Page 2 - Working On Saturday: Courtesy of Microsoft

I agree that Frontpage is a POS, but I am a witness to the horrors of something far worse. In my computer class, we were told to create websites using MS Word in Windows 98. :blech:

Heh.. it's Monday afternoon now.. we got everything more or less wrapped up about 4:30 in the afternoon on Saturday, and (after a pitcher of beer at the sports bar) I cleaned up all the Perl code of hard references to the old server. I thought we were ready to roll with it until... dah dah dah DUM... I noticed earlier this morning that the FrontPage search component on the new server is searching the WHOLE site even when it's supposedly restricted to certain folders... one of my projects is to replace that crappy search engine, but I've been too busy to get it done... oivay... this is nuts. Now we have to maintain two sites because we expected to have this done by today, so we switched part of the user base to the new system on Friday (guinea pigs) and expected to switch the rest on Saturday... ugh.

Being someone who is more a graphic designer than a programmer, let me throw in a bit different perspective on this:

For one, not everyone likes things to be complicated. Yes, powerful things usually are a lot more complicated, however, not ever web designer is a IT guy, and vice versa.

I dont think MS preys on anything, but takes advantage of the fact that only IT guys have the time to be IT guys, and that:
1. not everyone wants to be one
2. not everyone wants to hire one,
and 3. not everyone has the time to be one.

They fill in a demand, which is to accomplish certain tasks with a limited amount of required knowledge and time.

FP extensions are a great concept, however, I think that the actual implemenation leaves MUCH to be desired.
I used to use them when first starting out (on my Angelfire account. I was 1337).
While I dont use them anymore, I do still use Frontpage (much to the chagrin of my design geek cohorts), and I think that its a great tool for what it is. I wont be coding PHP in it anytime soon, but it does handle some things really well, and some things even better than Dreamweaver.

I do however disagree with your companies MS only policy. I mean, its great in one way for standardization, but its incredibly inflexible for an approach to solving problems.

I used to work at a company where the office manager was a staunch democrat who refused to use ANY MS products for political reasons.
So she would try to force everyone into using some craphole office suite, and use netscape to browse the web.
I think any company should basically look at what is the best product for their setup and in their pricerange, regardless of maker of said product.

Thats just me though

Any intelligent manager will not enforce such a stupidity in the workplace. This will most likely reduce productivity. It's hard to avoid MS products: database, operating system, spreadsheet, web browser, software development, word processing, web server, project management, video gaming, networking, computer peripherals; they've got it all. so why avoid it unless it's absolutely necessary?

lol no way this thread made it 2 pages.

Actually it is really easy to avoid MS products, and doesn't hinder productivity at all. Openoffice works exactly the same as Word/Excel/etc. and it can open office docs. Ximian is a fantastic email client. I wouldn't know where to begin with all the alternatives to software development and everything else you mentioned.

We won't even discuss IIS as a webserver.

Businesses and people are beginning to avoid M$ software because they are tired of paying continuing license fees for bloated, insecure, crashy software. A prime example are the extreme security holes in Outlook/Outlook Express that have cost hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity due to viruses.

Not to dwell on the license fees, but just how much sense does it make to charge someone for a license to install software (Win2k server) on a server, and then have to get licenses for every computer that connects to the license that you already paid for. You have to do this with Terminal server, SQL server, etc. Basically they are charging you twice to use the same software.

Try explaing this to a client, and then try keeping track of all of it.

Maybe you can follow a course and become MSCF, Microsoft Certified Flamer.

List
List

Have fun!

Seriously, I've really only a played a little with Comanche, but it seems to be pretty popular, so maybe check it out first if you haven't already.

I was thinking more in the lines of forcing your end users use Linux instead of Windows, PHP instead of Asp, Oracle instead of Access. Sometimes it's just not necessary when you're doing small things, and it would be beneficial to use MS products, but some folks go out of their way to avoid them.

Now, I can agree with the licensing madness. Part of my company has been trying to migrate to Linux, which should be interesting. Linux is a great idea, but I think MS has too much power in the market. Unless M$ does something outrageous, the take off of Linux will be slow.

Slow but steady wins the race.

Windows: An inferior Operating System that costs a lot of money.
IIS: An inferior web server that wastes a lot of time.
.NET Framework: Microsoft's way of saying "Look! UNIX did this interoperability between apps thing 20 years ago - now we're gonna do it and tie into the web as if someone actually cared!"

Microsoft always yells about how "innovative" they are. This breaks down to one of four possibilties:

1. The rarest one: they really have a good, innovative idea (Honestly.. I can't think of anything right now, but I know they've done a few worthwhile things now and then).
2. The most common one: they're finally immitating something someone else did a long time ago (stability comes to mind...).
3. The most annoying one: They've "innovated" something stupid like Passport, the spying version of Media Player, or Licensing 6.0.
4. The oldest trick in the book: They stole, bought, or tricked a competitor or individual out of a good idea and claimed it as their own ('insert any Microsoft product here').

I wished Microsoft copied, stole or bought their errormessages from someone else, maybe then they would make some sense.

They even stole the color. (The Color blue belongs to IBM !!!)

The real problem, to my opinion, is not so much the fact that they make and sell crappy software. But the fact that they use that crappy software and their 'not so honest' advertising, to try to dominate the IT world so they can force more crappy software on to us.

I actually ran across an article the other day - a press release, from maybe 1999 or 2000 - about a little software company that MS purchased; this company's software allowed application code to be compiled into a common, intermediary format, which could then be read w/in a virtual machine on a PC running windows - much like Java, bytecodes, and the JVM.

Hmmm....

Your list is poignant, in the sense that of the 3 MS products you listed - Windows, IIS, and .NET - at least 2 of them have their genesis at a company other than MS: Windows, being the GUI for DOS, which was purchased by MS; and .NET, which is essentially MS's porting of another company's software to their code. Can we make it 3 out of 3? Anyone know where IIS is actually from?


Sorry, btw, that I don't recall the name of the company MS purchased... I'll dig around my browser history, see if I can come across it again. Must've seen it on ZDNet or /., tho.

I actually ran across an article the other day - a press release, from maybe 1999 or 2000 - about a little software company that MS purchased; this company's software allowed application code to be compiled into a common, intermediary format, which could then be read w/in a virtual machine on a PC running windows - much like Java, bytecodes, and the JVM.

Hmmm....

Your list is poignant, in the sense that of the 3 MS products you listed - Windows, IIS, and .NET - at least 2 of them have their genesis at a company other than MS: Windows, being the GUI for DOS, which was purchased by MS; and .