5 ms·
One thing I love about the hacker culture is that it functions like a (somewhat dysfunctional) meritocracy. Software that is good will often gain kudos, and bad
by eykanal 14y ago
One thing I love about the hacker culture is that it functions like a (somewhat dysfunctional) meritocracy. Software that is good will often gain kudos, and bad software will be torn apart in critiques.
This fails when it comes to large companies as old biases and conspiracy theories tend to kick in, but still, when Microsoft does something good, eventually people will fess up and write good things about it. It's definitely one of the nicer things about communities like this.
- wslh 14y agoAnd OneNote is great too!
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoI miss Clippy !
- ZoFreX 14y agoThen you might like Ribbon Hero 2 [1], an interactive tour / tutorial around Microsoft Office starring clippy! [1]: http://www.ribbonhero.com/news.html http://www.ribbonhero.com/news.html
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoCuriously this links to the lifecycle email thread - the idea is to create long running engagement with the user such that they learn things useful to them, also moving towards your product So a game where Clippy needs to say and an image to a doc, is a good idea. Oddly, by automating word I guess one product could be to create game engine for just such things.
- akx 14y agoDeity Here, yes. OneNote is one of those pieces of software I use honestly daily - bi-hourly, more or less, if only for Win+S - and no one knows about it! "Copy Text From Image" is also simply great. And I also use it to quickly document series of screenshots for functionality tests (or rather "worksforme"s).
- thurn 14y agoI liked SkyDrive, but its Windows bias is pretty apparent. It won't sync Unix files that would be illegal on Windows (due to e.g. the filename) and the sync algorithm is pretty bad on OSX (frequently running my CPU up to 100%). These are some of the reasons why people distrust the Microsoft brand.
- gameshot911 14y agoWhat's the connection between being unable to sync files with invalid filenames (from MSFT's perspective) and trust?
- possibilistic 14y agoDiscounting Microsoft's long history, if there's this much platform incongruity now, should we trust them to change that with time? If you were forced to place a bet, which service provider would you stake it on? I've nothing against Microsoft, but I think the grandparent poster has a point.
- justin66 14y agoI'm pretty sure I've had the opposite thing happen with Dropbox: files silently not syncing to my Windows machine until I corrected a filename on the Linux file. Definitely not a showstopper but the lack of a visible error message was annoying.
- gizmo686 14y agoMy concerns with using Microsoft services (or Apple, or Facebook, or Google or ...) is that they are a maintained by a single entity for the purpose of profit, and if that entity makes changes I do not like, or cancel a product, it is generally difficult to migrate to an alternative because of intentional technical lock-in. There are many good examples of when this does not happen, and for-profit software is great, but given the potential for it to happen, I feel a lot better using open software, and failing that, software that uses open and standard(ish) protocals and formats. Note: I have not looked into SkyDrive, so they might not have any of these concerns.