What is Microsoft's problem?

[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.

[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]

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?

[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.