I don’t hate Microsoft. I don’t like them. Their products tend to be second-rate, with too many features, bloated code and generally hostile user interfaces that make using the programs far harder than they should be. Word v.X’s default interface has over 40 unlabelled buttons on the screen. Word for Windows was, last I saw, just as bad.
I’m fortunate in that I work in an industry where Microsoft isn’t much of a factor, print publishing. The only Microsoft program I use regularly is Word, and now that Nisus Writer has a beta out for Mac OS X, I’m gonna switch to that as much as possible (if only because it’s a genuine Mac application that works and feels like a Mac program). Not intentionally, but I now have no Microsoft icons on my Dock – Internet Explorer gave way to first Camino, and now Safari. Entourage has been replaced by Mail, Address Book and iCal. And now Word bows to Nisus, at least in the short term. I didn’t go looking for reasons to ditch Microsoft, but it is nice not relying on them, because Microsoft isn’t a particularly nice company (though few companies are).
Microsoft has done terrible things in the past: they stole other people’s ideas, sometimes even their code (as in the famous Windows Video & QuickTime case), and use their monopoly power and their OS control to harm competitors in the application market.
For example, Microsoft Office didn’t become dominant because it was better than WordPerfect. It became dominant because Microsoft, controlling both Windows and Office, was able to push out first a Windows 3.1, and then a Windows 95 version of office day and date with the release of the OSes. The WordPerfect folks couldn’t keep up, they didn’t have the internal knowledge MS did, which was an advantage – a monopoly advantage – MS exploited. Of course, today, Microsoft Office is a better product than Corel’s WordPerfect suite. But only because Microsoft used its advantage to suffocate Corel’s predecessors in the WP business.
As to the lamentable fate of Netscape, it goes both ways. Internet Explorer made its major market share inroads with version 3.0, which was markedly inferior to Netscape Navigator 3.0. How? By being freely bundled with the operating system. Now, in versions 4.0 and forward, Microsoft’s product was better, because Netscape’s market had been gutted by the free 3.0 browser, and Netscape made a horrible tactical move with Communicator 4.0 – they bundled all their apps into one program, which made performance dog-slow.
The lightweight spin-offs from Netscape’s Mozilla organization – Firebird and Camino – are just browsers, as browsers should be, and they are stellar. At least as good as Internet Explorer on their respective platforms, as well as faster and more standards-compliant. Whether Firebird can gain marketshare against the entrenched Internet Explorer is another question. Camino faces its own challenge against Apple’s Safari.
My experience on Windows is limited. Being into journalism as a aspired-for career and film and video as a hobby, I have no need for it. I help fix Windows computers that my fraternity brothers have trouble with, and use them occassionaly. There’s nothing impressive about them. Using them, I struggle to find a single thing that Microsoft came up with. The Start Menu is just a warmed-over Apple Menu, the Taskbar is basically the old NeXT Dock. The only UI contribution Microsoft made is that detestable Window-in-a-Window MDI thing, which is the worst UI I’ve ever seen. That’s probably the root of my trouble, philosophically, with Microsoft. They’re just a leech. They produce nothing original, they simply take the ideas of others and lay claim to them, and I find that to be reprehensible.
