5 ms·

Looks nice. The problem with M$ is that over the years they've always offered simple tools for creating software, and then abandoning it somewhere along the way

by rshlo 13y ago

Looks nice. The problem with M$ is that over the years they've always offered simple tools for creating software, and then abandoning it somewhere along the way. Access is a great example.

evo_9 13y ago
MS Access hasn't been discontinued: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access-help/what-s-new-in-access-2013-HA102809500.aspx http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access-help/what-s-new-in-... Also haven't we all tired of the hole 'M$' thing?
- ZanyProgrammer 13y ago
  What versions of Office does Access come shipped with? I've rarely seen it in the wild since...a decade? And I work in a .Net shop.
  - heartbreak 13y ago
    Office 365 Home Premium, Office Professional 2013, and a la carte for ~$100.
HNJohnC 13y ago
M$? What decade are we in?
- stinos 13y ago
  the one where non-Microsoft users (or maybe rather, Microsft-haters) still want to express how they feel about Microsoft in every single sentence they use on the subject.. It's been around for a long time, and probably will still be used for a long time. Just ignore it and hope they eventually get over their slightly childish behaviour.
  - alan_cx 13y ago
    Yeah, probably "whinux" users.... ;)
sergiotapia 13y ago
I don't know why you were voted down. Had I invested heavily in learning Silverlight a couple of years ago, I would find myself with my thumb squarely secured up my own ass. I can't imagine spending so much time and effort learning how to use a framework only to have it discontinued in it's infancy. Silverlight dying was a good thing and ultimately it's a win for everybody as HTML is more open, but still - I feel for the devs out there who waste their time. Edit: On the plus it does use HTML and JS, instead of something much more closed. :)
- TheAnimus 13y ago
  >I don't know why you were voted down. Had I invested heavily in learning Silverlight a couple of years ago, I would find myself with my thumb squarely secured up my own ass. Not really, as someone who specialised in WPF since it's latter beta stages, I still am finding plenty of work at a very good rate. Same thing goes with silverlight, even in a discontinued state, it still is going to have years and years of bug fixes. Just no new functionality. The fact is, even today with all the frustrations I have with WPF been 'unfinished' it is still a lot more pleasurable than HTML/Knockout or something that tries to make HTML palatable. A quick search in London on your favourite job site shows that learning WPF hasn't been a waste of time, my skills are not in a vacuum, I also have strong OOP skills, whilst knowing how to run software projects. Plus learning something is never bad. Obviously I wouldn't recommend someone learning it now. But compare it with whichever flavour of the month framework people are loving right now, people who've learn say Ruby on Rails aren't as fashionable as say Node.js is right now. But just do a quick jobs search in London and you'll see that you'd be better off on average doing WPF/Silverlight than RoR.
  - Spearchucker 13y ago
    It's better than that - WPF and Silverlight skills are directly transferrable to Windows Phone and Windows RT. Yes, there are differences, limitations and in some cases more complete features, but the jump is negligible, with a herd of good resources on MSDN, StackOverflow and so on.
    - 13y ago
mikestew 13y ago
Access is a horrible example (they still sell it, and it still works), and you have so many better ones to choose from. WinForms, Silverlight, and..., hmm that's all that really come to mind. Maybe FoxPro, but MSFT didn't create it and everyone expected them to kill it when they bought it (they kept it around for over ten years after). And "M$"? Am I going to have to go find the link to that Penny Arcade cartoon?
- groovy2shoes 13y ago
  > WinForms, Silverlight, and..., XNA, WinRT, ...
- elipsey 13y ago
  still funny. allow me: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22 http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22
csomar 13y ago
and then abandoning it somewhere along the way. Access is a great example. Why do you think these tools aren't being used. I know a small company using Access to deliver business management applications and they are turning a $100k/year profit. And that's in a random, small, and crappy city in a third-world country.
moron4hire 13y ago
I think Microsoft's issue is that it tries to do too much under one umbrella. If MS were multiple companies, the fact that these very same projects lived and died wouldn't be notable. This sort of stuff happens in the FOSS world all the time: projects grow, live, and die over the course of time. There is the argument that FOSS means "The Community" can take it over and maintain it if it wants, but consumers are not necessarily cut from the same cloth as producers, the skills don't necessarily translate. I would actually like to see MS do it more often, release more things to the public at much earlier stages, because I think it's their primary differentiator over a company like Apple. Apple has dug themselves into an extremely R&D-intensive process that requires products be sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus. Let's talk about the Newton, the Pippin, the iTunes Phone, the Apple TV, etc. When MS tries to do this (Zune, Windows Phone), they get mocked and people ignore their products, even though in many cases they are technically superior products. MS needs to understand that the tech culture views them as unhip and should stop spending money on trying to change that perception. The anti-MS sentiment also seems to suggest a scenario in which a programmer would learn a particular programming language once, then live off of that for the rest of his life. We have an excellent example of where that leads, and it's called COBOL. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to expect programmers to learn how to learn. A particular MS or FOSS tech stalling out and dying is not going to be a huge impact on you if you're not betting the farm on one thing. MS writes good software. You can't keep blaming the size and breadth of the company on anti-competitive behavior from the early 90s that they had already curbed by the time the DOJ tagged them for it. You can arm-chair quarterback and say that a particular example sucks compared to another particular thing, but in most of those cases it's missing the ecosystem and context of the times. Windows was the best home desktop operating system; it had its problems but every OS had problems back then. Internet Explorer really was better than Netscape Navigator (when IE6 was released in 2001, for the times it was good. The five year resting-on-laurels period was the mistake). At any period in time, regardless of how bad the latest version of Visual Studio has been, not comparing it against itself, it has been the best full-featured development IDE on the market (even the first VS.NET in 2002 was better than any non-VS product). Then someone hired Ballmer to take over and he treated the company like a Detroit manufacturing behemoth. Any successes post-Ballmer were a result of R&D efforts that started before he took over that were too obviously going to succeed for even Ballmer to give them the axe.

by rshlo 13y ago

Looks nice. The problem with M$ is that over the years they've always offered simple tools for creating software, and then abandoning it somewhere along the way. Access is a great example.

evo_9 13y ago

MS Access hasn't been discontinued: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access-help/what-s-new-in-access-2013-HA102809500.aspx http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access-help/what-s-new-in-... Also haven't we all tired of the hole 'M$' thing?

ZanyProgrammer 13y ago
What versions of Office does Access come shipped with? I've rarely seen it in the wild since...a decade? And I work in a .Net shop.
- heartbreak 13y ago
  Office 365 Home Premium, Office Professional 2013, and a la carte for ~$100.

HNJohnC 13y ago

M$? What decade are we in?

stinos 13y ago
the one where non-Microsoft users (or maybe rather, Microsft-haters) still want to express how they feel about Microsoft in every single sentence they use on the subject.. It's been around for a long time, and probably will still be used for a long time. Just ignore it and hope they eventually get over their slightly childish behaviour.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  Yeah, probably "whinux" users.... ;)

sergiotapia 13y ago

I don't know why you were voted down. Had I invested heavily in learning Silverlight a couple of years ago, I would find myself with my thumb squarely secured up my own ass. I can't imagine spending so much time and effort learning how to use a framework only to have it discontinued in it's infancy. Silverlight dying was a good thing and ultimately it's a win for everybody as HTML is more open, but still - I feel for the devs out there who waste their time. Edit: On the plus it does use HTML and JS, instead of something much more closed. :)

TheAnimus 13y ago
>I don't know why you were voted down. Had I invested heavily in learning Silverlight a couple of years ago, I would find myself with my thumb squarely secured up my own ass. Not really, as someone who specialised in WPF since it's latter beta stages, I still am finding plenty of work at a very good rate. Same thing goes with silverlight, even in a discontinued state, it still is going to have years and years of bug fixes. Just no new functionality. The fact is, even today with all the frustrations I have with WPF been 'unfinished' it is still a lot more pleasurable than HTML/Knockout or something that tries to make HTML palatable. A quick search in London on your favourite job site shows that learning WPF hasn't been a waste of time, my skills are not in a vacuum, I also have strong OOP skills, whilst knowing how to run software projects. Plus learning something is never bad. Obviously I wouldn't recommend someone learning it now. But compare it with whichever flavour of the month framework people are loving right now, people who've learn say Ruby on Rails aren't as fashionable as say Node.js is right now. But just do a quick jobs search in London and you'll see that you'd be better off on average doing WPF/Silverlight than RoR.
- Spearchucker 13y ago
  It's better than that - WPF and Silverlight skills are directly transferrable to Windows Phone and Windows RT. Yes, there are differences, limitations and in some cases more complete features, but the jump is negligible, with a herd of good resources on MSDN, StackOverflow and so on.
  - 13y ago

mikestew 13y ago

Access is a horrible example (they still sell it, and it still works), and you have so many better ones to choose from. WinForms, Silverlight, and..., hmm that's all that really come to mind. Maybe FoxPro, but MSFT didn't create it and everyone expected them to kill it when they bought it (they kept it around for over ten years after). And "M$"? Am I going to have to go find the link to that Penny Arcade cartoon?

groovy2shoes 13y ago
> WinForms, Silverlight, and..., XNA, WinRT, ...
elipsey 13y ago
still funny. allow me: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22 http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22

csomar 13y ago

and then abandoning it somewhere along the way. Access is a great example. Why do you think these tools aren't being used. I know a small company using Access to deliver business management applications and they are turning a $100k/year profit. And that's in a random, small, and crappy city in a third-world country.

moron4hire 13y ago

I think Microsoft's issue is that it tries to do too much under one umbrella. If MS were multiple companies, the fact that these very same projects lived and died wouldn't be notable. This sort of stuff happens in the FOSS world all the time: projects grow, live, and die over the course of time. There is the argument that FOSS means "The Community" can take it over and maintain it if it wants, but consumers are not necessarily cut from the same cloth as producers, the skills don't necessarily translate. I would actually like to see MS do it more often, release more things to the public at much earlier stages, because I think it's their primary differentiator over a company like Apple. Apple has dug themselves into an extremely R&D-intensive process that requires products be sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus. Let's talk about the Newton, the Pippin, the iTunes Phone, the Apple TV, etc. When MS tries to do this (Zune, Windows Phone), they get mocked and people ignore their products, even though in many cases they are technically superior products. MS needs to understand that the tech culture views them as unhip and should stop spending money on trying to change that perception. The anti-MS sentiment also seems to suggest a scenario in which a programmer would learn a particular programming language once, then live off of that for the rest of his life. We have an excellent example of where that leads, and it's called COBOL. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to expect programmers to learn how to learn. A particular MS or FOSS tech stalling out and dying is not going to be a huge impact on you if you're not betting the farm on one thing. MS writes good software. You can't keep blaming the size and breadth of the company on anti-competitive behavior from the early 90s that they had already curbed by the time the DOJ tagged them for it. You can arm-chair quarterback and say that a particular example sucks compared to another particular thing, but in most of those cases it's missing the ecosystem and context of the times. Windows was the best home desktop operating system; it had its problems but every OS had problems back then. Internet Explorer really was better than Netscape Navigator (when IE6 was released in 2001, for the times it was good. The five year resting-on-laurels period was the mistake). At any period in time, regardless of how bad the latest version of Visual Studio has been, not comparing it against itself, it has been the best full-featured development IDE on the market (even the first VS.NET in 2002 was better than any non-VS product). Then someone hired Ballmer to take over and he treated the company like a Detroit manufacturing behemoth. Any successes post-Ballmer were a result of R&D efforts that started before he took over that were too obviously going to succeed for even Ballmer to give them the axe.