Linux, yes. Unfortunately, Android seems to be stepping away from "Linux" proper and is becoming its own beast. (OpenBSD and FreeBSD are closer in form and function than Debian Linux and Android).
Chrome? Gmail? Maybe. Google however is pushing far more than Microsoft has as far as dropping my anonymity from Youtube, pushing me into their Google+ features and making me share sign-in information across Chrome sessions. I'd say its a Tie between Microsoft / Google here, both want me in their cloud services.
Although, Outlook.com works a hell of a lot better on Android than Gmail / Google Calendar works on Windows8. So from a usability point of view, Google is beginning to lose it in their anti-microsoft wars. I don't like getting caught up in the middle of their politics. So that's my tiebreaker: Microsoft's calendar platform is supported in more platforms than Google Calendar.
Google Docs vs Microsoft Office? That one is easy. One of them runs on my computer, and the other one is untrustworthy, in the cloud. Do I really trust Google's servers over my own computer? Will Google protect the privacy of my documents from prying eyes?
Nothing beats cold storage on my own computer, Microsoft Office gives me that. Open Office vs Microsoft Office is another story of course... but Open Office is pretty terrible IMO.
Open Office is pretty bad in my experience. Instead... its about Abiword and Gnumeric. Unfortunately, there is no adequate replacement for OneNote and Powerpoint, so I'll keep using those.
All android needs are sync adapters for your own mail/calendar/whatever service running on your own hardware. There is no need to discard entire platform just because you don't like Google cloud services.
Most people won't bother running their own servers though.
I was quite supportive of Meego, although my enthusiasm has dampered quite a lot with Tizen. There are only so many failures that one can put up with...
>Unfortunately, Android seems to be stepping away from "Linux" proper and is becoming its own beast. (OpenBSD and FreeBSD are closer in form and function than Debian Linux and Android).
You realize that Linux is just a kernel?
OpenBSD and FreeBSD are both server/desktop operating systems, meanwhile Debian Linux and Android are desktop and mobile OS'es respectively, your comparison is pretty worthless.
A similar comparison to Debian Linux with Android would be FreeBSD with iOS.
This is a shockingly honest and open assessment of Microsoft's PR from someone who actually works at the company. I think the underlying notion is spot-on, and -- as someone who doesn't bear any particular ill will towards Microsoft besides the travesty that is Excel for Mac -- its interesting to see the seeds being sown of irrational Google hatred.
Every time I have to suffer through the archaic UI of Word and enjoy late 1990s performance in the mid 2010s, I am reminded that my Pappy is still dead, even though MS could have made amends. They haven't. And in addition to my Pappy there's a whole other cast of characters that are dead, and they've saddled the entire world with mediocre-to-bad computing experiences. No amends for that either. Perhaps can't make amends, because they are themselves too stuck in the past, unwilling to fix their ways or legacy programs.
The world of computing could have been and would be today a better place if they hadn't dominated through business practices, but instead dominated with products.
Yes. Microsoft Word killed your pappy. Best argument ever.
That is absolutely weak man. If you don't like Word, then don't use it. There are plenty of alternatives. TeX, LaTeX, Abiword, Open Office, Wordpress...
I kid you not, I submitted every single college paper manually typeset in TeX / LaTeX document, created using Vim + Makefiles I hand crafted. Graphs were generated in GnuPlot, maybe R if it were statistics related. Gnumeric was my spreadsheets program, and occasionally I'd use Abiword for times when I needed a more classic "double-spaced 500-word" homework assignment.
Exactly. I use LaTeX for almost everything that most people use Word or Powerpoint for. Yes, with vim and makefiles. There is no matching my productivity there in a word processor.
And I use Gnumeric (and assume you do too) because of the latex export function.
If Microsoft wants my business back, having really good LaTeX export from every MS Office program would be the place to start, along with native Linux clients.
I use Gnumeric because its one of the most reliable spreadsheet programs on Linux. Its simply a high quality piece of work, and I've had no issues with it.
MS Word however, will forever be incompatible with the notions of LaTeX. It solves a different problem than LaTeX anyway. An export tool would be nice though.
Why would they? Latex is garbage to 90% of the normal human beings they're trying to sell to. I finally learned it for a comp models class a year or two ago and I have no intentions of ever touching it again. I use Libre Office now but given all the incompatibilities with the rest of the world, I'd use Word if it worked on Linux.
Yes, you used LaTeX in school. Best argument ever.
That is absolutely weak man. If you live out in the real world, there aren't plenty of alternatives.
I kid you not, I keep buying MS Word, despite hating it passionately, because it's the only word processing document format that we can share in common with business partners, our legal counsel, accounting, etc.
I live in the real world. I use the tools I need to communicate with who I need.
When a customer asks for a Word Document, I deliver a Word Document. When a customer asks for a 200-page print-out, I deliver it however the hell I feel like it. I'll deliver it using InDesign if I believe its the best tool for the job.
Here's why Microsoft Office is used. Because it works. Sticking with a standard office font works across Mac, Windows, and yes, even Linux (thanks to Crosstools). Abiword and OpenOffice are much better at reading Microsoft Office documents than they are at reading each other.
But when it comes down to beautiful typesetting, semantic markup and the like? LaTeX is quite hard to beat.
When it comes to opening up a 25 year old document and it still looking exactly like how it was typeset in Word 95? Well... Microsoft actually has accomplished that quite decently. Tell me, does Libre Office support the StarWord format as well as Word 2013 supports a Word95 document?
On the other hand, LaTeX supports documents from the 80s quite well, ditto with TeX.
Word changes its layout if you plug a different printer in, never mind open documents from 1995. It was never designed to keep a consistent layout and it fails miserably in practice.
Fair point. PDFs (and TeX's DVI format) are better for that, but PDFs aren't very editable. Microsoft XPS should be used now for long-term read-only document storage.
Nonetheless, its how Word is used today. I can't think of many tools with a beginner-friendly UI that can do what Word can do.
Bah, this is unfair to put on Word. Every word processor will do the same, if the default margins, or the margins set by the user fall outside the ability of the printer vis-a-vis printable page area.
Blaming Word because some cheap printer isn't able to use as much of the page as something else is shooting the messenger. And Word is word processing software. It attempts to do the most logical thing - reflows the document to fit within usable margins. If you need absolute page layout control, use a tool devised for that purpose, like InDesign. To not, and complain, is to complain that HTML and web-browsers can't be relied on with certainty for pixel perfect display.
> That is absolutely weak man. If you don't like Word, then don't use it. There are plenty of alternatives. TeX, LaTeX, Abiword, Open Office, Wordpress...
I'm not sure what Wordpress is doing in the list, but the fact is that dealing with Word documents can be pretty much unavoidable (depending on where you work), and they don't always open correctly in Open Office.
Many companies are using Wordpress where MS Word documents were once used before. Giant word documents with cross references that documented procedures are instead replaced by Blogs and Wikis.
Best part about Wordpress / Wikis, is that you get open collaboration, instant publishing, RSS, Emails, and everything. Its the perfect publishing platform.
On the other hand, a number of businesses still pass around Word Documents like the internet hasn't been invented yet. Tell me this, which is easier to collaborate on. A Group-Blog hosted on Wordpress? Or the 20 copies of a Word document that your office is passing around by email?
Enterprise wikis are where documents go to die. Enterprise wikis are 'WORN' - write once, read never. (And edit/refactor even less often than never.)
If I want to know what the spec was six months ago before someone changed it, I'll go check the wiki.
There's little motivation to keep them up-to-date. They are usually sold to companies on the basis of feature lists rather than getting the simple shit right. I can't edit Confluence in text/plain any more.
I'm a Wikipedia admin. We actually know how to use a wiki and there's at least some motivation to make shit presentable because even minor topics are going to have a couple hundred readers each month. There's no such motivation in enterprise wiki-land. I can write a long and detailed document, put it up on the wiki and people still won't read it.
However... its no worse than Word documents rotting away for 10+ years.
Enterprise Wikis, while the project is active, are usually kept up to date decently. When the projects die down a bit and enters "maintenance mode", thats when the real trouble begins.
But the update problem happens exactly the same with Word Documents and classical media.
Also, to ing hell with Confluence. Piece of . But its still easier than emailing Word Documents to everyone and getting lost between the versions.
> On the other hand, a number of businesses still pass around Word Documents like the internet hasn't been invented yet. Tell me this, which is easier to collaborate on. A Group-Blog hosted on Wordpress? Or the 20 copies of a Word document that your office is passing around by email?
You won't find in me a staunch defender of collaboration via Word documents (or of Word in general). However, the fact that Wordpress and Word share a relatively small use case doesn't mean Wordpress is a viable Word replacement, otherwise I'd point out that you could just as well setup a private Git repo and collaborate that way.
I'm sorry, but I've just noticed that "If you don't like [Microsoft product], don't use it" is an awfully frequent argument of pro-MS people. An awfully weak argument, too. (Edit: because, you know, sometimes there just isn't a way to avoid using an MS product).
Sure there is. Just don't use it if you don't want to.
Again, use Tex, use LaTex. Google Docs (although I really dislike the cloud). Make .rtf files in WordPerfect if you really want to avoid Word.
I guarantee you, building RTF files is just about the most cross-platform thing you can do. Its supported by damn near everyone, Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice, Abiword.
I mean, have you even tried not using a Microsoft Product? Its a hell of a lot easier than you're making it out to be.
How exactly is any of what you mentioned going to help me when I'm being sent an OOXML file (because I work in a business where sharing documents among companies is common)? It won't or it will be partially broken. Yes, I have tried. (and that's just office, don't even try to suggest that avoiding using Windows is easy)
My 9-to-5 work computer is actually a Red Hat machine. So I think I know what I'm talking about. I release .rtf files when I can so that it can be friendly on most platforms.
As for document writing... I've mentions practical alternatives already. WHY are they sending you an OOXML file? Is it for collaboration? In which point, a Wiki is more than suitable as a replacement. Are they sending it for final consumption? A PDF file is good for documents where the layout must be faithfully preserved.
If you're documenting code and leaving the documentation in an SVN server, .doc documents are treated as binary and don't really get revision editing you'd like. Its better to document using Doxygen (which is much akin to HTML) than .doc in many cases.
Sure, let me just change the habits in hundreds of companies in the EU, including not very tech-savvy people. Brilliant idea.
I would have moved to some other OS if it wasn't for the Office issue and the fact that huge number of games is under DirectX.
> Is Microsoft circa 2014 worse than Google, Apple, or Facebook? We're not nearly as organized as we'd need to be to be as evil as you might think we are.
Microsoft is not any worse than the other companies. They are all at the same terrible level.
But Microsoft became a bit better over the last years, I would say.
I usually think of a business model whereby a company goes around and tells others "pay me for patent X or I'll sue you" as extortion. And shockingly enough, that's part of the modern, saintly Microsoft business model. Not to mention the suspicious fast-tracking of the word document standard.
Another thing is trust. Why would you trust an organization which still had at least a famous C-level executive which executed a number of business strategies you have a problem with? Why would you trust an organization run by Steve Ballmer? Now, maybe new management will turn Microsoft around, but it has done enough dodgy things over the years that yes, it will have to "bend over backwards" for a long time before I trust it again.
I'll add that on the other hand, I have the utmost respect for Microsoft Research, which keeps churning out amazing results. I just wish it was called something else. I think I'd like the idea of a chartered research establishment, like the BBC, with a secure amount of public EU money, focusing on the future of computing, and not scrounging for grants.
When you stop shaking down your competitors with software patents, let me know. Until then, your talk about openness is just talk. Extracting settlements from android OEMs over FAT patents is contrary to all the values you've mentioned in this post.
I hope it is on Satya's list. I have several other items on my wishlist too such as fixing the OOXML fiasco. I just realized that Office for Windows don't use the "Open XML" term that much inside the software.
Unfortunately, that part of the company is still part of your company. And it's a big, visible part. Because of MS's transgressions in the past, you don't get the benefit of the doubt from younger devs. Because you're still behaving like jerks with patents, younger devs know that the company hasn't changed.
Microsoft is still extracting software patent royalties from android OEMs this very minute - that's not anyone's pappy, and it's not a vendor overreaching. It's a calculated, evil decision by the highest levels of management.
That's 20 years ago. And for bundling a browser
in the operating system that couldn't be uninstalled
or easily replaced? Sure, no operating systems do that
in 2014. I wonder if I can swap out Chrome from Chrome
OS or Mobile Safari in iOS. Point is, it's common now.
I lived through this time "hating" Microsoft for some of the stuff it was doing then, and it's probably well past time to bury those hatchets.
But they still do rather icky things: Rockstar Bidco lawsuits and the "Scroogled" campaign come to mind. I'm biased, but they've got to can it with these things (and just innovate) until I'll look at them as a pleasant company.
As a former Google user and Chromebook owner, I kind of agree with the sentiments of the Scroogled campaign. That said, I don't think it made for good commercials.
Actually, Apple transitioned from Motorola 68k to PowerPC in the mid-90s and the 2000s transition from PowerPC to x86 was their second successful transition.
Yes, I got reminded of that recently when I installed MS Office on my Mac. I just wanted Excel and Word - now I have Microsoft Messenger, Microsoft Remote Desktop, Microsoft Connection Manager(?!), Microsoft Communicator, Microsoft Office Setup Manager, Microsoft Document Connection, and the complementary launch agent "com.microsoft.office.licensing.helper".
Best thing: They plastered my dock with app icons that I just couldn't drag out of the dock to delete them. I had to go the rightclick->submenu->"remove from dock" route for every of the ~10 icons. Now why would they do this? So the typical Mac user won't be able to remove them because the default way to remove them doesn't work?
" I just wanted Excel and Word - now I have Microsoft Messenger, Microsoft Remote Desktop, Microsoft Connection Manager(?!), Microsoft Communicator, Microsoft Office Setup Manager, Microsoft Document Connection, and the complementary launch agent "com.microsoft.office.licensing.helper"."
Yet when you were in that "Customize Installation" menu choosing Excel and Word, you for some reason didn't de-select Messenger, RDC, or the Dock Icons. And that's Microsoft's fault... hmm.
Ehh, I don't see how that was a great point since the problem with Windows bundling a browser which couldn't be uninstalled or easily replaced was that they were a monopoly on the desktop, OSX certainly is not, and of course neither is ChromeOS.
I can't speak for anyone else, but as a Web developer, I hate Microsoft because of their current and recent handling of Internet Explorer - specifically that it doesn't auto-update.
I love my job, but in my job, Internet Explorer 8-9 is pain. It's why we can't have nice things. I checked out a Windows Phone in a store once, and thought it was pretty sweet until I saw the IE logo and physically recoiled. There was no way I was going to own something where I'd have to hit that logo every day to browse the Internet.
That's not ancient history, that's present-day reality.
Internet Explorer doesn't automatically update because every company disables the automatic updates.
Developing for Internet Explorer 8 is my present-day reality too, but if IT departments were instead mandating Firefox 3.0 or Chrome 1.0 I'm not sure how much better it would be.
Even if I concede all that, in the meantime, we've had the "Secure boot" fiasco and some other things I don't remember distinctly. I just remember constantly trying to fight the instinct to hate, to give MS the benefit of the doubt, but I just can't do it.
When discussing past wrongs of an institution, the question to ask is not "how long ago did they do it?" but "has the institution changed since?". In Microsoft's case, the answer seems to me to be "not enough".
One thing I have learned though is that large companies almost never deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their interests or motivations.
Is Microsoft any more evil than Google? No, and they are probably less so these days. Google strikes me as more deeply invested in defence informatics and surveillance than Microsoft, for example. But am I going to run out and use Windows Phone because it is the lesser of evils? Definitely not.
Lesser of evils unfortunately has proven very successful in American politics. But it has very little place in business.
Windows Phone cannot be the lesser of evils because it is very restrictive and cannot be forked. Plus Microsoft is making more money with Android through extortion. So no, they have a long way to go before they can earn my trust again.
So far the worst effect has "merely" been to introduce needless hassle and obstacles when installing non-Microsoft operating systems [1]. Microsoft's current hardware certification spec (that manufacturers tend to implement so they can put "Certified for Windows 8" on the box) requires that the user be able to switch off Secure Boot (generally taking the entirety of UEFI with it) as long as they are not on an ARM system. They could change this at any point, and unification of ARM and "PC" is a current trend at Microsoft of which the move to Secure Boot on both platforms is already a part. Forgive me, but I'm not ready to accept Microsoft having me by the balls just because they haven't clenched their fist yet.
Secure Boot's purported threat model is a solution looking for a problem ("boot sector viruses" in 2014?). It doesn't really make much sense to make the boot process entirely unmodifiable on the grounds that "malware might modify it". Malware might modify anything else on your system too, and you are pwned either way. So it's probably safe to assume Microsoft had a different motive. I don't think it's wise to think of it as over-and-done-with.
It hasn't, because I haven't yet needed to buy a new computer. But if we can only call out moral wrongs when they personally affect us, we may as well stop calling it morality at all. If you're saying it is, in fact, not prohibitively difficult to securely install an arbitrary operating system, then I would honestly be delighted to see some proof. But all I heard was that the signing keys couldn't be changed, and it was difficult to get things signed so they could be booted, and that's enough to make me angry.
Past behavior is a great predictor of the future, and winning back trust is both hard and slow. This post would be more believable if MS isn't still exhorting companies with their large patent portfolio.
Maybe Nadella can change the culture but I have my doubts.
Scott, actions are much louder than words.
EDIT: I'm not saying other companies are much better. However I think it's more productive to have an internal company awareness campaign and mission of "Don't be an asshole", instead of publicly whining about people who still remember past misdeeds or current ones.
Ah, the great question of modern times: Should I more hate Microsoft or Google? Personally I'll go with Microsoft, because contrary to what the blog says, I feel that Google is far more open, though that still won't make me buy and Android device. At least not without instantly "flashing" it with some custom ROM that's stripped of as much Google things as possible. Would any Windows version allow me to do this? Of course not, WP doesn't even allow me to access the file system.
As for Microsoft being aware of anything, it's aware of sales and automated feedback. That's all. Considering Lumia 520 makes up a third of all Windows Phone sales, I assume there will be a lot of cheap phones in the future and little expensive innovation.
Both companies are effectively forcing things on people, so talking about "being open" is, in general, out of the question. And with the "cloud and mobile foremost" direction of Microsoft, I don't think I'll have to look for "new" reason to hate Microsoft the same as or more than Google.
It's been a while since I've acted the angry young man, but it hasn't been all that long since Microsoft found itself happily embroiled in controversies regarding the OOXML ISO vote, notably the Sweden situation.
It isn't enough to fail at being evil. Trying to do so loses you points.
I'm ambivalent towards MS today. I'd like to see good stuff from them, but I treat their stuff with caution.
I always thought that Windows kinda spoiled the digital culture of a generation And therefore I always supported Linux for professional usage and Apple for personal usage.
But that's an opinion based on a range of products; sticking a sentiment like hate to a company that makes tools you still can decide to buy or not to buy, is always pretty stupid.
OK. I'm pissed that they dropped the deployment tools from Visual Studio. [1]
People keep saying that the desktop is dying, but PC makers still managed to sell over 300M units last year. But if the desktop market ever does truly die, I think Microsoft can be said to have had a part in that.
[1] I'm not actually pissed. I moved on to WiX, but since you asked I felt pressured to come up with something.
They dropped the setup project (deployment). If they had dropped the development tools from VS, I'm not not sure what would be left. [edited (twice) for clarity]
Setup deployment projects went wayward in VS2012. The 3rd party incumbent company suggested by MS is charging for an underwhelming product as an alternative replacement.
What happens when VS2013 hasnt been used for a while then whilst being offline you fire it up?
Im referring to requiring a login here... whats the expected behaviour?
Currently on an offline machine I cannot use VS 2013, I get a modal with the only option being "Exit Visual Studio".
Last time I used VS was 22/12/2013.
This is really fucked IMHO.
My 2013 Pro from MSDN doesn't do anything like that.
Edit: I just span up a copy fo the virtual machine snapshot and it didn't say anything even though that had been technically not used and has no network connection.
In which someone doesn't understand the difference between doing a thing when you do have a monopoly, and doing it when you don't. I say this as a pretty heavy windows user, but chrome on chromeos and safari on iOS are simply not comparable to ie on windows in the early-mid 2000s.
Ahem. You mean Opera and Netscape Communicator were not comparable to IE5 and IE6.
Microsoft IE stagnated at that point, as Netscape morphed into Mozilla Communicator, and then was rewritten into Mozilla Firefox. But IE reigned supreme only after it defeated Netscape Communicator (which was supported by the internet monopoly AOL)
Nope! Being a hatchet-burier weakens my current hatchets.
I'm still boycotting GoDaddy, for example, even though I forgot why. Presumably I had a good reason. And when I've forgotten why I was mad at the companies who wrong me today, I'll still avoid them. This is an incentive for them to be nice now instead of later.
Microsoft on putting a backdoor on encryption in Hotmail/Outlook.com: "When we upgrade or update products we aren't absolved from the need to comply with existing or future lawful demands."
Google, Apple etc. make sweet products and contribute a lot of FOSS tech back to the community. I'm not a fan of MS products, and they contribute back very little.
Unlike perhaps a decade ago I don't really care about Microsoft today. They're irrelevant to my life, and I don't use any of their software. If anyone recommended using a proprietary Microsoft system I'd respect their choice but strongly advise against it.
You might say that stuff that happened a decade ago is done and gone, but the thing to really consider is whether the people running Microsoft has changed significantly and whether their overall approach/philosophy has changed. I think the answer to that is not much.
Could you expound on what this means? Because Apple was the first to bring out a consumer-grade multi-touch screen, and I believe everyone was blown away by how thin their Mac Book Airs were compared to everyone else's efforts?
edit: So I'm not sure what flat here is exactly referring to. Surface? What about all the tablets that preceded it, all the way back to the 90s with GO, Newton, and the like?
Ms has not changed a lot, the OOXML standardisation process showed this. And putting the actions of 20 years ago in today s context is irrelevant as ms doesn t have the power anymore it enjoyed at that time.
A lot of devs are also still pissed because of the countless hours , ie lost evenings and nights, they had to spend to make their app compatible with IE.
This isnt a defense of apple or google btw, any market controlling company is harming progress imo.
There is a big difference between "We stopped being evil at some point" and "we stopped being successful enough to pull off the evil shit that we really, really wanted to do". The DRM[0] that Microsoft were trying to bundle with the Xbox One just scant months ago is the same Microsoft I remember - and they thought that they could pull it off because they were the market leader last console generation. If Microsoft gets any headway with any other of their products, I know exactly what they're going to use it for, whether good-hearted programmers working there support it or not.
For me, it's really not a matter of hatred, I've gotten over it. It's just straightforward ROI. I'd need a really compelling reason to consider Microsoft technology, to offset the expected amount of integration pain, license cajoling, oh-but-it-really-only-works-if-you're-using-a-full-MS-stack bait and switchery that I've experienced in the past. There's more than enough fantastic tech out there to keep me busy that doesn't have that baggage attached. Sorry, guys.
I'm sure others can list more recent FUD and lies put out by Microsoft.
If in another 5-10 years there's no more incidents of that kind of stuff maybe I'll like them again?
...
Actually I can't really say I hate them now. But I think it's important to point out they are still a pretty shitty company in many ways. I hope they stop that crap.
An x-coworker at my last job had previous worked at Microsoft. His parting message to everyone was how happy he was that at this job the company always tried to do the right thing whereas at his previous job at MS the company always tried to see how much they could get away with.
Of course that's just one anecdote but if true I hope MS can change that attitude to something positive and that we'll see the results for the next few years.
Different people have widely varying experiences working at Microsoft. There are 130k people in the company. That might mean your boss might vary a bit over a company that is bigger than many cities.
WebGL shipped in IE11. I argued with them over getting it in earlier, too, but they had some semi-valid concerns over running web-delivered instructions directly on your GPU.
> I'm sure others can list more recent FUD and lies put out by Microsoft.
Really? I had a PC on which Firefox and certain WebGL content would hard crash my machine thanks to what I resume are video card driver bugs. (Upgrading video card drivers resolved that particular instance of that problem)
Given that, it is by no means unreasonable to assume that WebGL content might be able to hit security holes in video card drivers. What that entails, who knows. Presumably going right away and saying "sure, we'll just add a hole to let people stream code directly from the web right into your video card" sounded like a horrible idea.
And since IE is shipped with the OS, level component, it has to be supported to customers for-bloody-ever. (Or so it seems at least!) So there is a higher bar, and all of a sudden releasing patches isn't an "auto-update the world and hopefully don't break anyone" sort of thing like it is with Chrome or Firefox, but now it becomes a "well have to test this patch across an almost unimaginable number of test scenarios and machine configs because we don't want to break functionality that any one of our large customers rely on".
At that point, adding a new feature, which even sorta smells like it could open up a whole new can of worms, becomes, for good reason, somewhat less desirable!
(Disclaimer: I work for MS, but in a completely unrelated area, opinions are my own, those of an overly paranoid-for-the-customers software engineer.)
You do realize MS continued to bash WebGL long after the CORS issue was resolved. The point is there's still reason to hate MS. They are still a bad company that does arguably bad things.
I'm all for them switching to sweetness and light but the OP is suggesting their evil ways were 20 years ago. They're not. Their evil ways are still recent.
(Edited to add: I am not aware of any statements on WebGL from MS beyond that blog post, but I don't follow those circles, so I'll accept your word that they continued bashing it after CORS was introduced. However, people I'd trust more than either Google or Microsoft employees, like Carmack and various security researchers on HN like Daeken, agreed that WebGl is a security risk, so I disagree that counts as bad behavior on MS's part.)
So why did Microsoft go ahead and include WebGL? Why, because they had to respond to Google who did exactly the same thing that Microsoft was lambasted for doing with IE: pushing proprietary, unsafe technology before it became standardized and forcing other browsers to catch up. But since you work for Google, I am sure you consider Google's actions to be perfectly not "evil"...
> But there’s more! Not only is WebGL inherently flawed, but Google — one of WebGL’s strongest proponents — even knew about the DoS and cross-domain image vulnerabilities months before they were thrust into the limelight by Context’s report. Not deterred by these flaws in the WebGL spec or its implementation, Google pushed ahead and turned on WebGL by default in February 2011, in Chrome 9.
> As terrifying as that is, we now have to wonder why Google rushed the deployment of a nascent, dangerous technology...
Note that it was enabled before the v1 of the specification was even released. But worse, when I follow the embedded links in the top para, why I do believe they show that you ("you" as in not Google, "you" as in you specifically) were aware of these security flaws before anyone else reported it, and yet you (as in Google) went ahead and enabled WebGL in Chrome by default. And then you accuse Microsoft behaving badly! Really?!
> They are still a bad company that does arguably bad things
I'd like examples of Microsoft "behaving badly", preferably:
1) stuff that isn't religious fanaticism;
2) stuff that isn't driven by vested interests that are not in everybody else's interests;
Except for the CORS issue have you seen an exploit related to WebGL? As detailed in my post it's unlikely there are any. In fact it's far more likely there are bugs in JavaScript implementations or JPEG decoders or video decoders or font renderers than WebGL.
As for the CORS issue, MS shipped CSS first and CSS had the same issue. Namely that you could change the :visited property to something heavy and then through timing divine a user's web history. Once that was discovered it was fixed. I suspect it was similar to WebGL where someone was like
"hey, you know, it might be possible to use timing to figure out some stuff"
"yea, but that seems pretty unlikely"
a few months later someone shows a working timing attack.
"oh shit, let's fix that"
As for DOSing, as detailed in my post, we (or I) didn't see that as the same level of important because there's no incentive to do it. Sure we worked on fixing it (and that's why WebGL is now enabled by default on several Android devices who's drivers can deal with the issue). But even on devices that can't deal with the issue there's no incentive to DOS someone's machine because they aren't going to visit your website a 2nd or 3rd time if you do that and you weren't able to do accomplish anything else except to get them stop visiting your website. Awesome. I'm going to go make a site right now that people actively avoid visiting. Yea!
You also realize that Mozilla started the WebGL spec, not Google and that Mozilla also released WebGL long before v1. Opera was also involved and MS was welcome to join but never bothered. WebGL is not proprietary. Never has been. So claiming Google is copying Microsoft by pushing proprietary standards is pretty disingenuous.
> Except for the CORS issue have you seen an exploit related to WebGL?
And as far as I can tell, that was the issue MS needed fixed before going ahead with WebGL, but then again I haven't been following their actions in this area. On the other hand, another Microsoft employee seemed to agree with Mozilla and Google: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/20/webgl_/
"And, frankly, if Microsoft has taken a formal position against WebGL, no one I know got the memo.”
So maybe it was only the MS Security team being paranoid, as they are supposed to be?
>As for the CORS issue, MS shipped CSS first and CSS had the same issue.
Wouldn't that indicate that they have more reason to be wary of things like this?
>You also realize that Mozilla started the WebGL spec, not Google and that Mozilla also released WebGL long before v1. Opera was also involved and MS was welcome to join but never bothered. WebGL is not proprietary. Never has been. So claiming Google is copying Microsoft by pushing proprietary standards is pretty disingenuous.
Mozilla doesn't have clean hands in this either. It may not be proprietary, but releasing an implementation with known vulnerabilities? Enabling something widely used connected to the Internet without sufficient hardening is exactly what MS did with Win95/WinXP/ActiveX, and it created a decade of malware-infested Internet. They also got widely excoriated for that. I wouldn't blame them for being cautious going forward.
> Want some MS evil evidence? Just Bing it
So negative advertising is "evil"? I knew F/OSS folks thought MS's publicity against their religion was "evil", because, well it offends their personal beliefs... but so is negative advertising against your employer? Sorry, but Google engages in a lot of that itself, it's just that people in this echo chamber uncritically accept it as fact because it confirms their biases.
A company that has objections to a spec discusses those objections with others. A company that is trying to spread FUD hires a 3rd party company to dig up dirt.
Microsoft did the latter.
I'm sorry you can't see it but Microsoft was clearly not showing concern for WebGL's security. As pointed out before, if they had they would have also have brought up Silverlight and Flash 11, which both provide the same features as WebGL.
> Do I hate Japan for World War II? [...] I said, "No, we're cool with Japan. We've done some good stuff together." And he was like, "Cool."
No we are not cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 is not cool, still not cool. I won't repeat the horrific things that happened there, read it for yourself, but no, just saying "we are cool" about it goes a little too far.
> Is Microsoft circa 2014 worse than Google, Apple, or Facebook? We're not nearly as organized as we'd need to be to be as evil as you might think we are.
Microsoft has been, as most people perceive today, de-fanged. It was a scary monopoly, it was pushing crappy APIs, not following standards, perverting them. That legacy crap is still there. It is still maintained. Someone deals with it. So it wasn't just about browser wars. Imagine perhaps Facebook merging with Google so now everything you do online or anywhere on your computer is controlled by one company. That was kind of how Microsoft was viewed.
So, true, there isn't as much reason to hate anymore. But there is a lot of reasons to not forget as well.
What does that mean in practical terms? It means I won't be jumping on or using any Microsoft technologies if I have a choice. F# looks awesome, but nope, I am not touching it. Maybe Visual Studio 2014 is going to be really great, but I won't even try it. If it is tied with .net anything, not touching it.
> Moreover, I think that Microsoft is very aware of perceptions and is actively trying to counter them by actually being open.
Too late. Open source Windows if you want to be open. Open source your browser if you want to be open. Go back and fix your broken APIs and start following standards. Google as much as many don't like it (and I am in that camp too, when it comes to privacy), has to be commended for being open and contributing to Open Source. So use Google as your example in that respect.
Google is not open-sourcing software core to their business. None of it. So your request to open-source Windows and pointing to Google as an example to follow is ridiculous at least.
I said core business. Don't know why is it so difficult to read the whole comment, it wasn't long. If Google wanted to, they could migrate to FreeBSD quite quickly and you would not notice too much.
Google's core products are: Plus, Hangouts, Chrome, Search, Docs, Mail, and all these products on Android. They're the same to Google as Windows is to Microsoft. Yes, Android is open source, the rest aren't. And what consumers call Android is not free/libre either. I have no problem with that, and I'm not criticizing Google, just saying, that companies very rarely open source their core business stuff.
Presumably those big online services expect to be run on top of Google's backends rather than my garden variety VPS, so what it would mean to package them for open source release isn't clear.
> Google is not open-sourcing software core to their business. None of it. So your request to open-source Windows and pointing to Google as an example to follow is ridiculous at least.
Android's core is open source.
So MS would have no problem releasing their source to Bing ?
Android is based on the Linux kernel. User-land is not required to be open-source. Dalvik, Android's SDK, all user-land libraries, the whole of open-source Android is not required to be open-source. You may notice that the license is Apache 2.0, a license that's incompatible with GPL v.2 ;-)
> What is the line from Android to Bing? Does google open source google? gmail?
The line is that Bing is not core to Microsoft, but complementary, so why not open-source the technology behind it?
In fact, Bing is even less important for Microsoft, than Android is to Google, because Android for Google is their insurance that they'll stay relevant in this mobiles connected world. Without Android, Google would be at the mercy of the various walled gardens that popped into existence, a trend started by Apple ... quick question, can you set Google as your search provider on Windows Phone? Maybe you can, but I can't do it on my Nokia Lumia. There is no way to make that search button open Google and the option in IExplorer doesn't work.
Open-sourcing Bing would be great for everybody, including Microsoft, just like when Yahoo open-sourced Hadoop. Yet, they won't do it - because they are the same bastards, that's why.
> The line is that Bing is not core to Microsoft, but complementary, so why not open-source the technology behind it?
Fair enough. It is a server software, though. How much server software do companies usually opensource?
The point that Android as a whole doesn't have to be open source is true. But how much linux- (or other opensource) based software does MS distribute where it open sources only the needed parts? None, AFAIK. So none of its products are in a similar position. It does distribute sources with plenty of their proprietary software, though. Admittedly, for many it does it only because it has to to stay relevant. People want to fiddle with the sources of their web stack.
In short, yes, they are bastards, just as any other for profit company.
That's very odd, just tested on my lumia with Google set as default and it searched using google in IE. Not being able to set the search provider for the search button does annoy me a bit though.
> also Android is based on Linux code. It would be illegal to distribute it without source
*BSD systems are not based on Linux code. It wouldn't be illegal to not distribute it. It wasn't like Google was caught by surprised. Besides, they still do not have to open source anything running on top of it. But they did.
> What is the line from Android to Bing? Does google open source google? gmail?
Original claim -- Google is not open sourcing their core software. (Let's assume Android is not their core software). So Microsoft should have no problem open sourcing Bing.
> No we are not cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 is not cool, still not cool. I won't repeat the horrific things that happened there, read it for yourself, but no, just saying "we are cool" about it goes a little too far.
I think you've missed the point. You can't blame a Japanese child for the sins of his grandfather. The same goes for a German child whose family has a Nazi past or an American whose ancestors slaughtered native American women and children like they were animals.
No I didn't miss it, it was just a bad original point. Microsoft is not a child, it is a little too cute of a metaphor. Microsoft is a bureaucratic organization. Just like Google and also governments. Most important, it is effectively the same entity. Japan is still Japan. US is still US. Google is still Google, and Microsoft still Microsoft.
If you lived in Europe you'd see an obvious truth : people are blamed for what their grandparents did, if it's about WWII and nazis. Forget about joining the military, politics, judicial system or police. Well police is a special case. There's a few regions where you won't be able to enter the police if you're not a nazi (despite everything they still exist), but the vast majority the reverse is true. Anything reeking faintly of nazism, like a wrong last name, and you're locked out. It also definitely affects your job prospects in the private sector.
Yes I am aware of that, I lived in Europe for a long time.
The difference, and I pointed out, is between an individual that inherited a last name from another individual (their parent) and a large entity like a company or country.
Microsoft is still Microsoft, US is still US. Unless Microsoft was bought or acquired somehow and assimilated, it is still itself.
Because mind you, German government is still paying restitution back to its victims. US still prosecutes and kicks out those 90 year old concentration camp guards.
My point was that equating Microsoft to a child is a little too much. It was a bad analogy to start with.
In summary, I do not support discriminating again children based on their last name. That is not right. But I do support not forgetting what companies and countries did. Especially if they haven't made amends or taken steps to distance themselves and remediate the past wrongs.
He says, 'Microsoft is aware of perceptions' and then they go and join Oracle in their attempt at having API's copyrightable, seriously?
Overall I can just ignore Microsoft because they no longer impact me as a developer, but if they and Oracle manage to make API's copyrightable it will have a huge negative effect on software development, in particular interoperability, the fact that they are aiding Oracle in this crap shows me that they are not changing their tune at all.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadFor entirely pragmatic reasons, I'd rather use Chrome, Linux, Android, Gmail, Google search and Google Docs.
Typescript looks nice, I might use Babylon.js, and I still use Skype from time to time, but I'll still never use Windows, IE, Hotmail, etc...
Chrome? Gmail? Maybe. Google however is pushing far more than Microsoft has as far as dropping my anonymity from Youtube, pushing me into their Google+ features and making me share sign-in information across Chrome sessions. I'd say its a Tie between Microsoft / Google here, both want me in their cloud services.
Although, Outlook.com works a hell of a lot better on Android than Gmail / Google Calendar works on Windows8. So from a usability point of view, Google is beginning to lose it in their anti-microsoft wars. I don't like getting caught up in the middle of their politics. So that's my tiebreaker: Microsoft's calendar platform is supported in more platforms than Google Calendar.
Google Docs vs Microsoft Office? That one is easy. One of them runs on my computer, and the other one is untrustworthy, in the cloud. Do I really trust Google's servers over my own computer? Will Google protect the privacy of my documents from prying eyes?
Nothing beats cold storage on my own computer, Microsoft Office gives me that. Open Office vs Microsoft Office is another story of course... but Open Office is pretty terrible IMO.
Open Office is pretty bad in my experience. Instead... its about Abiword and Gnumeric. Unfortunately, there is no adequate replacement for OneNote and Powerpoint, so I'll keep using those.
All android needs are sync adapters for your own mail/calendar/whatever service running on your own hardware. There is no need to discard entire platform just because you don't like Google cloud services.
Most people won't bother running their own servers though.
I was quite supportive of Meego, although my enthusiasm has dampered quite a lot with Tizen. There are only so many failures that one can put up with...
You realize that Linux is just a kernel?
OpenBSD and FreeBSD are both server/desktop operating systems, meanwhile Debian Linux and Android are desktop and mobile OS'es respectively, your comparison is pretty worthless.
A similar comparison to Debian Linux with Android would be FreeBSD with iOS.
In many ways, Microsoft's Open Specification Promise is quite a bit stronger of a promise than most people might expect.
The world of computing could have been and would be today a better place if they hadn't dominated through business practices, but instead dominated with products.
That is absolutely weak man. If you don't like Word, then don't use it. There are plenty of alternatives. TeX, LaTeX, Abiword, Open Office, Wordpress...
I kid you not, I submitted every single college paper manually typeset in TeX / LaTeX document, created using Vim + Makefiles I hand crafted. Graphs were generated in GnuPlot, maybe R if it were statistics related. Gnumeric was my spreadsheets program, and occasionally I'd use Abiword for times when I needed a more classic "double-spaced 500-word" homework assignment.
And I use Gnumeric (and assume you do too) because of the latex export function.
If Microsoft wants my business back, having really good LaTeX export from every MS Office program would be the place to start, along with native Linux clients.
What? They won't do that?
MS Word however, will forever be incompatible with the notions of LaTeX. It solves a different problem than LaTeX anyway. An export tool would be nice though.
There's a fair bit of overlap though. I know people who typeset books with Word :-(
Why would they? Latex is garbage to 90% of the normal human beings they're trying to sell to. I finally learned it for a comp models class a year or two ago and I have no intentions of ever touching it again. I use Libre Office now but given all the incompatibilities with the rest of the world, I'd use Word if it worked on Linux.
That is absolutely weak man. If you live out in the real world, there aren't plenty of alternatives.
I kid you not, I keep buying MS Word, despite hating it passionately, because it's the only word processing document format that we can share in common with business partners, our legal counsel, accounting, etc.
When a customer asks for a Word Document, I deliver a Word Document. When a customer asks for a 200-page print-out, I deliver it however the hell I feel like it. I'll deliver it using InDesign if I believe its the best tool for the job.
Here's why Microsoft Office is used. Because it works. Sticking with a standard office font works across Mac, Windows, and yes, even Linux (thanks to Crosstools). Abiword and OpenOffice are much better at reading Microsoft Office documents than they are at reading each other.
But when it comes down to beautiful typesetting, semantic markup and the like? LaTeX is quite hard to beat.
When it comes to opening up a 25 year old document and it still looking exactly like how it was typeset in Word 95? Well... Microsoft actually has accomplished that quite decently. Tell me, does Libre Office support the StarWord format as well as Word 2013 supports a Word95 document?
On the other hand, LaTeX supports documents from the 80s quite well, ditto with TeX.
Nonetheless, its how Word is used today. I can't think of many tools with a beginner-friendly UI that can do what Word can do.
Blaming Word because some cheap printer isn't able to use as much of the page as something else is shooting the messenger. And Word is word processing software. It attempts to do the most logical thing - reflows the document to fit within usable margins. If you need absolute page layout control, use a tool devised for that purpose, like InDesign. To not, and complain, is to complain that HTML and web-browsers can't be relied on with certainty for pixel perfect display.
Got it.
I'm not sure what Wordpress is doing in the list, but the fact is that dealing with Word documents can be pretty much unavoidable (depending on where you work), and they don't always open correctly in Open Office.
Best part about Wordpress / Wikis, is that you get open collaboration, instant publishing, RSS, Emails, and everything. Its the perfect publishing platform.
On the other hand, a number of businesses still pass around Word Documents like the internet hasn't been invented yet. Tell me this, which is easier to collaborate on. A Group-Blog hosted on Wordpress? Or the 20 copies of a Word document that your office is passing around by email?
If I want to know what the spec was six months ago before someone changed it, I'll go check the wiki.
There's little motivation to keep them up-to-date. They are usually sold to companies on the basis of feature lists rather than getting the simple shit right. I can't edit Confluence in text/plain any more.
I'm a Wikipedia admin. We actually know how to use a wiki and there's at least some motivation to make shit presentable because even minor topics are going to have a couple hundred readers each month. There's no such motivation in enterprise wiki-land. I can write a long and detailed document, put it up on the wiki and people still won't read it.
Enterprise Wikis, while the project is active, are usually kept up to date decently. When the projects die down a bit and enters "maintenance mode", thats when the real trouble begins.
But the update problem happens exactly the same with Word Documents and classical media.
Also, to ing hell with Confluence. Piece of . But its still easier than emailing Word Documents to everyone and getting lost between the versions.
You won't find in me a staunch defender of collaboration via Word documents (or of Word in general). However, the fact that Wordpress and Word share a relatively small use case doesn't mean Wordpress is a viable Word replacement, otherwise I'd point out that you could just as well setup a private Git repo and collaborate that way.
Again, use Tex, use LaTex. Google Docs (although I really dislike the cloud). Make .rtf files in WordPerfect if you really want to avoid Word.
I guarantee you, building RTF files is just about the most cross-platform thing you can do. Its supported by damn near everyone, Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice, Abiword.
I mean, have you even tried not using a Microsoft Product? Its a hell of a lot easier than you're making it out to be.
As for document writing... I've mentions practical alternatives already. WHY are they sending you an OOXML file? Is it for collaboration? In which point, a Wiki is more than suitable as a replacement. Are they sending it for final consumption? A PDF file is good for documents where the layout must be faithfully preserved.
If you're documenting code and leaving the documentation in an SVN server, .doc documents are treated as binary and don't really get revision editing you'd like. Its better to document using Doxygen (which is much akin to HTML) than .doc in many cases.
Microsoft is not any worse than the other companies. They are all at the same terrible level.
But Microsoft became a bit better over the last years, I would say.
Another thing is trust. Why would you trust an organization which still had at least a famous C-level executive which executed a number of business strategies you have a problem with? Why would you trust an organization run by Steve Ballmer? Now, maybe new management will turn Microsoft around, but it has done enough dodgy things over the years that yes, it will have to "bend over backwards" for a long time before I trust it again.
Microsoft is still extracting software patent royalties from android OEMs this very minute - that's not anyone's pappy, and it's not a vendor overreaching. It's a calculated, evil decision by the highest levels of management.
But they still do rather icky things: Rockstar Bidco lawsuits and the "Scroogled" campaign come to mind. I'm biased, but they've got to can it with these things (and just innovate) until I'll look at them as a pleasant company.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G5
I mean, dear god. WindowsXP is OLDER than PowerPC iMacs. And people expect Microsoft to support it for free? Where the hell is my iMac G5 support?
Oh yeah, thats right. Its in the trash. When Apple declared the PowerPC (or was it Mortorola?) dead, and switched over to x86 Machines.
Keep in mind Safari is not a critical part of OS X and can be deleted without affecting anything.
Yes, I got reminded of that recently when I installed MS Office on my Mac. I just wanted Excel and Word - now I have Microsoft Messenger, Microsoft Remote Desktop, Microsoft Connection Manager(?!), Microsoft Communicator, Microsoft Office Setup Manager, Microsoft Document Connection, and the complementary launch agent "com.microsoft.office.licensing.helper".
Best thing: They plastered my dock with app icons that I just couldn't drag out of the dock to delete them. I had to go the rightclick->submenu->"remove from dock" route for every of the ~10 icons. Now why would they do this? So the typical Mac user won't be able to remove them because the default way to remove them doesn't work?
MS truly lives and breathes bloatware.
Yet when you were in that "Customize Installation" menu choosing Excel and Word, you for some reason didn't de-select Messenger, RDC, or the Dock Icons. And that's Microsoft's fault... hmm.
I love my job, but in my job, Internet Explorer 8-9 is pain. It's why we can't have nice things. I checked out a Windows Phone in a store once, and thought it was pretty sweet until I saw the IE logo and physically recoiled. There was no way I was going to own something where I'd have to hit that logo every day to browse the Internet.
That's not ancient history, that's present-day reality.
you might want to do a double check on that
Developing for Internet Explorer 8 is my present-day reality too, but if IT departments were instead mandating Firefox 3.0 or Chrome 1.0 I'm not sure how much better it would be.
When discussing past wrongs of an institution, the question to ask is not "how long ago did they do it?" but "has the institution changed since?". In Microsoft's case, the answer seems to me to be "not enough".
Is Microsoft any more evil than Google? No, and they are probably less so these days. Google strikes me as more deeply invested in defence informatics and surveillance than Microsoft, for example. But am I going to run out and use Windows Phone because it is the lesser of evils? Definitely not.
Lesser of evils unfortunately has proven very successful in American politics. But it has very little place in business.
So far the worst effect has "merely" been to introduce needless hassle and obstacles when installing non-Microsoft operating systems [1]. Microsoft's current hardware certification spec (that manufacturers tend to implement so they can put "Certified for Windows 8" on the box) requires that the user be able to switch off Secure Boot (generally taking the entirety of UEFI with it) as long as they are not on an ARM system. They could change this at any point, and unification of ARM and "PC" is a current trend at Microsoft of which the move to Secure Boot on both platforms is already a part. Forgive me, but I'm not ready to accept Microsoft having me by the balls just because they haven't clenched their fist yet.
Secure Boot's purported threat model is a solution looking for a problem ("boot sector viruses" in 2014?). It doesn't really make much sense to make the boot process entirely unmodifiable on the grounds that "malware might modify it". Malware might modify anything else on your system too, and you are pwned either way. So it's probably safe to assume Microsoft had a different motive. I don't think it's wise to think of it as over-and-done-with.
[1] http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/9844.html?thread=328308
Maybe Nadella can change the culture but I have my doubts.
Scott, actions are much louder than words.
EDIT: I'm not saying other companies are much better. However I think it's more productive to have an internal company awareness campaign and mission of "Don't be an asshole", instead of publicly whining about people who still remember past misdeeds or current ones.
http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-most-profitable-mobile-opera...
It isn't enough to fail at being evil. Trying to do so loses you points.
I'm ambivalent towards MS today. I'd like to see good stuff from them, but I treat their stuff with caution.
I always thought that Windows kinda spoiled the digital culture of a generation And therefore I always supported Linux for professional usage and Apple for personal usage. But that's an opinion based on a range of products; sticking a sentiment like hate to a company that makes tools you still can decide to buy or not to buy, is always pretty stupid.
Unless they're Nestlé or Monsanto, of course.
OK. I'm pissed that they dropped the deployment tools from Visual Studio. [1]
People keep saying that the desktop is dying, but PC makers still managed to sell over 300M units last year. But if the desktop market ever does truly die, I think Microsoft can be said to have had a part in that.
[1] I'm not actually pissed. I moved on to WiX, but since you asked I felt pressured to come up with something.
Even though it was limited, it was very useful. I lost a fair number of days trying to rebuild setups from scratch using other solutions.
Edit: I just span up a copy fo the virtual machine snapshot and it didn't say anything even though that had been technically not used and has no network connection.
Microsoft IE stagnated at that point, as Netscape morphed into Mozilla Communicator, and then was rewritten into Mozilla Firefox. But IE reigned supreme only after it defeated Netscape Communicator (which was supported by the internet monopoly AOL)
I'm still boycotting GoDaddy, for example, even though I forgot why. Presumably I had a good reason. And when I've forgotten why I was mad at the companies who wrong me today, I'll still avoid them. This is an incentive for them to be nice now instead of later.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...
You might say that stuff that happened a decade ago is done and gone, but the thing to really consider is whether the people running Microsoft has changed significantly and whether their overall approach/philosophy has changed. I think the answer to that is not much.
edit: So I'm not sure what flat here is exactly referring to. Surface? What about all the tablets that preceded it, all the way back to the 90s with GO, Newton, and the like?
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/05/what-is-flat-design/
A lot of devs are also still pissed because of the countless hours , ie lost evenings and nights, they had to spend to make their app compatible with IE.
This isnt a defense of apple or google btw, any market controlling company is harming progress imo.
For me, it's really not a matter of hatred, I've gotten over it. It's just straightforward ROI. I'd need a really compelling reason to consider Microsoft technology, to offset the expected amount of integration pain, license cajoling, oh-but-it-really-only-works-if-you're-using-a-full-MS-stack bait and switchery that I've experienced in the past. There's more than enough fantastic tech out there to keep me busy that doesn't have that baggage attached. Sorry, guys.
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_one#Initial_used_games_and...
http://games.greggman.com/game/webgl-security-and-microsoft-...
I'm sure others can list more recent FUD and lies put out by Microsoft.
If in another 5-10 years there's no more incidents of that kind of stuff maybe I'll like them again?
...
Actually I can't really say I hate them now. But I think it's important to point out they are still a pretty shitty company in many ways. I hope they stop that crap.
An x-coworker at my last job had previous worked at Microsoft. His parting message to everyone was how happy he was that at this job the company always tried to do the right thing whereas at his previous job at MS the company always tried to see how much they could get away with.
Of course that's just one anecdote but if true I hope MS can change that attitude to something positive and that we'll see the results for the next few years.
WebGL shipped in IE11. I argued with them over getting it in earlier, too, but they had some semi-valid concerns over running web-delivered instructions directly on your GPU.
Really? I had a PC on which Firefox and certain WebGL content would hard crash my machine thanks to what I resume are video card driver bugs. (Upgrading video card drivers resolved that particular instance of that problem)
Given that, it is by no means unreasonable to assume that WebGL content might be able to hit security holes in video card drivers. What that entails, who knows. Presumably going right away and saying "sure, we'll just add a hole to let people stream code directly from the web right into your video card" sounded like a horrible idea.
And since IE is shipped with the OS, level component, it has to be supported to customers for-bloody-ever. (Or so it seems at least!) So there is a higher bar, and all of a sudden releasing patches isn't an "auto-update the world and hopefully don't break anyone" sort of thing like it is with Chrome or Firefox, but now it becomes a "well have to test this patch across an almost unimaginable number of test scenarios and machine configs because we don't want to break functionality that any one of our large customers rely on".
At that point, adding a new feature, which even sorta smells like it could open up a whole new can of worms, becomes, for good reason, somewhat less desirable!
(Disclaimer: I work for MS, but in a completely unrelated area, opinions are my own, those of an overly paranoid-for-the-customers software engineer.)
Cmd-F WebGL
I'm all for them switching to sweetness and light but the OP is suggesting their evil ways were 20 years ago. They're not. Their evil ways are still recent.
So why did Microsoft go ahead and include WebGL? Why, because they had to respond to Google who did exactly the same thing that Microsoft was lambasted for doing with IE: pushing proprietary, unsafe technology before it became standardized and forcing other browsers to catch up. But since you work for Google, I am sure you consider Google's actions to be perfectly not "evil"...
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/87696-webgl-is-fundamen...
> But there’s more! Not only is WebGL inherently flawed, but Google — one of WebGL’s strongest proponents — even knew about the DoS and cross-domain image vulnerabilities months before they were thrust into the limelight by Context’s report. Not deterred by these flaws in the WebGL spec or its implementation, Google pushed ahead and turned on WebGL by default in February 2011, in Chrome 9.
> As terrifying as that is, we now have to wonder why Google rushed the deployment of a nascent, dangerous technology...
Note that it was enabled before the v1 of the specification was even released. But worse, when I follow the embedded links in the top para, why I do believe they show that you ("you" as in not Google, "you" as in you specifically) were aware of these security flaws before anyone else reported it, and yet you (as in Google) went ahead and enabled WebGL in Chrome by default. And then you accuse Microsoft behaving badly! Really?!
> They are still a bad company that does arguably bad things
I'd like examples of Microsoft "behaving badly", preferably:
1) stuff that isn't religious fanaticism;
2) stuff that isn't driven by vested interests that are not in everybody else's interests;
3) and stuff that I haven't already covered in my linked comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7282162). I hope you do better than the other replies in that subthread.
As for the CORS issue, MS shipped CSS first and CSS had the same issue. Namely that you could change the :visited property to something heavy and then through timing divine a user's web history. Once that was discovered it was fixed. I suspect it was similar to WebGL where someone was like
"hey, you know, it might be possible to use timing to figure out some stuff"
"yea, but that seems pretty unlikely"
a few months later someone shows a working timing attack.
"oh shit, let's fix that"
As for DOSing, as detailed in my post, we (or I) didn't see that as the same level of important because there's no incentive to do it. Sure we worked on fixing it (and that's why WebGL is now enabled by default on several Android devices who's drivers can deal with the issue). But even on devices that can't deal with the issue there's no incentive to DOS someone's machine because they aren't going to visit your website a 2nd or 3rd time if you do that and you weren't able to do accomplish anything else except to get them stop visiting your website. Awesome. I'm going to go make a site right now that people actively avoid visiting. Yea!
You also realize that Mozilla started the WebGL spec, not Google and that Mozilla also released WebGL long before v1. Opera was also involved and MS was welcome to join but never bothered. WebGL is not proprietary. Never has been. So claiming Google is copying Microsoft by pushing proprietary standards is pretty disingenuous.
Want some MS evil evidence? Just Bing it
http://www.bing.com/search?q=microsoft+fud+2013
And as far as I can tell, that was the issue MS needed fixed before going ahead with WebGL, but then again I haven't been following their actions in this area. On the other hand, another Microsoft employee seemed to agree with Mozilla and Google: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/20/webgl_/
"And, frankly, if Microsoft has taken a formal position against WebGL, no one I know got the memo.”
So maybe it was only the MS Security team being paranoid, as they are supposed to be?
>As for the CORS issue, MS shipped CSS first and CSS had the same issue.
Wouldn't that indicate that they have more reason to be wary of things like this?
>You also realize that Mozilla started the WebGL spec, not Google and that Mozilla also released WebGL long before v1. Opera was also involved and MS was welcome to join but never bothered. WebGL is not proprietary. Never has been. So claiming Google is copying Microsoft by pushing proprietary standards is pretty disingenuous.
Mozilla doesn't have clean hands in this either. It may not be proprietary, but releasing an implementation with known vulnerabilities? Enabling something widely used connected to the Internet without sufficient hardening is exactly what MS did with Win95/WinXP/ActiveX, and it created a decade of malware-infested Internet. They also got widely excoriated for that. I wouldn't blame them for being cautious going forward.
> Want some MS evil evidence? Just Bing it
So negative advertising is "evil"? I knew F/OSS folks thought MS's publicity against their religion was "evil", because, well it offends their personal beliefs... but so is negative advertising against your employer? Sorry, but Google engages in a lot of that itself, it's just that people in this echo chamber uncritically accept it as fact because it confirms their biases.
Microsoft did the latter.
I'm sorry you can't see it but Microsoft was clearly not showing concern for WebGL's security. As pointed out before, if they had they would have also have brought up Silverlight and Flash 11, which both provide the same features as WebGL.
No we are not cool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 is not cool, still not cool. I won't repeat the horrific things that happened there, read it for yourself, but no, just saying "we are cool" about it goes a little too far.
> Is Microsoft circa 2014 worse than Google, Apple, or Facebook? We're not nearly as organized as we'd need to be to be as evil as you might think we are.
Microsoft has been, as most people perceive today, de-fanged. It was a scary monopoly, it was pushing crappy APIs, not following standards, perverting them. That legacy crap is still there. It is still maintained. Someone deals with it. So it wasn't just about browser wars. Imagine perhaps Facebook merging with Google so now everything you do online or anywhere on your computer is controlled by one company. That was kind of how Microsoft was viewed.
So, true, there isn't as much reason to hate anymore. But there is a lot of reasons to not forget as well.
What does that mean in practical terms? It means I won't be jumping on or using any Microsoft technologies if I have a choice. F# looks awesome, but nope, I am not touching it. Maybe Visual Studio 2014 is going to be really great, but I won't even try it. If it is tied with .net anything, not touching it.
> Moreover, I think that Microsoft is very aware of perceptions and is actively trying to counter them by actually being open.
Too late. Open source Windows if you want to be open. Open source your browser if you want to be open. Go back and fix your broken APIs and start following standards. Google as much as many don't like it (and I am in that camp too, when it comes to privacy), has to be commended for being open and contributing to Open Source. So use Google as your example in that respect.
Google's core products are: Plus, Hangouts, Chrome, Search, Docs, Mail, and all these products on Android. They're the same to Google as Windows is to Microsoft. Yes, Android is open source, the rest aren't. And what consumers call Android is not free/libre either. I have no problem with that, and I'm not criticizing Google, just saying, that companies very rarely open source their core business stuff.
Your point is valid though.
Android's core is open source.
So MS would have no problem releasing their source to Bing ?
> So MS would have no problem releasing their source to Bing ?
What is the line from Android to Bing? Does google open source google? gmail?
Asking for open sourcing WinCE or NT kernel would be a valid point. Both are products that date from ~20 years ago so it's probably not gonna happen.
EDIT: also Android is based on Linux code. It would be illegal to distribute it without source
> What is the line from Android to Bing? Does google open source google? gmail?
The line is that Bing is not core to Microsoft, but complementary, so why not open-source the technology behind it?
In fact, Bing is even less important for Microsoft, than Android is to Google, because Android for Google is their insurance that they'll stay relevant in this mobiles connected world. Without Android, Google would be at the mercy of the various walled gardens that popped into existence, a trend started by Apple ... quick question, can you set Google as your search provider on Windows Phone? Maybe you can, but I can't do it on my Nokia Lumia. There is no way to make that search button open Google and the option in IExplorer doesn't work.
Open-sourcing Bing would be great for everybody, including Microsoft, just like when Yahoo open-sourced Hadoop. Yet, they won't do it - because they are the same bastards, that's why.
Fair enough. It is a server software, though. How much server software do companies usually opensource?
The point that Android as a whole doesn't have to be open source is true. But how much linux- (or other opensource) based software does MS distribute where it open sources only the needed parts? None, AFAIK. So none of its products are in a similar position. It does distribute sources with plenty of their proprietary software, though. Admittedly, for many it does it only because it has to to stay relevant. People want to fiddle with the sources of their web stack.
In short, yes, they are bastards, just as any other for profit company.
Oh and for the search you have to jail break WP7, in WP8 it is possible http://www.nokia.com/gb-en/support/faq/?action=singleTopic&t...
That's very odd, just tested on my lumia with Google set as default and it searched using google in IE. Not being able to set the search provider for the search button does annoy me a bit though.
*BSD systems are not based on Linux code. It wouldn't be illegal to not distribute it. It wasn't like Google was caught by surprised. Besides, they still do not have to open source anything running on top of it. But they did.
Original claim -- Google is not open sourcing their core software. (Let's assume Android is not their core software). So Microsoft should have no problem open sourcing Bing.
I think you've missed the point. You can't blame a Japanese child for the sins of his grandfather. The same goes for a German child whose family has a Nazi past or an American whose ancestors slaughtered native American women and children like they were animals.
The difference, and I pointed out, is between an individual that inherited a last name from another individual (their parent) and a large entity like a company or country.
Microsoft is still Microsoft, US is still US. Unless Microsoft was bought or acquired somehow and assimilated, it is still itself.
Because mind you, German government is still paying restitution back to its victims. US still prosecutes and kicks out those 90 year old concentration camp guards.
My point was that equating Microsoft to a child is a little too much. It was a bad analogy to start with.
In summary, I do not support discriminating again children based on their last name. That is not right. But I do support not forgetting what companies and countries did. Especially if they haven't made amends or taken steps to distance themselves and remediate the past wrongs.
Overall I can just ignore Microsoft because they no longer impact me as a developer, but if they and Oracle manage to make API's copyrightable it will have a huge negative effect on software development, in particular interoperability, the fact that they are aiding Oracle in this crap shows me that they are not changing their tune at all.
Hate is perhaps a strong word, but I'd say being acutely aware of whom you're dealing with is still in order.
Microsoft never ceased to be hostile. I can point to 3 specific things in recent memory to illustrate that:
- 2008: Corrupting a standardization process
- 2010, ongoing: extracting royalties from people who don't use their technology (Android royalties)
- 2012: Throwing a monkey wrench at Linux install fests (by more or less goading laptop manufacturers into this SecureBoot thing).
Here's hoping that Nadella is a more level-headed guy than Ballmer was, and this trend stops.