
Microsoft Killed My Pappy (2014) - dbattaglia
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx
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Rjevski
I don’t think many people are hating on Microsoft because of the bad they did
a decade ago.

People are hating on Microsoft because of the shit they are doing _now_.

Windows 10 and Skype are prime examples, and that is _still_ happening as we
speak, as opposed to something that happened years ago.

~~~
blub
The amount of whitewashing of the telemetry/spyware is disturbing: most MS
defenders (as if this rich corporation needs any defense!) keep saying that
_now_ they're listing all information they're gathering and allow users to
turn it off.

What they're conveniently not saying is how MS completely ignored all customer
concerns and moved ahead with their invasive telemetry/spyware, initially
didn't list anything thay they were collecting, aggressively changed their
implementation in Windows updates to get around telemetry/spyware blockers and
didn't allow turning it off.

I have zero trust in the MS of today, they have shown their true colors. The
fact that they publish some open source trinkets and say how much they "heart"
this or that is almost irrelevant for me.

The stuff they did in the past also matters: trying to derail the open
document format standard and killing the Munich Linux project are recent
events. They continue to be a bad actor.

~~~
rasz
>and allow users to turn it off

which is still not true, random services will keep making mysterious
connections no matter wat you disable. Turn of DNSCache and watch svchost
query stuff almost every 10-20 minutes.

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seabird
People don't rip on Microsoft for poor decisions and anti-competitive
practices 20 years ago. They rip on Microsoft because the Microsoft ecosystem
is a Rube Goldberg-esque shitshow of poorly integrated acquisitions,
"features" that basically exist for the sake of causing headaches, and the
reality that compelling solutions to problems get sidelined because "nobody
ever got fired for going with Microsoft". Vendor lock-in doesn't endear those
who have to deal with it to the company holding their business process
hostage.

~~~
themacguffinman
Thank you, it's frustrating constantly being told that there's no good reason
to rip on Microsoft today. I don't hate Microsoft out of righteous anger at
proprietary software or some grudge from the 90s; Their software sucks
_today_.

It's so disingenuous to say that "oh well Microsoft isn't organized enough to
be evil". Mustache-twirling villainy isn't the fear with 2018 Microsoft. The
fear is that they'll just ruin things they acquire just like they ruin their
own software, and possibly ruin markets they wade into due to their sheer
size.

You don't need to be organized to ruin things. You don't even need to be evil.

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caiocaiocaio
I've seen a few things recently in this vein, that I should look at Microsoft
with new eyes because it hasn't done anything bad lately, as if a few years
makes up for three or four decades.

Even if I were to buy that, "We've been on our best behaviour lately" isn't
really a great reason to invest time and money in a company's mediocre-at-best
products.

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bootsz
This. To me Microsoft has basically become the embodiment of mediocrity in
tech. Just about everything they offer, maybe other than Office, is a worse
version of a better product by someone else. And they can still rake in
profits because most huge corporations are hopelessly dependent on their
ecosystem.

In the 90s they were unstoppable and their products unrivaled; but that was a
long time ago. I don't care about antitrust 20 years ago, I care about not
using terrible products that feel constantly 10 years behind the curve.

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bobx11
This is written by a Microsoft employee

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megaman22
I have an odd perspective, because the state of Maine landed some wild
kickback-laden deal to supply high schoolers with ibooks in the 2000s.

I hated those machines. I think they were the very first iteration of OSX.
They were locked down with annoying, if not very effective Bess proxy
software. Nothing was compatible. Safari blew.

Using the old Win95 machine in the computer lab was refreshing. I had the
freedom of fucking around with QBasic and then VB6 was envigorating. Then some
probably bootleg copies of VC++6 for a year. Completely opened my eyes to all
the cool, low-level, hacky shit you could do on windows.

I'm sure it helped that this was pre-steam, where the pirate pc gaming system
was a thing. So learning to fix busted windows systems was an everyday thing.
Mac... eh, i had one game that had a macos9 version I could get to run (Lords
of the Realm 1, i think...)

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yuhong
I wrote a poorly written wishlist for Satya partly because of this post.

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juststeve
did he reply?

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yuhong
No, and I never asked.

