First to market kind of matters, yeah? The whole idea of software independent of the hardware got it’s feet under it primarily because of MS, I’d argue.
I think you must think I’m some dumb ass MS fan girl, but I’m not. I don’t like MS and rarely use their products (except when forced to by work), because better alternatives exist. Are their products any good? Not really - it’s buggy and problematic. Did they help change the landscape for how we think about software and how non-techies use software, I’d say that’s the case. You don’t have to like that or think it’s a positive to acknowledge it. Are they monopolistic assholes that sought to destroy all competition, you bet. No one is denying that at all. History be a complicated thing, yo.
Yes, certainly. But only for the worse, and even then not significantly. I curse everytime I have to deal with a .doc or .docx (though, at this point, I only accept .pdfs from my students at least), but even there Microsoft isn’t really innovative at all. If MS hadn’t existed I would be cursing about receiving WordPerfect files.
Re: Altair Basic - is this supposed to be a concrete example of Microsoft’s technological innovation? If Microsoft had invented BASIC, I would concede the point. While BASIC isn’t necessarily that relevant as a language for implementing important software, it was important from an educational standpoint (it was the first programming language I learned). However, BASIC was developed by Kemeny & Kurtz in 1964, over a decade before. And Microsoft wasn’t even the first to develop a BASIC implementation for the Altair even. Again, on the business side, obviously they were successful.
I think you must think I’m some dumb ass MS fan girl, but I’m not.
I don’t think you’re an MS fan girl or anything of that sort. I just disagree about the technological relevance of Microsoft. I’m sure they’re fascinating to study from a technology business standpoint, but they’re uninteresting from a technological standpoint.
History be a complicated thing, yo.
Yeah, I understand that much. But I still stand by my claim that — setting the evilness of the company itself aside — they’re not technology innovators, but rather technology adopters. And in the early market, they were just one of many, and some other (likely also monopolistic asshole) company would have filled in the space MS ended up occupying.
That is their history, true. Since 2014, it is a whole new company with Nadella, and while it is true they still hold some monopolistic market positions they are all weaker than before.
They have made some truly great software in the last 10 years. They are a major cross platform software maker now, actually.
I know people like to hate on it and some of the reasons are valid but Office is a kick ass bit of software. Also having used Notes (why IBM, why?) while I have quibbles with Exchange/Outlook I can’t hate it anymore.
Actually most of my gripes with Office/Outlook are the goddamn autocorrects of formatting and such. Please quit assuming what I want to do and pissing me off by ‘fixing’ it for me.
This is more true than untrue. They like to take ideas from the OSS world and polish them up and integrate them into the Windows ecosystem. Most of TFS for example. The CLR. A lot of Windows features under the covers.
Some stuff truly is new. Kinect, Hololens come to mind.
My argument here is that they did get there first, and as such led the way in revolutionizing how average people interact with computers. I still think first to market matters here, even if they were operating in a field of competitors.
If you want my agreement that at the end of the day, their monopolistic practices had a negative impact, I do tend to agree.
On some level aren’t most similar type programs based on their model? I think others above made that same point…
Although it pisses me off when I write my files in OO, then upload them to the college system, and MS office won’t handle them properly… I think documents should always be universal, but they’re not. That’s a major problem with MS products, I think.
Open/Libre/I never keep track of the nameOffice is actually pretty good but I have gripes with that too. It is what I use on the home machine as it does all I need and more.
I get that it will not be as visible to you as a desktop user. So here goes top of mind for me:
The recent Visual Studio editions are a modern marvel. There is no other IDE for any language which removes so many of the hurdles to coding. It feels at times like the code writes itself. And they have editions for Linux and OSX now.
Recent SQL features are similarly miraculous. Assuming you have your transaction logs, you effectively can roll back to a snapshot of a database at a specific moment in time. Transparent row level data encryption also super cool.
I would say Office. Buddy of mine in finance says his stuff he uses for his day job would be impossible with any other spreadsheet, including previous versions of office.
The whole .Net ecosystem is great. Personal feeling is that although it is Java-like, it is much larger in scope than Java and avoids some of the pitfalls.
I thought aside from the UI SNAFU’s all recent versions of Windows were super solid under the covers. Windows 10 accomplishes reasonably well a compromise between Desktop and Tablet OS, leading to some very nice and usable hardware like the Surface laptop/tablets. Comparable devices on other platforms (Basically Android I guess) are kludgier.
