambda(), let(), and parameter cells. Excel doesn't like to switch reliably between sheets that aren't at the same zoom level, sometimes drawing one of them at the previous's sheet's zoom…but using blurry upscaling. Or sometimes just stops drawing part a sheet or parts of the UI, requiring Excel to be relaunched. The web version is really a completely new spreadsheet …with unfortunately the same name as the desktop application. They have different bugs, and different features. They have too many kinds of add-ins, each with a different management interface, and too many scripting languages. Actually, the mere number of them wouldn't be a problem…if they all worked both in desktop and on the web. As is, there's no way to script the two Excels that guarantees function in both the online and offline applications. Some of types of add-in or scripting actions can be implemented with lambda(). …Euh…I could go on for far-far too long. (^_^);
fortran77 1y ago
> You can trust Microsoft to make anything they touch suck. Their stock doesn't stuck. Latest figures show MSFT has a $3.69 Trillion market cap, while apple is sitting at $3.00 Trillion. You're living in a bubble where you think "nobody uses Microsoft."
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  Uses =/= being good. Arguably especially for Microsoft, they're the anti-thesis of each other. Gamers use Windows because (until recently, and even still only in specific contexts) you need Windows to game properly. Thankfully between things like the Proton framework and broader support for Mac and Linux gaming, that's starting to change. People in business and government use Windows because Apple has never prioritized the Enterprise environment in MacOS, and it shows. And to be honest thank fuck, otherwise MacOS might be as bad as Windows is now. A whole lot of regular people use Windows at home, because it's just the default and you can get PC's for dirt cheap (pre-tariffs anyway) that come preinstalled with it. However that market is eroding as people go full time on smartphones for general computing and computers become less relevant overall. I'm not saying Windows is going away, the inertia is incredible there and I suspect they'll continue trotting along, being mediocre and pissing off everyone continuously because that's really what they've always done. But let us not pretend financial success in the market is in any way an indicator of a good product. Like evolution, markets do not select for "the best" they select for "the okayest" and Windows is very much the okayest OS.
- bboygravity 1y ago
  Everybody uses Microsoft, because they have to. Not because they love it or even like it. That's the root cause of why the stores failed. Think about it: how many people openly say that they love to use Apple products vs people who openly say they love Microsoft products? I have never ever heard anybody say/write about a great Microsoft product. I write all of this as someone who uses Windows, Teams and other Microsoft crap every day all day.
  - dan-robertson 1y ago
    Excel is one example of a product that is well liked and considered extremely valuable by some people. Azure (if that’s still the name for their aws competitor) is also reasonably well liked from what I can tell. Certainly it seemed they were beating gcp by having a product people liked more.
octopoc 1y ago
C# is an absolutely fantastic programming language. It runs pretty much everywhere, is garbage collected but has a lot of low level primitives for performance optimization when necessary, the people building the language are making excellent calls when adding new features.
- mystified5016 1y ago
  WinForms, WPF, UWP. They abandoned forms and WPF, and UWP is getting much the same treatment. Also there was the whole framework/standard/core fiasco

You can trust Microsoft to make anything they touch suck. This has been a constant for decades at this point. Please give me contradicting examples, if they exist.

leakycap 1y ago

My second job was somehow a cool job for a remote Microsoft office. The people I worked with REALLY tried and cared to deliver what the bigger MS office asked for, but the distributed nature of the organization combined with a lack of unifying vision made delivering something great almost impossible. Even with dedication, the result would be half-baked Wizards and ASP "solutions" that met the punch list requirements

FirmwareBurner 1y ago

>You can trust Microsoft to make anything they touch suck. That's not entirely true. Microsoft is not just the Office and Windows 11 monolith of trash, but is made o dozens or even hundreds of small teams and silos, some making cool shit even though not all of them survived their niches or kept their quality. >Please give me contradicting examples, if they exist. Encarta, Visual Studio, the OG Xbox and 360, windows Phone 10, Zune, Surface Studio, Age of Empires, Flight Simulator, AutoRoute, IntelliMice, trackballs and ergonomic keyboards, Kinect camera systems, Spot Watches, Hololens.

fortran77 1y ago
A lot of Office is very good. Nothing beats Excel.
- IIsi50MHz 1y ago
  Excel is _very_ powerful, …and very buggy and inconsistent, in my experience. Refreshing a QueryTable object or ListObject that has the filldown option enabled to automatically copy formatting and formulæ to all cells in the same column of the object can cause all or part of the object's header row to be copied into the body of the object. There are workarounds of varying ease and varying reliability. There's still no visible indication whether an edit box that accepts cell references or formulæ is currently in the mode where using the arrow keys inserts cell references and has no undo stack, or is in the mode where it acts like a normal textbox. The security model still allows a user to specify that sorting and autofiltering a locked worksheet is allowed, but does not actually implement it. Trying to use those features on a locked sheet fails with a permissions error. Similarly, if a formula returns an array, you cannot use Autofilter or right-click->Sort. Even if the array is 1-dimensional (and thus, your action applies to the entire array), Excel complains that you cannot modify part of an array. There's a workaround, that amounts to re-implementing both Autofilter and Sort using lambda(), let(), and parameter cells. Excel doesn't like to switch reliably between sheets that aren't at the same zoom level, sometimes drawing one of them at the previous's sheet's zoom…but using blurry upscaling. Or sometimes just stops drawing part a sheet or parts of the UI, requiring Excel to be relaunched. The web version is really a completely new spreadsheet …with unfortunately the same name as the desktop application. They have different bugs, and different features. They have too many kinds of add-ins, each with a different management interface, and too many scripting languages. Actually, the mere number of them wouldn't be a problem…if they all worked both in desktop and on the web. As is, there's no way to script the two Excels that guarantees function in both the online and offline applications. Some of types of add-in or scripting actions can be implemented with lambda(). …Euh…I could go on for far-far too long. (^_^);

fortran77 1y ago

> You can trust Microsoft to make anything they touch suck. Their stock doesn't stuck. Latest figures show MSFT has a $3.69 Trillion market cap, while apple is sitting at $3.00 Trillion. You're living in a bubble where you think "nobody uses Microsoft."

ToucanLoucan 1y ago
Uses =/= being good. Arguably especially for Microsoft, they're the anti-thesis of each other. Gamers use Windows because (until recently, and even still only in specific contexts) you need Windows to game properly. Thankfully between things like the Proton framework and broader support for Mac and Linux gaming, that's starting to change. People in business and government use Windows because Apple has never prioritized the Enterprise environment in MacOS, and it shows. And to be honest thank fuck, otherwise MacOS might be as bad as Windows is now. A whole lot of regular people use Windows at home, because it's just the default and you can get PC's for dirt cheap (pre-tariffs anyway) that come preinstalled with it. However that market is eroding as people go full time on smartphones for general computing and computers become less relevant overall. I'm not saying Windows is going away, the inertia is incredible there and I suspect they'll continue trotting along, being mediocre and pissing off everyone continuously because that's really what they've always done. But let us not pretend financial success in the market is in any way an indicator of a good product. Like evolution, markets do not select for "the best" they select for "the okayest" and Windows is very much the okayest OS.
bboygravity 1y ago
Everybody uses Microsoft, because they have to. Not because they love it or even like it. That's the root cause of why the stores failed. Think about it: how many people openly say that they love to use Apple products vs people who openly say they love Microsoft products? I have never ever heard anybody say/write about a great Microsoft product. I write all of this as someone who uses Windows, Teams and other Microsoft crap every day all day.
- dan-robertson 1y ago
  Excel is one example of a product that is well liked and considered extremely valuable by some people. Azure (if that’s still the name for their aws competitor) is also reasonably well liked from what I can tell. Certainly it seemed they were beating gcp by having a product people liked more.

octopoc 1y ago

C# is an absolutely fantastic programming language. It runs pretty much everywhere, is garbage collected but has a lot of low level primitives for performance optimization when necessary, the people building the language are making excellent calls when adding new features.

mystified5016 1y ago
WinForms, WPF, UWP. They abandoned forms and WPF, and UWP is getting much the same treatment. Also there was the whole framework/standard/core fiasco