Lol Microsoft

[Gooberlx2]

Meh, 95 wasn't really shit...it was drastically different and it took a while for the hardware manufacturers to release drivers and developers to get a hang of things.

ME might have been the only truly "shit" release. Partially because of some of the poorly fleshed out features like System Restore, but also because it was a bridge between 98se and XP. I think a lot of manufacturers never cared to really develop/update their drivers for ME when they knew going forward everything was going to be on the NT platform. As a result, ME was an incomplete bastard OS.

On release, XP was as much shit as the others. Again, drivers issues were a large part of that, despite Win2K having been out for a while to allow hardware manufacturers a chance to get their shit in order.

People have a warped sense fondness for XP because of how long it reigned as MS's desktop OS. They forget what the sentiment was like at release. I remember frequent complaints about everything from instability to the Fisher Price UI. IMO, pre-sp1 XP is the least stable MS release I've used.

The whole "vista debacle" was exaggerated due to drivers issues with ancient hardware and forced changes on consumers and developers, like UAC, to deal with increased security measures. On release it was a helluva lot better and more polished than XP.

Windows 8 isn't shit at all. You don't really have to deal with the start screen if you don't want to and there are a number of back-end improvements.

Really, every "shit" OS release from MS has more to due with people bitching and moaning about UI changes than anything else, imo.

 

[Brigandier]

The only bad M$ OS I remember is ME, all others were great. I never bought Vista, but the release candidate seemed pretty slick to me.


Windows 2000 is my favorite OS by M$, It's like a sleeker, more svelte version of XP with the classic theme turned on. I only upgraded from it because my video card decided not to support it.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Have fun with Linux, Perl/Ruby/Java/PHP, Lotus Notes, Novell, Oracle DB, Open Office, the 20 products you need to replace SharePoint, etc. Most consumers just associate Microsoft with Windows and maybe Office. They do a whole lot more. Chances are, the majority of your company's infrastructure runs on Microsoft stuff.

I don't seriously think Microsoft's enterprise software is going anywhere. I think they'll just adapt and make it easier to use with iOS and Android devices. We've seen Sharepoint gradually evolve and increase browser support from SP 2007-->2010-->2013 and I think it will continue. Plus, Microsoft is wisely going to release Office versions of iOS and I believe there is a rumored Android version as well.

Where Microsoft has badly failed (besides appointing Ballmer as CEO) is in the mobile market. They could've had the entire market to themselves but could never get Windows Mobile right.

 

[holden j caufield]

I swear this is the same pattern the Call of Duty series goes through

 

[SheHateMe]

Bought a Windows Phone 7 when they first came out. Loved it for about a month and then realized that its pretty much boring compared to Android. Been stuck with the thing for 2 years now, I am waiting for the Samsung Galaxy IV to be announced to I can get one when it comes out.

Oh ya, did I forget to say that they practically abandoned Windows Phone 7 about 6 months in to start developing Windows Phone 8. Yea, they totally did that.

 

[baydude]

Missing 3.11, NT, 2008 r2.... You know...

Missing 98SE!!

 

[sourceninja]

I'm tempted to agree, but will corporations give up that much control? I can see the security guys having a stroke at the very idea of offloading that much responsibility. What about SoX? Any impact there?

A lot of cloud services are including real encryption and meeting all the requirements companies need to be compliant and to ease the concerns of their security staff.

In the end, your not giving up anything you don't already have. Security guys can still control access to data, data is still encrypted and protected, everything is just as it should be. Your just no longer caring about the OS, the backups, the DR, etc. Your paying for someone else to care about that.

I've actually worked up how to do this where I work. I'm not sure I'd take it to my CIO yet, but I could honestly make this place run without a single onsite server for less then we pay now (hardware, software, power, maintenance) and I can almost make us 100% software as a service with little effort. The things I can't SaS could still run in the cloud and we really wouldn't have a need for AD any longer.

Granted our needs are pretty small with only 400 staff members, but it is doable today. The hardest part would be the paperwork, legal work, and testing to make sure everything was compliant.

There are negatives, when you put your baskets in the cloud, you better have a damn solid network connection, you better pick a company with a good track record (which is NOT microsoft as they can't handle SSL certs or leap year), and you have better get good contracts on SLA. It won't make IT sunshine and ponies, it won't limit your staff, and it won't be easy. But it will empower your users, increase your availability, decrease some costs, make yearly costs more predictable, and possibly improve worker efficiencies.

But like I said, I'm not quite ready to propose this to our CIO/Board. I am however going to propose we move our home directories to the cloud. 90% of the access people are asking for are files in their home directories, it's time to just move that to some kind of corporate 'dropbox' like system. As we are heavily invested in google apps, that will probably be google drive. A lot of testing would have to be done first before I could make that call.

 

[rh71]

can someone tell me why Vista was bad? I've been running it daily without reinstall since January 2009. Before this I reinstalled XP every year or so.

As for the original topic, if I were looking at a new phone, I'd still go android over windows phone. I have to admit I haven't given WIN8 a look at all and really have no reason to. Retail prices are insane. I'd say reducing cost to below market rate would be a good start to get people to come back and take a look.

 

[Vdubchaos]

Bought a Windows Phone 7 when they first came out. Loved it for about a month and then realized that its pretty much boring compared to Android. Been stuck with the thing for 2 years now, I am waiting for the Samsung Galaxy IV to be announced to I can get one when it comes out.

Oh ya, did I forget to say that they practically abandoned Windows Phone 7 about 6 months in to start developing Windows Phone 8. Yea, they totally did that.

I don't care what you get.....it WILL get boring.

All of this hype products only excite for about a week or 2.....if that. Take my S3 today and my life doesn't change one bit.

Heck these devices are HARMFUL more than they are useful. Thankfully mine is free (work phone) and I use it mostly for toilet material.

It's def a nice to have if you travel.....

 

[TechBoyJK]

Have fun with Linux, Perl/Ruby/Java/PHP, Lotus Notes, Novell, Oracle DB, Open Office, the 20 products you need to replace SharePoint, etc. Most consumers just associate Microsoft with Windows and maybe Office. They do a whole lot more. Chances are, the majority of your company's infrastructure runs on Microsoft stuff.

Yep, everything listed is mostly consumer facing products. Their foothold on business is totally different.

ANybody priced out what it costs to put SQL Enterpise on a single Dual Hex Core CPU machine? (a machine you could probably build for less than $2k)..

It'd cost about $70k to license that machine for SQL Enterprise.

 

[Train]

Yep, everything listed is mostly consumer facing products. Their foothold on business is totally different.

ANybody priced out what it costs to put SQL Enterpise on a single Dual Hex Core CPU machine? (a machine you could probably build for less than $2k)..

It'd cost about $70k to license that machine for SQL Enterprise.

I thought they changed the SQL licensing so it's no longer based on number of cores?

 

[Genx87]

Even that is becoming less and less.

More and more staff are demanding 'dropbox' so at what point do I just find a enterprise friendly version of dropbox for my staff. At 15k a year for storage (based on box.com, dropbox, skydrive, and google drive est costs) I'd save money over my current situation of 125k every 5 years (san upgrades and replacements).

So now I'm using a directory for local login, but everyone wants to byod their ipads, macs, and phones. Cloud based services like salesforce are taking away most of my local apps, so really my directory is just letting you login, which you then get to do for dropbox (or whatever I pick) and salesforce (or other apps). So let's just stop with the directory all together and just manager our users via salesforce or some other cloud product. They could then federate their account info to other cloud services.

Boom, I don't even need a local directory now. Let's stop buying computers now too, we can stipend our users money to buy their own tools.

All of these ideas present challenges, but I see no reason this can't be the norm in 5-10 years.

You too? I was monitoring our traffic the other day to present a reason to pull in fiber. Our connection was pegged at about 90% utilization through most of the day. The biggest consumers of this bandwidth was dropbox and yousendit. It was an eye opener for sure.

 

[rockyct]

Meh, 95 wasn't really shit...it was drastically different and it took a while for the hardware manufacturers to release drivers and developers to get a hang of things.

ME might have been the only truly "shit" release. Partially because of some of the poorly fleshed out features like System Restore, but also because it was a bridge between 98se and XP. I think a lot of manufacturers never cared to really develop/update their drivers for ME when they knew going forward everything was going to be on the NT platform. As a result, ME was an incomplete bastard OS.

On release, XP was as much shit as the others. Again, drivers issues were a large part of that, despite Win2K having been out for a while to allow hardware manufacturers a chance to get their shit in order.

People have a warped sense fondness for XP because of how long it reigned as MS's desktop OS. They forget what the sentiment was like at release. I remember frequent complaints about everything from instability to the Fisher Price UI. IMO, pre-sp1 XP is the least stable MS release I've used.

The whole "vista debacle" was exaggerated due to drivers issues with ancient hardware and forced changes on consumers and developers, like UAC, to deal with increased security measures. On release it was a helluva lot better and more polished than XP.

Windows 8 isn't shit at all. You don't really have to deal with the start screen if you don't want to and there are a number of back-end improvements.

Really, every "shit" OS release from MS has more to due with people bitching and moaning about UI changes than anything else, imo.

I think the bigger idea is that every time Microsoft releases a completely new OS, it's launched in a very rough form and takes a couple years for them to polish it. Win7 isn't hugely different from Vista but it did polish out the issues people had. People seem to love Win7 but by SP1, the bugs with Vista were ironed out and Win7 was just a further refinement. WinXP was terrible when it came out like you mention and it didn't really get fully polished until SP2.

Win8 is in a unpolished form right now but I expect Blue this late summer to fix many of the simple issues and then possibly Win9 next year to really be the OS Win8 was meant to be.

 

[Fritzo]

The only bad M$ OS I remember is ME, all others were great. I never bought Vista, but the release candidate seemed pretty slick to me.


Windows 2000 is my favorite OS by M$, It's like a sleeker, more svelte version of XP with the classic theme turned on. I only upgraded from it because my video card decided not to support it.

You missed out on joys in Vista like security prompts with every key stroke, taking 8 minutes to boot due to MS Live crap tools, and blue screens because of drivers having the wrong version number.

They fixed it with the service packs, but Win7 was out by then.

 

[Genx87]

I do believe Microsoft's long term viability is still up in the air. They cant break out of the PC markets. But the PC markets have stagnated or declined. I think some of these points about exchange server and apps ect has more to do with the ability of corps to have access to cheap bandwidth. As bandwidth becomes more available the less reliance on local resources will be needed. And once that happens why do I need to buy servers with an MS OS on them? Cals? App licensing? Then the move to mobile products like tablet or phones with doc stations and I could see companies move completely out of the MS sphere.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Yep, everything listed is mostly consumer facing products. Their foothold on business is totally different.

ANybody priced out what it costs to put SQL Enterpise on a single Dual Hex Core CPU machine? (a machine you could probably build for less than $2k)..

It'd cost about $70k to license that machine for SQL Enterprise.

You aren't going to build a dual hex core, enterprise-quality server for under $2K. And while $70K might sound high, I invite you to compare it to Oracle.

 

[Train]

You missed out on joys in Vista like security prompts with every key stroke, taking 8 minutes to boot due to MS Live crap tools, and blue screens because of drivers having the wrong version number.

They fixed it with the service packs, but Win7 was out by then.

It took all of 5 seconds to disable UAC. Never saw it again until I installed on a new machine. I never saw what the big issue was.

 

[Genx87]

You aren't going to build a dual hex core, enterprise-quality server for under $2K. And while $70K might sound high, I invite you to compare it to Oracle.

Well somebody might be able to from Newegg. Of course then somebody has to ask why are we spending 2K on a core infrastructure server that has 70K in software licensing and we have nobody to call for hardware support when it shits the bed?

 

[IndyColtsFan]

I thought they changed the SQL licensing so it's no longer based on number of cores?

It was based on CPU sockets but with their 2012 products, they started selling licenses based on cores.

 

[ShawnD1]

The only bad M$ OS I remember is ME, all others were great. I never bought Vista, but the release candidate seemed pretty slick to me.

Pretty much all of them sucked right after release because it would always break compatibility. Suddenly your printer doesn't work, and you can't download drivers because you don't have internet.

I've almost always been behind with operating systems, so most of them were good by the time I got em. Windows 3.1 on a custom computer was solid. Windows 95 on a custom computer was solid. Windows 98 crashed all the time, but that was likely due to a hardware problem (cheap piece of shit retail computer). Windows 2000 was solid. Windows XP was good. Vista was eventually good after software started to adopt a more linux-like model of file management; up until then they would save everything in Program Files and required administrator rights. Windows 7 RC was total crap, but it was good by the time I bought it.

 

[PingSpike]

The rumors of Microsoft's demise are greatly exaggerated. That said, their recent efforts to break into new markets seem to be best described as "flailing". They don't have short term problems but they do have long term ones. I feel like disruptive technologies like virtualization and the cloud (ugh) coupled with a shifting of some segments towards mobile devices will all chip away at their position. They're trying to head this off, and maybe they will. But they waited to long on mobile and now they can't get in...or at least, get on top. And they somehow managed to bungle away their dominate web browser position.

They've also developed a nasty habit of abandoning product lines that do not take off, which to any non casual observer is a good reason to avoid any of their new products until after they are successful.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Well somebody might be able to from Newegg. Of course then somebody has to ask why are we spending 2K on a core infrastructure server that has 70K in software licensing and we have nobody to call for hardware support when it shits the bed?

I think it is still doubtful. If it is truly an enterprise server, you're going to need fiber HBAs for SAN attachment (well, proper SAN attachment ), a ton of ECC RAM, etc.

 

[Red Squirrel]

XP suffered the same issue as Vista. It was way too bloated when it got released. It took a few years at least for hardware to be powerful enough where XP runs smoothly. And of course the driver issues too. Back when it got released, machines with single core processor and 256MB of ram was the norm. XP runs like crap on anything with less than 1GB, even 1GB is pushing it. Vista/7 you want at least 4. Even with 4 you'll find yourself with low memory warnings over time.

 

[Ichinisan]

Your bottom half is missing an OS. Should start with win2k.

...also, the top half doesn't distinguish Win98 frm Win98SE. I think one is crap and one is good.

 

[unokitty]

Microsoft faces resistance in effort to push people to Office 365

While Microsoft has a huge installed base, they don't seem to be gaining much mindshare.

I see a lot of excitement about drop box, Salesforce, AWS, and similar cloud based products; while, Microsoft keeps loosing money with their online services.

I don't expect Microsoft to disappear. And for a lot of people Microsoft's current products meet their current needs.

But the industry always evolves. and, like IBM, I think that Microsoft's best days are behind them.

Uno