Why are so many people Anti-microsoft?

John Lasseter, the man behind Toy Story.

 

That is incorrect, or at least incomplete. Apple didn't "rewrite their OS." They used what they acquired from NeXT, which in turn was developed from BSD Unix... Apple contains a lot of the lessons not learned from MS's failures, but from the long road that UNIX has taken, including the open source times.

And you basically said why I don't like Microsoft... " Spyware and viruses are so successful because MS never thought of it."

MS is negligent.

 

I'm convinced that it's harder than you think... and i think you're underestimating the problem.

How do you explain the armies of zombie computers, some numbering in the tens of thousands out there on the net that are all compromised without their users even remotely knowing about it?

Spam doesn't come from a small number of sources that pummel the entire email population of the net... it comes from tens of thousands of zombie computers out there.

Whether you agree or not that it's "easy" to secure your computer, the reality is that most people aren't as secured as they should be, and some people already have their computers compromised without them being aware of it.

 

When Windows first came out it was blasted by anyone who's favorite piece of hardware or software didn't work just right. MS worked very hard to increase compatiblity. That is the reason they are where they are today.

They should still be burned at the stake, I just want everyone to be shouting the right reasons. :lol:

 

I just remembered a hilarious spoof written a couple of months ago surrounding the 'switcher' phenomenon.

This fellow tried out Mac OS X for a couple of weeks, and decided to go back to windows. Among his reasons -- Mac cannot run the programs or have replacements for what he depends on, and uses day in and day out:

anti-malware this,
anti-virus that,
anti-windows fixit tools ..

OS X is wonderful, and peppered with my favorite shareware, is a joy to use.

Linux is nice, and is probably my future. I built my first box a couple of months ago. Took all of 30 minutes. Commodity hardware is great ! Drivers in Linux can still be a pain, but as Linux gains presence, the manufacturers will see the light.

Windows -- is nowhere. Buggy, infiltrated, boring. Yuch.

 

See my previous post....

Quick summary...
#1 Microsoft makes middling software through negligence, which has caused many of the headaches users have encountered nowadays.
#2 Microsoft is a private entity that owns the most critical and ubiquitous common platform for PCs... the OS. Because they are a private entity, that has in the past put them at odds with their own developers and users. They strive for the status quo, to keep themselves relevant. This has hurt the software industry in the past decade, shifting the focus to just a handful of big software companies that can survive. not a healthy software industry.

Open source promises to be a solution to #2.

 

I never said that Microsoft deserved all the blame. I've always said they are partly to blame...

See my previous post. I think we can all agree that the problem with security really is summed up through the fact that Microsoft makes middling software sometimes. I don't see one release changing all of that overnight...

But the bigger issue isn't just their poor software, but their business positioning, and how they continue to demand to privately own the platform.

Edit: I do in fact think Dell deserves a lot of blame for putting out really sh!tty commodity PCs... and I also blame ISPs, yes. Users of course deserve blame too, but you can't argue that they just asked for horrible things to happen to them. Ignorance is a problem, but it's not a sin, and they don't deserve to be punished. you've hit all the points, basically.

 

Not all software should be open source, but basic infrastructure should be open and free. Basic infrastructure that Microsoft has positioned itself to own... the result is that it has taxed every single Windows user to use their computers. That's why I think Linux is so important. I'm not saying that Microsoft should just open up their OS... fat chance of that happening... but I think trends will shift toward when they will no longer be relevant in the OS business.

Think about the internet, and how it has flourished based on open standards and interoperability. No one taxes the internet and the web like Microsoft has done with computing in general with the OS.

I mean imagine if you got taxed each time you wanted to use the IP protocol...

 

I don't care deeply enough about Microsoft to consider myself "anti Microsoft," but I often dislike using Microsoft's products for two main reasons. First, Microsoft has been extremely lax about security, and this has led to an enormous amount of wasted human effort (creating, maintaining, advertising, and distributing software, the sole purpose of which is to plug the holes Microsoft should not have left open in the first place).

Second, Microsoft's products grow ever difficult to use with each new release. Word 4 and Word 5 for the Mac were elegant, powerful word processors. Versions of Word since then have grown into complicated beasts that, by default, do all sorts of annoying things I do not want done (auto-formatting, auto-correcting, grammar checking, etc.). If Apple's TextEdit (which can now do tables) could do headers and footers, I think I would abandon Word 2004. Something like the following must be printed in a Bill Gates Little Red Book distributed to all Microsoft comrades:

"Let features_blooming=1,000,000,000'.

"If feature='new', then feature='good'.

"Set novelty_acceptance to 'on'. Set new_features to 'enabled'.

"Set inevitable_forces_of_history to 'change_in_file_format'.

"The Enlightened Few (i.e., compulsive upgraders in corporate IT departments) shall pull the rest along with the help of the inevitable forces of history (see above)'."

 

I think this is an important point... there are a lot of you who think it's not a big deal to secure up your Windows PCs, but it's hard to argue that it's not a waste of human effort.

Especially if people's jobs aren't in computers, but they depend on computers... so much effort has been spent over the years protecting computers from harm and cleaning up the mess when they become compromised. And a significant part of the problem is design decisions that Microsoft made.

Microsoft is changing, but I see their turnaround of late as an admission that they really have been lax on security for the last 10 years. Just because they are turning themselves around doesn't mean they are all fine and dandy today.

 

The power and phone companies? Funny... both of those kinds of companies are heavily government regulated... the phone companies, they were once a huge monopoly just like Microsoft, and the government broke them up...

Funny that it didn't turn out that way for Microsoft...

Linux running Wine does just that... It's just a matter of time. Linux needs a lot of work before it becomes the everyman's operating system.

 

Yes, they do make mediocre software like most other companies. Overall, they have helped far more than hurt the IT industry. Yes, MS is often at odds with their developers and users -- just like every profit seeking company in the world. As for open source, it promises nothing of the sort. MS strives to be relevant by adding needed features (real or imagined). With open source, you have to write your own new feature or wait for some kid without a date on friday night to write it.

 

Humor aside... the point isn't that Microsoft introduces new features into it's products... it's that the basis of all of it's products, the Windows OS, is technology that is quite old and long matured... it is essential infrastructure.

I'm willing to bet that Microsoft makes few changes to the kernel of Windows... XP is very similar to NT and 2000 at the kernel level, which is why it was such a big deal when the NT source code was leaked a few years ago. The features that changes sit above that basic infrastructure.

But yet Microsoft continues to make a killing selling us this core infrastructure.

It could be done better. Look at Linux for example. The kernel is wide open for everyone to see, and taking an analogy from security, public key security is almost always better than private...

I'm not talking about everything needing to be open source... but things like the OS kernel should be.

 

I don't entirely disagree. But I have to be honest, I like the fact that I impact a company's financial wellbeing if they don't make a good product. With open source I lose all aspects of control unless I write the software myself -- and I love to code!

 

Well the current state of things, Microsoft has made it fairly difficult to "vote with your dollar"...

I don't like Microsoft very much, I don't like their OS, yet I have Windows on my gaming PC... why? because I don't have a choice if I wanted a gaming box.

I still voted with my dollar when I bought a Mac however.

 

I was not an avid Microsoft hater until they stopped allowing Mac users to access their videos on MSNBC.com. There was no reason to do this as Windows Media Player works fine on the Mac. You must use Explorer and a windows based machine. As FireFox takes over the browser market, I wonder what they will do.