Harvey Newstrom writes:
> without asking the PC owner first. Only Microsoft thinks is a good
> "feature."
Microsoft has an ancient well-documented tradition of releasing
unstable, insecure, (ILOVEYOU is just a recent instance, see BUGTRAQ
archive for a truly impressive accomplishment track) poorely
engineered poorly performing products with proprietary extensions of
standards (standards are sure wonderful, everybody should have one),
notoriously excessive hardware requirements, extremely poor
scalability and portability, paired with a remarkable lack of features
with at best mediocre high latency support, which is frequently so bad
it's not there. They don't understand version control and proper
software upgrading. They don't believe in strict separation in kernel
and userland, and minimization of kernel code. They don't release
their source nor development tools with full source, so users can't
help themselves and other users. I wouldn't be surprised if their
OSses and apps would have back doors, fed-mandated, and others.
In short, they suck on all fronts as far as I can see. According to
what I hear, Win2k seems their first more or less decent product
developed in-house. However, they need to release much more than that,
to be able to gloss over their other deficiences. Also, they need many
years of angelic behaviour to compensate for their abysmal track
record. Right now I trust them in the extent as I have MS stock in my
portfolio (I don't have any).
Their business practices over almost two decades demonstrate a
remarkable lack of interest in serving their customers but a strong
incentive in maximizing their revenues. They routinely use legal
action and leverage of economies of scale to create and maintain
product monopolies. (I don't blame them, I blame their idiot customers
which allowed them to become what they became). Their record track is
bad, and their trend points to worse. They are a huge sink of
first-rate minds and developers (in terms of mindpower, the absence of
output is conspicuous), which thus become lost to humanity's other
enterprises. If they have good engineers, they hide that fact
remarkably well.
This is only a highly incomplete ad hoc list. I would have expanded
the list to many times this size, only I have more constructive things
to do with my time. If anyone would still think this is highly
subjective MS bashing (heck, I've been fuming over PC/MS cruft since
PC/XT and DOS), be my guest. Just please don't lump me together with
clueless newbie lemming MS bashers, because I'm not that. Ok?
Microsoft bashing is there for a Reason. Strangely, techies of any
mettle tend to despise MS violently. Misguided MS bashers, all of
them? If yes, then I'm in very fine company.
I don't mind other people using their products, as long as I don't
have to clean up after them, and don't have to deal with their
proprietary "standards" and perversions of standards they inflict upon
those of us, who don't use their products.
Unfortunately, because other people use MS products, I have to deal
with their aftermath (smoking ruins and misconfigurations, systems
which need constant doctoring and periodic reinstalls to keep them
minty-fresh), flaky Internet infrastructure, useless tech support
lines, unreadable websites, HTML poop in my INBOX, multimegabyte
attachements in unreadable formats, spam about viruses and similiar
crapola. GAH, ICK, PTUI.
Thank you Microsoft. We all love you, and your lame customers.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:10:33 MDT