Eugene Leitl says:
> Harvey Newstrom writes:
>
> > without asking the PC owner first. Only Microsoft thinks is a good
> > "feature."
>
> Microsoft has an ancient well-documented tradition of releasing
> unstable, insecure, (ILOVEYOU is just a recent instance, see BUGTRAQ
> archive for a truly impressive accomplishment track) poorely
> engineered poorly performing products with proprietary extensions of
> standards (standards are sure wonderful, everybody should have one),
> notoriously excessive hardware requirements, extremely poor
> scalability and portability, paired with a remarkable lack of features
> with at best mediocre high latency support, which is frequently so bad
> it's not there. They don't understand version control and proper
> software upgrading. They don't believe in strict separation in kernel
> and userland, and minimization of kernel code. They don't release
> their source nor development tools with full source, so users can't
> help themselves and other users. I wouldn't be surprised if their
> OSses and apps would have back doors, fed-mandated, and others.
>
> In short, they suck on all fronts as far as I can see. According to
...
I've seen so much of this over the years I've grown very weary of it.
If you think they suck on all fronts you can see, you can't see the
factors that go into making successful office productivity products.
Not that you necessarily should see those, but they are real, and
Microsoft knows them like nobody's business.
I am a programmer. I've worked mostly with Sun's unices (SunOS and
Solaris) as well as a little with AIX. At home I run NetBSD, and
Linux. And I frequently use Windows 98 because I want to see things as
my end users will. I know the difference in quality between the
Microsoft products and others I use. And I have come to think the
arguments I read on this topic are like this:
Person #1: McDonald's makes the best food in the world. The worldwide
popularity of the Big Mac proves it to be an extremely useful,
flexible meal product. It contains all kinds of different food,
including vegetable grain and meat. The price is right. The
consistent high quality is shown by the extremely low number of
customers who die immediately after eating a Big Mac. No one should
eat anything but McDonald's food, and in the future, when they
introduce their McDonald's Vegan meal, the last objections to everyone
eating at McDonald's all the time will be swept away.
Person #2: Yuck! Puke! I only eat at Antoinette's house of Vegan
Delights. Antoinette is my friend and she's told me exactly what goes
into each meal. The nutritional benefits, the cleanilness of her
kitchen, and the quality of her food are way above McDonald's. Her
recipes are better. She even lets me kibbitz a little and help her
improve the recipes. Talk about having it my way! McDonald's makes
pure poison and eating there is suicide. No one should ever do it, no
one has any reason to do it, and the McDonald's fortune is entirely
due to mistakes and stupidity.
etc.
These people are arguing totally different metrics of success.
There's no point in comparing the two.
Regards,
James Wetterau
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:10:35 MDT