danmohr wrote:Your knowledge of the history of the personal computer industry is a little lacking - you gotta stop treating slashdot like a reference work. Microsoft won out over companies offering competing products in the OS space (CP/M, TopDeck and some other proto-windowing software), the application space (Lotus, WordPerfect, etc.) and the development space (Borland, Delphi, etc.) because of a) extremely canny business sense and b) they offered the right products at the right time at the right price. If you fail to see these products as great, you are in the minority.
They got the market because of OEM deals, and not product quality. The person I know who worked at Microsoft was a product manager on Vista, and he will say it straight out... They do not make quality products. They got the market based on OEM deals. When you buy a new PC, what operating system is installed on it? Do you have a choice? Windows users are not "customers" any more than someone flying on an airline is a customer of security screeners. Windows is something you have to use because it is what is on your computer at most companies and it is what is on your computer when you buy it at a store.
It doesn't surprise me that a Microsoft employee feels that their market share is a sign of quality. I'm sure Halliburton gets all of their contracts in Iraq based on their high quality of service.
It is also typical of a Microsoft employee to marginalize anyone critical of them as a "slashdot" fanatic. Their lack of criticism and internal review is partly to blame for their product quality. Apple is worse in this respect.
In my 10 year career, I have learned that you NEVER install a Windows OS when it first comes out. The best time is 2 years after release when there are 3-4 service packs released.
To be quite honest, we moved our J2EE app server to IBM AIX Unix, and it has been rock solid. We still use SQL Server, but there is still enough Sybase code in their to make it relatively solid (we are using 2000 still, because we are honestly afraid of 2005 until maybe 2 more SPs are released). The main reason we stuck with it is more the half a million lines of stored procedure code that we would have to port to IBM DB2. SQL is standard, but T-SQL is not. One of the best arguments for not writing stored procs... There used to be a performance benefit, but most db's will cache SQL nowadays...
The best Microsoft products (in terms of quality and not market share) are the ones they bought from other companies. Windows NT was great until they eventually made it just another bloated and poor quality MS product. It was based on LanManager, which they purchased from Novell. It was there most rock-solid OS, and I never knew why until I found out it was a Novell product originally...
SQL Server is a Sybase product that they bought. I haven't experienced too many bugs with that product, but I have come across quite a few bugs in connecting to the database via other Microsoft technologies. If you connect to it through a type 4 JDBC driver, it is quite good. So the less Microsoft I use, the more reliable everything seems to be. In other words, they have a few products that don't piss me off.
As far as development, Microsoft took a long time to get a solid internet platform out there. I still don't think their J2EE knock-off (.NET) is up to snuff. It wasn't until 1998 that IIS was a reliable app server. I remember when ASP first came out, and every time you went to the Microsoft site you would get the "Object Moved" error message. They couldn't even run their own site on their technology. Nonetheless, since they included this platform for free with the OS, people used it. I guess for most people a free piece of crap that you can mold into something passable (while getting a fair amount of crap on your hands) is better than paying for quality.
Look at Hotmail. When it was a non-MS product, it was reliable and fast. After MS bought it, they ruined it by porting it to their technologies. It is a lot less reliable now. Unfortunately, it is the email address I have used for the past decade, so I stick with it. Yahoo mail and Gmail are superior products.
Now, I do think Microsoft makes better products than Apple... But I also think they have some challenges ahead as their organization grows larger and more latent.
As far as their corporate culture -- it depends where you are in the company. In the business development side (product management) it is very much the Harvard elite prepster crap where people cling together based on where they went to college. It is probably not too different than most companies. They have extraordinary benefits, but compared to Google, they are a sweatshop.
The person I know was reprimanded by his manager for not being in his office during non-meeting work hours. So I'm not sure about this "come and go as you please" stuff. I guess you're supposed to eat lunch at your desk? Now, this is Vista product management, and not some Zune or MSN content division... This is the high stakes side of it.
I was also told that to change some text on a dialog box takes about a month.
It's just that everyone I know who goes to MS ends up coming back... I haven't worked there, and I'm sure for some people it may be a great place to work. I just have never seen this to be true. I saw a 60 minutes about the corporate culture there, and it was depressing. Nerds in their 20s who have nothing better to do on a Saturday night than hang out at work and play ping pong and maybe do a little work. Depressing, but I think they rely on this type of pathetic, lifeless person to make products with passable quality by brute force which are sold by brute force.
And yes, I am typing all this on my slow Windows XP laptop, which is twice as fast (in terms of specs) as my last laptop which ran 2000, but it actually runs twice as slow due to software bloat.
