Do people still trash Microsoft? Maybe it's just because I'm in Seattle, but I feel like their reputation has really turned a corner in the past year or two.
There's still a lot of cruft from who they used to be, but I feel like most people I know echo the sentiment that Satya has been a revolution. Things like them embracing Linux, acquiring and not ruining NPM and Github, contributing to open source projects, and all the work they've done with Dotnet Core seem to really have bought them a lot of goodwill, at least with the people I know.
Yes, people still thrash Microsoft because many of their business practises and products are thrashy, even if it needn't be.
Windows is a great example - forced updates, forced ads, forced data-ming and spying, stupid UI changes etc. all make an otherwise decent OS a real pain to use and a must-avoid for the privacy conscious. These are easy to fix for a company like MS, but they do not.
I don't understand whinning about that when you have bilions of people using your OS, so shitton of people who are newbies at computers then you want to help them to stay as secure as possible.
"at best(worst?)" this thing is "not nicest", but it's totally reasonable.
you have reasonable control over updates on non-home versions, imo.
It's very jarring for an inanimate object that you are trying to wield as a tool, to suddenly have its own agency and its own priorities that it treats as more important than yours. "No, I'm busy for the next 40 minutes" and "Sorry, I have to go now" are things you hear from your friend, not from your hammer or or your toaster.
I don't mind Chrome's forced auto-updates, because they've never gotten in my way.
This was a huge, huge, huge pain in the butt in a big enterprise. Nothing like a creeping "users can no longer access the internet" spreading across the environment.
Serious question, do you actually use Windows 10? I use it daily and I've never had it force an update on me in the middle of the day. I turn it off every night and it applies the updates then, as it should.
It happened to me a couple of times this year. It was really annoying to go make coffee, and come back to an updating screen. Even better, one of these failed and spent another 30 minutes rolling back the update.
That makes sense, if you've got a laptop and you never reboot it then you're creating an impossible situation for the updater. I still don't understand the constant whinging in that case, though. Of course it's going to update while you're using it if, from its perspective, you are always using it.
People complain about forced updates because updates have come down that inexplicably break things. For example there was one update in 2020 that caused appeared to delete any files placed in the users Desktop folder (although the files weren't really deleted) and another which caused running chkdsk to corrupt users filesystem in a fashion that typically required fixing the filesystem offline.
Furthermore such updates which usually require a reboot can easily interrupt important work or a long running task.
Just yesterday my Windows install which exists solely to run steam and steam games updated and then committed suicide in a fashion that can't be automatically repaired and requires a reinstall with zero explanation. For reference the hardware is fine as is the Linux install on another drive. The windows drive is a ssd less than 6 months old. I can even mount the ntfs filesystem which appears to be just fine.
There is absolutely no excuse for not letting users pick when or if they would like to update their OS especially when their QA has completely gone to shit and they cannot realistically promise that their update wont break your install.
ltsc is the solution, and even though all the MS sychophants will tell you it's for ATMs/medical equipment only: I've been running it on my 2019 gaming box for a year, and had no issues at all
My laptop running Windows hangs periodically requiring a hard reset... if I watch Hulu on Chrome. At least twice a week and sometimes multiple times a day.
At least Windows in the 90s had the decency to put up a blue screen — now it just hard crashes without any display or debugging information.
Telemetry and forced updates are a slap in the face on top of the quality regressions.
At least Windows in the 90s had the decency to put up a blue screen
This sounds like back then there were only crashes with a blue screen (and dump), and currently there's only hard crashes without blue screen. Both of them are not true. I.e. there are apparently types crashes for which it hasn't been possible in the past decades to come up with a bluescreen, othiing new there. It is just as likely, maybe even moe so, the difference in your particular case is your hardware/driver. It's of course possible there were effectively changes at the OS level in how hard faults are dealt with, but I wouldn't just assume so.
That sounds like a hardware or driver thing, specifically related to GPU, rather than a Windows issue. You can try to disable hardware acceleration in Chrome.
My testing pointed towards a DRM problem, since it doesn’t happen with other video streaming or with rendering outside the particular Chrome + Hulu combination.
My point is two-fold:
1. Even if the driver crashes, the OS should blue screen (like it used to) rather than just hard freeze the machine.
2. Using an HP laptop with Windows and Chrome to view Hulu is so mainstream it should “just work” — so it’s a sign of industry breakdown it doesn’t.
Especially, as Windows updates, given basically infinite combination of hardware (often broken) and software (broken even more often) are super rock solid.
> Especially, as Windows updates, given basically infinite combination of hardware (often broken) and software (broken even more often) are super rock solid.
Apart from breaking SSDs [0] less than two weeks ago. And deleting your certificates in November [3]. And breaking Kerberos in November [4]. And moving your files to another user in February [1]. And breaking their own reset feature in February [2].
All of those are massively disruptive and breaking changes. And all of them have Windows Update to blame (especially the moving files bug) - not some buggy underlying hardware that Microsoft had to work around.
So true. I just yesterday, on a lark, took a win10 SSD from a new Dell and stuck it in a 10 year old HP, and within about a minute it booted much to my surprise.
For quite a while, Windows was the holdout. MacOS wouldn't even flinch if you moved it to another machine; Linux might have needed a little help finding its root volume or NIC but would otherwise be happy. Windows, however, would fall over with a BSOD.
Don't try that with Arch Linux. That distro lost me forever because I didn't log into a computer for six months (in 2012) and the OS was recoverably broken.
From experience, I highly doubt it was actually unrecoverable. I did something similar many times & all it takes is to read archlinux.org news section & apply .pacnew config diffs where needed. Arch is a bleeding edge distro constantly marching ahead; that's one of its primary advantages, so it's best to update regularly. That being said it is very much possible to not update for months, just requires a bit of extra care when you finally do due to the large number of accumulated changes.
I even did an online, in place switchover from SysV to systemd in 2011 and despite that being a scary amount of changes at once still got a working system.
The trade off there is that Apple can then perform a major architectural shift in a single fell swoop because it’s not carrying around silly amounts of legacy cruft. Endless backwards compatibility isn’t always a benefit imo.
The latter. Usually when my Microsoft Surface Book 2 (the flagship consumer device, for context) BSODs for the third time in a day because MS couldn't be assed to fix compatibility/thermal issues with the graphics card that was one of the highlight features of the device, or the tablet undocking (another highlight feature) fails, or their "Modern Standby" drains the battery from 100% to 0% overnight (Is it the 3AM wake-up to phone home? Weird ancient USB controller issues? Who knows!), I tend to just go to reddit or the Microsoft support forums and see how many other people are complaining without finding any solutions. No time to blog.
People who are newbies at computers wouldn't be able to find the
switch to turn off updates anyway, so why not include the
opt-out setting for users who care?
Forced updates are unnecessary and a bad idea, even more so in
rolling-release models.
I dislike the forced windows update because they shove crap down your throat with the updates, try to force edge on you, and repeatedly try to get you to accept their privacy stuff.
>I don't understand whinning about that when you have bilions of people using your OS, so shitton of people who are newbies at computers then you want to help them to stay as secure as possible.
But they do a great deal of backporting anyway. Enterprise and Education users can run a slow path that gets bug fixes and security updates only, for feature updates as far as 30 months back. This is not offered for any other editions of Windows, meaning feature updates are forced on them earlier than they need to be.
General consumers are now the beta testers for Microsoft Windows. With Windows built-in spyware features, they don't even need any user interaction to collect data from your computer.
I think he meant frequent and unpredictable forced reboots. But the updates are also a disaster. Microsoft trying to shoves their shitty apps down our throat every time, resetting the default applications regularly.
The thing that finally got me to abandon Windows was when a forced update wiped away the system settings that I had spent days figuring out to get a trackpad to work the way I wanted to.
I wonder how many people who complain about forced updates also complain(ed) about having to support users running decade-old versions of the OS/browsers?
It really wasn't that long ago that most commercial software still had to support IE8 (released 2009), for example, because that's where the user base was and they didn't upgrade.
I actually looked at BYOD computers and it only happens when a certain non-Microsoft software cough AV that sounds like coffee cough tried to modify the start tiles/menu for no good reason (corrupting the file in its process and forcing Windows to reset it).
Note: I'm not in the US. It seems that Americans tend to complain about this more. I don't know if it was deliberately done or not in that case.
Hasn't happened to me. My start menu always remains the same after updates. Maybe use an alternate start menu if that's the problem. There are no ads anywhere else IIRC.
As far as I recall pinball had no micro transactions.
For what it's worth I always enjoyed the "stock" games like pinball, solitaire, freecell and minesweeper. But I liked them tucked away under the clear label of the games sub menu, and without any pressure to use them
Micro transactions do suck, and I wish the trend of them would just die, but that doesn’t make a game an ad. You also have a point of the games being tucked away with the option of bringing them out if you wanted. Microsoft should’ve done that.
They are doing this to survive, not because they love open source and Linux. MS is still every ounce of the company they were in the 90s, they just saw the writing on the wall and decided to play for the new generation of developers. I don't trust them any better.
We're fortunate that Microsoft shareholders think catering to developers is good for business. Not every megacorp thinks so. I mean, take a look at Swift's documentation and tell me with a straight face that Apple cares about developers.
While Windows 10 i pretty good and stable system, the bundled programs that are default for photos etc are truly awful. In corporate environments it's often hard or impossible to install 3rd party programs, so when the default bundled software suck, it is frustrating to deal with...
It's funny because Linux did just that to Unix. Embrace (new OS that does everything Unix does, and free!), extend (Linux has features not found in classic Unixes), extinguish (Linux is now the de facto standard, so anyone who wants to use Unix is laughed at).
Microsoft gets mocked for embrace/extend/extinguish, but really, it means just do a better job than the competition. Embrace: "do what others are doing", extend: "do a better job at it, have more features than the competition", extinguish: "sell customers on those features and improvements". How anyone could be against competition, simply because it's framed in a cheesy phrase, is beyond me.
You can compete without working to convert an ecosystem from standardized to proprietary. If that happens it becomes much harder for anyone else to compete, and the end result is reduced competition.
It's much less of an issue if you make your own new thing be proprietary. It causes problems when you co-opt an existing market. It really causes problems when you're devoting external resources to conquering the market and once you do so you stop caring very much about improving any more.
Commercial Unix extinguished themselves without much help from Microsoft. The Halloween documents were about Linux after all (over 20 years ago!).. the commercial Unix players have only themselves to blame. Unless we’re going to blame all the mistakes of DEC, HP and IBM on Microsoft. Like geez.... even if that’s true then frankly Microsoft deserved to win.
Commercial Unix suffered from a lack of vision. They could have made version to run on x86, but they basically conceded to the low end to Linux. They were too busy making money from selling super-expensive RISC-based machines.
Solaris had a good version, which I used for a time, while I was running a data center full of Sparc equipment. All the user space stuff was happening in Linux-land. Solaris x86 had a nice repo for various packages, but there was always something you wanted that wasn't there. It got really close, though.
If one of the bigs would have gotten serious about packaging up, say, Debian's userland stuff, they could have put a serious dent in Red Hat, and maybe things would have played out differently.
> How anyone could be against competition, simply because it's framed in a cheesy phrase, is beyond me.
Because you've entirely misunderstood what EEE means. It absolutely does NOT mean to "do a better job." That phased was coined SPECIFICALLY because it was how Microsoft either absorbed competitors, or put them out of business. They spent decades doing JUST ENOUGH to persuade people to use their stuff, even when it was NOT as good -- given the advantage of their monopoly position and vertical integration -- in order to starve the competition of oxygen.
Microsoft is a big company. Some things it does will always be trashy - like fighting tooth and nails to keep Linux desktops and truly-open formats out of European public-service procurement. That's still going on, 20 years and 2 CEOs later, and will probably never stop, because screw public interest when there is so much money on the line!
But sure, in some areas they behave better now. They had no choice, after losing a whole generation of developers and seeing their cash-cows (Windows, Office, and AD/Exchange) under siege from SaaS insurgents. I've still to see something where their efforts are not fundamentally tied to their immediate self-interest, though.
Could be my neck of the woods too but where I am Microsoft has the best reputation among the Major tech companies (not a privacy nightmare, great research division, has started supporting open source, remains fairly apolitical)
> and all the work they've done with Dotnet Core seem to really have bought them a lot of goodwill, at least with the people I know.
Microsoft has done some good things with .NET Core, but they still don't have a very friendly OSS or partner strategy.
AppGet is a pretty good example; there was an existing Open source solution that filled a need, and Microsoft decided to create their own replacement, not bothering to give any credit (until there was an internet ruckus) to the original despite the very striking similarities and relative level of obviousness that they were at bare minimum 'inspired' by the tool; after all, they interviewed him for a role and even warned him the day before it came out... [0]
Octopus is another example. I -hate- TFS Release pipelines. Octopus Deploy was (until they ruined their pricing model) a far superior product overall. You can really tell the way TFS Release pipelines were done, they tried to 'checkbox-copy' Octopus Deploy's features without making it too much like Octopus to be obvious.
But the checkbox-copy strategy is inferior in many ways. In Octo you can have a stage that runs in all environments (but certain steps on/off per env) and configure server groups that way. In TFS Release, You have to have to 'copy' the steps for every stage. It's like their data model is missing a 1-many relationship or two somewhere.
And the impacts in the case of their behavior has a second-order effect; I am curious whether TFS Release eating into Octopus's market share was a factor in their price hikes a couple years ago; in that regard, I can't blame them if that's the case.
Microsoft is like the government... everyone has a relationship with them, and those experiences vary from high trust / strategic down to a sort of taxman.
If your work is such that scaling to bazillions of servers or other artifacts isn’t an issue, Microsoft is a smart choice. If you are building Facebook, it is a dumb choice.
I only wish more of those tools would be cross platform. I know it's not happening, but it'd be nice if I could develop WPF stuff right on my macbook without a VM.
Brands can turn money into goodwill, given enough money, time, and skill.
I don't think this is some fundamental shift in Microsoft or its values: simply a shift in their market positioning and brand value/identity.
Their products are still proprietary spyware, designed to get as many people locked into the Windows (or now Azure) licensing ecosystem as possible. Even the best parts of VS Code, often cited as one of their best new releases, are either spyware or proprietary. Windows remains a tire fire.
GitHub and NPM are prime examples of this concept that one can turn money into goodwill. I assume money also changed hands for the first-class support that Docker has for windows.
A lot of people don't update their opinions because it takes work. I know because I've made it habit of checking my assumptions and I still forget. For example, people still trash PHP and post a "A Fractal of Bad Design" when PHP 8 is now on par with any other language and not an amateur minefield. Some things get better, some things get worse. It's best to check in once in awhile. Microsoft is much better than it was 20 years ago.
Good point and maybe true for PHP, but not for Microsoft or its products. They've continued to "update" their bad practices too, and it's not just old criticisms that are rehashed again against them.
And no, to me Microsoft is actually worse than before as they have turned Windows into a spyware. The forced updates (not just security updates) make it even worse.
There is some correlation between selling good products and valuation. Intel's valuation for example went down 25% in 2020 in contrast to the NASDAQ US Composite index (of which Intel is a part) which went up over 40%.
Who decides it is a good product? Seems to me it is rather "selling a lot". Lots of people do not think Apple make good products and prefer Dell or Huawei etc. That doesn't change the valuation of Apple.
There's still a lot of cruft from who they used to be, but I feel like most people I know echo the sentiment that Satya has been a revolution. Things like them embracing Linux, acquiring and not ruining NPM and Github, contributing to open source projects, and all the work they've done with Dotnet Core seem to really have bought them a lot of goodwill, at least with the people I know.