Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates.
Apple's bad rep is probably due to high pricing, tech lock-in, horrible apple store experience, bad behavior regarding right-to-repair, pretty bad software overall.
> Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates.
Microsoft has many business models and one of them is based on advertisements, example : LinkedIn.
I was surprised to see this is true about their advertising! While dated, their 2016 disclosures showed ads making up only 18% of revenue ($109mm)[1]. Which was only about 10% of the $1.6bn that Bing pulled in around that time[2].
Having managed ad campaigns on LinkedIn, that's both surprising and not. They have a horrifically high cost per click compared to other channels, but the results in B2B verticals were usually enough to warrant putting up with it. So it's surprising it was only pulling in around $100mm. But then, their self-service component didn't allow for accessing all of their inventory, and none of my clients wanted to go in with the commitments necessary for the high-touch placements. So that may have dampened demand a good bit.
That said, Sales Navigator (and premium subscriptions) is an equally small portion of revenue. 65% of their money came from their "talent solutions" recruiting features.
Yes, it is always a reality check from the feel good vscode/wsl/Nadella lovefest when they foist some unwanted telemetry or ads in various parts of Windows, that they are a beast with many heads.
> Apple's bad rep is probably due to high pricing, tech lock-in, horrible apple store experience, bad behavior regarding right-to-repair, pretty bad software overall.
How times have changed. It wasn't long ago that many of us (myself included) were saying virtually the same thing about Microsoft's product.
Including people at the top running things. Interesting (to me) how the sales guy CEO's having been changed led the companies in different directions afterwards.
Ironically I recall a minority pointing out Apple would be even worse than Microsoft if they were in Microsoft's place given their controllingness - Microsoft was fine with third party manufacturers as opposed to suing to stop "Hackintoshes". There never was an equivalent for Microsoft.
Sure, though not enough to really be called a hardware company.
The comparison was between MS in the 90s and Apple now, as I understood it. At the time they might have been making peripherals, maybe? But not computers.
Yeah, I don't recall any MS-branded computers back in the 90s. They were making mice and keyboards, but that's about it. And they have always been happy to sell a copy of Windows to anyone that wanted to run it (and had compatible hardware, which was already commoditized back in the 90s).
I remember seeing news reports about the Black Friday-esque runs on stores at midnight the day of the Windows 95 release (while I was sitting smug at home because we had been running prerelease builds at home for months due to my dad's software company being a member of MSDN [or whatever the equivalent was at the time]).
> Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates.
You mean they don't put ads in the windows home menu or hundred of spywares in the OS ?
Or that they don't have ads in bings, skype or outlook ?
> Apple's bad rep is probably due to high pricing, tech lock-in, horrible apple store experience, bad behavior regarding right-to-repair, pretty bad software overall.
Or maybe you mean they don't lock in with proprietary formats, avoiding to publish the specs and when they then do don't follow it like with Office ? Hopefully this has been compensated by the fantastic Windows Update experience and good behavior.
I'm not an FB, Apple or Google fan. In fact I don't have an FB account, I voluntarily don't buy Apple products and refused a job interview with Google.
But let's not forget the numerous bad deeds of MS. That's how we never solve the problems we have: we let people misbehave and after a while, they are all forgiven. It's the same with politics, bad bosses, abusive spouses, etc.
Every people have problems too. Some beat their wife, some are a bit moody.
MS has been repeatedly caught lying, cheating, insulting and corrupting.
Can I slap you if I give a treat to a puppy later ? Because being pro-microsoft now that their PR is more human and their actions more positive looks pretty much like that.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they make TypeScript and VSCode. But they need 20 years of being a good boy to compensate for what they did. More if we want to take in consideration they became incredibly rich doing it.
They don't need 20 years of anything; they simply needed a change in leadership, which they got.
Satya is drastically changing the culture and with it the business. I get there are people out there that will always have an ax to grind (you seem to be one of those) but if you wait 20 years to trust a business again, you'll be left behind with any improvements or optimizations that happen in the meantime.
If Microsoft sustains its direction for a few more years at most, given the pace at which the industry they are in evolves, the legacy practices they had won't much matter.
The way you see things leads to the society of today, where big companies have powers close to the state, and very little accountability.
If it's ok to accumulate immense wealth and power by misbehaving for 20 years, and just with switching a head and orienting PR, it's all forgiven, then why not keep doing it ?
We're not wedded to these big tech companies. I don't know why we need to forgive them at all. Let's talk about smaller companies making interesting products that haven't betrayed our trust, like System76, Lulzbot, or Purism. There's a whole world of hardware and software out there.
We don't need to forgive them, I personally just don't have the energy to remain angry at a company that has CLEARLY changed direction significantly.
All of you are of course free to remain pissed off at anyone or anything you want. Just be mindful of why you're mad, and make sure once in a while that it's still worth being angry about.
I still don't get the aversion and outcry at any sign of data collection from software companies. It just seems so cultish. Media tells you data being collected is bad so you grab your pitchfork.
If a company is collecting my data without my consent non-anonymously and selling it for profit then yes I don't like that. But why the outcry of a company collecting data anonymously to make a product I use regularly better for me?
After perhaps the fourth time I disabled Cortana and cleaned up mysteriously re-enabled bloatware on the Start menu, I started getting the same "I don't own this device" feeling I've had for years with smartphones. It's obviously less egregious than e.g. Facebook, but it's also a more fundamental element of the stack where I'm less willing to tolerate bad behavior.
If it was simply a matter of doing a bunch of cleanup one, I'd get over it. But between buggy, user-unfriendly update features and instantly-out-of-date instructions on what I need to turn off, it's uncomfortably reminiscent of Android's issues.
Maybe but it's not their main source of revenue like with Google and Facebook. So they don't have to go crazy doing unethical stuff in that area (privacy) which is what people tend to care most about these days.
I don't know if that is true anymore. One of my friends who is very much non-technical but has been an iPhone user since 2009 and Mac user for almost as long just asked me for a recommendation on an android phone a few weeks ago. He specifically cited the battery issues, and after having keyboard problems had done some googling for alternatives. Repairability was specifically mentioned, since he has had to have screens replaced on phones.
There has been a fair amount of negative press, this is filtering to 'normal' people, not just Lewis rossman's viewers
Another reason Apple gets a bad rep is the often obnoxious behaviour of a group of people who defend the brand's every step and misstep with an almost religious fervour.
I don't think he uses Apple products so in that respect he is unlikely to fit the category. He has been implicated in giving Apple a bad rap in other ways though.
>Microsoft doesn't get a bad rep like facebook or google, because their business model is not based on pushing ads onto their users and selling their users' data, which everybody hates.
I really hate Windows 10 automatically turning off all my privacy setting each time it updates, and re-installing ads for candy crush and other junk on my start menu after I'd explicitly removed it. Windows 10 tracks damn near everything you do and sends it back to Microsoft.
I consider Windows 10 to be a privacy nightmare, and I don't use it outside of work (where it's necessary because it's one of our target platforms).
However, and this is big to me, Microsoft doesn't pretend that Windows 10 isn't doing what it's doing. That means, even though I don't consider Windows suitable for my own use, that doesn't reduce the amount of trust I have in them as a company.
Care to elaborate? I've never had a negative experience making purchases or getting devices repaired at the Apple store.
Compared to HTC, which left me without my brand new phone for two months while they shipped my $800 One M8 back and forth with a different defect every time it came back to me.
Microsoft are selling an incredible suite of products and services. They are dependable, responsible and innovative. When I choose to use their platforms, I know they are taking me seriously, that they have a very long product support horizon, that they are embracing openness, have excellent documentation and integration with their tools (one fun exercise is debugging an Azure Function (their serverless lambdas) locally and seamless inside Visual Studio on your machine. Magical).
I would have thought they are a dying company just two years ago and today I have a completely opposite outlook of them.
Do others have similar experience? I'm not a fan of Microsoft products however I sometimes have to use them or want to give a try to something like Azure, and so far my experience has been pretty bad. I had to contact their customer service in 2 cases and in both cases they couldn't help me and told me to create a new account (one case was me asking to change billing country in Azure so that I could provide credit card from another country). Also in both cases I had to go through a few emails and a few phone calls and even after they told me they can't do anything, they kept calling me just to check whether I'm satisfied with their solution (!) so that they could close the ticket in their system.
I've had a profoundly awful experience with Azure in particular. Most of Microsoft's offerings are pretty good (I quite like Office 365 in both a browser and on an iPad) but Azure is hot garbage. Their APIs are inconsistent (the Ruby ADAL connector has been broken for a year, and it's an easy monkey-patch fix so that's doubly awful), Azure AD insists on being king-shit-of-all-it-surveys and does not want to federate with a (better) directory option (what Okta does to get even halfway-decent integration is kinda heroic, and also terrible), and even once you get past all that the technical offerings are, in my experience, significantly less reliable and comprehensive than AWS or GCP, to the point where I would regularly see stuff like "the audit log doesn't show the restart you requested on that server". And all this (because, again, the APIs are bad) has you swimming through the tar pit that is their web console. It's tremendously bad in ways I didn't think web applications could be. The horizontal-scrolling blade nonsense is unintuitive and doesn't correctly handle browser history (so on refreshes you get lost, sometimes, but not all the time) and it looks ugly and action buttons are in stupid places.
Then, when you have to ask for help, you get thrown into a tilt-a-whirl of awful, near-nonsensical customer support and it takes an act of Congress and God to get escalated to somebody who 1) speaks English clearly and with enough care as to be understood, and 2) understands the problem at hand. (And, not or.)
Granted, I'm probably not their target market. I don't want a more expensive datacenter in The Cloud(tm) so I'm not grateful for incremental improvements over racking servers. But it's a really unpleasant experience compared to either Amazon or Google and I'm mystified as to how it can be so cumulatively bad.
I agree, though I wouldn't say my experience with Azure has been "profoundly awful". Not all that great is more like it. I'm commenting because you mentioned the horizontal blade scrolling thing. For me, that has to be some of the worst UI/UX. Drives me absolutely nuts.
GCP is quickly becoming my favorite. The UI/UX of the web console is light years ahead of either AWS or Azure. The GCP documentation is a breath of fresh air. I'm stuck with AWS as my primary provider for now, but for new projects the bias is GCP. Most of the services I have used on GCP are well documented and easy to get around. Compare this to the AWS experience where documentation is often non-existent or out of date or the product itself just feels incomplete and broken.
I've found that some areas of the GCP docs are fantastic and some are appallingly bad. Two examples I dealt with last week that I particularly hated were trying to find a good resource on unit testing parts of a Cloud Dataflow and how examply to access the private key for a service account on Appengine Standard. (The switch from Java 7 to 8 really fucked this up).
There seem to be two versions of a LOT of Google's APIs and it's often not clear which one is the correct one to use.
Another annoying issue is that I'll be looking at the Java documentation on something and will suddenly be told to run some Python commands (which mean installing python and PIP and a bunch of other stuff) just to get some Java thing working.
But, all this aside, I agree it's miles better than the last time I looked at Azure.
My experience with Azure was awful. I moved a desktop app with 5000 paying customers to SAAS and wanted to not have to worry about the database management side and wanted to use azure. So not a huge business by any means, but growth potential is good.
I signed up, started to look around, maybe a test table and that was it. It was end of the day. Next day, account deleted for breaking the TOS.
Tried to contact support, few days later, got a reply saying I had broken the TOS. Yes I know. But how? What did I do? You broke the rules. No I didn't. I am from the EU (personal details / bank etc) but live abroad, this sometimes causes issues when I say I am from a country that doesn't match my IP so I ask if this was the issue ? No reply, I was just blanked after that.
I imagine there must be a scale where Azure is pleasant. Certainly, Microsoft seems to do a great job of marketing it to the sorts of giant Windows-and-Office companies that might not want to sign on for a standard AWS package.
But all of my experiences (up through "startup" size), and virtually all the stories I hear from below "major corporation", are terrible. Endless compatibility issues, awful interfaces, flatly inaccurate documentation, and support which is more time-consuming than GCP's approach of "buzz off" but equally unhelpful.
> I imagine there must be a scale where Azure is pleasant. Certainly, Microsoft seems to do a great job of marketing it to the sorts of giant Windows-and-Office companies that might not want to sign on for a standard AWS package.
I work at what has been all-in Windows-.Net-Office enterprise, and despite an existing investment in Azure AD that we’re staying with for now, the experience with trying to work with Azure has been such that our comprehensive cloud transition effort is centered around AWS (which seems like it is going to have a side effect of making us less of a Windows and .NET shop, as well.)
> I imagine there must be a scale where Azure is pleasant.
I do not. I imagine that there is a point at which the decision-makers and the Azure sales team can have many lunches and have many Serious Conversations.
The further away purchase power is from implementation responsibility, the more likely one is to wind up hands-on with something as immediately-obviously deficient as Azure.
All just personal opinions, but Microsoft products and services are generally good, from my experience. Windows 10 works great (and I seem to be the only person who actually appreciates their update policy). Office works well. OneDrive used to work well, now it's just "okay", but still fine. My Surface Go is a champ and feels great, despite being silly cheap. My Microsoft Ergonomics keyboard + mouse are still going strong, and is still my all-time favourite Ergo keyboard. Xbox One X is a nice piece of kit. Azure can be kind of overwhelming, but it works well enough and is far less overwhelming than AWS, despite offering mostly similar services.
Microsoft still has legacy weirdness all over the place. It's 2019 and it still feels like nobody from Windows talks to anyone in Office, and no one in software talks to anyone doing hardware. And Microsoft botches acquisitions (Skype is still a tire fire, similar for LinkedIn). But generally, the quality of Microsoft products is good, despite their failings.
Microsoft consumer support is pretty poor. But I basically never need to use it, and some of competition is so much worse, that Microsoft look good in comparison. (Have a problem with anything Google, for example, and Microsoft Support suddenly looks like mana from heaven).
Oh yeah, I totally forgot. Their handling of Minecraft has been mostly great, from both a product and software quality perspective. (except for the modding stuff)
They have, but they've also been helped by the former center of Mojang's fanbase's cult-of-personality going completely off the deep end. If Notch was still "that quirky dude making little games here and there" instead of a chud screaming on Twitter all the time, I tend to think there would be more (unreasonable, but extant) dissatisfaction with Microsoft's handling of Minecraft.
> Windows 10 works great (and I seem to be the only person who actually appreciates their update policy).
I had an annoying problem last weekend trying to get ray tracing enabled in a video game. After searching around I found out that a my graphics driver doesn't auto update and the "windows is up to date" message is a lie. Turns out I was on win10-1803 instead of 1809 and had to download a separate *.exe to upgrade. These types of problems don't happen with a modern (sane) package manager.
There's also a few other problems with windows that stop me from thinking it's great: no pseudoterminal, rigid window manager, registry nightmares, possibly more.
> After searching around I found out that a my graphics driver doesn't auto update
It does, graphics drivers do auto-update (unless you've manually disabled it on your system).
They just update slowly, you'll get the latest long-term driver from your device manufacturer / OEM, -- you won't instantly get things like "nVidia Game Ready Drivers, now with experimental ray-tracing" that come out every two weeks or so.
Adding my own anedocte, I tried to read some of their training material, the processes of creating an account was incredibly annoying and un-intuitive. Something that even "Web 1.0" companies back in 1997 had already figured out.
Then I tried following the examples of the training, start a small, free VM and do some stuff, but it won't let me, because the web interface was completely broken, no matter which browser I used. I even tried using that damn Edge on a W10 VM.
Yeah, MS might not have been the target of a lot of backlash recently, but their products are still as awful as ever.
I had an MVP in azure web services. I had 20 users in my "beta" phase that were using the product and giving me feedback.
One day, I got a message that I need to update my billing method. Strange, I was using mostly free tier with one paid component and the card on file was good til 2022, but ok. I put in another card because maybe there's something wrong with the system.
The next day I get a call that the site isn't working from one of my beta users. I log in and all of my azure resources are gone.
I immediately try to reach out to azure support via various mechanisms (their support chat, email, twitter, etc). Funny enough, twitter is always the fastest way to get support. Just write that something bad happened and tag their product, and you get someone who can communicate. However, they just redirected me to their support channel.
Two days go by and I get a template email response. I have an email chain going back and forth over the week to try and get the resources restored.
In the end, they tell me that not only will they be unable to restore my resources (a production database. the backups were all "gone" because the resource didn't exist anymore), but that I had to create a new azure account to use any services because of how screwed up my account got.
I tried escalating, but received the same response.
Now I just go with AWS. I'd even go with google as long as they don't delete my production database.
I've previous experience as a Devops engineer for a Large company which at the time was one of the larger customers of Azure (as in they'd put our company on the marketing materials). Support was obviously better when we could get a turn around time of <1 day to talk to an engineer that worked on a piece of infrastructure. Still wasn't a pleasant experience.
It's really unfortunate, all of this. I know that there are so many teams that are putting out great products, but their cloud approach is awful. _Some_ of the offerings are actually pretty nice, but combined with UI churn, the worst support (I'd rather take googles non-existent support as long as my data doesn't get deleted) of all cloud providers (IME) and empty apologies on the internet (you can say you're sorry, but I don't believe you unless you act on the mistake), I don't see myself going back anytime soon.
Typically in the free tiers there is a caveat in the service agreement that it is not meant for production services and your resources can be shut down at any time. It's important to read the fine print.
As a habitual Microsoft hater who spent most of the 90s and early 2000s being constitutionally incapable of writing the company name without a $, yes I have.
They still suffer from an appalling lack of taste and poor design sensibilities, but their enterprise level products and services are top notch. And I'm developing a new appreciation for a business model that involves transparently charging me a known price in exchange for a known service. They could still get better at that though. They still have too many enterprise clients over a barrel.
I had a small app that pulled my agenda (calendar events) from an Exchange server. But my company switched to office 365. I spent a few days trying to figure out where I need to register and what API to use, etc so I can rewrite my app to work with Office 365.
Now I don't have an app showing my agenda.
Let’s not occupy ourselves with establishing narratives. These are all stories and perspectives from which to view the world.
Microsoft has huge swaths of critical legacy systems held hostage. Governments, etc. How many of your tax dollars go to Microsoft? How much of their government influence is due to superiority of product versus lock-in, etc?
Too bad their OS barely works on the hardware it was pre-installed on. Things like wifi, suspend, brightness control are all extremely flaky under Windows 10 on my machine, but on Ubuntu work perfect. Most people I know have ditched Office for the most part, except for hardcore Excel users. Trying to install any sort of development tools on Windows is a pain, unless it's MS tools. As for their services, heard bad things about Azure and they're definitely not on the level of Google or Amazon as far as market share. They've also capitulated to Android on mobile and somewhat to Linux in the server space, so not sure how those are wins.
What is Microsoft? It's not a singular person born in the 80s and is now 40 years old. It's individual people who have come and gone over decades. The same people who were ultimately responsible fpr "personally burning you over and over again" are either retired or happily leading at other companies that you support. And new people with fresh ideas and fresh ideals may have replaced them.
This comment turned out an interesting experiment in internet crowd dynamics. I have over 40 upvotes at this point, but all the replies to my post have been more-or-less negative. My guess is that the people who are happy with Microsoft or generally agree can't be bothered to reply, while the few who've been burnt would take this as an opportunity to take out their anger (very justifiably so).
Most of us know internet opinions behave in this manner where you mostly get to hear discontent, but it's still fascinating to experience it first hand.
(I'm not in any way criticizing the replies to my post, which have been diligently written with real life examples and definitely given me some things to think about)
Well, its certainly much easier to upvote than to write a comment - you don't have to actually justify your upvote nor will the words be scrutinized. If you feel happy with MSFT products, you can just upvote, but if you don't like them you can't just say "Well, I don't agree!".
And the lack of downvotes can be explained by another phenomenon - there is no incentive for some to downvote a comment like yours at this point, because nearly all replies are negative! If a comment thread surfaces some bad things about someone you don't like, and it becomes popular, you actually want it to become more popular isn't it?
> And the lack of downvotes can be explained by another phenomenon
There may be another factor as well. I don't downvote comments based on whether or not I agree with them (if I disagree enough to want to express that, I just make my own comment saying so). I downvote comments if I feel that they were egregious in some way (overly combative, insulting, nonsensical, etc.)
I may be the only one who votes like this, though.
I think that your comment turned into a "topic" of "opinions on azure". Perhaps it's that topic, rather than the content of your single starting comment, that is being upvoted.
I thought that the subcomments listing out experiences was valuable to me. I would be conflicted on downvoting your comment though, because it would hide the subcomments that I do feel are valuable to have visible.
To clarify, I don't think you wrote anything off topic or bad for discussion (which is why I would downvote something). Even though we have different perspectives, I feel both are valuable to have a comprehensive view.
One of my colleagues in a previous job had this super boring but very critical task - making sure the financial numbers entered in the system are correct. One mistake could cause serious problems for the company.
My boss (CTO) once remarked - "we never hear from or about Patrice, she must be doing a fantastic job!"
Point being, when things work, it is rare that people talk about it (like my boss), they just take it for granted. When things don't work though, that is a different story.
Thank you for registering to post about the rules we're all familiar with. I don't actually believe, in this instance, the comments about the voting/comments make for boring reading. The moderation seems to working as intended here.
I've had similar experiences on HN, and funnily enough the last time was for a comment that was fairly supportive of Microsoft. I got absolutely roasted in the comments, but received a ton of upvotes from the silent majority.
There are three areas I'd disagree with you though.
The first is Microsoft's Surface line of tablets and laptops. I literally cannot find a kind word to say about the (very expensive) Surface Book devices we bought en masse about 18 months ago. They are awful[1] and we are already starting to phase them out as a result. It makes no sense because Microsoft can clearly do hardware well: for example, I have no complaints about my Xbox One X - it's all round great.
The second may substantially be connected to the first, and that's Windows 10. I increasingly hate using it because I find it slow, finicky, and unresponsive/a serious resource hog. So much of the time my laptop is running hot and draining its battery because Windows is doing something or other not related to what I'm working on.
The third is Microsoft Teams. The functionality it offers is good and, for VOIP and video calls, it's probably second only to Zoom so does get a thumbs up from me there. However, it's painfully slow to switch views, doesn't support multiple windows (so you can't sensibly look at chat and wiki at the same time), takes an age to start up, and behaves like an absolute moron when it comes to switching networks or losing and regaining network connectivity (usually requires a restart of the app).
[1] Underpowered, overpriced, poor battery life, run very hot, ropey WiFi, poor speakers that are insufficiently loud, crappy trackpad, only a single display port built in, poorly designed/laid out ports, unreliable (and often weirdly slow) charging, drains battery within 12 - 18 hours whilst asleep, I could go on (and on). In short: DO NOT BUY UNLESS YOU HATE YOURSELF!
I wholeheartedly agree that the Surface (4 Pro for me) is an absolute garbage, but not for the lack of trying. It’s a good product in concept but requires a level of polish and software/hardware integration that - IMHO - only Apple has.
Microsoft teams is featured packed. But some ui decisions and bugs won't let it be great. And the problems are not only on the desktop version. On android I receive a notification only to open the app and the message hasn't loaded yet, and doesn't load for at least 20 more seconds.
I have a morning meeting in teams that I often wind up calling into on my phone + bluetooth in my car... it often borks out and won't stay connected without force stopping the app. That's about my biggest complaint with teams... I also think the desktop version should use the material/android interface for starting a new thread... it's to easy to think you are replying but actually starting a new thread. Looking/finding old messages is pretty nasty/hard too...
Interesting. I've never really had any of those issues with my surface book. I might not recommend it if the tablet mode won't see use, though.
I do have the original, so I suppose if you got the newer ones things may have changed, but... heat is high but not problematically so, wifi works without noticeable issues, trackpad works fine. I really can't figure out what you're talking about with the ports - 2 usb + sd card reader on one side, charger + mini display port on the other, all bog standard. Not a spectacular selection, but not poor design/layout from my experience.
Charging... the cable can have issues, especially with bending near the connection, but charging itself has always been fine (assuming no cable issues).
Battery life is spectacular when you set it to focus on that, and performance is good when you aim for that. I've never really liked 'balanced' settings, because then it's either not powerful enough (usually games, I think I've needed it in perf mode for data processing once or twice) or chewing through too much battery for what I'm doing (programming while on the go is not particularly demanding, but I want time, so I set it up for battery life). I do rarely use it without the base, because the battery life then is poor - being able to connect it backwards is very nice for managing that in some cases, but makes it quite heavy for handheld use.
Possibly connected, my experience with Windows 10 is great on my Surface Book, but it takes forever to boot on my desktop (with an admittedly rather old processor/hdd). Windows defender, on the other hand, is definitely bloated and can be a pain to keep under control if I haven't used the Book for a while.
Re: Windows 10, I've found the LTSC (formerly LTSB) version to be much more tolerable. Still bloated compared to, say, Windows 2000/XP, but much better than even Windows 7, let alone 8/8.1 or non-LTSC 10.
I have mixed feelings... I think Azure in general, and o365 specifically are pretty nice. I do think Azure is a bit overpriced, but they do offer a lot of discounts in a lot of ways, which offsets it for some. They've been a bit better than most at adapting to changes in tech, and if you put Windows aside for a moment, are overall moving in a very nice direction.
Windows' changes have been pretty bad in terms of invasiveness since Windows 8/10. I just really don't like several bits of it. I think LSW is pretty nice, but iirc SystemD support is probably over a year off still, and docker/podman still a ways off. Windows vs Linux containers and Docker has seriously muddied the waters so to speak.
MS, like most corporations isn't a single entity... there's various child entities with some areas of cooperation between them. I'm glad that Windows no longer steers the ship and appreciate a lot of the efforts I've seen. Open tooling and platforms in particular. I love VS Code, the Azure Data Studio (or whatever it's called) is nice and progressing for cross-platform. I do think its' weird that Teams is the odd man out as an electron app from MS without a proper Linux release. Moving Edge to blink/chromium is a good move overall.
I'm anywhere from luke warm to positive on MS in general. That said, it isn't generally my first choice for a lot of things (outside o365). I'm often frustrated with working in Windows at work after about 6 years working outside windows. I use bash (from git) with windows, and there's quirks, but less than with LSW.
I really want them to succeed as I think with the current leadership and direction a better MS means better options and tools for all. I wish they'd redouble their efforts on linux support for everything around Office and Teams though. I'd also like to be able to build/deploy a damned SQL project without windows too.
In 2 years, by my own estimation, it will be a very different world running Windows as a developer and at that point it may become my favorite environment for building Linux apps of all things. MS/Windows progresses while Mac stagnates and alienates its creative/development/pro users more and more.
People with less than 500 karma can't downvote though, so it's possible to end up with 40 upvotes even if the majority of people dislike Microsoft.
Let's say 200 people wanted to vote on your post.
100 people with > 500 karma vote 45% up 55% down ending up with -10 karma total.
100 people with < 500 karma vote 45% up but the other 55% can't downvote = 35 total upvotes.
I consider Microsoft more trustworthy than the other big tech companies because they behave in a more trustworthy fashion by (generally) being forthright about what they do and what their intentions are.
That said, I avoid Microsoft products because I don't like what they do and what their intentions are.
The difference between my attitude toward Microsoft and (for example) Facebook is that I make my decisions about Microsoft based on their products and services. I make my decisions about Facebook, etc., based on the fact that I don't trust them even a little.
This means that Microsoft has the advantage -- if they cared whether or not I am on board with them (and they have no reason to), they could change my mind very quickly by altering their products.
Facebook, etc., could not affect my attitude in the same way, as my main problem with them is that they are entirely untrustworthy.
Having been forced to dabble in the Microsoft world I have in general found documentation to, at least in some cases, be very sparse. Or maybe I've just not found the right resources?
For example, I was looking for some documentation on how to tune the CLR, and performance tips for writing C# in general. In Java there are lots of books on the topic, and I know of some blogs on the JVM internals, but for .Net all I could find was one small (selfpublished?) book. I'm not sure it would be fair for me to judge the state of the blogs and online resources, but at least I did not find what I was looking for at the time.
Similarly, I had to try some stuff with Service Fabric, and it felt more or less impossible to get it working with the publicly available documentation. I'm really not sure how they think one is supposed to learn how to use that technology.
Lastly I've been dealing with shipping and releasing natively compiled binaries for Windows etc, and here I've found online resources, but mostly unofficial ones. This whole area seems rather hairy and it feels a bit scary to rely on some random blogpost or stackoverflow answers for what (not) to do.
In general from what I've seen is that the Microsoft documentation is very much How-To focused. But there is often a lack for more comprehensive documentation like a man page, and in particular I've found it hard to get "sharp" information, like what are the exact guarantees for this thing.
> one fun exercise is debugging an Azure Function (their serverless lambdas) locally and seamless inside Visual Studio on your machine. Magical).
I read this initially as a red flag as it looks like they are coupling Azure with Windows/VS development. A better indication of how serious they are in creating an open platform would be how magical the experience is for people not using MS blessed tools.
I think many people working on development tools outside MS either don't understand value of debuggers, or don't have enough resources to implement them well.
I've been programming for living for 20 years now, did/doing various stuff including mobile, embedded, videogames incl. console, desktop, servers, a bit of web. In my experience, debuggers only work well on microsoft platforms.
Integration is simple on surface, press F5 and it will launch with debugger. Implementation of that can be very complex, launching may involve complicated deployment (over network, USB or worse), starting virtual machines, connecting multiple TCP streams using weird protocol each, and so on.
It works consistently for MS platforms, even very old ones like WinCE. It's broken consistently for the rest of them, even Android or iOS which have larger install base than Windows.
The conclusion is contrary to the evidence presented.
> companies untouched by scandal — including Microsoft —
> prospered in the eyes of consumers
Except that Amazon, which has gotten a bit of a black eye later (HQ2 + worker treatment + antitrust), has stayed steady near the very top of the cited poll. Apple, which has had few such problems, has sunk from near the top to #32. When you only have eight samples to begin with, and two strongly contradict your theory, your theory sucks. Microsoft in particular is doing relatively well for a variety of reasons, but not because of this one.
>Microsoft in particular is doing relatively well for a variety of reasons, but not because of this one.
Why exactly wouldn't Microsoft's newfound good reputation be included among those reasons? Your rebuttal would be just as unfounded as the theory you are dismissing. Perhaps it's not as determinant a factor as the author makes it out to be, but discarding it altogether doesn't look reasonable to me.
>that doesn't validate the higher-profile original either.
You're right, it doesn't. I never said that, either.
>Seems a bit "well actually" TBH
I'm sorry if it came across that way, really. I like to be as precise as I can with everything I say, so it just came out that way naturally. Actually, one of the first replies I got here (not too long ago) was a similar kind of comment to the one we are discussing now. At first, my reaction was negative, as in "this guy is just trying to one-up me by nitpicking my comment"; then, I realized it was an opportunity to start to make myself as clear as possible whenever I wrote any other comments. Anyhow, I hope you can understand where I'm coming from.
Having Amazon topping that chart and then dutifully ignored as a narrative was spun makes the whole thing dubious. The rankings themselves seem a bit ridiculous and wholly unrelated to really anything at all. Not only has Apple had no such problems, in similar polls they rank at or near #1 year after year.
Apparently, they averaged about 300 interviews per company, then stack ranked on net favorability.
I'm not a social scientist, but that seems.. low? And while I'm sure the initial call list was demographically weighted, apparently they'd ask each respondent to talk about two companies they were more familiar with from the list of 100. That doesn't sound like the ~300 people rating each company had any proper demographic weighting at all.
Although Microsoft has been very successful lately, I wish they hadn't given up on competing in some consumer areas such mobile. Now we are stuck with only Apple & Google.
I wonder if they wait for the right moment (e.g. when Android gets replaced with whatever Google tries to replace it with) for a new play on mobile or if they really are "done" with it.
I think there is a still a possibility that Microsoft expects the phone and PC markets to merge and hopes to be there with welcoming arms when it does, but I'm getting the impression they won't build new hardware to do it if they can't convince other manufacturers to join in.
I'm betting that Microsoft is going to come out with a Surface branded Android phone in the next 2-3 years, and allow Android apps to be entered into the Microsoft Store. Use their leverage in developer tools to make publishing in all 3 stores easy. The groundwork is being laid, but I think they are very much focused on the cloud and catching up to AWS offerings.
I think the new MS realigned with some of the old MS' ideas: the Surface line is meant to lead OEM hardware manufacturers, not to be the sole OEM hardware manufacturer. I don't see the new MS releasing a new phone/phone OS branch without phone hardware manufacturers begging for it. That doesn't seem likely without pressure from phone carriers, and they seem very happy with the Android and Google duopoly as it is easy for them to sell and/or profit from.
Hah, the Freudian slip there of "Android and Google" instead of "Apple and Google" amuses me noticing it days later. It's probably increasingly accurate, too.
I had a Windows Phone. I really liked it. What I didn't like is that there were no apps for it. So I ended up switching to an iPhone.
I also had a Windows RT tablet. It was pretty good, but I wish MS hadn't nerfed it. If I could have used a browser other than IE I would have likely bought another one when the SSD failed.
"Tech industry/company" is a useless term. Facebook and Google are ad networks, and it's advertising that's getting a backlash.
Microsoft has a much smaller ad business with Bing (although still 3x bigger than Twitter) so of course they don't get the same amount of backlash because of it. Apple is in a similar position.
I really wish Microsoft would release a modern, capable smartphone. Not based on Android. Revive the windows phone UI, couple it to good hardware. Maybe partner with Samsung. A surface phone, so to speak. I'd buy it instantly. I don't care about apps. I care about a good browser, good screen, maybe whatsapp, long battery life.
I think the problem with Google is it can't decide if they are into software or into advertising.
Google had a big lead on Microsoft with their web based 'office like' products, but they just could not get the paying business customer.
Microsoft can see what Google is doing, quickly push out their 'Office 365' clone and without much effort find they have quickly become the biggest player in that field.
I think Google would have easily won that game it they could just convinced business they where more than just an advertising company.
I get the impression business is more than happy giving their data to Microsoft, while also paying for that privilege where as they are not so sure about trusting their data with Google.
I would love so much to pay for Google services if it meant disabling all of their ads and data tracking. But they're just not interested in that kind of business model.
If there's one uncomfortable thing Google has made painfully clear to all of us, it's that the vast majority of consumers just aren't interested in paying for things like email or search.
It isn't due to a lack of offerings. There are plenty of provides that will happily do so. Anyone who wants to can buy email from Google today! Yet in the face of this the vast majority of users choose not to pay for email.
My current operating hypothesis is that the vast majority of ordinary users value their privacy right up to the point where they have to put a price on it. At which point a handful of nerds (like us!) are willing to pay, but most people happily trade their privacy for services instead of involving money.
With that said, might this be viewed as a distinction without a difference? If the provider puts a price on their service, the consumer evaluating this price must decide if they find it acceptable. This is necessarily going to involve some amount of implicitly calculating their price for the service, isn't it?
I pay for Fastmail and I get a relatively large amount of spam there. We self-host our email at work, and plenty of spam gets through there, too. I never see spam in the inbox on my gmail address, ever. Google's email is the best I've seen (though I admit I haven't used a lot). I use it because I want to use it, not because it is free.
I'm not sure what you mean by "buy email from google today." I don't want to "buy email," I want to pay them to not serve ads or track me when I use their services. That includes far more than email, I'm talking about the whole ecosystem like Android, Maps, Search and so on. Surely $120/year from me is worth far more than they're getting in ads, right? I dunno.
As opposed to Windows 10's ads in the start button and lock screen, and data tracking in every part of the OS? At least Google only puts up (mostly) relevant ads when you search for something.
Google shuts services down left and right. What large business would trust google with all their documents / spreadsheets / etc. when there is a pretty good chance they just shut the service down in a few years? Microsoft on the other hand supports their office products basically forever.
...their office product or, more surprisingly & worryingly, their cloud services.
How could Google, come distant 3rd in the cloud infrastructure race. They were the ones that obsessed about milliseconds. They ran YouTube and Gmail and all the other services reliably, at massive scale. Due respect to Amazon's dogfooding, but Amazon never released novel internet applications at anything like the volume that Google did.
Google have generally displayed recurring problems getting products to real maturity, and making money from them. For all the high profile stuff that they bought or built over the years... There is still only one real revenue source.
It may be something like the "oil curse." It's hard to compete with search/ads on revenue.
Google was built from the ground up writing software for itself to run. Microsoft made systems and development tools for customers to run. Google has to make a much larger cultural change to turn their monolithic infrastructure inside out into products, whereas Microsoft had to make a change in the reverse direction to try to compete in Internet/cloud services.
Really the whole "techlash" feels incredibly manufactured in the first place - I think the uniform shallowness of criticisms is part of its smell. I mean most content it shallow but you expect a "bell curve" of nuance between slogan repeaters and those pondering more in depth at the edges. Look at other movements and their diversity of ideas - even if mostly in agreement differing implementations tend to be proposed by some even if most parrot shallow slogans.
The selectivity also stinks. Comcast, a serial worst company winner infamous for poor service is left unmentioned while social media somehow qualifies as "a monopoly" and the equivalent of Store Brands in Amazon is somehow monopoly abuse?
Don’t discount the gentrification issue. In places like Austin, San Fran, and West LA the “techlash” started when small businesses and non-tech workers could no longer afford to pay rent in their city, and their culture was pretty much replaced.
For LA they were going wannabe terrorists about gentrification back in the the late 90s with the Yuppie Eradication Project - it seems nobody was sympathetic to them and who can blame them? I think most would rather have the most obnoxious yuppie stereotype than those idiot self-righteous vandals.
Gentrification seems to be a noisy minority issue - I hear far most people who would want gentrification.
Which I suppose points to another cultural divide. To suburbanites and even other major cities they look like huge spoiled brats - conplaining about things other areas would kill for, and already offer more for far less. I am aware of differing situations and needs but it seems that someone isn't being reasonable.
I was just musing about what makes a tech company more likeable.
Personally, I made money for years using Microsoft products, find Amazon quite useful (living in small towns) and just see Google as irritating. But then, if the internet were reduced to USENET, email, and maybe a curated list of serious websites like online banking, I'd be fine with it, and probably better off in some ways.
> Personally, I made money for years using Microsoft products, find Amazon quite useful (living in small towns) and just see Google as irritating. But then, if the internet were reduced to USENET, email, and maybe a curated list of serious websites like online banking, I'd be fine with it, and probably better off in some ways.
You're not alone in this thinking. The vast bulk of the Web is of marginal benefit, or harmful, and I think in the end it's going to contribute to taking us (humanity) to a very, very bad place.
The chart is very misleading. Instead of charting rank year on year, Axios should have charted the actual reputation, and then placed a few household names next to them so they're more comparable.
Facebook's score (58) is basically in the dumpster category, a notch behind Comcast (61.4), Bank of America (60.9), and Goldman Sachs (60), though still several notches ahead Trump Org (50.1), Philipp Morris (49.4), and the US government (48.6).
The other tech giants are within a few points of each other: Amazon gets 82.3, Microsoft 79.7, Netflix 77.3, Apple 76.4, and Google 75.4. Amazon is in the same category as Disney. The other 4 are comparable to the likes of Coca Cola, Procter and Gamble, Unilever, Nike, etc.
As an aside, FB's continued success, while having such a bad public image is astonishing.
They obviously have a moat, a very literal network effect. But, FB also has lots of competition (more than google, amzn, & msft anyway) and the type of product that should be substitutable.. with some combination of twitter-wechat-HN-or-whatnot. Social network, seems, at least to me, like something that lends to rising and waning popularity. They're not embedded in businesses or hard to turn off in any way.
It just seems that negative user opinion of FB should be a bigger deal than it would be for amazon of msft.
> As an aside, FB's continued success, while having such a bad public image is astonishing.
The public image is a bunch of people who want them to be bad, not actual consumers. The media has narratives it drives and a bunch of nerds here hate them for legitimate reasons. The average consumer does not care and never will.
I disagree. The average FB user is opinionated about all sorts of things. I bet you if you polled random people on the street, they have an opinion on FB... and I bet it has gotten worse in the last few years.
Microsoft is more B2B than B2C compared to the other companies, so it makes sense that they're barely ever in the news cycle. They've done a good job of creating separate identities for their Office, Azure and Xbox brands, so bad PR on the Xbox side won't adversely impact the company's reputation as a whole.
...says Axios, an outlet infamous for obsequious coverage of the wealthy and well-connected. In Tech, Microsoft is old money, thus this puff piece.
Just this year Microsoft's Outlook service had a massive breach, leaking ~800 million passwords. Their flagship product, Windows 10, is infamous for randomly blocking people from working. The recent October automatic update even went ahead and just deleted users' files. Remembebr Windows Phones? Remember Bing? MSN is still live... so I guess it outlasted Google Plus.
I guess since its efforts in social media are a whisper of a joke, that by default they're "winning" ? More likely it's just Axios being Axios.
I just last week had to deal with customers that had locked-down computers stuck on IE11 and hit some JS that used unsupported features.
IE11 was released after the relevant features were in common use in the Javascript community, but Microsoft was still in its "the web is better with our proprietary extensions, trust us" mode so they aren't in IE11.
They can't upgrade their browser because IE11 is the last browser version Microsoft supports on their Microsoft operating system, because they want users to upgrade.
They can't use an alternative browser because they're in a security-sensitive industry with policies written in the Old Days when running third-party software was marketed as "dangerous", including by Microsoft.
They don't want to upgrade operating systems because that means a huge software spend to Microsoft, plus migrating all their other software, POS hardware, etc.
The point being, none of these are things Microsoft is doing today. But they're all decisions they made in the past, and the consequences of those decisions are still making people's jobs harder.
Edge is MS's current browser... IE11 was an incremental release over IE10 and several years old at this point. Most browsers update very frequently. IE never did.
Maybe you need to look at whoever locked said computers down to ONLY support IE? Chrome and Firefox are both better options at this point. It really isn't MS's fault that an organization can't be bothered to update their software for what, 4 years now?
IE11 was well after the "web is better with our proprietary extensions" days. It even tried to disable add-ons and extensions entirely by default until (enterprise) backward compat anger forced their hand.
For IE11 (and 10 and Edge in either direction around it), Microsoft was firmly stuck in a "WebKit/Blink treadmill" where they had to run twice as fast to try to keep up and almost succeeded (until they gave up recently, RIP EdgeHTML).
Most of rest of these complaints sound like your customers should stop hitting themselves in the face.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadApple's bad rep is probably due to high pricing, tech lock-in, horrible apple store experience, bad behavior regarding right-to-repair, pretty bad software overall.
Microsoft has many business models and one of them is based on advertisements, example : LinkedIn.
LinkedIn make bank from selling Sales Navigator. Ads are a tiny proportion of their revenue.
Having managed ad campaigns on LinkedIn, that's both surprising and not. They have a horrifically high cost per click compared to other channels, but the results in B2B verticals were usually enough to warrant putting up with it. So it's surprising it was only pulling in around $100mm. But then, their self-service component didn't allow for accessing all of their inventory, and none of my clients wanted to go in with the commitments necessary for the high-touch placements. So that may have dampened demand a good bit.
That said, Sales Navigator (and premium subscriptions) is an equally small portion of revenue. 65% of their money came from their "talent solutions" recruiting features.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/120214/how-does-lin...
[2] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/313837/micros...
How times have changed. It wasn't long ago that many of us (myself included) were saying virtually the same thing about Microsoft's product.
Including people at the top running things. Interesting (to me) how the sales guy CEO's having been changed led the companies in different directions afterwards.
A software company (MS) and a hardware company (Apple) definitely make different choices!
The comparison was between MS in the 90s and Apple now, as I understood it. At the time they might have been making peripherals, maybe? But not computers.
I remember seeing news reports about the Black Friday-esque runs on stores at midnight the day of the Windows 95 release (while I was sitting smug at home because we had been running prerelease builds at home for months due to my dad's software company being a member of MSDN [or whatever the equivalent was at the time]).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)#Microsoft
You mean they don't put ads in the windows home menu or hundred of spywares in the OS ?
Or that they don't have ads in bings, skype or outlook ?
> Apple's bad rep is probably due to high pricing, tech lock-in, horrible apple store experience, bad behavior regarding right-to-repair, pretty bad software overall.
Or maybe you mean they don't lock in with proprietary formats, avoiding to publish the specs and when they then do don't follow it like with Office ? Hopefully this has been compensated by the fantastic Windows Update experience and good behavior.
I'm not an FB, Apple or Google fan. In fact I don't have an FB account, I voluntarily don't buy Apple products and refused a job interview with Google.
But let's not forget the numerous bad deeds of MS. That's how we never solve the problems we have: we let people misbehave and after a while, they are all forgiven. It's the same with politics, bad bosses, abusive spouses, etc.
Don't let people forget.
MS has been repeatedly caught lying, cheating, insulting and corrupting.
Can I slap you if I give a treat to a puppy later ? Because being pro-microsoft now that their PR is more human and their actions more positive looks pretty much like that.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they make TypeScript and VSCode. But they need 20 years of being a good boy to compensate for what they did. More if we want to take in consideration they became incredibly rich doing it.
Satya is drastically changing the culture and with it the business. I get there are people out there that will always have an ax to grind (you seem to be one of those) but if you wait 20 years to trust a business again, you'll be left behind with any improvements or optimizations that happen in the meantime.
If Microsoft sustains its direction for a few more years at most, given the pace at which the industry they are in evolves, the legacy practices they had won't much matter.
If it's ok to accumulate immense wealth and power by misbehaving for 20 years, and just with switching a head and orienting PR, it's all forgiven, then why not keep doing it ?
All of you are of course free to remain pissed off at anyone or anything you want. Just be mindful of why you're mad, and make sure once in a while that it's still worth being angry about.
Second, anonymous telemetry is not spyware.
If it was simply a matter of doing a bunch of cleanup one, I'd get over it. But between buggy, user-unfriendly update features and instantly-out-of-date instructions on what I need to turn off, it's uncomfortably reminiscent of Android's issues.
On this note: if you opt-out of telemetry, don't complain when your power-user features stop being catered to.
I think there is plenty of room for legitimate disagreement on this point so long as it's not optional and/or fully disclosed.
It has tried to replace win32 many times creating a mess for developers. How do silverlight experts feel ?
Recently, Microsoft has changed. visual studio code is excellent and OSS. WSL is getting very good.
There has been a fair amount of negative press, this is filtering to 'normal' people, not just Lewis rossman's viewers
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/10/11/apple-narrows-ios...
I really hate Windows 10 automatically turning off all my privacy setting each time it updates, and re-installing ads for candy crush and other junk on my start menu after I'd explicitly removed it. Windows 10 tracks damn near everything you do and sends it back to Microsoft.
http://go/wiki/Wine_(software)#Other_versions_of_Wine
However, and this is big to me, Microsoft doesn't pretend that Windows 10 isn't doing what it's doing. That means, even though I don't consider Windows suitable for my own use, that doesn't reduce the amount of trust I have in them as a company.
Care to elaborate? I've never had a negative experience making purchases or getting devices repaired at the Apple store.
Compared to HTC, which left me without my brand new phone for two months while they shipped my $800 One M8 back and forth with a different defect every time it came back to me.
B) No they are not winning.
C) Fuck you shill.
I would have thought they are a dying company just two years ago and today I have a completely opposite outlook of them.
Then, when you have to ask for help, you get thrown into a tilt-a-whirl of awful, near-nonsensical customer support and it takes an act of Congress and God to get escalated to somebody who 1) speaks English clearly and with enough care as to be understood, and 2) understands the problem at hand. (And, not or.)
Granted, I'm probably not their target market. I don't want a more expensive datacenter in The Cloud(tm) so I'm not grateful for incremental improvements over racking servers. But it's a really unpleasant experience compared to either Amazon or Google and I'm mystified as to how it can be so cumulatively bad.
GCP is quickly becoming my favorite. The UI/UX of the web console is light years ahead of either AWS or Azure. The GCP documentation is a breath of fresh air. I'm stuck with AWS as my primary provider for now, but for new projects the bias is GCP. Most of the services I have used on GCP are well documented and easy to get around. Compare this to the AWS experience where documentation is often non-existent or out of date or the product itself just feels incomplete and broken.
I've found that some areas of the GCP docs are fantastic and some are appallingly bad. Two examples I dealt with last week that I particularly hated were trying to find a good resource on unit testing parts of a Cloud Dataflow and how examply to access the private key for a service account on Appengine Standard. (The switch from Java 7 to 8 really fucked this up).
There seem to be two versions of a LOT of Google's APIs and it's often not clear which one is the correct one to use.
Another annoying issue is that I'll be looking at the Java documentation on something and will suddenly be told to run some Python commands (which mean installing python and PIP and a bunch of other stuff) just to get some Java thing working.
But, all this aside, I agree it's miles better than the last time I looked at Azure.
I signed up, started to look around, maybe a test table and that was it. It was end of the day. Next day, account deleted for breaking the TOS.
Tried to contact support, few days later, got a reply saying I had broken the TOS. Yes I know. But how? What did I do? You broke the rules. No I didn't. I am from the EU (personal details / bank etc) but live abroad, this sometimes causes issues when I say I am from a country that doesn't match my IP so I ask if this was the issue ? No reply, I was just blanked after that.
But all of my experiences (up through "startup" size), and virtually all the stories I hear from below "major corporation", are terrible. Endless compatibility issues, awful interfaces, flatly inaccurate documentation, and support which is more time-consuming than GCP's approach of "buzz off" but equally unhelpful.
I work at what has been all-in Windows-.Net-Office enterprise, and despite an existing investment in Azure AD that we’re staying with for now, the experience with trying to work with Azure has been such that our comprehensive cloud transition effort is centered around AWS (which seems like it is going to have a side effect of making us less of a Windows and .NET shop, as well.)
I do not. I imagine that there is a point at which the decision-makers and the Azure sales team can have many lunches and have many Serious Conversations.
The further away purchase power is from implementation responsibility, the more likely one is to wind up hands-on with something as immediately-obviously deficient as Azure.
Microsoft still has legacy weirdness all over the place. It's 2019 and it still feels like nobody from Windows talks to anyone in Office, and no one in software talks to anyone doing hardware. And Microsoft botches acquisitions (Skype is still a tire fire, similar for LinkedIn). But generally, the quality of Microsoft products is good, despite their failings.
Microsoft consumer support is pretty poor. But I basically never need to use it, and some of competition is so much worse, that Microsoft look good in comparison. (Have a problem with anything Google, for example, and Microsoft Support suddenly looks like mana from heaven).
Not all of them. They've done well with Mojang.
I had an annoying problem last weekend trying to get ray tracing enabled in a video game. After searching around I found out that a my graphics driver doesn't auto update and the "windows is up to date" message is a lie. Turns out I was on win10-1803 instead of 1809 and had to download a separate *.exe to upgrade. These types of problems don't happen with a modern (sane) package manager.
There's also a few other problems with windows that stop me from thinking it's great: no pseudoterminal, rigid window manager, registry nightmares, possibly more.
It does, graphics drivers do auto-update (unless you've manually disabled it on your system).
They just update slowly, you'll get the latest long-term driver from your device manufacturer / OEM, -- you won't instantly get things like "nVidia Game Ready Drivers, now with experimental ray-tracing" that come out every two weeks or so.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-l...
Then I tried following the examples of the training, start a small, free VM and do some stuff, but it won't let me, because the web interface was completely broken, no matter which browser I used. I even tried using that damn Edge on a W10 VM.
Yeah, MS might not have been the target of a lot of backlash recently, but their products are still as awful as ever.
I had an MVP in azure web services. I had 20 users in my "beta" phase that were using the product and giving me feedback.
One day, I got a message that I need to update my billing method. Strange, I was using mostly free tier with one paid component and the card on file was good til 2022, but ok. I put in another card because maybe there's something wrong with the system.
The next day I get a call that the site isn't working from one of my beta users. I log in and all of my azure resources are gone.
I immediately try to reach out to azure support via various mechanisms (their support chat, email, twitter, etc). Funny enough, twitter is always the fastest way to get support. Just write that something bad happened and tag their product, and you get someone who can communicate. However, they just redirected me to their support channel.
Two days go by and I get a template email response. I have an email chain going back and forth over the week to try and get the resources restored.
In the end, they tell me that not only will they be unable to restore my resources (a production database. the backups were all "gone" because the resource didn't exist anymore), but that I had to create a new azure account to use any services because of how screwed up my account got.
I tried escalating, but received the same response.
Now I just go with AWS. I'd even go with google as long as they don't delete my production database.
I've previous experience as a Devops engineer for a Large company which at the time was one of the larger customers of Azure (as in they'd put our company on the marketing materials). Support was obviously better when we could get a turn around time of <1 day to talk to an engineer that worked on a piece of infrastructure. Still wasn't a pleasant experience.
It's really unfortunate, all of this. I know that there are so many teams that are putting out great products, but their cloud approach is awful. _Some_ of the offerings are actually pretty nice, but combined with UI churn, the worst support (I'd rather take googles non-existent support as long as my data doesn't get deleted) of all cloud providers (IME) and empty apologies on the internet (you can say you're sorry, but I don't believe you unless you act on the mistake), I don't see myself going back anytime soon.
In my case, I was paying for the database and the object storage, both of which had their contents (db data and backups) lost.
As a habitual Microsoft hater who spent most of the 90s and early 2000s being constitutionally incapable of writing the company name without a $, yes I have.
They still suffer from an appalling lack of taste and poor design sensibilities, but their enterprise level products and services are top notch. And I'm developing a new appreciation for a business model that involves transparently charging me a known price in exchange for a known service. They could still get better at that though. They still have too many enterprise clients over a barrel.
Microsoft has huge swaths of critical legacy systems held hostage. Governments, etc. How many of your tax dollars go to Microsoft? How much of their government influence is due to superiority of product versus lock-in, etc?
Bull shit
I've been personally burned over and over and over again by Microsoft "embracing openness" and I will never trust them again on this point.
Most of us know internet opinions behave in this manner where you mostly get to hear discontent, but it's still fascinating to experience it first hand.
(I'm not in any way criticizing the replies to my post, which have been diligently written with real life examples and definitely given me some things to think about)
And the lack of downvotes can be explained by another phenomenon - there is no incentive for some to downvote a comment like yours at this point, because nearly all replies are negative! If a comment thread surfaces some bad things about someone you don't like, and it becomes popular, you actually want it to become more popular isn't it?
There may be another factor as well. I don't downvote comments based on whether or not I agree with them (if I disagree enough to want to express that, I just make my own comment saying so). I downvote comments if I feel that they were egregious in some way (overly combative, insulting, nonsensical, etc.)
I may be the only one who votes like this, though.
I thought that the subcomments listing out experiences was valuable to me. I would be conflicted on downvoting your comment though, because it would hide the subcomments that I do feel are valuable to have visible.
To clarify, I don't think you wrote anything off topic or bad for discussion (which is why I would downvote something). Even though we have different perspectives, I feel both are valuable to have a comprehensive view.
My boss (CTO) once remarked - "we never hear from or about Patrice, she must be doing a fantastic job!"
Point being, when things work, it is rare that people talk about it (like my boss), they just take it for granted. When things don't work though, that is a different story.
I suppose it is just human nature.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There are three areas I'd disagree with you though.
The first is Microsoft's Surface line of tablets and laptops. I literally cannot find a kind word to say about the (very expensive) Surface Book devices we bought en masse about 18 months ago. They are awful[1] and we are already starting to phase them out as a result. It makes no sense because Microsoft can clearly do hardware well: for example, I have no complaints about my Xbox One X - it's all round great.
The second may substantially be connected to the first, and that's Windows 10. I increasingly hate using it because I find it slow, finicky, and unresponsive/a serious resource hog. So much of the time my laptop is running hot and draining its battery because Windows is doing something or other not related to what I'm working on.
The third is Microsoft Teams. The functionality it offers is good and, for VOIP and video calls, it's probably second only to Zoom so does get a thumbs up from me there. However, it's painfully slow to switch views, doesn't support multiple windows (so you can't sensibly look at chat and wiki at the same time), takes an age to start up, and behaves like an absolute moron when it comes to switching networks or losing and regaining network connectivity (usually requires a restart of the app).
[1] Underpowered, overpriced, poor battery life, run very hot, ropey WiFi, poor speakers that are insufficiently loud, crappy trackpad, only a single display port built in, poorly designed/laid out ports, unreliable (and often weirdly slow) charging, drains battery within 12 - 18 hours whilst asleep, I could go on (and on). In short: DO NOT BUY UNLESS YOU HATE YOURSELF!
I do have the original, so I suppose if you got the newer ones things may have changed, but... heat is high but not problematically so, wifi works without noticeable issues, trackpad works fine. I really can't figure out what you're talking about with the ports - 2 usb + sd card reader on one side, charger + mini display port on the other, all bog standard. Not a spectacular selection, but not poor design/layout from my experience.
Charging... the cable can have issues, especially with bending near the connection, but charging itself has always been fine (assuming no cable issues).
Battery life is spectacular when you set it to focus on that, and performance is good when you aim for that. I've never really liked 'balanced' settings, because then it's either not powerful enough (usually games, I think I've needed it in perf mode for data processing once or twice) or chewing through too much battery for what I'm doing (programming while on the go is not particularly demanding, but I want time, so I set it up for battery life). I do rarely use it without the base, because the battery life then is poor - being able to connect it backwards is very nice for managing that in some cases, but makes it quite heavy for handheld use.
Possibly connected, my experience with Windows 10 is great on my Surface Book, but it takes forever to boot on my desktop (with an admittedly rather old processor/hdd). Windows defender, on the other hand, is definitely bloated and can be a pain to keep under control if I haven't used the Book for a while.
Windows' changes have been pretty bad in terms of invasiveness since Windows 8/10. I just really don't like several bits of it. I think LSW is pretty nice, but iirc SystemD support is probably over a year off still, and docker/podman still a ways off. Windows vs Linux containers and Docker has seriously muddied the waters so to speak.
MS, like most corporations isn't a single entity... there's various child entities with some areas of cooperation between them. I'm glad that Windows no longer steers the ship and appreciate a lot of the efforts I've seen. Open tooling and platforms in particular. I love VS Code, the Azure Data Studio (or whatever it's called) is nice and progressing for cross-platform. I do think its' weird that Teams is the odd man out as an electron app from MS without a proper Linux release. Moving Edge to blink/chromium is a good move overall.
I'm anywhere from luke warm to positive on MS in general. That said, it isn't generally my first choice for a lot of things (outside o365). I'm often frustrated with working in Windows at work after about 6 years working outside windows. I use bash (from git) with windows, and there's quirks, but less than with LSW.
I really want them to succeed as I think with the current leadership and direction a better MS means better options and tools for all. I wish they'd redouble their efforts on linux support for everything around Office and Teams though. I'd also like to be able to build/deploy a damned SQL project without windows too.
In 2 years, by my own estimation, it will be a very different world running Windows as a developer and at that point it may become my favorite environment for building Linux apps of all things. MS/Windows progresses while Mac stagnates and alienates its creative/development/pro users more and more.
Let's say 200 people wanted to vote on your post. 100 people with > 500 karma vote 45% up 55% down ending up with -10 karma total. 100 people with < 500 karma vote 45% up but the other 55% can't downvote = 35 total upvotes.
That said, I avoid Microsoft products because I don't like what they do and what their intentions are.
The difference between my attitude toward Microsoft and (for example) Facebook is that I make my decisions about Microsoft based on their products and services. I make my decisions about Facebook, etc., based on the fact that I don't trust them even a little.
This means that Microsoft has the advantage -- if they cared whether or not I am on board with them (and they have no reason to), they could change my mind very quickly by altering their products.
Facebook, etc., could not affect my attitude in the same way, as my main problem with them is that they are entirely untrustworthy.
For example, I was looking for some documentation on how to tune the CLR, and performance tips for writing C# in general. In Java there are lots of books on the topic, and I know of some blogs on the JVM internals, but for .Net all I could find was one small (selfpublished?) book. I'm not sure it would be fair for me to judge the state of the blogs and online resources, but at least I did not find what I was looking for at the time.
Similarly, I had to try some stuff with Service Fabric, and it felt more or less impossible to get it working with the publicly available documentation. I'm really not sure how they think one is supposed to learn how to use that technology.
Lastly I've been dealing with shipping and releasing natively compiled binaries for Windows etc, and here I've found online resources, but mostly unofficial ones. This whole area seems rather hairy and it feels a bit scary to rely on some random blogpost or stackoverflow answers for what (not) to do.
In general from what I've seen is that the Microsoft documentation is very much How-To focused. But there is often a lack for more comprehensive documentation like a man page, and in particular I've found it hard to get "sharp" information, like what are the exact guarantees for this thing.
The underdog has to do better to compete.
https://www.adweek.com/creativity/how-avis-brilliantly-pione...
I read this initially as a red flag as it looks like they are coupling Azure with Windows/VS development. A better indication of how serious they are in creating an open platform would be how magical the experience is for people not using MS blessed tools.
I've been programming for living for 20 years now, did/doing various stuff including mobile, embedded, videogames incl. console, desktop, servers, a bit of web. In my experience, debuggers only work well on microsoft platforms.
Integration is simple on surface, press F5 and it will launch with debugger. Implementation of that can be very complex, launching may involve complicated deployment (over network, USB or worse), starting virtual machines, connecting multiple TCP streams using weird protocol each, and so on.
It works consistently for MS platforms, even very old ones like WinCE. It's broken consistently for the rest of them, even Android or iOS which have larger install base than Windows.
> companies untouched by scandal — including Microsoft — > prospered in the eyes of consumers
Except that Amazon, which has gotten a bit of a black eye later (HQ2 + worker treatment + antitrust), has stayed steady near the very top of the cited poll. Apple, which has had few such problems, has sunk from near the top to #32. When you only have eight samples to begin with, and two strongly contradict your theory, your theory sucks. Microsoft in particular is doing relatively well for a variety of reasons, but not because of this one.
Why exactly wouldn't Microsoft's newfound good reputation be included among those reasons? Your rebuttal would be just as unfounded as the theory you are dismissing. Perhaps it's not as determinant a factor as the author makes it out to be, but discarding it altogether doesn't look reasonable to me.
True enough, but that doesn't validate the higher-profile original either. Seems a bit "well actually" TBH.
You're right, it doesn't. I never said that, either.
>Seems a bit "well actually" TBH
I'm sorry if it came across that way, really. I like to be as precise as I can with everything I say, so it just came out that way naturally. Actually, one of the first replies I got here (not too long ago) was a similar kind of comment to the one we are discussing now. At first, my reaction was negative, as in "this guy is just trying to one-up me by nitpicking my comment"; then, I realized it was an opportunity to start to make myself as clear as possible whenever I wrote any other comments. Anyhow, I hope you can understand where I'm coming from.
Amazon hasn't been involved in any large privacy-related scandals.
I'm not a social scientist, but that seems.. low? And while I'm sure the initial call list was demographically weighted, apparently they'd ask each respondent to talk about two companies they were more familiar with from the list of 100. That doesn't sound like the ~300 people rating each company had any proper demographic weighting at all.
Full report: https://theharrispoll.com/HarrisPoll_Axios_MostVisible_2019....
I also had a Windows RT tablet. It was pretty good, but I wish MS hadn't nerfed it. If I could have used a browser other than IE I would have likely bought another one when the SSD failed.
Microsoft has a much smaller ad business with Bing (although still 3x bigger than Twitter) so of course they don't get the same amount of backlash because of it. Apple is in a similar position.
Google had a big lead on Microsoft with their web based 'office like' products, but they just could not get the paying business customer.
Microsoft can see what Google is doing, quickly push out their 'Office 365' clone and without much effort find they have quickly become the biggest player in that field.
I think Google would have easily won that game it they could just convinced business they where more than just an advertising company.
I get the impression business is more than happy giving their data to Microsoft, while also paying for that privilege where as they are not so sure about trusting their data with Google.
It isn't due to a lack of offerings. There are plenty of provides that will happily do so. Anyone who wants to can buy email from Google today! Yet in the face of this the vast majority of users choose not to pay for email.
My current operating hypothesis is that the vast majority of ordinary users value their privacy right up to the point where they have to put a price on it. At which point a handful of nerds (like us!) are willing to pay, but most people happily trade their privacy for services instead of involving money.
With that said, might this be viewed as a distinction without a difference? If the provider puts a price on their service, the consumer evaluating this price must decide if they find it acceptable. This is necessarily going to involve some amount of implicitly calculating their price for the service, isn't it?
I'm not sure what you mean by "buy email from google today." I don't want to "buy email," I want to pay them to not serve ads or track me when I use their services. That includes far more than email, I'm talking about the whole ecosystem like Android, Maps, Search and so on. Surely $120/year from me is worth far more than they're getting in ads, right? I dunno.
I can also see the criticisms now: "privacy isn't a luxury only for rich people!".
But if you do so, does that mean that Google won't track you? Even if Google claims they won't, can you trust them?
Google pushing all of their APIs to force you to sign up a GCS account has also rubbed me the wrong way.
How could Google, come distant 3rd in the cloud infrastructure race. They were the ones that obsessed about milliseconds. They ran YouTube and Gmail and all the other services reliably, at massive scale. Due respect to Amazon's dogfooding, but Amazon never released novel internet applications at anything like the volume that Google did.
Google have generally displayed recurring problems getting products to real maturity, and making money from them. For all the high profile stuff that they bought or built over the years... There is still only one real revenue source.
It may be something like the "oil curse." It's hard to compete with search/ads on revenue.
Because MS utilized their vendor-locked(office, MS SQL Server, Windows, .NET, etc) user-base, which Google didn't have.
The selectivity also stinks. Comcast, a serial worst company winner infamous for poor service is left unmentioned while social media somehow qualifies as "a monopoly" and the equivalent of Store Brands in Amazon is somehow monopoly abuse?
For LA they were going wannabe terrorists about gentrification back in the the late 90s with the Yuppie Eradication Project - it seems nobody was sympathetic to them and who can blame them? I think most would rather have the most obnoxious yuppie stereotype than those idiot self-righteous vandals.
Gentrification seems to be a noisy minority issue - I hear far most people who would want gentrification.
Which I suppose points to another cultural divide. To suburbanites and even other major cities they look like huge spoiled brats - conplaining about things other areas would kill for, and already offer more for far less. I am aware of differing situations and needs but it seems that someone isn't being reasonable.
It does tend to affect minorities more. See Inglewood and Boyle Heights for recent examples.
Expensive gelato and coffee shops are not things these communities “would kill for”.
I understand your point, but it does seem quite tone deaf.
It’s not about “annoying yuppies” it’s about family businesses and lifetime-long residents being pushed out due to rent increases.
Personally, I made money for years using Microsoft products, find Amazon quite useful (living in small towns) and just see Google as irritating. But then, if the internet were reduced to USENET, email, and maybe a curated list of serious websites like online banking, I'd be fine with it, and probably better off in some ways.
You're not alone in this thinking. The vast bulk of the Web is of marginal benefit, or harmful, and I think in the end it's going to contribute to taking us (humanity) to a very, very bad place.
My too, but that doesn't mean that Microsoft products are appropriate or desirable for me for personal use.
https://theharrispoll.com/axios-harrispoll-100/
Facebook's score (58) is basically in the dumpster category, a notch behind Comcast (61.4), Bank of America (60.9), and Goldman Sachs (60), though still several notches ahead Trump Org (50.1), Philipp Morris (49.4), and the US government (48.6).
The other tech giants are within a few points of each other: Amazon gets 82.3, Microsoft 79.7, Netflix 77.3, Apple 76.4, and Google 75.4. Amazon is in the same category as Disney. The other 4 are comparable to the likes of Coca Cola, Procter and Gamble, Unilever, Nike, etc.
They obviously have a moat, a very literal network effect. But, FB also has lots of competition (more than google, amzn, & msft anyway) and the type of product that should be substitutable.. with some combination of twitter-wechat-HN-or-whatnot. Social network, seems, at least to me, like something that lends to rising and waning popularity. They're not embedded in businesses or hard to turn off in any way.
It just seems that negative user opinion of FB should be a bigger deal than it would be for amazon of msft.
I dunno how to square this circle.
The public image is a bunch of people who want them to be bad, not actual consumers. The media has narratives it drives and a bunch of nerds here hate them for legitimate reasons. The average consumer does not care and never will.
[1] https://theharrispoll.com/axios-harrispoll-100/#2019-ranking...
Just this year Microsoft's Outlook service had a massive breach, leaking ~800 million passwords. Their flagship product, Windows 10, is infamous for randomly blocking people from working. The recent October automatic update even went ahead and just deleted users' files. Remembebr Windows Phones? Remember Bing? MSN is still live... so I guess it outlasted Google Plus.
I guess since its efforts in social media are a whisper of a joke, that by default they're "winning" ? More likely it's just Axios being Axios.
meanwhile .. https://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/, http://www.millwardbrown.com/brandz/rankings-and-reports/top..., and any other extant brand ranking shows Microsoft pretty far from the top
IE11 was released after the relevant features were in common use in the Javascript community, but Microsoft was still in its "the web is better with our proprietary extensions, trust us" mode so they aren't in IE11.
They can't upgrade their browser because IE11 is the last browser version Microsoft supports on their Microsoft operating system, because they want users to upgrade.
They can't use an alternative browser because they're in a security-sensitive industry with policies written in the Old Days when running third-party software was marketed as "dangerous", including by Microsoft.
They don't want to upgrade operating systems because that means a huge software spend to Microsoft, plus migrating all their other software, POS hardware, etc.
The point being, none of these are things Microsoft is doing today. But they're all decisions they made in the past, and the consequences of those decisions are still making people's jobs harder.
Maybe you need to look at whoever locked said computers down to ONLY support IE? Chrome and Firefox are both better options at this point. It really isn't MS's fault that an organization can't be bothered to update their software for what, 4 years now?
For IE11 (and 10 and Edge in either direction around it), Microsoft was firmly stuck in a "WebKit/Blink treadmill" where they had to run twice as fast to try to keep up and almost succeeded (until they gave up recently, RIP EdgeHTML).
Most of rest of these complaints sound like your customers should stop hitting themselves in the face.