Ross doesn’t trust Microsoft’s approach to Web

Does MS not support WWW standards…because it’s not in MS’s interest to do so? Why make IE W3C-compliant when many sites are IE-compliant first, W3C-compliant maybe? Most people *must* have IE on their machine for those sites that are non-W3C compliant. That will change, I hope, as MS loses it’s grip on the world.

Regardless, it’s an example of why many of us dislike and distrust MS. And with schools and developing nations using OO, and governments mandating open-source data storage, I expect the decline of MS, fought tooth-and-nail by dirty tricks, rather than actually listening to customers…

please sound like MS is the big bad wolf on the block.

It ain’t true, they have made innovations in software development, even my grandpa can use a PC, thanks to MS.

Funny to see soo many slashdot style comments here

@Mischa: Hehehehe, true…

@114 – Khurram Ali – I agree. MS have in the past produced operating systems and software that have driven the price down, and made them far more accessible to non-computer literate folks. All very good.

However, when comparing the latest version of Windows (XP) with Apple Tiger (OSx), its very apparent that the Apple OS is far far simpler to use. And now that Tiger is being ported to Intel, there’s a *possibility* that it can become a replacement to the ageing and rather stale windows we have today.

Possibly even before Vista ships.

Probably before Vista SP1 ships.

It all points to MS having lost customer trust, their own focus, and the ability to push out large software projects (“Vista Reset”)

—* Bill

Sean Bryant:

Ruby/Rails editors ARE available.

See http://www.radrails.org/ or http://www.activestate.com/Products/Komodo/.

#13 All sales are final. There is no way (read money) back if I bought wrong or too many licences, I can never downgrade.

A few years back I was big MS partisan and the fact that I’m not so much anymore I think says something about what’s gone wrong.

First, I agree that MS has inadvertantly really shot itself in the foot by tightening licensing during the last couple of years. I’ve often used unlicensed or improperly licensed versions of MS software for years (by sharing CD’s, or volume license or MSDN subscription software). That meant that Microsoft lost some revenue while I fooled around with super expensive products on my laptop. In exchange, they got lots of revenue later when what I built for free got deployed. If I didn’t have access to this basically free stuff I wouldn’t have explored and built using MS products. Even $50 for VS Express would potentially be a barrier to me, out of laziness or rebellious disregard for IP law (that’s right, and I haven’t bought a CD in 6 years either, RIAA).

Second, in 2000-01, MS hyped .NET development and made it seem very cool in their demos (I attended several and was excited). And .NET is conceptually great. But the reality is that way too many features were the kind that only look good in demos or make simple apps for the whole conference and magazine crowd to throw together. When it got time to write real world stuff, I found myself writing a bunch of redundant crap and never using the drag and drop stuff or the wizards because they didn’t generate real world useful code and/or took away too much control from me. Recently I went to an MSDN presentation on ASP.NET 2 and was disappointed that the presenter showed the same silly wizard generated “select * from authors” stuff for 2.0 but couldn’t answer my questions as to whether certain annoying gaps in 1.1 had been closed in 2.0. If happiness equals reality divided by expectations, MS has done badly by emphasizing the sale rather than the ongoing experience.

So I left that MSDN presentation very disappointed with MS. I was also struck by the fact that at age 37, I was (unbelieveably) one of the youngest 5 people in a room of 80. I can’t say I’m excited enough by OSS to bother going over to the other side (maybe it’s time to head to a second career outside programming). But whatever MS is doing, it’s failing to inspire a new generation of programmers.

Being a longtime MS fan who has never bought the line that OSS is cheaper, faster, more secure or more reliable in the long run, I feel very sad about where things are. MS, why don’t you listen to your wayward fans?

– Andrew

how can it be good the M$ produts, when they never follow standards?

i am tired of redeveloping my code just because IE wants to show it in a different way..

for gods….

Fish mouth: to say we “never” follow standards is pure and simple FUD. Come on, can’t you do better than that? Geesh. You do realize who developed DHTML, right? WHo developed CSS, right? And if we never followed standards you wouldn’t be able to hook your Windows computer up to the Internet.

And, IE was developed to match the standards that were popular in the late 1990s. Now that about 9/10ths of all computer users use IE, maybe you should develop for it first and be bothered that the other browsers force you to do more work.

Or, you can wait for IE 7 to come here. That’ll follow the standards.

“WHo developed CSS” – well it wasn’t Microsoft you work with the W3C but so do a lot of other people, if you made css then why don’t you comply with css 1, 2 or 3
“And, IE was developed to match the standards that were popular in the late 1990s.” – Isn’t that the problem even if it did match the standards of its time it hasn’t moved forward.
“And, IE was developed to match the standards that were popular in the late 1990s.” – Don’t you read Ms’ own blogs it isn’t going to completely fix everything stds related so it isn’t going to follow the standards unless by that you mean be be behind them.
I’m a Windows-centric Developer I use it for my Desktop, I use asp and asp.net but comments like that are exactly why I and no-one else really trust Microsoft. It is the World Wide Web not the Microsoft narrow web.
“IE, maybe you should develop for it first and be bothered that the other browsers force you to do more work” – the fact is no-one is going to or wants to do that the world’s moving forward, designing for a broken system then fixing it for a correct one makes no sense, and if it did what would you do if IE7 did make the site you designed for IE 4,5 and 6 break?

p.s. “Now that about 9/10ths of all computer users” – Computer users or “Windows users” they are NOT the same thing are unix, Linux or Apple systems not computers? Also have you seen the stats for Germany (25% Firefox use)? or other countries? so is that 9/10 Worldwide?
Please, I started reading the article with an element of hope thinking may’be they will sort themselves out so I don’t have to reskill but no obviously not, wheres that Linux distro.

p.p.s oops going into rant mode obviously made me keyboard happy
“And, IE was developed to match the standards that were popular in the late 1990s.” – Don’t you read Ms’ own… this was obv meant to read
“Or, you can wait for IE 7 to come here. That’ll follow the standards.” – Don’t you read Ms’ own… this was obv meant to read
Another point though you do realise DHTML is dead right? it’s not the way forward or even way now? to emphasise look up “unobtrusive Javascript” and you’ll see why. I’m worried that after one little comment you flame so easily after saying “Thanks Ross, though, for bringing your distrust out into the open. That’s helpful cause at least we can work on it now”
I understand your probably frustated since a lot of the feedback is negative; but comments like that just don’t help and make it look like you’re not serious about this “See, I don’t want uninformed customers. That doesn’t help me. It doesn’t help Microsoft. It doesn’t help the customers.”

Per-CPU licensing.

I’m a developer, not a consumer. I want a tool I can use to engineer a solution for my clients — I don’t want to partner with MS or enroll in programs or worry about licensing etc etc. I don’t care about MS and they aren’t my business — my client is.

Instead, I have the tools I need which are replicable and available on-demand on any number of platforms. Any tricky problems mostly cost in man-power — and if I am going to pay out the nose for something, I’d rather give it to consultants than licensing + support etc.

As for MS on the web — forget about it. Developing sites for IE already forces me to develop invalid pages.

MS runs on too many assumptions.

I’m an engineer not unlike any other out there — the only difference is that other engineers don’t license the tools they need to support the solutions they build. Well.. OSS engineers already know this, and that’s what I like about OSS.

Re. 31, vanderwal.

Where does this myth that Ruby doesn’t scale come from? It’s absurd! It’s how you code not what you code in. It how you organise your database not what db or how you access it that make the difference to whether you can scale or not.

1. Do you remember how MS has grown? Loose license of DOS (or ignorance of license). If MS tood a really strong action on DOS, they might not be successful.
2. Fortunately, Bill wants to make program easier to use for end-users. So, even though MS Word was a really bad program, they succeeded in taking market.
3. Unfortunately, after getting majority people as its customers, it began to start strict licence policy.

–> I’ve loved MS more than 10 years now. It’s been pretty friendly to end-user. Easy to use OSs and easy to use programs even though they’re not good.

These are views of a program user not a programmer. Then what does the programmer select as their platform? MS. I know that Windows is not good. I know that there are a lot better programs out there. I know that Mac is prettier. But I choose MS. Why? Because I’m accustomed to the environment.

This is not a problem of which is good or which is bad. It is a problem of habits, momentum, or peer-pressure (whatever) thing.

I don’t care about the server side because I’m an end-user. So, for developers, it might not matter which OS they should use. But if developers do not have good experience of MS, how can they make better programs than those in MS?

On the other hand: I recently started to learn Ruby, and found that it is interesting and I’ll continue to study that as a hobby. I’m also thinking about learning Rails too. But I’m not thinking about learning MS develping tools like VS. It comes to me that it just looks too difficult to learn. I don’t want to learn how to use tools in VS. It is not necessary. You know what? HTML grammer was enough for me to make my simple homepage. Now I need only a small amount of DB. I heard about the starter kit of VS Express but it requires 1GB on my poor small computer, on the other hand, RoR requires only 30MB and tiny text editors. As a hobbiest, RoR is enough and I found that I don’t have to study really headaching concepts of .NET and ASP. Ruby is pretty fun to use.

So, in my opinion, I’ll use Windows as my desktop, and I’ll use Ruby and RoR as my hobby language to make a small desktop applications (using Ruby/Tk library), a small homepage for my own blog. I’m really happy to know that I don’t have to study gigantic stuffs of MS development environment to make simple things.

For professional developers??? I don’t know and I don’t care. They might have some issues on other bigger problems. But if it is not a joy to programming in MS, but there is a joy in other, why do you stay in a MS develping environment? If it is a joy in MS, I don’t oppose to you at all. I’m just happy that I fianlly found an environment that I’ve wanted to find, which is an easy environment.

Well, I am an ardent .NET fan and have been developing usng .NET since it’s advent. Only problem is that I use all the tools a.k.a VS and MSDN Universal at my work (my company has the licenses and the money to buy it).
Sad to say that I cannot afford these softwares and I am slowly turning away towards opensource tools (MySQL, PHP, Apache etc.) and software – although they are much cumbersome to use.
I know one day I will leave my current job and with it I will lose my abilities to use the expensive MS tools. (:
VS 2005, SQL 2005, VSTS and MSDN Universal are some of the coolest tools to develop .NET apps today. MS should really open up SKUs like the Express Editions for cheap (I know they are free for a year…) although they are devoid of many important features. Something is better than nothing…
MS should really think about the single developer and the one man development shops that can’t afford these excellent tools. Proof is on the internet – except for MSDN bloggers (MS employees), how many bloggers do you find talking about MS tools – very very few. The average guy (not working for a big corporation) cannot afford MS tools. But, for opensource tools – a very big community is out there interacting and sharing.
Sorry about the rant, but I love .NET and the nice MS tools – wish I had them for personal use…

MS SQL Server can take a pounding like no other database management system. MySQL is perfect for smaller sites. Business’ that start-up with no money shouldn’t even start-up. If you’ve never secured the cash and capital upfront, then you have absolutely no business doing business. That sounds mean, but I speak the truth.

To the comment at 137 (probably right above this)

So, what you are saying is, it would be dumb for some kids to drop out of college before they are even halfway through, and start their own business?

To me it’s simple. Linux and MySQL – FREE.
Why pay anyone anything if you don’t have to?

And if I did want to use windows server and ASP.net or SQL Server, I’d just run unlicensed software. I’m not giving the damn billionaires any of my money!

Hello,
About interoperability, I think it is a shame that you actually have to BUY Microsoft products to read files made with them.
For example, many people publish .doc files, thinking that everyone can read them, but that is simply not true. If I want to read any of these files (for example, a file that a client gave me), I would have to buy Word, or Office or whatever, while I actually don’t NEED it for anything else that reading that file. There are some “Save to HTML” commands and such, but this not only give incomplete documents, you also need to have the program to read the original file and convert it. There are of course open-source alternatives, but these will not give the document exactly as it was, and are not really “Microsoft solutions”, are they?
Maybe MS could publish some free-of-cost “demo versions”, that would only allow reading of these files, and saving them to other non-MS formats?

Another example: web developpers need to create sites that work with every browser. What about the standard support in IE? (although it seems you are slowly improving with IE7, but still, there is a long way to go).
Also, web developpers need to test their sites with many browsers, including but not limited to: IE5, IE5.5, IE6, IE7, Firefox (many versions), Opera (many versions as well), etc.
Still, any IE installation overrides older ones. You cannot use different versions of IE on the same computer without some complex manipulations, wich are not really safe (because not supported by Microsoft).
While it would be so easy for MS to allow standalone IEs to work together.
BTW, if a web developper is to test his sites for IE7, he will have to buy Windows XP, even if he doesn’t need it for anything else. That is more like “forcing people to buy your products” instead of “letting people buy your products if they need them, because these are very good products”. Definitely not a “good business model”.

On a sidenote, it is still nice to see that Microsoft’s employees feel free to tell things like “why some people don’t trust Microsoft for this or that”, without fear of being fired. It proves that Microsoft respect their employees, and somehow cares about their rights to express their own opinions. MS can also create very good software, it’s just a matter of how you try to force your customers to buy them or not.

Good luck.

Help needed….I am trying to find web sites (both electronic and paper/ people/ organizations if necessary)that advocates the use of United States Standards and Methodologies vice the UK’s ITIL/ Microsoft MOF methodology. For example IEEE, SEI-CMM/I, NIST STandards, Military and DOD Standards, Etc. Etc….

For over 35 years, I have been using U. S. Standards and Methodologies to do Configuration Management, which “includes” Release Management and Change Management, and it has worked just fine for all of that time. An example of this is the U.S. Navy’s Ships and planes weapons systems, the U.S.Air Forces planes, and the U.S. Army’s Tatical Systems.

Microsoft MOF (Microsoft Operating Framework) through their PR advocates using their MOF product/methodology, which is riding piggyback off of the UK’s ITIL methodology.

Most of the contractors in the Washington D.C. area are now pushing the use of MOF to their U.S. Government clients. It is sad to say that our Governement clients are being fooled by Microsoft and MOF.MOF does not even come near to the Standards and Methodologies that are home grown here in the U. S.

If anyone has any information on sites/ programs or personnel that are trying to fight this intrusion by Microsofts MOF please email me.

Thank You