If you really feel that way than go Linux, you can download a base copy for free from any major distro and get free updates. However, they do appreciate if you buy a full packaged version from time to time so that the progammers can eat more than red beans and rice every day. As for duping us for years, developing anything for hardware or software is extremely hard work, and requires 70-80 hrs a week. MS overcame some awesome challenges to write an OS that would integrate all of the cheap, crappy, standards non-compliant hardware known to man all made right here in lovely SE Asia. They probably could have come out with a much better OS years ago, but its hardware requirements would have been so rigid that not very many PC’s would have worked because the components requirements would have been too high and too expensive. There is a reason Mac is still and always will be so expensive. This is also the reason why I have had to buy new hardware cards when upgrading one of my systems to a Linux server, because Linux was not willing to play with the older cheap stuff I had. Linux is like that, can be very touchy to bad hardware (especially cheap non-branded memory) because it is written to be very standards compliant, so any hardware that plays loose with the standards to get a higher product yield, i.e. less rejects = higher yield, will be more prone to problems on Linux. It has gotten better, but Linux is still much more sensitive, and for many of the products drivers have not been written yet or the system will default to a generic driver that might not be optimized to get the full performance of the device.
I used to feel the same way about MS with Win 95/98 and all the blue screens of death until I actually got into the HW/SW field and started to understand how difficult this type of work was. Then you start to realize that if some Mom and Pop operation opens up to make some cheap clone of a PC card (NIC, modem, graphics, etc.) that is not designed, tested, or integrated, but somebody buys it and it doesn’t work right they yell at MS, not the company that made it, even though they were not willing to pay the additional 5-10US it might have taken to buy a higher quality product that had been thouroughly integrated and tested.
A rant, and yes I digress, but seeing all of these high tech jobs leave the US and come here to Asia, and everybody so willing to rip off IP for free after a while starts to get me upset. I know too many good people that have lost their jobs in this recession because someone else is willing to buy the 5 dollar pirated copy at the local night market.
Umm, excuse me, but Microsoft turns out crap because of the way they work internally. I know this firsthand because I have worked there on contract, not to mention that I live in the area and know a hell of a lot of their employees (both current and former).
Let’s go through a typical product development cycle, shall we?
Find out that someone else has produced a useful product.
Announce that MS will put out the same thing next month, only better, and “free” since it’s included on the OS install disk or in the next service pack or free for download.
Take six months to a year and put out a really crappy, buggy initial version that nobody can use. Be sure that it disables the competitor’s product and takes over all of its file-type associations. Don’t include a functioning “uninstall”.
Ignore the screams.
Let marketing decide how best to integrate the “new product” into the rest of the Microsoft O(ctopu)S and Office system.
Scramble to put in ninety features nobody will ever use or want, all because some nitwit in Marketing decided it would be cool.
Throw out half the new features because they won’t work in time.
Get delayed by six months because Marketing insists that all the features are essential. Oh, and you’ll need to add these others which have become essential since they came up with the first batch.
Repeat-and-churn steps 7 and 8 until Bill or Steve gets pissed and insists that it has to go out the door next week. (This may take up to two years.) Throw together some documentation.
Force-feed it to an unsuspecting public. Promise bugfixes.
Deliver bugfixes, but with inadequate testing because there were just too many to fix. Include new bugs and major security loopholes that allow hackers to destroy the machine.
Repeat 11 until the next “release” comes out.
Procedure for “next release”: start at Step 6 above.
[quote][quote=“MaPoDoFu”]Umm, excuse me, but Microsoft turns out crap because of the way they work internally. I know this firsthand because I have worked there on contract, not to mention that I live in the area and know a hell of a lot of their employees (both current and former).
Let’s go through a typical product development cycle, shall we?[/quote][/quote]]
I worked on a case involving MS and got to see their internal process [read: hundreds of boxes of paper in a warehouse of thousands of boxes]. The development cycle, at least from management point of view ie thru their emails, etc., doesn’t really make me sympathise with MS. For that matter, after seeing MS and their competitor’s rants (ie Oracle, Sun, but especially Larry Ellison. and excl. Linux), I am not sympathetic with any of them. Management emails basically can be summed up as: Everyone is out to get us, how can we maintain our stranglehold on the industry and protect our nearly trillion dollar surplus cash, and how can we maintain viselike grip on the computer mfrs, developers, distributors, computer standards, etc. with language similar to how can we destroy netscape. I don’t recall them complaining about how hard it was to include all the crappy hardware to make things work (granted, such docs could have been outside the scope of our search). but then again, when you’re the king of the hill, everyone wants a shot at the title, so i can understand their paranoia. naturally, management shat on the engineers.
In Microsoft’s case, not very – the manufacturers have their own staff on site to do compatibility testing and driver-writing.
If their product doesn’t work with Microsoft’s OS, it won’t sell. So the manufacturer has a strong incentive to get it to work.
Hmm. I don’t really remember that being the case; they treated their programmers like little gods, in fact. But the rest of the staff were expendable – the graphic-arts people especially seemed to hate Microsoft; one told me she’d been laid off after two years when Microsoft went through its periodic “reshuffle the noncritical staff so they can’t cash their stock options” dance, which apparently is the standard treatment for anyone who can be replaced.
Programmers at least used to be safe from that, since a huge part of their job is to remember how everything works internally, and dumping one means that the new hire has to learn everything from scratch. But graphic artists, tech writers, secretaries, and so on don’t need much in the way of institutional memory, so they’re easy targets for shoving through the revolving door.