Micro$haft

Whether the product is good or not is not the issue.

The simple fact of the matter is: MS did win, either through marketing or superior products.

As has already been stated, the numerous and equally placed competition was not just beaten but demolished by MS.

In the absense of anything better it seems unfair to release all geeky hate towards MS when in fact they did a better job than the ones they beat (what part of the job they did better could be debated but they won, regardless)

So is this age (i.e. decade :p) old microsoft bashing simply not a case of hating a winner?

Which by its very nature is simply sad.

The simple fact is the industry has grown up, its no longer just the realm of the bedroom geek, its now the staple backbone of a lot of society and most of industry, hence the more childish aspects of the lifestyle are quickly receeding. Pithy slurs such as Micro$haft are amongst that more childish aspect.
 
Frank_Rizzo said:
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"
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You can call them what you like.

Why can't we call you what we like?
 
Frank_Rizzo said:
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"
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True they do earn A LOT compared to anyone else, but if they plan to make/participate in every aspect of computing/technology then they'll need it ;)

And most of all, they earnt it ;)
 
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Frank_Rizzo said:
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"
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Er the biggest cost in the roll out of NT tended to be the Hardware, something MS are not responsible for and something the IT dept like to charge a fortune for doing.

I have been in companies where the It dept charge a monthly fee per terminal which is more than the terminal is actually worth and then they add on support/software/storage.

I don't see you blaming HP or Dell for charging what they do for their systems.
 
Frank_Rizzo said:
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"
Click to expand...

Do you even understand why they were fined? It was basically for prepackaging WMP into Windows. That's all. Well, that and them not providing help to others trying to communicate with their servers. Which is frankly retarded. You say NetWare was better than NT and that Novell was god's gift, when they forced Microsoft to code their own way of communicating with IPX/SPX protocols. They should be fined too, no?

What has profit got to do with ANYTHING? You're hating on them now because they earn too much money? They won the business race, they won the money. Come back with a decent argument.
 
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).
 
Frank_Rizzo said:
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).
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You're actually a joke. You get in a mood because people called you silly and immature for saying the word "Micro$haft", as people are not allowed to judge you. Yet you're allowed to judge Microsoft. And all of us who've disagreed with you, when you say our posts aren't sensible.

You're not sensible.
 
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!
 
Frank_Rizzo said:
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).
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MS (in general) offer an easy to use, well integrated and compatible, fairly reliable interface that allows the majority of the population to use PCs effortlessly. They win and we win if you want to put it that way. You can pick up an off the shelf PC for £400 all in which does the average family.

Take MS out of the equation and it would only have been replaced with another company who may not have had an S in the name so could not have had it replaced with a $, and possibly, we would not be where we are now in terms of easy access to workable home or office computing.

But the choice to use NT has hardly had the same consequences as WWII or the recession in the 80’s etc etc. In fact I don’t really see any ills from implementing NT.
 
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More and more government departments are actually using OpenOffice now. My mother at DELTA says they have all stopped using Office software in the department and went to OpenOffice.
 
Frank_Rizzo said:
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!
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I don't know why I have to point this out but I will anyway before I start - I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft because I recognise they have made some very dodgy moves but they are a company, in the definition of a company is the requirement to make a profit (for shareholders). They do this very well so to slate them for this is rather like complaining that Tiger Woods plays golf well - it is his job to do so.

Just saying it wasn't broke so don't fix it is a shade naive at best because it was broke or at least creaked ominously. NT offered far more options for 'locking down' the system than 98 or 95 did and was much more stable to boot so it was a fairly obvious choice for business. It was more secure so while the old OS might have worked it was likely to be a matter of time before the security vulnerabilities were exploited. I don't think NT was that much slower and the stability more than made up for that minor inconvenience plus as you said, most people switch on the machine at the start of the day and then do very little else in terms of booting etc so once loaded the speed was easily comparable.
 
KNiVES said:
More and more government departments are actually using OpenOffice now. My mother at DELTA says they have all stopped using Office software in the department and went to OpenOffice.
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My grandparents use a Mac.

For a while they have struggled to like Appleworks, I then introduced them to OpenOffice.

While they were more impressed than with Appleworks they asked what I used. I said Microsoft Office (they really are Apple people through and through) to which they said they would try and give it a go.

Well they went round to a friends who owns a PC and after 30 minutes of messing round with Word and Powerpoint 2003 they literally went out the next day and bought Office 2004 for Mac (with an OAP discount :p)

I personally think that speaks volumes as to why Microsoft is such a winning corporation. Their products quite simply do what the vast majority are looking for, even some elderly Mac users who by their own admission buy Macs because they dont like "Microsoft PC's." and "Mac's look nicer on the desk."

For the record, their reasoning for preffering MS Office over OpenOffice varied from "well it feels much faster doesnt it" to "It actually works with my printer" and finally "we much preferred all the menus and things."

Microsoft have forged the UI as we expect it to be today (albeit with a lot of creative influence from the good people at Apple.)

Office 2007 is a genuine triumph in HCI study in my opinion, its the first Office version I have purchased under a student license and been really pleased I did, its such an improvement and so much better at nearly everything it does than OpenOffice (all in my opinion of course.)
 
I think the move to OpenOffice at DELTA was partly to save on funds - it's open source so it's free, and it's very similair to what was used before.
 
lemonkettaz said:
Old people using macs!

What are all the scene kids going to do now!?
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hehe they both use a Mac as its what the Geology and Biology departments at Manchester University had when they were both doing their degree's in the mid 1980's (Apple II's i presume) and well... old habits die hard, plus they were instantly swayed by the Mac Mini :)
 
So "NT sucks" because you say it doesn't increase productivity and doesn't lower TCO. You also say it sucks because Microsoft are a partial monopoly.

Oooookay... even though those views are totally misguided as has already been explained to you, how about judging the product on its technical merit compared to rival products?

It's like saying an F-22 Raptor fighter jet "sucks" because it can kill people... yet it is still a brilliant piece of engineering and comparitively speaking is one of the best jets in the sky.
 
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.
 
Why've you completely changed your tune? Just because all your previous points have been proved wrong? At first you were outraged by being judged for saying "Micro$haft", and now you're whining about Windows NT.
 
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