What is Microsoft's problem?

[Bijo]

Because I'm working with someone online and another messenger service seemed to not function for this person, the use of MSN Messenger is necessitated. What I want:

1. Download app
2. Install app
3. Use app

It can be that simple, really. But nooooooooo: they gotta make it so ****** up. First I must browse a bloated site and find the goddamn link, then there's a whole story and rubbish for noobs which I must navigate through, then it redirects me finally to the MSN site of my country (but I don't give a damn, I read English, or even give me French or German version, I don't care... and what's messed up is when I selected my country (which has its own language) I still got it in English.... what the ****), then I get a bloated installation window when the file is run... What the ****? All this marketing, all this rubbish, all this talk about nothing: just give me the goddamn download, then let me install it and use it.


The way:

1. Download app
2. Install app
3. Use app
4. No hassle!

Of course, when I finally used the program after a long time I discovered it was changed. I see it's become even more bloated than ever with all kinds of unnecessary abundant rubbish.

And I shall end this complaint with the following phrase: Microsoft must cease to exist.

[sapi]

Forget Microsoft, trust open source?

[Husar]

I'm currently using Miranda(if you compare that to pidgin, pidgin looks like a graphics blender ) but to be honest, I always liked the MSN Messenger, now called Live Messenger. There are some features that can be/have to be customized and to be honest it was faster than downloading, installing and getting to work all the Miranda plugins I use now. Also keep in mind that some people may actually like to have fancy graphics in a sidebar with links to all sorts of stuff that may be irrelevant to you and me. For you and me there's an option to turn that sidebar off. It's a bit like setting a new game to the correct resolution and tweaking the graphics settings until you're satisfied.

I've heard some bad things about the Microsoft Messenger but for me it seemed to be the most private protocol whereas until some years ago I used to receive daily requests in ICQ from porn stars who wanted me in their contact lists.
ICQ 6 even goes a step further and after adding someone you cannot see her/his online status because that requires a special permit now on top of the one already given.
Well, Miranda works around this and a few other annoyances, uses less ressources etc but you have to find all the nice plugins yourself and features like voice chat(which I have actually used somewhat extensively some years ago) are not available at all AFAIK.

To answer your original question, I don't think Microsoft has a problem, I think you have one.

[sapi]

For you and me there's an option to turn that sidebar off.

I'd never seen that before

Thanks a lot

[Bijo]

Fascinating. It seems Husar might be correct when he states he thinks it is I who have a problem and not Microsoft. Well, even then what about all the bloated websites and such? Ah, they must go to hell! I used Miranda before but I didn't like it and I probably never will.

I followed sapi's advice and checked out Pidgin. What a beautiful program. There seems to be a downside, though, at least from what I notice: transfers are slow as heck and the program often disconnects which never happened with the other separate messengers. Still, nice program.

[Fragony]

Windows, made by a nerd who worked in his spare time to develope something that turned out to be just what the people wanted, this guy deserves respect, he even invested more capital in good causes then you and your kids and theirs will ever earn in your life and probably a whole lot more generation to come. What is it with people to envy succes, he would never been succesful as a salesmanager, a pimp or a pornstar, but he was good enough at this when others weren't, congrats billyboy

[Bijo]

I don't envy his success: I dislike Microsoft's marketing, bloated rubbish, bloated sites, etc., which is the whole point. You are being.... illogical, Fragony boy! ;)

[Xiahou]

I don't envy his success: I dislike Microsoft's marketing, bloated rubbish, bloated sites, etc., which is the whole point. You are being.... illogical, Fragony boy! ;)

Took the words out of my mouth. I respect the hell out of what Bill Gates has done, and he earned his riches (well, for the most part). What I don't like is how the company now acts more like a monopolistic thug than a fresh innovator. They do everything they can to force you into their products across the boards, via forced incompatibilities and the like rather than making us want to use their stuff because it's the best out there.

[Husar]

On a completely related note, let me try this Pidgin, my Miranda tells me that everything I write could not be delivered now despite the fact that the other side gets it. Wouldn't be surprised if certain developers of certain messaging protocols deliberately send compatibility to hell as well.
Or maybe it's something else but it worked fine before and I had to upgrade the protocol plugin before because they changed something in the official protocol somehow whatever.

edit: ok it works fine so far, just too bad it doesn't allow to disable groups, will have to shuffle everybody into the same group or so.

[Papewaio]

Took the words out of my mouth. I respect the hell out of what Bill Gates has done, and he earned his riches (well, for the most part). What I don't like is how the company now acts more like a monopolistic thug than a fresh innovator. They do everything they can to force you into their products across the boards, via forced incompatibilities and the like rather than making us want to use their stuff because it's the best out there.

What is your comparison point? Apple... forced OS on force Hardware unless you hack it.

Oh look an iPhone that works on a non-monopoly carrier... update 1.1 one... Oh look a brick that no longer works on anything.

Compared to a lot of its competitors MS is a lot more capable of playing well with others. Apple shot itself in the foot in the home computer market when it stopped clones, and it is doing it again with the restrictions on iPhone.

[Lemur]

Apple had its moment, and completely wiffed it. Read it and weep. The upshot is that we could have had a thriving windowed GUI environment a lot sooner.

I'm not sure one needs a technological "comparison point" to be unhappy with how Microsoft behaves. And if you absolutely need a similar yardstick, why not compare the bullies from Redmond to the unwashed hippies of Linux?

[caravel]

Wouldn't be surprised if certain developers of certain messaging protocols deliberately send compatibility to hell as well.

This actually happened in the case of M$, and was a deliberate attempt to block free 3rd party IM client software such as pidgin (or gaim as it was called back then) from connecting to MSN's Messenger service.

[Papewaio]

I'm not sure one needs a technological "comparison point" to be unhappy with how Microsoft behaves. And if you absolutely need a similar yardstick, why not compare the bullies from Redmond to the unwashed hippies of Linux?

I don't believe in using absolute points of comparison outside of a church.

So it is down to relative contrast. MS is by no means the worst of the bunch, heck one only needs to work with other IT vendors to know how much stuff is kept 'in-house','specialized architecture', 'specific hardware supported only'... when a lot of it is about locking people into contracts and sucking out as much revenue. MS gets a lot of stick purely because MS is so large, and a lot of these complainers haven't had to deal with Oracle or Cisco or any of the telephony/VoIP vendors... all of which can be quite nuanced/picky about who and what they work well with. Apple is merely the other store bought home user OS alternative... there are plenty of freeware out there... but then the user would generally have to blame themselves for tech support issues and thats not the point when trying to pass the buck now is it. So no point bringing up Red Hat and the rest as they would require expert knowledge or self introspection... neither of which the home user wishes to put effort into as much as blaming the man for all his woes.

MS still sucks from time to time, but it doesn't take much effort to find far worse. It does take effort to get better computing... as that requires end users to RTFM.

[Xiahou]

You're missing the point entirely. If Cisco doesn't play well with an app, what do you do? You buy other hardware. You'd be hard pressed to find a company with more monopoly powers in the IT industry than Microsoft. They have it, and they love leveraging it to "encourage" us to adopt their new offerings by forcing users into closed standards of which they have sole control. DirectX is a good example and their legal woes over bundling IE are also well-documented. I think another one in the making is the 'Games for Windows' iniatiative as it implements Live features to tie in with the 360 and inexorably herds people into subscriptions.

[Papewaio]

You don't exactly run a non-Cisco app on Cisco hardware or vice-a-versa. Heck Call Manager will run only on a very limited scope of non-Cisco hardware and that is because CM was not developed orginally in house. Look at Cisco video conferencing at first you had to use a very expensive (rebadged with from product X to Cisco) camera that only had an extra chip in it that the software checked to make sure it was badged Cisco. Cisco IOS on the whole runs on Cisco hardware.

Likewise on the whole Apple apps run on apple OS that runs on Apple hardware.

MS isn't the worst, its the biggest... and it probably is the biggest because it had the most open standards... which is something it keeps forgetting and shooting itself in the foot everytime it tries and corner a market.

[caravel]

Cisco products and home PC OS products is not the best comparison. Putting the server market aside, it is undoubtedly the home PC software market that M$ have been controlling pretty much since day one. When they first bundled IE with Win98 this was M$ attempting to control the way home users access the net as well - a goal which they have almost succeeded in.

M$'s grip on the home PC is a wholly different issue to Cisco systems dominance in the networking hardware market or Apple's policy of their own OS on their own hardware. There is a simple solution to the Apple issue: Don't buy an Apple. With an Apple you can choose not to buy it, with a load of PC hardware and the latest games when you've put it all together you still need the missing link: M$ Windows.

M$ have the almost absolute monopoly in the home PC gaming market due to DirectX. This gives M$ effective control of the gaming market. So if you want to play a game, such as M2TW, you need to run an M$ OS on your otherwise open hardware platform. Apple aren't exercising this kind of leverage over consumers. In the past some developers such as ID Software looked set to release most of their games as Linux ports. Also ID and some others used OpenGL as their main graphics API and not Direct3D. Many late 90's early 00's games had the option of either Direct3D or OpenGL this welcome option has now disappeared. Back then things seemed to be going in the right direction, now it is clear in retrospect that the first indications of the situation we are now in were there.

The failure of OpenGL has has been put down to it's lower performance in latter years compared to Direct3D but in fact this failure is more so that of M$ to provide a decent and up to date reference driver (I wonder why!?) to ship with it's Windows OS. In the past it was almost always necessary, especially in the case of the old 3dfx cards, to go into the windows\system32 folder and remove the M$ Opengl32.dll file and replace it with the one provided by the graphics card manufacturer. This would then yield a huge performance boost over the M$ reference driver. M$ were simply steering the user towards Direct3D with the ultimate objective of gaining leverage over the gaming market and destroying the cross platform gaming dreams of many.

[Husar]

So they're pretty successful in their business.

[caravel]

They're cut-throat in their business approach and this is no reason to applaud or admire them.

M$ don't put out a quality product they merely got lucky back in the days of M$ DOS vs IBM DOS and as a result of this they can now force their software, which is mostly composed of a plaigarised concoction of other developers', down consumers throats.

[Banquo's Ghost]

M$ don't put out a quality product they merely got lucky back in the days of M$ DOS vs IBM DOS and as a result of this they can now force their software, which is mostly composed of a plaigarised concoction of other developers', down consumers throats.

And therein lies the problem that even Microsoft admirers ought to recognise - monopolies throttle competition, and no competition means precious little innovation.

I have no doubt that Steve Jobs would be a worse monopolist than Bill Gates - given how he treated Woz, there isn't a philanthropic bone in his body. But because Apple blew their chance, they have to innovate and compete. The Linux and other open source communities do the same. Bill doesn't. The MS approach is to smash competition rather than out-innovate it.

Microsoft at 55% of market share would be a much better consumer proposition than at its current 94% share. MS customers themselves would be much better off. And it's perfectly possible to have cross-platform standards by agreement rather than by dictat.

Here's an interesting example of how Bill Gates' philosophy works to the detriment of the wider populace.

[Papewaio]

They're cut-throat in their business approach and this is no reason to applaud or admire them.

M$ don't put out a quality product they merely got lucky back in the days of M$ DOS vs IBM DOS and as a result of this they can now force their software, which is mostly composed of a plaigarised concoction of other developers', down consumers throats.

BUT this is the issue, MS isn't the only one that is doing it, nor is it worst of breed. Virtually every large software and/or hardware company is trying to force their own standards and not use open standards. To point a finger at MS and ignore the rest doesn't show any insight at all nor will it remove the root cause.

Also as far as market dominance is concerned, MS didn't so much earn it as it was given it by its competitors... all of whom used far more restricted standards... something which MS continues to forget and hence hinder its own market share.

I find it funny that the ones who do the best are the most open and have a store front where you can buy it... a mix of old fashioned brick and mortar store where consumers can try out the product, a price tag attached (no one appreciates something they get for free) and the ability to use it with as much things as possible. USB devices is one of the growth areas in the world of computing... why because it is one of the most open standards.

[Xiahou]

BUT this is the issue, MS isn't the only one that is doing it, nor is it worst of breed. Virtually every large software and/or hardware company is trying to force their own standards and not use open standards. To point a finger at MS and ignore the rest doesn't show any insight at all nor will it remove the root cause.

Again, we're talking about the effects. Some little no-name company can my a product and try to bundle it with other software and force their closed, incompatible standards on consumers- but they'll fail. People will buy something else and either the company will change its product or go out of business.

Microsoft is the only game in town. When they break OpenGL compatibility and force their closed standard on us- people have few options. Once they get a monopoly on graphics with DirectX, they can go ahead and force people to buy their new OS in order to stay up to date with it.

It's not that they're the only company that behaves in such a way, it's that they are a monopoly that's behaving so heavy handedly. As a consumer, I don't like their practices and don't like them trying to force me into products and standards that they dictate. I don't care when a company I never heard of makes a product I never heard of that does the same thing- it doesn't affect me. Microsoft's tactics affect everyone.

And therein lies the problem that even Microsoft admirers ought to recognise - monopolies throttle competition, and no competition means precious little innovation.

[caravel]

Also as far as market dominance is concerned, MS didn't so much earn it as it was given it by its competitors... all of whom used far more restricted standards... something which MS continues to forget and hence hinder its own market share.

I disagree with this point. M$ were not handed the OS market by inept competition, they simply got lucky, captured it and then through anti competitive tactics formed an almost total monopoly and have held on to it ever since. There has never really been any competition to speak of apart from GNU/Linux. Any competing proprietary OS was stifled due to not being able to run the same programs as Windows. This and this alone is what secures M$ in their position.

M$ have shown the world their typical business tactics with the M$ vs Netscape case. Yes if you want to you can congratulate M$ on that one (though luckily it did backfire and lead to Mozilla), but at the end of the day it leaves you, the end user, with less choice and having to pay M$ extortionate prices. Most of the second and third world is rife with pirated M$ software. They are well aware of this and know only too well that there's not a lot they can do about it.

In fact this situation works very well for M$ with western users paying the premium price for the OS to counter the rest of the world that is using the pirate copies. The proliferation of Pirate windows in China, the far east, South America and in other parts of the world actually does a lot to stifle any potential competition in those areas. It would be hard for a software company in China, for example, to compete with what is in essence a free product.

[R'as al Ghul]

The only hope for Open source software is that governments around the world discover that they can save a load of money when they use OS software. The netherlands have just decided to go OS in the future and others have done so before. If those users realise that the systems work as good or better than MS's than there's hope that they'll install Open source software on their private machines, too.
If that gets established the game developers sooner or later have to deal with those customers that use a different platform.