I have fascination for Microsoft. The super-enthusiastic marketing by Ballmer et al. The genius programmers like Raymond Chen and Dave Cutler. The pretty pictures on computer screens that they show in the demos. The little sounds Windows makes. The mystical mystery of how someone ever thought ".NET" was a good name for anything. All the strange abbreviated code names like "NTOSKRNL" and "umdmxfrm.dll". The central importance on Internet culture for the past decade of everything to do with Microsoft and Windows. The millions of fraudulous imitators, including the Indians who telephone and claim to be from "Microsoft" and these ads posted on the street for tech support with the old Windows XP logo sketchily pasted in. The secret source code kept in Microsoft's vaults for decades, and never leaked in full. The fact that all they ever seemed to do is bullshit their way into a monopoly then rip off Apple. But also the interesting fact that NT is the only major system that isn't Unix. All the versions of Windows with the massive release launch events. The speeches from Bill Gates where he frequently uses the word "rich", perhaps as a kind of Freudian slip self-description moment, and always prefixes established technical terms like "natural language processing" by "so-called", but never prefixes things like the Microsoft Bob "agent" by "so-called". The idea that Mr. Gates is a billionaire and could spend his days watching TV and worrying about nothing while I spend my life freezing my ass in this cold country. The entire mystery of Win32 API programming, complete with dozens of complicated verbose routines and structures and lots of NULLs, and where everything is in hungarian notation. The fact that Windows XP has been running almost half the world non-stop since 2001. The decision all of sudden to make everything tablet-based with Windows 8 in 2012, for no apparent reason and with poor success. The knowledge that a lot of Windows is written in good old C and not this hipstr.js bullshit. The fact that they came up with the slogan "that's business with .NET" which sounds like an advertisment for a toilet. The Apple copying, discussed ad nauseam on millions of fanboy forums since forever.
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Anonymous2014-01-28 0:53
You forgot about the Visual Basic juggernaut which they suddenly abandoned because they decided to switch from COM to .Net ... only to end up switching back to COM with WinRT.
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Anonymous2014-01-28 7:28
I don't have quite the fascination you do, OP - I left the world of proprietary software long ago. But sometimes, when the night is still, and the air smells of snow, and there isn't a sound except for the far-off sounds of rap music and sirens, I wonder. What's it like in the land of DWORD dwInfoErr = RegQueryInfoKey(&hkCMM, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, &dwMaxName, &dwMaxValue, NULL, NULL); ? Are we really so different, after all?
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Anonymous2014-01-28 21:48
I feel the same way as you OP, tough their lack of actually technically decent, usable and undestandable technology has made me lose interest. If i ever become unlazy il try to make a company with similar traits but much less fuckup.
OP here. my only post was >>1. anyway they got a new CEO yesterday, and apparently he wants to focus on mobile and cloud.
how does /prog/ feel about this ?
it seems this aggressive pushing of cloud intends to
1) send all your data to the NSA 2) charge monthly fees to make more $$ then the traditional model where you pay 100$ and get a CD that you can keep for as long as you like 3) lock you in to microsoft's servers and services
What happened to ballmer? Did his zeal finally kill him? Is the new CEO a moron too?
mobile and cloud
Seems more like they jump on too late on the bandwaggon and abandon their usual customers, well in any case they were already heading towards the dumpster even with ballmer on board.
the future of computing is going to be expert systems
Actually, that is exactly what Wolfram Alpha and Web 3.0 Semantic Web are doing!
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Anonymous2014-02-06 22:45
REDMOND, WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Bill Gates’s first day at work in the newly created role of technology adviser got off to a rocky start yesterday as the Microsoft founder struggled for hours to install the Windows 8.1 upgrade.
The installation hit a snag early on, sources said, when Mr. Gates repeatedly received an error message informing him that his PC ran into a problem that it could not handle and needed to restart. After failing to install the upgrade by lunchtime, Mr. Gates summoned the new Microsoft C.E.O. Satya Nadella, who attempted to help him with the installation, but with no success. While the two men worked behind closed doors, one source described the situation as “tense.” “Bill is usually a pretty calm guy, so it was weird to hear some of that language coming out of his mouth,” the source said. A Microsoft spokesman said only that Mr. Gates’s first day in his new job had been “a learning experience” and that, for the immediate future, he would go back to running Windows 7.
>>18 In all seriousness, I wonder what Microsoft would have been like with Gates in charge the whole time. He was clearly better at it than everyone else. You guys are now seeing what Microsoft could have been.
>>22 Called it from ``it was weird to hear some of that language coming out of his mouth''. Apparently during code reviews with the G-man, it was common practice to count the number of times he said ``fuck'' and use that to estimate how well the review went.
