Micro$haft

Frank_Rizzo

Frank_Rizzo

Frank_Rizzo

Associate
Joined
18 Mar 2003
Posts
1,138
In all my years of posting on message boards and bbs I have never had any objections from anyone for using the terms Micro$haft or Micro$oft.

I did make a post yesterday using one of those words and I now feel as outcast as Ron Atkinson.

Who has the right to call me 'childish' and 'immature' because I choose to type Microsoft in a way I see that corporation?

I thought the youth of today were as rebellious as in my younger days but it seems they are not: they are more caring of company images and prefer to launch disrespectful attacks on individuals!

I know there is no such thing as free speech on message boards, and I know that there are many words you just can not post.

But really - is it such a taboo to call Microsoft Micro$haft?
 
So is it the case that anyone with a view on something be it:

Microsoft
Blair
CND
Esso
Huntingdon Life Sciences
Margaret Thatcher
Saddam Hussein
Monsanto
Guantanamo Bay
Fox Hunters

is immature if they choose to state any of the above in not the exact name they are meant to be?

Can anyone suggest how I can show my disapproval of Microsoft on occassions where I have to mention their name?

Or am I not allowed to disapprove of them in the first place?
 
Some good replies here people. Give me a bit of time to try and respond to each in turn.

What I will say now though is that this place is clearly pro-Micro$haft (I realise now I can still say this, even if I look immature. But I'd rather be seen to be a immature than be totalitarianised :) ) and that it is not the done thing to speak ill of the great company.

Maybe we should start clearing up other words? Like earlier I read some guy ask a question about t'internet. Isn't that so Peter Kay 2005?

Why not start on the whole l-8-r m8, woot, puter, rev up me scooter kind of text?

10-10 till we do it again good buddy :D
 
BTW, I did have a previous username here prior to this one. Long before Rizzo I went under the username of NTSucks.

I think one of the Dons got it toasted (for you new age geeks read: bagelled). Now I guess some of you guys are too young to know what NT is or how it sucked :p
 
i get the impression that you seem to think you are better than us "pro-microsoft" guys here.
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That would not be true.

My original beef was with a poster who took it upon himself to hijack a thread just to point out that I was "childish" and such. I was surprised at this because

a) I didn't realise it was not the done thing to talk of Microsoft in this way

b) I later read that there are other threads here with variations of M*$* and yet there is no riposte.
 
IMO NT did suck. The only reason it was popular as a desktop is because there was hardly any alternative. For server operations Netware was far superior.

In both desktop and server mode it was slow, clunky, memory hungry but the biggest gripe I had with it at the time was that the board of directors were fooled by brown corduroy troused, and jesus sandaled geeks that this next technology was the big thing, and needed for the year 2000.

The truth was that in the mid to late 90's a lot of money was wasted on staff who did not necessarily need NT, or faster PCs. IMO this is the classic cycle of waste perpetuated by Microsoft: constantly offer users stuff they do not need.

Back in the mid 90's 99% of users in a company just need a basic wordprocessor, email, and mainfraime client (where the mainframe client was used for the majority of the day). These users did not need faster PCs and did not improve their productivity by using NT - all it did was waste millions on an IT budget which would have been better spent improving existing support facilities.

I saw this in government agencies, in the financial sector, and the retail sector.

Now I know exactly what you want to type right now "Rizzo thinks that in 2007 everyone should be running Windows 95 on a 200Mhz pentium".

No that is not the case. IMO there was a one sided race to get out as many products and as much hardware in a short period of time which was unecessary and wasteful.

Obviously today there are much better advantages with faster hardware and better O/S. The difference today is that the project developers have more choice of which O/S and hardware to choose from such that TCO and other budgetry considerations are more acceptable to the suits.

All the above is MO from working in the IT sector for three decades. The period from 97-00 was one of the worst for Microsoft 'roll outs'.

---

To those who say that Microsoft is bona fide and that they never shafted anyone answer this:

Why were they fined 500M Eur for "violating the European Union treaty's competition rules by abusing it's near monopoly"
 
You Laud MS's products as being rubbish
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I'd rather say wasteful, inefficient, expensive - could be better.

Well Windows NT4 worked very quickly on my schools Pentium 120's
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Sure - in a classroom environment where you are learning something.

But in the real world, with real end users (and I don't mean IT geeks in their offices) it was overkill. For the vast majority of a companies workforce NT was not needed at the time. The prime function of a PC was to provide a session to an as/400 or similar and that could easily be done with O/S earlier than NT.

My point being that:

9am User switches on PC.
User loads up terminal client software
User uses the front end provided by the client software
5pm User logs out of session and shuts down PC.

That was the scenario for the majority of a workforce. Now I know the IT geeks would have their helpdesk (jeeze, I nearly typed helldesk there but thought I'd get slated for it), and other stuff, and Finance would have the spreadsheets and custom databases, and other departments the odd custom app etc.

But the truth is that NT was not needed by the mass workforce at that time.
 
Government departments don't have shareprices.

Of course organisations need to upgrade IT now and again.

IMO upgrades to NT was a particularly bad milestone and the worst in a companies history.

If a director or IT manager has been in a particular place for a long time I'm pretty sure that of all the upgrades that had gone on they would state that the NT upgrade was the worst for productivity / cost pay off.
 
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Nope but they do seem to have IT bods who like to build systems that they think the department needs and in reality they don't.
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Exactly. That's what I have been saying. IT bods mesmersied by eenNNNN tTTTTeee sold the board a pup. They convinced them that the next million should be spent on upgrading to NT, upgrading PCs, training staff for an O/S they didn't need....

Now I see your point: you are blaming the IT bods for this. But I say they were themselves suckered into this by thinking that the next technology would make their jobs easier and company productivity go up. On that second point - it didn't.
 
They weren't forced to upgrade
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No but they did. They were convinced that productivity would go up and IT support costs would go down. But it did not happen. All that happened was that the majority of (front line) staff had stuff they did not need or use and that support problems increased (presumably as support budgets were cut because of the new "wonder system")

As I say, I saw this in government departments, retail, finance. For all the companies I worked for over the years the NT roll outs had the most problems and IMO the worst productivity / cost ratio.
 
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Stoofa I don't know what companies you worked for at the time but the ones I worked for the majority of staff just:

Switch on PC
Opened terminal session to AS/400
Used AS/400 front end
Logged out
Switched off
 
Why do you guys have to resort to a personal attack? Have I done that to any of you guys personally?

If you can not debate without gutter remarks can you please find some other thread to unleash your vitriol?

I'm not here to win friends and influence people. I don't give a jot if you don't like my style. But what started as Rizzo is childish to Rizzo is a premuptious fool is not very nice and totally disrespectful.

Is there anyone here who wants to debate the OT, or the supplemental namely NT was a poor upgrade decision (in general) for companies?
 
Benjarghmin said:
Ok so it's Microsoft's fault that people bought their product.
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It's Microsoft's fault that they fooled people into thinking NT would increase productivity and lower support costs. In my experience the total opposite happened.
 
There is profit and excessive profit. And IMO they can justifiable be called M$ and it's derivitives because of:

"violating the European Union treaty's competition rules by abusing it's near monopoly"
 
manic_man's post #81 seems to be one of the most sensible so far.

I get your point. I still think that way about Microsoft having recently experienced Vista and not being too impressed with it (it came with a PC I had to purchase in an emergency - I wouldn't buy it out of choice).
 
mrk1@1 said:
Er the biggest cost in the roll out of NT tended to be the Hardware, something MS are not responsible for
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Ahh, that's the problem: New O/S needs new hardware, new hardware needs 'better O'S", better O/S needs new hardware....

My point being that those terminal clients ran perfectly well on existing hardware which wasn't broke and didn't need fixing. Now when the IT gurus told the board that NT was a miracle cure, and that they needed extra money for hardware upgrades to be 'faster and more reliable'.... The truth was the end user experience was actually a slower process!
 
I don't understand your analogy there.

NT did not increase productivity or lower TCO in the various places I saw this happening in the mid to late 90's. I'm not saying it never rolled out well - it probably did in Microsoft head office or a college or something.

But in the real world businesses of government departments, finance and retail I saw that the opposite happen because the O/S at the time was not matched to the skills of regular joe / jane user.

Look. In the mid to late 90's not every house had a home PC. Fewer people knew or were bothered with what Windows or Microsoft was.

For the majority of people in a particular workplace all they knew about was their AS/400 terminal software.

When some companies started rolling out NT they had to provide training for staff on software which at the time they did not need and did not understand. There was a bigger increase in support incidences because staff were causing faults they did not need to create in the first place!

Of course, things are different today with just about every household having one or two PCs and everyone knowing what Microsoft is, what Windows is, Word, Excel, or Works etc.

Maybe it was the case that the NT roll outs were premature. It would have made far more sense for companies to have waited a few years before rolling out NT. The average workplace user today is much more PC savvy than 10 / 15 years ago. I'm pretty sure roll outs today would be much smoother and this is why I say the NT roll outs of the mid to late 90s are probably the most least effective of all Microsoft roll outs in the past three decades.
 
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