Paul Graham recently wrote a piece about how Microsoft is basically irrelevant to new developers--the tired old guard just isn't cutting edge. A Microsoft VP wrote back that all is well in Redmond.
Just as Stephen Jay Gould said we shouldn't blame the dinosaurs for being obsolescent--they lasted for hundreds of millions of years--we shouldn't be too hard on Microsoft. Being very popular means having a target audience of morons, so you add all these annoying features that help the stereotypical computer user, who seems to be unsure of everything he closes ("are you sure?"), or everything he opens ("may contain unsafe macros"). Excel and Word could probably be good programs if you took out 90% of the bloatware that seemed helpful to someone (clippy?). As my computer is now 100 times more powerful when I was in grad school, it's barely faster because my task manager tells me I have 30 programs running in the background, and every month or so I try to delete these bastards. If Bill Gates spent more money on vaccinating poor kids, and less on coding, it would probably be a good thing.
I remember a professor who was a good academic, but didn't get good reviews from his MBA students. The department chairman made him sit in on a professor who was not good academic, but got great reviews, thinking it would be helpful. But when the professor saw the lengths to which the popular professor dumbed down his material to be easy to digest, he simply said no thanks, I'll be unpopular. Clearly this can go to far, being popular isn't necessarily bad, as it forces you to communicate clearly, and non condescendingly, but it can easily go too far.
Just as Stephen Jay Gould said we shouldn't blame the dinosaurs for being obsolescent--they lasted for hundreds of millions of years--we shouldn't be too hard on Microsoft. Being very popular means having a target audience of morons, so you add all these annoying features that help the stereotypical computer user, who seems to be unsure of everything he closes ("are you sure?"), or everything he opens ("may contain unsafe macros"). Excel and Word could probably be good programs if you took out 90% of the bloatware that seemed helpful to someone (clippy?). As my computer is now 100 times more powerful when I was in grad school, it's barely faster because my task manager tells me I have 30 programs running in the background, and every month or so I try to delete these bastards. If Bill Gates spent more money on vaccinating poor kids, and less on coding, it would probably be a good thing.
I remember a professor who was a good academic, but didn't get good reviews from his MBA students. The department chairman made him sit in on a professor who was not good academic, but got great reviews, thinking it would be helpful. But when the professor saw the lengths to which the popular professor dumbed down his material to be easy to digest, he simply said no thanks, I'll be unpopular. Clearly this can go to far, being popular isn't necessarily bad, as it forces you to communicate clearly, and non condescendingly, but it can easily go too far.
HedgeFundGuy - am 2007-04-12 03:04
Kevembuangga (guest) meinte am 12. Apr, 10:33:
Simpson's wisdom
Yes, as Bart Simpson says "I didn't think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows. "
Hedgie (guest) meinte am 12. Apr, 18:02:
What?
I don't agree at all. Microsoft has the most impressive development system in the world. Visual Studio is unbeatable for cheap, rapid and robust development. It is being used on trading floors everywhere, for example. I don't know what you mean by bloatware in MS Office. Microsoft dumped Clippy a long time ago. I use pretty much every feature in Excel 2003, and I find the added features in Excel 2007 to be amazing and very useful. I don't use Word very much, but I'm sure that professional Word users feel the same way about Word's rich feature set. Not everyone has a need for the advanced analytic and data tools in Excel, but some people do and it makes no sense to strip out these features just because not everyone uses them. By the way, if Windows is dead as a development platform, then what exactly is the alternative? OS X? Give me a break. Who in their right mind thinks that OS X is going to replace Windows in the business enviornment? Microsoft has a target audience of morons, but Apple doesn't? Hah. Is Linux going to kill Microsoft? That's an old prophesy from the dotcom bubble days which has pretty much been proven incorrect. Linux is only sensible in in specialized server enviornments, provided that you can afford the increased total cost of ownership involved (hiring a team of Unix administrators, spending countless manhours editing the nightmare of configuration files in Linux, dealing with interoperability issues, etc, etc).
I have a lot of respect for Graham, but I really don't agree with him on this. Just because Apple sells more MP3 players than Microsoft, I should move my mission criticial business infrastructure to OS X? Or I'm going to be turning all of my software, including Office, into a website? Why on Earth would I ever want Excel to be a website? I've seen some web-based institutional trading systems, and they simply cannot compete with a native application. No way in hell do I want my trading platform to depend on Internet Explorer or Firefox. This whole "all applications will be web-based" idea is just a new spin on a very very old concept that we used to call the dumb terminal and the mainframe. Only software developers who want to RENT software on a monthly basis and want total control over users are pushing for a return to the dumb terminal. Sun Micro also tried to revive the dumb terminal a few years ago with their Java thin client and that was a complete failure as well.
Finally, I would like to say that my computer is running faster than ever before (I'm running Windows Vista). With the right hardware, I am able to do more things much faster than ever before, even after the ever-increasing hardware requirement of new software.
HedgeFundGuy antwortete am 13. Apr, 00:29:
You have a point...I made a Linux box but eventually got tired of installing all my drivers, etc. But Windows, Excel, Word, could be so much better if they allowed people to take more stuff out. Most of what they add I don't want and slows me down. It's big enough now to be open source, why not let everyone make it better.
blah (guest) antwortete am 15. Apr, 12:34:
you use the command line if you're serious
who is doing serious computation in excel? That's baby stuff. You will be using R/Matlab, Unix commands, and flatfiles if you're doing anything nontrivial. Excel! Bwahahaha.
> I should move my mission criticial business infrastructure
If your mission critical business infrastructure is on Windows rather than a *nix variant, your business' mission is not that critical.
Paul N (guest) meinte am 13. Apr, 03:12:
Excel is decent considering, but the development *is* targeted to the marginal user, not the power user. The thing that's worst for me is how the charting features are identical to what they were 10+ years ago, you can't even do a 3d scatter plot. So what do they do for charts in Excel 2007? Add fancy graphics to all the charts, that's it. As if the graphics abuses in corporate America weren't egregious enough. Anyway Excel is at least a useful program, Word is kind of a joke, all that web integration stuff MSFT spent so much time on is unused by amost anyone. The whole autocorrect, autoformat thing is a nightmare for anyone who has a clue what they are doing. PowerPoint is really insubstantial, if people had to pay for it separately they would buy something different.
