This is really so much of a rant (though I am pissed off about it). I put it in the pit because, well it is sort of a rant, and we’re bound to get the anti-Microsoft crowd in here raving about using Redhat/SuSe/BeOS or whatever (please don’t). FTR I also have my own Redhat system which I use quite a bit - let’s keep the “platform wars” out of this.
I’m not sure how to describe what I’m talking about except to call it “network naievety”.
Let me say that I’m definitely not anti-Microsoft - in fact I have a few Microsoft certifications and I am a professional developer in their environment. I think the development tools are excellent, and most of their software, while not the most robust in the world, is pretty easy to use and intuitive.
One thing seems to pervade everything Microsoft produces though: none of their products have any idea that they are on a network! I’m currently trying to use Outlook XP over my company’s VPN. Now, bear in mind that my connection is not sluggish - I’m connected over cable at speeds approaching 3 Mbps. My company’s VPN servers are pretty fast and the ping times are all low. So why is it that OutlookXP takes friggin’ forever to do the simplest tasks? I click my inbox - the thing locks up for several minutes, before finally presenting my list of messages. What is it doing all this time? It’s only friggin’ text - it’s not like my mail messages are rich multimedia files! It’s possible that there’s some obscure configuration setting I could change in Outlook to tell it “don’t be so damn stupid” but why should I have to?
Another example - Visual SourceSafe. It is unusable over anything but a local LAN. For one, it insists on you being able to map a drive, which is pretty Internet-unfriendly in itself - how many people want to open up NetBIOS to the Internet?! When you try to use VSS over a VPN connection, even a fast one, the simplest of operations take literally several minutes ( “get latest” on a file…compare files…) You have to buy something like Source Offsite, a (rather expensive) 3rd party product to do what VSS should be doing in the first place - allowing developers to work remotely. (Most things happen close to instantly with Source Offsite - so why couldn’t Microsoft do that with Visual SourceSafe ??)
How about when some stupid Microsoft application is waiting for the network to respond - more often than not, the application will stop responding to mouse clicks and keystrokes, and if you move other windows over it, the window will just get erased and you get a stupid blank gray background. Often times, even the Windows desktop stops responding - if you’re lucky you can still ALT-TAB between applications. I’m sure there are a lot of developers at Microsoft smarter than me, but even I know to pump windows messages during lengthy network operations so the user is not left with an unresponsive application.
Also - how about when you map a drive to a machine that is (gasp! god forbid!) no longer available…when you later open Explorer, Windows will stupidly keep trying to connect to the now unavailable machine. Stupid, stupid, stupid. This is also a great one for locking up the desktop. Jeez, I’ve been seeing this problem since Windows 95 - does Microsoft carefully build a “lock up the desktop” routine into every version of Windows??
Perhaps all the developers at Microsoft are interconnected with everything they need to be by T3 lines or LAN connections, so they can’t imagine anything slower? Do they even test their products over “slow” lines like my cable connection? I wonder if this is related to the evolution of Windows from a single-user, desktop product to where it’s trying to be a sophisticated, network-savvy operating system? You’d think by now that with all the versions of Windows that have been produced, Microsoft would have got the networking sorted out.
Perhaps a lot of their programming is done by teenagers during their summer vacation, and they have no idea of network latency and other such issues in the real world.