Microsoft's Business Practices

Good or bad?

Not another one of these threads...

None, they´re number three: ugly...

I think Microsoft is a fair and impartial company competing on the grounds of high quality products. They obviously provide the solutions that businesses and individuals need at competetive prices which is how they got to where they are today.

And besides, we all know that if software is free, it must suck and be created by communists.

wtf u must work for them...

In my opinion, it's good that they compete for high-quality solutions which a lot of businesses and individuals need, but they don't need to monopolize their products or carry such strong integration.

I hope linux or whatever gets into the mainstream and beat the crap out of microsoft windows - sorry for microsoft "supporters" just an opinion I like windows, but i'm willing to sacrifice that for something else.

OPEN SOURCE!!!

PhillyPino, I fear your post is not meant as sarcastic as Ctb´s...

So, my personal oppinion:
MS - "high-quality solutions" - ROTFL
linux - "gets into the mainstream" - ROTFL

Microsoft is crap. At least it was over the last 15 years. They might become some serious business solution with their Server 2003 and IIS6 because they re-wrote everything from scratch (at least they claim). But I still doubt... LOL!
Linux though will never become "mainstream".... But this depends on what you define "mainstream"...

[edit]
PS. I guess Ctb voted "don´t care" and you were the one voting "Yeah", right?
[/edit]

Of course; it's obvious open-source OS's such as Linux and BSD are superior to Windows because most companies/governments use them for mission-critical systems and for everyday use. Worldwide, i think they have/are prevailing but its the US thats more wedded to windows, and part of that may be familarity (we're the only ones that use english system vs. metric as well) ease-of-use (any, wait no most idiots can use it with no training/previous computer experience at all) and the fact it ships with most new pcs bought from big-name manafactures such as ibm and dell. and this is because they have agreements with microsoft... dell tried to circumvent theirs when they placed a free dos version os on some workstation pcs to benefit those that won't use windows at all

High quality:
IIS
Windows ME
Windows 95
Windows 98
FrontPage
PWS
Access
Outlook
Outlook Express
Internet Explorer
ASP
Visual Basic Whatever

Businesses Need:
I couldn't even begin to compile a sarcastic list for this because I don't use (and therefore, don't know) hardly any of the "features" that Microsoft crams into their over-priced crap and I don't know anyone who does either.

Individuals Need:
- 99% of the viruses, worms, trojans, and cracks out there (sendmail probably makes up the other 1% :rolleyes.
- Constant crashes, hard reboots, and hangs.
- To be protected from themselves (how else can you explain that while I had XP Pro installed, I got more popups from the system tray than a kiddie warez site selling porn to 13 year olds...? Or how Office XP gleefully formats everything the way it thinks I might want it [instead of the way I do want it] with no way to turn off the "feature")
- No functionality. Windows ships with what.. notepad and a calculator?
- Eternally corrupting data (FAT32 systems)
- Mysteriously disappearing data (FAT32 systems)

Yea... I'd say Microsoft is on a very stable technical platform. Gee... if only they could get their marketing department to match the quality of their technical department...

..they'd be dead in a day!!!


So what? Does that mean that while most businesses and governments were using Windows primarily that it was a superior OS to Unix? That's a joke. Just because it's used more doesn't make it better.


I beg to differ. Try to tell an 80 year old who's never touched a PC in her life to "click the left mouse button" and observe the reaction. If the fundamentals are learned on Linux/BSD with X-Server and a decent suite of user-friendly graphical tools (most notably, gui package managers and "control panels") then the person will likely find Windoze more difficult. The Red Hat installation, though somewhat irritating for techies, is far superior to the Windows installations I've done from an average end user perspective and I've heard that some other distro's have even friendlier installation procedures. I find that navigating the file structure on a doze system is encumbering and difficult because there's no real organization to it. I also think that the proliferation of powerless GUI tools on doze systems makes it difficult to use for anything but the most mundane of tasks. And forget games. I've never installed a Black Isle game on doze that didn't require extensive troubleshooting to get it working. I've only ever had one problem installing a game on Linux: a Doom engine that wouldn't play MIDI music. Still haven't figured it out - TBH, haven't much thought about it. Windoze is not easier than anything. In fact, it's probably far more difficult than a Mac, and about the same as one of the "desktop Linux distributions" such as RH or Gentoo.

I agree that somebody who never used a computer before would find Windows confusing if they nearned Linux.

However, I think Windows *is* easier to learn.

Stuff which is a real pain in the a$$ with Linux:


Getting software you need:

Sure, there's tons of open source software, but most of it is impossible to set up for the average user - sh** like compiling your own code, configuring a bunch of text files, installing extra required libraries and recompiling your kernel aren't things a Windows user needs to do.

Why the hell, I ask myself all the time, can't open source developers release their programs as some sort of installer package, so that one only needs to only select a directory and click a few buttons, like in Windows? Do those guys think it's l33t to be user-unfriendly and make their creations cryptic to newbies??

I really think open source software needs to focus on user-friendlyness.


Multimedia:

Windows pwnz Linux in this area, like it or not. If I simply want to listen to some MP3s or watch a DVD under Linux, I'll need to download all sorts of plugins so that I can. Maybe that MP3 problem only applies to RedHat... I don't know, but it's pathetic.

High quality sound drivers and stable utilities for my sound card? Haha! Either not available, or too difficult for a beginner like me to set up.

Mouse / printer drivers? See above. After several hours of messing around with my HP 695C on Linux, I finally got it to print, but it only printed in black and white, and the quality/alignment/border-spaces were all messed up. To get my printer working in WinXP, I just have to plug it in and the correct, working drivers will automatically get installed after a few clicks...


Games:

To totally contradict to what you were saying, Ctb, I think gaming on Linux is horrible. If you don't have a lot of experience with Wine(X), then there's basically no way you can have fun with your games on Linux as on Windows. I respect Epic, id Software and all those other developers who officially support their games on the Linux platform, but even with their support, games such as Unreal Tournament 2003 and Quake III are better on Windows than on Linux.

OK, I haven't actually tried playing Quake III or Unreal Tournament 2003 on Linux, but I am certain that I wouldn't be able to just install it, set up my game configs and run at a constant 100FPS/Hz (even with official nVidia drivers - thanks for supporting Linux btw - I can't get over 85Hz in X - I tried looking for some values to hack in the X config file, but without success). And I also wouldn't be able to use all 5 buttons on my Microsoft mouse (I would have to spend hours/days trying to get some proper drivers).

On Windows you have DirectX. Pretty much all games are developed with the DirectX API. Since Microsoft doesn't support Linux, you don't have DirectX on Linux, therefore one can only get games working on Linux by somehow hax0ring / emulating stuff. Obviously this is inconvenient.


Err, anyway... I'm tired, so I will conclude:

If you are a Linux expert, you might be able to get around all the problems I mentioned. Solving problems under Windows is way more simple than under Linux. For programming, running servers and networking I think Linux is l33t, but for most other stuff Windows, for me, is way better.


Ohh, hehe... and to reply to the actual thread (lol, I got quite off-topic), I don't like M$'s business practices. I think they ripped all their customers off with Win98/98/Me - those OS's were full of bugs, and even after 5 years of development (from 95 to Me) it was very unstable. I am very pleased with WinXP though - it's not perfect, but definitely the best MS OS I've ever had.

Macs are in my opinion the best for Multimedia. They are Unix-based so they're stable, and they come with a ton of free software like iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, etc. There are some flavors of Linux geared for mostly consumers that have a great GUI and can run almost all Windows software. I agree; but its like they own you instead of you owning it, with the activation and all. I think for new users, Macs are best, and Linux is best for more advanced users. Mac OS X is basically a user-friendly Unix OS. It's much more stable than Windows, and with all the bugs of Windows (viruses, crashes although XP's better, corruption, etc) I think everyone should go Unix

It's not fair to hold that against Linux/BSD because the problem is licensing, not technical (you should be using Ogg anyway). Also, I installed Xine and xmms and have never had to install anything additional for technical reasons. Only for licensing (MP3) and legal (DVD) issues.


Honestly.. this is where I draw the line to bringing in new people. If they can't type:

Then they deserver to keep using Windoze. And for source, if you follow the step by steps, you almost always get a working, default installation. You can't tweak without some knowledge a lot of the time, but a lot of the stuff that really needs ./configure options is things like PHP, Apache, etc. If you can't figure it out, you probably shouldn't be messing with those apps anyway.

--games--

Seriously. Two (three?) words: Direct X Bites.

Direct X crashes, direct x always has bugs. I "upgraded" from one version to another once and "bingo" all my games stopped working. Ugh. Had to drop back a version.

openGL is nice, but it's still got quite a bit of room for improvement. And really, why does gaming on Linux suck, because there's no potential? Hardly. Because greedy developers are afraid to take a serious test drive on Linux game development? Probably.

As for nVidia.. yea.. they have sort of half-assed drivers for their cards. They work for me, but not as well as they should.

Yeah, that's true. I hope this will change more and more in the future.

As for DirectX sucking: what else does Linux have to offer for game developers? Without a standard API (OK, graphics could be done with OpenGL, but what about networking, sound and input?), development would be slow and games would be a lot more buggy. If thousands of developers use the same API which has been around for 5+ years, then that API gets better and better, and developers get better and better at making use of it.

Also, why does it suck? The few times games have problems running on my system it's the game's fault, not DirectX's. When did you upgrade DirectX and your games didn't work anymore? 8.1 to 9? If that created a problem for you, then maybe you were using old sound/graphic card drivers.

Ohh, and there's another Linux thing (actually two) I'd like to rant about:

Software updates and removing software.

To update software under Windows I click on a patch installer, click 'OK', wait a few seconds and click 'Done'.

What do I do under Linux? Hell, I don't know... sometimes one needs to install a patch, sometimes one needs to look for all the program files which are scattered across the file-system and delete them, and then download the new source-code and compile, and sometimes one needs to download more RPMs.



Does somebody maybe have a good tutorial on how one deletes software on Linux? This seems difficult to me. 'make clean' only deletes the temporary configs needed to compile the program, correct? How do I delete the whole program? If I install a program the Windows way (i.e. have all the files in one folder), then it's easy.

But what does one need to do when the program