7 ms·
It is strange to me that people are re-discovering this today, in 2026. Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basicall
by keiferski 3mo ago
It is strange to me that people are re-discovering this today, in 2026. Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basically raised me (20+ years ago) by running a business fixing problems with Microsoft products for their clients.
- ecshafer 3mo agoThis is why Microsoft is good, there is an entire industry around fixing their nonsense. They are being a job creator!
- 12_throw_away 3mo agoA very very limited defense of Microsoft and their whole "support vendor" "ecosystem": if you are selling a complex product, there is value in having a robust knowledge base of known problems with known solutions, and a huge base of people who know all the right workflows. A buggier product that's well known and understood is maybe even preferable to a less buggy product with poorly understood failure modes. At least back in the heyday of the NT kernel times, it seemed like there were "MVP"s or whatever that knew the right way to do everything. (Not that I would know, I don't touch Microsoft's shit with a 10-foot-pole)
- wing-_-nuts 3mo agoI remember windows 2000 being pretty rock solid. I used it as my gaming os for years while folks struggled with windows me and windows xp (IIRC, xp did eventually become pretty good)
- fireflash38 3mo agoXP and 7 were only good because it was based off of 2000/NT.
- buran77 3mo agoLiterally everything that came after Windows Me both in the consumer and server space is based on NT, to this day. So I'm not sure this argument weighs much. P.S. My personal opinion is that Windows could be a great OS but MS keeps intentionally saddling it with more and more shit in the name of getting more from the user, instead of giving more to the user.
- aeyes 3mo agoThe kernel is solid, its all the userspace software where they are fumbling hard.
- VorpalWay 3mo agoThe kernel is okish. But compared to Linux it is surprisingly bad at a number of things. Handling lots of tiny files in huge directory trees is much slower on Windows than Linux for example. I dont know if that is due to NTFS vs ext4/btrfs/xfs, or if it is some broader issue in the NT kernel. Some other things have been baffling over the years (but I belive they are now at least somewhat solved). For example in Windows 7 and older Windows would spend tens of seconds on "installing drivers" for a USB stick every time a new stick was inserted (or even an old stick inserted into a new port). I don't remember seeing this on Windows 10 (or 11), but I barely used those. But yes, compared to the userspace the kernel is way less jank. (Like how Windows Updates takes minutes to run to conclude that there are updates, and dozens of minutes to install them, while pacman -Syu on Arch can be done in second if there are no updates, and maybe 2-4 minutes in the worst case of a kernel update with dkms modules being rebuilt.)
- inigyou 3mo agoAt least it has async I/O, unlike Linux.
- bigfishrunning 3mo agonot sure if I'm missing something, `select` seems to work just fine on my machine
- aleph_minus_one 3mo ago> I remember windows 2000 being pretty rock solid. Windows NT (including Windows 2000) was considered to be a workstation OS by Microsoft. From Windows XP on, the NT-based Windows operating systems (except for the server ones) were targeted to consumers.
- markus_zhang 3mo agoThat was the pinnacle of Microsoft Windows. I’d say mid 80s to late 90s when they focused on the P in PC. After that they went full enterprise mode.
- f6v 3mo agoI guess it’s surprising because how ubiquitous their products are. You’d expect them to be of better quality considering everyone is using MS software one way or another.
- TacticalCoder 3mo ago> ... considering everyone is using MS software one way or another. This used to be the case when Apple was in dire straits and MS abused their monopoly position to gain 95% of browsers market share. Grim days. But those days are thankfully long done and there are plenty of people who are completely Microsoft-free. The one thing people are using one way or another is Linux, because it's now in just about everything. Even those in the Apple ecosystem, with an iPhone and Mac computers, very probably have a Linux router and Linux TV at home. The number of devices in the world running one version of Linux or another outnumber Windows devices by something like 10 to 1. Maybe more. Microsoft is a despicable company producing turds since forever. I hate them and the crap they produce with a passion since the DOS days. As the saying goes: the day Microsoft shall produce something that doesn't suck is the day they'll start selling vacuum cleaners.
- inigyou 3mo agoGoogle of the 2020s is the new Microsoft of the 2010s.
- keiferski 3mo ago>considering everyone is using MS software one way or another. I don't think I've used a MS product in at least a decade. At least that I was aware of. Edit: did some research and I have used LinkedIn. Other than that, nothing.
- jkaplowitz 3mo agoNo GitHub at all?
- maigret 3mo ago
- bigstrat2003 3mo agoThat isn't true. Microsoft has made some genuinely good software over the years.
- inigyou 3mo agoLike what
- pishpash 3mo agoHere's a list of MS software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_software You cannot find a single one that was good, or better than whatever was the alternative at the time?
- inigyou 3mo agoEvidently you can't, or you would have named it
- pishpash 3mo agoYou're digging yourself a bigger hole. Keep digging.
- tapoxi 3mo agoI actually went into reading this thinking I'd agree with you that "yeah that's such hyperbole they must have made something good", and to my shock the good things they have shipped they eventually ruined. Examples: Edge (bloated with ads and Copilot), Office (now a subscription, hasn't evolved, annoying integration with copilot), Skype (dead), Halo (virtually dead), Doom (studio gutted), Visual Studio Code (locked down marketplace, replaced plugins with their own, now a giant GitHub copilot ad), Flight Simulator (massive regression with 2024)
- terribleperson 3mo agoTheir list of studio acquisitions over the years is damning. Something must be deeply wrong at Microsoft, because it seems like after one game release worth of time of being under Microsoft, studios become unable to release games in any reasonable amount of time.
- epistasis 3mo agoI was able to take a 25 year break from Microsoft, from 2000 to 2025. Yet I was drawn back in because my son wanted to play Minecraft. This was the worst account process of any system ever invented, as far as I can tell. Plus in 2025 I had some interesting clients that are large corporations that use Microsoft as their core IT practice. The escape to the relative simplicity and consistency of AWS interfaces, from MS land, was the best part of the IT experience with that client. (With how much I've moaned and complained about AWS over the years, that last sentence is the most damning thing I can possibly say about Microsoft's products.)
- inigyou 3mo agoJust pirate it. Minecraft is really easy to pirate if you don't want to play multiplayer, or want to play on pirate-compatible servers (which is one boolean flag in the official server configuration file and doesn't require a pirated server). Make sure to get Java Edition. The other one is just an ad-riddden slopfest where they also ban you if you say swear words.
- epistasis 3mo agoThe point of the account was multiplayer, unfortunately. Wanted a locked down account to play the game with a closed group of friends. Ended up on Minecraft Education on the computer, eventually.
- marcosdumay 3mo agoSince some time around 2024, the problems started to grow way more numerous than they already were; the workarounds started to be disallowed; and more broken software started to be pushed as necessary for basic functionality. People were adapted to a certain level of breakage, but are seeing a different one. Last time I remember them doing something similar was on the last days of XP / earlier Vista time. But it wasn't so bad at the time.
- artemonster 3mo agomicroslop before invention of slop
- inigyou 3mo agoThere was slop before AI. It wasn't called slop yet.
- inigyou 3mo agoWindows 2000,XP,7 may not have been perfect, but they were leagues better than the state of the art today.
- michaelt 3mo agoThere were problems, but they were problems of a distinct and different kind. Back in the early 1990s you'd get Microsoft Office from the store, as a box containing 10 floppy disks. And they had to put a lot of effort into testing it, because patching was impossible. And of course it was fully offline. Perpetually licensed, with paid upgrades. The problems were instead things like "this notionally multi-user OS is just a single-user OS with a decorative login screen" and "any application can crash the entire OS" and "spreadsheets auto-run macro viruses" and things like that.
- sumtechguy 3mo ago'always online' has created a whole new set of buggy from a lot of companies. For example cyberpunk is NOW a playable game. Launch date was a very mixed bag. 'fix it after launch' ugh.
- mikrl 3mo ago> cyberpunk is NOW a playable game I never had problems with cyberpunk but I think I know why: I built a new PC right around its release and it was good enough to play it smoothly on 4K medium or HD ultra. When I checked to see what 4K ultra looked like, the graphics latency caused a bunch of scripting to fall apart and the game glitched really bad. IIRC the console release was notorious for bugs, so I assume consoles were not performant enough to run the game buttery smooth nor could they be easily upgraded.
- robotnikman 3mo agoI encountered bugs when it first released even with a decent PC. IIRC there was a mission where you were running away in a truck, and it would crash every time at a certain point so I could never complete it. Also the whole save file size limit debacle, where they never actually removed deleted items from your inventory and the save file would reach a certain size that the game could no longer read (10mb or something like that)
- 3mo ago
- bryanlarsen 3mo agocounterpoint: in my experience, the low level Windows OS primitives are less buggy than low level MacOS primitives. They're weird to this unix-head, but generally not as buggy as in MacOS. But I don't think it contradicts your point. This is just a rare exception to the true general rule.
- Someone 3mo ago> Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basically raised me (20+ years ago) by running a business fixing problems with Microsoft products for their clients. I don’t see that as support for the claim that Microsoft’s products were half-baked in the 80s and 90s. If Linux had sufficient market penetration in small business, I bet you could run a successful business fixing problems with Linux products, even today. (It may be a bit of a stretch but you could even argue Amazon is making serious money supporting big companies with their Linux problems)
- jm4 3mo agoI would argue that Microsoft had a solid run for some years in the middle where their software was pretty good quality. I think it started with Windows 2000 and certainly lasted through the XP era. Windows 7 was pretty decent too. Their operating system was straight up trash before win2k and has been in steady decline for some years now. It doesn't surprise me that younger people are only now (re-)discovering that Microsoft operating systems are bad.
- markus_zhang 3mo agoI remember that back in the mid 80s the Application group was not happy about the quality of work so someone circulated a memo about software quality, which I read from Steven Sinorfsky’s blogs. Adding NT on top of it, I’d say they definitely treat software quality a lot more serious than today. I think they completely let it go when they laid off the testers and let users pay $$ to be testers, starting from 2010s perhaps. Maybe earlier.
- dwayne_dibley 3mo agoIt interesting to see how my kids barely know how computers work, but growning up on DOS, 3.1 and 95, I was basically learning to troubleshoot issues just by trying to us a computer.
- chanux 3mo agoMy theory is that, at some point they did a good PR job convincing many people that they are good (Maybe they were actually alright for a bit, who knows). To be honest I too saw them in good light probably since a few years before they bought Github. They have managed to undo this illusion themselves.