That's 20 years ago. And for bundling a browser
in the operating system that couldn't be uninstalled
or easily replaced? Sure, no operating systems do that
in 2014. I wonder if I can swap out Chrome from Chrome
OS or Mobile Safari in iOS. Point is, it's common now.
But they still do rather icky things: Rockstar Bidco lawsuits and the "Scroogled" campaign come to mind. I'm biased, but they've got to can it with these things (and just innovate) until I'll look at them as a pleasant company.
Yes, I got reminded of that recently when I installed MS Office on my Mac. I just wanted Excel and Word - now I have Microsoft Messenger, Microsoft Remote Desktop, Microsoft Connection Manager(?!), Microsoft Communicator, Microsoft Office Setup Manager, Microsoft Document Connection, and the complementary launch agent "com.microsoft.office.licensing.helper".
Best thing: They plastered my dock with app icons that I just couldn't drag out of the dock to delete them. I had to go the rightclick->submenu->"remove from dock" route for every of the ~10 icons. Now why would they do this? So the typical Mac user won't be able to remove them because the default way to remove them doesn't work?
MS truly lives and breathes bloatware.
Yet when you were in that "Customize Installation" menu choosing Excel and Word, you for some reason didn't de-select Messenger, RDC, or the Dock Icons. And that's Microsoft's fault... hmm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G5
I mean, dear god. WindowsXP is OLDER than PowerPC iMacs. And people expect Microsoft to support it for free? Where the hell is my iMac G5 support?
Oh yeah, thats right. Its in the trash. When Apple declared the PowerPC (or was it Mortorola?) dead, and switched over to x86 Machines.
No we are not cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 is not cool, still not cool. I won't repeat the horrific things that happened there, read it for yourself, but no, just saying "we are cool" about it goes a little too far.
> Is Microsoft circa 2014 worse than Google, Apple, or Facebook? We're not nearly as organized as we'd need to be to be as evil as you might think we are.
Microsoft has been, as most people perceive today, de-fanged. It was a scary monopoly, it was pushing crappy APIs, not following standards, perverting them. That legacy crap is still there. It is still maintained. Someone deals with it. So it wasn't just about browser wars. Imagine perhaps Facebook merging with Google so now everything you do online or anywhere on your computer is controlled by one company. That was kind of how Microsoft was viewed.
So, true, there isn't as much reason to hate anymore. But there is a lot of reasons to not forget as well.
What does that mean in practical terms? It means I won't be jumping on or using any Microsoft technologies if I have a choice. F# looks awesome, but nope, I am not touching it. Maybe Visual Studio 2014 is going to be really great, but I won't even try it. If it is tied with .net anything, not touching it.
> Moreover, I think that Microsoft is very aware of perceptions and is actively trying to counter them by actually being open.
Too late. Open source Windows if you want to be open. Open source your browser if you want to be open. Go back and fix your broken APIs and start following standards. Google as much as many don't like it (and I am in that camp too, when it comes to privacy), has to be commended for being open and contributing to Open Source. So use Google as your example in that respect.
I think you've missed the point. You can't blame a Japanese child for the sins of his grandfather. The same goes for a German child whose family has a Nazi past or an American whose ancestors slaughtered native American women and children like they were animals.
Overall I can just ignore Microsoft because they no longer impact me as a developer, but if they and Oracle manage to make API's copyrightable it will have a huge negative effect on software development, in particular interoperability, the fact that they are aiding Oracle in this crap shows me that they are not changing their tune at all.
Hate is perhaps a strong word, but I'd say being acutely aware of whom you're dealing with is still in order.
Microsoft never ceased to be hostile. I can point to 3 specific things in recent memory to illustrate that:
- 2008: Corrupting a standardization process
- 2010, ongoing: extracting royalties from people who don't use their technology (Android royalties)
- 2012: Throwing a monkey wrench at Linux install fests (by more or less goading laptop manufacturers into this SecureBoot thing).
Here's hoping that Nadella is a more level-headed guy than Ballmer was, and this trend stops.
Android's core is open source.
So MS would have no problem releasing their source to Bing ?
The world of computing could have been and would be today a better place if they hadn't dominated through business practices, but instead dominated with products.
That is absolutely weak man. If you don't like Word, then don't use it. There are plenty of alternatives. TeX, LaTeX, Abiword, Open Office, Wordpress...
I kid you not, I submitted every single college paper manually typeset in TeX / LaTeX document, created using Vim + Makefiles I hand crafted. Graphs were generated in GnuPlot, maybe R if it were statistics related. Gnumeric was my spreadsheets program, and occasionally I'd use Abiword for times when I needed a more classic "double-spaced 500-word" homework assignment.
That is absolutely weak man. If you live out in the real world, there aren't plenty of alternatives.
I kid you not, I keep buying MS Word, despite hating it passionately, because it's the only word processing document format that we can share in common with business partners, our legal counsel, accounting, etc.
And I use Gnumeric (and assume you do too) because of the latex export function.
If Microsoft wants my business back, having really good LaTeX export from every MS Office program would be the place to start, along with native Linux clients.
What? They won't do that?
I'm not sure what Wordpress is doing in the list, but the fact is that dealing with Word documents can be pretty much unavoidable (depending on where you work), and they don't always open correctly in Open Office.
When discussing past wrongs of an institution, the question to ask is not "how long ago did they do it?" but "has the institution changed since?". In Microsoft's case, the answer seems to me to be "not enough".
Is Microsoft any more evil than Google? No, and they are probably less so these days. Google strikes me as more deeply invested in defence informatics and surveillance than Microsoft, for example. But am I going to run out and use Windows Phone because it is the lesser of evils? Definitely not.
Lesser of evils unfortunately has proven very successful in American politics. But it has very little place in business.
So far the worst effect has "merely" been to introduce needless hassle and obstacles when installing non-Microsoft operating systems [1]. Microsoft's current hardware certification spec (that manufacturers tend to implement so they can put "Certified for Windows 8" on the box) requires that the user be able to switch off Secure Boot (generally taking the entirety of UEFI with it) as long as they are not on an ARM system. They could change this at any point, and unification of ARM and "PC" is a current trend at Microsoft of which the move to Secure Boot on both platforms is already a part. Forgive me, but I'm not ready to accept Microsoft having me by the balls just because they haven't clenched their fist yet.
Secure Boot's purported threat model is a solution looking for a problem ("boot sector viruses" in 2014?). It doesn't really make much sense to make the boot process entirely unmodifiable on the grounds that "malware might modify it". Malware might modify anything else on your system too, and you are pwned either way. So it's probably safe to assume Microsoft had a different motive. I don't think it's wise to think of it as over-and-done-with.
Microsoft is still extracting software patent royalties from android OEMs this very minute - that's not anyone's pappy, and it's not a vendor overreaching. It's a calculated, evil decision by the highest levels of management.
I love my job, but in my job, Internet Explorer 8-9 is pain. It's why we can't have nice things. I checked out a Windows Phone in a store once, and thought it was pretty sweet until I saw the IE logo and physically recoiled. There was no way I was going to own something where I'd have to hit that logo every day to browse the Internet.
That's not ancient history, that's present-day reality.
you might want to do a double check on that
Developing for Internet Explorer 8 is my present-day reality too, but if IT departments were instead mandating Firefox 3.0 or Chrome 1.0 I'm not sure how much better it would be.
OK. I'm pissed that they dropped the deployment tools from Visual Studio. [1]
People keep saying that the desktop is dying, but PC makers still managed to sell over 300M units last year. But if the desktop market ever does truly die, I think Microsoft can be said to have had a part in that.
[1] I'm not actually pissed. I moved on to WiX, but since you asked I felt pressured to come up with something.
Even though it was limited, it was very useful. I lost a fair number of days trying to rebuild setups from scratch using other solutions.
I really like Hanselman and his blog and I even like some of the stuff Microsoft has been doing, but this is a distasteful marketing piece.
And BTW, in society trust is a fragile thing and many people don't forget so easily. Other companies should pay attention to this fact. Fool me once shame on you and all that.
1. Android patents is part of an all our war between all vendors. Everyone is shitting on everyone's lawn. Apple, Google, Samsung are all just as bad. The whole mobile market is lawyer driven.
2. SCO is gone, dead. They went after Microsoft as well for Xenix. They weren't involved other than to cheaply get them to go away.
3. Web standards. There were no web standards. There are barely web standards now and IE10/11 do a pretty good job with supporting them.
4. Nokia yadda yadda. Nokia was dying and knew what was going to happen. Nokia is a big company and handsets were a dead end for them so it made sense to lose them cheaply to Microsoft. The Nokia board made a killing.
All companies are assholes but facts are facts.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_controversie...
3. IExplorer 11 is lagging behind all other popular browsers: http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html
4. Nokia's fate was sealed the minute it signed that agreement with Microsoft.
Did you know that Nokia N9, the last MeeGo/Maemo phone they released as a limited edition, was a success with raving reviews? Do you realize that almost everybody that has held a Nokia Lumia in their hand thinks that the models are awesome, including the cheaper ones, too bad it isn't on Android? And besides the phones it produced, Nokia was huge and as a result had amongst the best distribution networks and brand recognition - it wasn't too late for them to turn around, they could have been bigger than Samsung. But ALAS, that Microsoft shill had to become their CEO - and Nokia's board I'm sure got bonuses, but what about the shareholders? Not happy ...
http://thenextweb.com/eu/2012/05/04/nokia-and-execs-hit-with...
I remember the J# lawsuit!
From wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J++ "Some observers have remarked that this was deliberate from Microsoft, in an attempt to at least slow the advance of Sun's Java technology."
For entirely pragmatic reasons, I'd rather use Chrome, Linux, Android, Gmail, Google search and Google Docs.
Typescript looks nice, I might use Babylon.js, and I still use Skype from time to time, but I'll still never use Windows, IE, Hotmail, etc...
Chrome? Gmail? Maybe. Google however is pushing far more than Microsoft has as far as dropping my anonymity from Youtube, pushing me into their Google+ features and making me share sign-in information across Chrome sessions. I'd say its a Tie between Microsoft / Google here, both want me in their cloud services.
Although, Outlook.com works a hell of a lot better on Android than Gmail / Google Calendar works on Windows8. So from a usability point of view, Google is beginning to lose it in their anti-microsoft wars. I don't like getting caught up in the middle of their politics. So that's my tiebreaker: Microsoft's calendar platform is supported in more platforms than Google Calendar.
Google Docs vs Microsoft Office? That one is easy. One of them runs on my computer, and the other one is untrustworthy, in the cloud. Do I really trust Google's servers over my own computer? Will Google protect the privacy of my documents from prying eyes?
Nothing beats cold storage on my own computer, Microsoft Office gives me that. Open Office vs Microsoft Office is another story of course... but Open Office is pretty terrible IMO.
Open Office is pretty bad in my experience. Instead... its about Abiword and Gnumeric. Unfortunately, there is no adequate replacement for OneNote and Powerpoint, so I'll keep using those.
You realize that Linux is just a kernel?
OpenBSD and FreeBSD are both server/desktop operating systems, meanwhile Debian Linux and Android are desktop and mobile OS'es respectively, your comparison is pretty worthless.
A similar comparison to Debian Linux with Android would be FreeBSD with iOS.
http://games.greggman.com/game/webgl-security-and-microsoft-...
I'm sure others can list more recent FUD and lies put out by Microsoft.
If in another 5-10 years there's no more incidents of that kind of stuff maybe I'll like them again?
...
Actually I can't really say I hate them now. But I think it's important to point out they are still a pretty shitty company in many ways. I hope they stop that crap.
An x-coworker at my last job had previous worked at Microsoft. His parting message to everyone was how happy he was that at this job the company always tried to do the right thing whereas at his previous job at MS the company always tried to see how much they could get away with.
Of course that's just one anecdote but if true I hope MS can change that attitude to something positive and that we'll see the results for the next few years.
Really? I had a PC on which Firefox and certain WebGL content would hard crash my machine thanks to what I resume are video card driver bugs. (Upgrading video card drivers resolved that particular instance of that problem)
Given that, it is by no means unreasonable to assume that WebGL content might be able to hit security holes in video card drivers. What that entails, who knows. Presumably going right away and saying "sure, we'll just add a hole to let people stream code directly from the web right into your video card" sounded like a horrible idea.
And since IE is shipped with the OS, level component, it has to be supported to customers for-bloody-ever. (Or so it seems at least!) So there is a higher bar, and all of a sudden releasing patches isn't an "auto-update the world and hopefully don't break anyone" sort of thing like it is with Chrome or Firefox, but now it becomes a "well have to test this patch across an almost unimaginable number of test scenarios and machine configs because we don't want to break functionality that any one of our large customers rely on".
At that point, adding a new feature, which even sorta smells like it could open up a whole new can of worms, becomes, for good reason, somewhat less desirable!
(Disclaimer: I work for MS, but in a completely unrelated area, opinions are my own, those of an overly paranoid-for-the-customers software engineer.)
WebGL shipped in IE11. I argued with them over getting it in earlier, too, but they had some semi-valid concerns over running web-delivered instructions directly on your GPU.
Microsoft is not any worse than the other companies. They are all at the same terrible level.
But Microsoft became a bit better over the last years, I would say.
Another thing is trust. Why would you trust an organization which still had at least a famous C-level executive which executed a number of business strategies you have a problem with? Why would you trust an organization run by Steve Ballmer? Now, maybe new management will turn Microsoft around, but it has done enough dodgy things over the years that yes, it will have to "bend over backwards" for a long time before I trust it again.
Microsoft IE stagnated at that point, as Netscape morphed into Mozilla Communicator, and then was rewritten into Mozilla Firefox. But IE reigned supreme only after it defeated Netscape Communicator (which was supported by the internet monopoly AOL)
1. "Open source Bing/Windows": Yes, please, give away the things that took thousands of engineers and billions of dollars and decades to build. Look, I like open source and use entirely open source stuff at my day job and hobby projects, and even have open sourced my piddly crap that nobody uses on Github... but nobody is entitled to somebody else's work for free. And damning somebody else for not espousing your beliefs is simply being a religious fanatic.
2. "Antitrust/Monopoly": They were dinged by the US and the EU for essentially trying to turn their OS into a browser while having an OS desktop monopoly. They were trying to be ChromeOS before Google even existed. They were accused of leveraging their monopoly to enter another market but, as is obvious now, is that the desktop and browser market were one and the same. And then people insist that they "missed the web"! And after almost being dismantled by the US government for going that route, people are angry that they let IE stagnate!
3. "Android patent trolling" - They have an impressive patent portfolio (well, by the standards of most patents out there) and have every right to monetize it, which is how things typically happen in all industries. And as an early incumbent in mobile OSs, they did do a lot of work that modern smartphones still use, so it's not like Android isn't standing on the shoulders of WinMobile in addition to iOS.
4. "API copyrightability": It's not so much that Microsoft and Oracle are right on this, it's Google that's wrong. Google's arguments as to why why APIs should not be copyrightable, taken to their logical conclusion, mean no code ever can be copyrightable. My take is they would be found copyrightable, but Google may probably prevail on fair use.
5. "Scroogled": It's based on surveys that shows people are not aware that gmail scans their email contents, and when told of this, most of them disapprove. And if the surveys don't convince you, the class action "wiretap" lawsuits recently filed against Google are a clear indication that there are those who don't like this. It's perfectly fine to make consumers aware of their product choices, especially if it's also in your business interests.
6. "WebGL": There were actual security holes (DOS was just one hole -- the screencap exploit was much worse), and what Microsoft had said then was "WebGL in its current form is not safe". However, as the standard was redesigned to address such issues (http://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/why-micr..., search for "CORS"), MS has gone ahead and included it in IE 11.
It isn't enough to fail at being evil. Trying to do so loses you points.
I'm ambivalent towards MS today. I'd like to see good stuff from them, but I treat their stuff with caution.
I always thought that Windows kinda spoiled the digital culture of a generation And therefore I always supported Linux for professional usage and Apple for personal usage. But that's an opinion based on a range of products; sticking a sentiment like hate to a company that makes tools you still can decide to buy or not to buy, is always pretty stupid.
Unless they're Nestlé or Monsanto, of course.
You might say that stuff that happened a decade ago is done and gone, but the thing to really consider is whether the people running Microsoft has changed significantly and whether their overall approach/philosophy has changed. I think the answer to that is not much.
For me, it's really not a matter of hatred, I've gotten over it. It's just straightforward ROI. I'd need a really compelling reason to consider Microsoft technology, to offset the expected amount of integration pain, license cajoling, oh-but-it-really-only-works-if-you're-using-a-full-MS-stack bait and switchery that I've experienced in the past. There's more than enough fantastic tech out there to keep me busy that doesn't have that baggage attached. Sorry, guys.
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_one#Initial_used_games_and...
Maybe Nadella can change the culture but I have my doubts.
Scott, actions are much louder than words.
EDIT: I'm not saying other companies are much better. However I think it's more productive to have an internal company awareness campaign and mission of "Don't be an asshole", instead of publicly whining about people who still remember past misdeeds or current ones.
http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-most-profitable-mobile-opera...
In many ways, Microsoft's Open Specification Promise is quite a bit stronger of a promise than most people might expect.
A lot of devs are also still pissed because of the countless hours , ie lost evenings and nights, they had to spend to make their app compatible with IE.
This isnt a defense of apple or google btw, any market controlling company is harming progress imo.
Microsoft has forced me to continuously deal with my providers for sending me invoices in a non-standard format (.doc). Because they fought, and are fighting open standards for office documents (I am exclusively using open office / libre office, but that is not a 100% working solution)
Microsoft is one of the biggest extorters using the patent system to tax us all.
I would say that MS is still one of the biggest drags on the world economy: not because their products do not increase productivity (they do!), but because we could be in much better place if they wouldn't have fought open standards.
The damage done is not reversible in a generation: I would say that the economic consequences are more lasting than the ones caused by both World Wars, since those proprietary products have a huge lifespan and have full world penetration, in all economic areas.
So no, I am not about to forget what they have done (and are doing).
I'm still boycotting GoDaddy, for example, even though I forgot why. Presumably I had a good reason. And when I've forgotten why I was mad at the companies who wrong me today, I'll still avoid them. This is an incentive for them to be nice now instead of later.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...
They've made some pretty piss poor decisions over the last 10 years that have had some huge impacts. IE6 was bad, but I can forgive their ignorance on that — no-one knew any better at the time.
What I can't forgive is IE8, and the years since then that they've CONTINUED to make major-versioned browsers. If IE6 was a one off problem, it'd be fine. But with IE7, IE8, IE9, IE10, IE11, and new ones being released all the time, it just seems like MS don't realise it's a problem. No-one should be making browsers that don't silently auto-update at least once a month. It's physically harmful to the web ecosystem.
I don't care how good IE11 is now, whether they've caught up or not, I care about them putting a system in place that ensures everyone always has the latest web technology. Don't tell me it's not possible. Google and Mozilla have had it sussed for years now. (Apple could do with sorting themselves out on this too. Could also see them go in this direction since Blink split off.)
I can't help but think the version numbers are political? Some group in Microsoft trying to prove its worth by making a big deal about version numbers every year? "Look how much we care about the web, look at our new shiny browser. It goes to 11..."
The web would be way further ahead if Microsoft had stopped making browsers years ago. Millions of hours are wasted every year testing websites in dead browsers. Microsoft created this situation, and they've still not adequately addressed it.
Put your latest browser on everything you've ever made, stop calling out the major version numbers, release every month or so. That's how you'll get people to like you.
Doubly so if you work for Microsoft who are currently making similar arguments against Google in Europe.
Nevermind Microsoft, I'm barely three paragraphs in and I'm forming a strong dislike of the writer due to his breezy dismissive style.
It's the free-wheeling multifaceted Bay Area – or more generally California – against a monolithic empire to the North, whose offerings are most popular among the crass bean-counters of the East.
Even those far away from these regions can be swept up in the same thematic framing.