Then turn off the autoformat option.
Microsoft killed Gary Kildall. Reason enough for me.
But if you really must have more reasons, go to the MacKiDo history area and check out the other Microsoft articles.
I don’t hate Microsoft, but I’m getting there.
First, regarding Windows…it’s a great OS in theory. There are plenty of bugs and it crashes a lot, but there has to be a standard, and if it’s Microsoft then we all have to deal with it. No other software company could do any better, so I don’t think it’s right to hate them simply because they’re in an advantageous position.
What pisses me off? Their shameless pandering to newbies. A software product shouldn’t be so “accessible” that it favors the newbie over the experienced user. This is what practically EVERY Office product does. I don’t WANT the first word capitalize, OK? If I did I’d capitalize it. I don’t WANT you to change what you deem “misspellings”–and I shouldn’t have to fuck around with the settings to get it the way I want.
MS Access is the most godforsaken database software on earth. Having used SQL databases before, I can honestly say that half of the procedures in Access go against simple logic. Again, it’s the newbie phenomenon…if you start out in Access with no previous database experience then it’s easy; it’s when you try to switch to Access that the learning curve kicks in. I can do in PHP/mySQL what would take me twice as long in Access. Why? Becaue it’s simpler.
Having said that, I write my web pages for Internet Explorer. Netscape is so disappointing these days…leave out a </table > tag, or something else minor, and your page doesn’t even FUCKING DISPLAY in Netscape. Opera is so close to being my main browser. I promise.
I don’t know if I buy into the conspiracy theories (there was one at fuckMicrosoft.com about the Find Fast utility that had me rolling on the floor), but there’s plenty of ammunition even without them.
To wrap it up, Microsoft’s business strategy of catering to the lowest common denominator pisses me off. But hey, they make great mice…and Age of Empires 2 was awesome. 
You know people actually want software that crashes and hangs. Just check out all the games released, they continue to get worse and worse.
I don’t hate Microsoft because of its crummy products. GM makes a lot of crummy cars, but I don’t hate them for it - I just don’t buy a GM car.
I hate Microsoft because of its market position. I guess I should hate the U.S. Government, too, because it is responsible for allowing one company to so thoroughly dominate what is supposed to be, and vitally needs to be, a competitive market. The recent lawsuit in which Microsoft almost got split is a step in the right direction, but if the Justice Department had been paying attention, they could have prevented the problem instead of trying to chop it out with a hatchet.
Are Microsoft’s products bad? It’s really a moot question, isn’t it? You have to have something to compare them to. For instance, I hate Word for reasons I’ll not go into now. But do I have a choice? Most of the competition has been killed off, and what remains is impractical because of Microsoft’s well-documented war on standards. I’m waiting for the day when Microsoft comes out with a proprietary version of TCP/IP. The United States is now in Phase One of Microsoft Dominance, in which we complain, critique, and sue. If that doesn’t work, we’ll move into Phase Two, in which the critiques will degenerate into pathetic nitpicks and flame wars. Then will come Phase Three: defeated acceptance. In 20 years, we’ll say “You can’t fight Microsoft” instead of “You can’t fight City Hall”.
I couldn’t agree more about Access. A substantial part of my job is database work (I am, after all, a database analyst). I live in fear of Access databases. Not only are they a standard unto themselves (Microsoft Jet, the SQLish thing that Access uses for access from other programming languages, is one of the weirdest misimplementations of SQL92 I have ever seen) but they have this really nasty habit of just up and dying without warning (and with no way to recover them). The more complex the database, the more likely they are to die. Nobody with any sense at all uses an Access database to store important data. The first thing I do when someone hands me a project that uses an Access database is fire up Data Transformation Services in SQL Server and convert the damn thing into a SQL Server database. (Of course, I still have to spend quite a while writing custom interface code – but that’s still better than using Access!)
That said, SQL Server 7.0 is a pretty decent product. Microsoft is capable of turning out a decent product, but only when they have competition. (SQL Server competes with quality products from Oracle, IBM, and a couple other companies.) It’s when they don’t have competition that they let the product go to hell.
The real problem with Microsoft isn’t that their products suck. It’s that they don’t have any competition to force them to make their products so they don’t suck.
I was going to say the same thing. Anyone who thinks Microsoft programs are buggy evidently doesn’t play computer games. PC games are buggier than MS products by amargin of ten to one; there is simply no comparison. It is quite common for major gaming releases, from major companies, after years of development, to be released in a state in which they are completely unusable.
As a matter of fact, MS games are generally the most stable games out there, although they’re still buggier than other MS products.
What Mort Furt said.
I hate M$ for sticking Word on all new computers sold to our clients. They end up using Word, so we must start using Word so that our documents will be easier to exchange via e-mail. This “Word creep” has slowly but surely forced a lot of law firms to abandon the better program, WordPerfect. There is not one secretary or paralegal here who has used both word processing programs and does not infinitely prefer WordPerfect. Word sucks!
Waaaaaahhhh! Give me back my WordPerfect! I want Reveal Codes again!
I hate Microsoft for all the reasons stated here, multiplied by 100.
I hate the way Gates does business.
I hate his smugness.
I hate his goals.
I hate his company.
And I hate Microsoft as just the ultimate expression of a trend I find tragic: the homogenization of the culture. The concentration of money, power, and influence in fewer and fewer hands, resulting in less and less choice in all areas of our lives, completely depresses me.
stoid
Gee.
I’ve caused a pit thread. Wow.
And all because I posted something that had little to do with my feelings about Microsoft, but with a little video clip of a bazillionaire stomping around on stage making loud scary noises.
I’m touched and honoured indeed. I’ll be back later.
Maybe.
Working for a lawfirm, I deal extensively with documents in both Microsoft Word and Corel WordPerfect formats. Anyone who has similar experiences will also hate Microsoft. I don’t have problems with Windows or anything else, because I’m a low-end user. But formating a document in Word is near impossible compared to how easy it is in WordPerfect.
Why would anyone use Word just to exchange files back and forth with Word users? Get MacLink Plus or Convertions Plus (depending on whether you’re on a Mac or a PC) and convert Word files to WordPerfect files and vice versa. Convert Excel files to Quattro Pro and vice versa. Heck, convert Word files to WordStar; convert 'me to Lotus WordPro; convert 'em to XYWrite, MacWrite, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, OfficeWriter, Claris Works! (unfortunately, not to Star Office, at least not yet).
I own exactly two Microsoft applications: Excel (version 5.0, no VB, no paper clip) and Windows Media Player for the Macintosh (beta). I work in a MS-Office standard office and have to deal with modern Word and Excel documents all the time (not to mention an occasional one of those bloody PowerPoint placemats). I just convert all the Word docs to (or from) WordPerfect 3.5e or Excel 5.x, as easy as downloading a file attachment.
standard disclaimer: I am not an employee of DataViz nor am I a DataViz stockholder.
Microsoft is irresponsibly advising sysadmins to take wholly inadequate steps to recover from the severe system security risks created by their own buggy software. (Code Red II installs a trojan that at the very least has to be removed separately, and because the trojan gives the entire universe unlimited, untraceable access to your system, the only way to be certain that your system is secure after a CRII infection is to reformat and reinstall.)
I use MS a lot. Tries to use Linux, but some of my components didn’t have drivers yet. Anyway, here are some of my reasons to hate Microsoft:
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Lack of downward compatibility with old software I have. Seems that I have to re-load all of the old drivers to get those programs to to run. Yet they refuse to sell Win3.1/95 anymore and older OSes.
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They decided to do away with DOS altogether, and go all-Windows, despite the fact that a lot of people, like me, use DOS for some of my operations.
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Despite the fact that they are powerful enough to have said ‘bite us’ to all of the record companies, and become heroes of the music consumers, they instead actually surrendered to them, and worked to cripple mp3 in their lastest Windows XP.
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For some reason, files go missing, or get corrupted, including some of the ones vital to bootup.
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Security is generally awful, and in fact there are a couple of files, user.dat and system.dat, that log everything you do on the computer, that can be read by any mediocre cryptographer. You the user can’t erase these files except by wizardry means. What the hell was that all about? And surfing anonymously is almost impossible. I have to use outside ptograms to clean my data properly.
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OSrot as mentioned before. It is so annoying, especially the part where there are thousands of files in one folder, windows/system, that are used by no less than 300 different programs and applications.
I mean, what is so wrong with keeping program files exclusively in separate folders? -
This new ad campaign is so bad. it essentally forces businesses to buy upgrades that they don’t need.
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The continuing arrogance in totally integrating programs that are better off as exclusive modules, such as IE with Windows Explorer. They tried to muscle Netscape before figuring out that to compete they have to build a better browser, which they finally got around doing with IE5. (All you Netscape Navigator fans: there are some vulnerabilities that Netscape have never fixed).
I thank everyone for your replies (except Chas, since he is, was, and always will be an ass). And I also thank everyone for confirming my suspicions about why people “hate” Microsoft.
One thing I need to address…
Would you prefer that it not reboot at all?
[Preachy tone]
I think very few people are realizing that, for the sheer amount of software/hardware that Microsoft has to cover, they actually do an excellent job of creating a decent operating system and/or proprietary software. They have to make a program that can handle thousands upon thousands of different combinations of hardware and software drivers.
While I may understand if you dislike the bugs or occasional crashes (I must admit that I’ve experienced very, very few of the crashes that people tout… maybe I’ve just been lucky), I don’t understand how this can justify the hatred that some people seem to have… such as JET’s vehemence, Chas.E’s misinformation that he spews from every orifice, or the ad hominem attack that Drewbert launched.
Color me confused, but I just don’t understand it (which is why I started this thread).
[/Preachy Tone]
Two things leap to mind when I read this. First, have you actually read all of the replies? There’s a lot more than bugs and crashes being mentioned here. Second, if you’re looking for a rational justification for the most extreme opinions then you’re bound to be disappointed. It’s kind of like asking people who dislike universal health insurance to justify the belief that smallpox vaccinations are an alien tracking device.
For the record I don’t hate Microsoft either. But I don’t think Windows won its current market share solely on its merits, and I don’t think all of their decisions are based on what would make a better product.
For a specific example, consider Windows NT 3.1 and IBM OS/2 2.0. Both OS’s were very similar under the hood, since they both were offshoots of the failed collaboration between Microsoft and IBM; in particular, they both had a mechanism for trapping hardware exceptions like division by zero and catching them in software. And they both had to provide an interface to that mechanism for C programmers.
How did IBM do it? The obvious way. They provided a library of C function calls. You could, for example, call a function at the beginning of a C block, passing a pointer to a function to handle exceptions rising from that block. Simple, straightforward, and compatible with any C compiler.
How did Microsoft do it? By creating a proprietary extension to the C language, adding C+±style “__TRY” and “__CATCH” blocks to C, which were converted into the appropriate (undocumented) assembly language instructions by Microsoft C compilers. Instead of making the feature easy to use, they made next to impossible to use unless you were using other Microsoft products.
A small example, but I think it illustrates the point (and it definitely pissed me off at the time).
A lot of people dislike Microsquash, and their products, with perfectly valid reasons. At times I am in their company.
But at the same time, Microsoft’s dominance of the software side of things, and Intel’s dominance of the hardware side, has actually been a good thing overall. For better or worse (mainly better), there’s a gross standard in computing - you use a Intel based machine, with a WinXX op system, running in the English language - worldwide. This enforced standard has actually led to the computer fulfilling most of the promises that were made for it 20 years ago. It’s possible to argue that this has had a significant effect in the good economy we have experienced in the same time frame.
It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it, that a lot of the people bashing MS are working in the very types of jobs that have been created by the computer revolution? How many of these jobs would exist if we were still fighting over which system and software to use?
I’m going to remind people once again that nobody has to justify their hate of Microsoft, BillG, SteveB, etc. Nobody needs any justification to hate a corporation that believes itself to be the most powerful thing on the face of the earth. That would be like having to justify why you think nuclear weapons are a evil.
Perhaps a brief history lesson is in order, for those of you in the audience who were not even born when Windows 1.0 was released. The battle over the personal computer is a battle for personal freedom in how we handle information, a battle against the centralization of power represented by mainframe computing of the 1960s and early 1970s, towards a user-centered approach. Now that the single-user platform has been monopolized by Microsoft, it is now clearly intending to shift that model back towards the centralized model with .NET and Hailstorm. The motivation for this new centralization is strictly greed.
In this context, saying you are pro-microsoft is analogous to saying you like totalitarianism because the trains always run on time. I think people need to justify why they LIKE microsoft rather than why they HATE them.
Totalitarianism = Nazi Germany
Asshol.E, are you calling Microsoft supporters Nazis? :rolleyes:
Putz.