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| ▲ | dchuk 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | While I don’t disagree that Microsoft isn’t necessarily the most innovative, Apple is absolutely the most successful example of “first mover advantage” not actually being an advantage, and second movers can often be the actual winners. Literally every product they have launched in the last few decades has had the category already defined, they just came in with so much more polish and elegance (and sharp marketing) that they just repeatedly obliterate and take over the category as if they invented it. I’ll never forget when they dedicated a minute or two in a keynote a few years ago to how they improved the volume indicator visual overlay in iOS to be less obtrusive like they talked to god himself to figure this out, when Android had that style for years…it was brilliant marketing. I say all of this as a die hard Apple guy. | | |
| ▲ | asdefghyk 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | RE ....Microsoft isn’t necessarily the most innovative.... Did you know Microsoft copied the idea of product activation from a PATENT and got fined about $300M USD for stealing the IP. Google the words Microsoft's fine for copying product activation idea, Ric Richardson for all the details ..... |
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| ▲ | linguae 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I’m no Microsoft fanboy, but Microsoft Excel was very innovative for being one of the first graphical spreadsheets, originally written for the classic Mac OS in the mid-1980s before it was available for Windows. It was Excel, not Word or PowerPoint, that fueled the popularity of Microsoft Office in the 1990s, though admittedly I lament the decline of WordPerfect and other word processors. Sure, Excel might not have been the most innovative graphical spreadsheet; that award goes to Lotus Improv for the NeXT computer. However, Excel was a leap ahead of DOS-based spreadsheets like Lotus 1-2-3. There are other innovative Microsoft products. Visual Basic was a very nice rapid GUI development environment in the 1990s. Windows 95’s interface was the result of a lot of research done on the user experience, and the result was a GUI that not only has persisted (with many modifications, of course) for about 30 years, but has inspired other desktops such as various Linux desktops, and in some ways even influenced later Mac operating systems. Let’s also not forget Microsoft Research, which has produced a lot of interesting work in operating systems and programming language research. | | |
| ▲ | adrian_b 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | While I agree that Microsoft Excel is a contender for the best Microsoft product ever, I do not see how one can claim that it was a more "graphical" spreadsheet that MS-DOS Lotus 1-2-3, except if by "graphical" you just mean that it was a native Windows application, so you did not have to exit Windows and revert to MS-DOS for having the best user experience, like you would have needed with MS-DOS Lotus 1-2-3 (whose drivers for various hardware graphics devices would not have worked well or at all under Windows emulation). When Windows 95 has made MS-DOS obsolete, Excel had the huge advantage of being a native Windows application, so I have switched like everybody else from Lotus 1-2-3 to Microsoft Excel, because switching between Windows and MS-DOS was unpleasant and inconvenient, and because the new Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows did not have any of the advantages of Lotus 1-2-3 for MS-DOS, while being inferior as a Windows program to MS Excel. Even if I have switched to Excel, for supporting the general Windows features, like nice TrueType fonts and being able to use great amounts of memory in a faster way, due to direct access instead of using extended/expanded memory, at that time Excel did not have any spreadsheet-specific feature, graphic or otherwise, that was better than Lotus 1-2-3. Despite strongly preferring Windows 95 to MS-DOS, I have always regretted a few MS-DOS programs that had a much better user interface than any Windows program that I have ever seen. One of those was Lotus 1-2-3. Learning to use MS-DOS Lotus 1-2-3 was significantly more difficult than learning MS Excel, but once you were an expert the speed of doing any spreadsheet operations using keyboard shortcuts was many times greater than what is possible in Excel with a mouse-based UI, or even with the Excel keyboard shortcuts, which are much less efficient. While the early Excel was extremely easy to use, that is no longer true about modern Excel or MS Office. Even if I had used for many decades MS Excel and several other spreadsheet applications, when I open now the recent versions of MS Word or MS Excel, I am no longer able to find most of the commands that I need and that I know that they must exist, except after a long random search through various menus, because those no longer have a hierarchical structure whose principles of organization I can discern. This is completely different from older versions of Excel, where one needed no help and no manuals to easily find any required command. |
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| ▲ | kristopolous 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | WSL2 is pretty nice as is powershell. Also I haven't done windows development in years but I miss windbg - still don't have anything like it on linux. Also you probably use vscode and people like typescript. playwright and omniparse are pretty useful as well. And unlike with a lot of companies, they often continue to invest and move their acquisitions forward, such as github. Microsoft 2025 isn't the same bastard from 1992. | | |
| ▲ | thewebguyd 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > And unlike with a lot of companies, they often continue to invest and move their acquisitions forward, such as github. Which helps them win in the enterprise. Not just their acquisitions, but if MS puts out a tech you can be confidently sure they are going to support it for a long time. There's been a few examples contrary to that - Silverlight and their UI frameworks they can't seem to get a handle on, but everything else they've put out exists long-term, and is generally backwards compatible. There aren't many others that offer that level of stability. We tend to value new and shiny, but non-tech companies don't they want boring and stable, which is why Microsoft won there. Hell, you can still run a lot of apps from the Windows 3.11 era on Windows 11 with minimal fuss. The same can't be said for most other platforms. Microsoft tech isn't necessarily sexy or exciting, but it checks boxes and is supported for a LONG time, and for a closed source OS, Windows is surprisingly open and configurable (well, used to be anyway - that seems to be going away with 11+) |
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| ▲ | p_ing 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You're conflating innovation with discovery/invention. Innovation isn't simply "think of/create something new", it includes incremental changes to something, leveraging an existing thing in a new way, etc. .NET is certainly not "a copy" of Java, it's just Java done correctly ;-) | | |
| ▲ | breadwinner 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Incorrectly. Wherever they deviated from Java they messed up. See exceptions, for example: https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex... | | |
| ▲ | p_ing 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | "Incorrect" okay, based on a brand-new-to-C# developer's experience. Sure. "The Trouble with Checked Exceptions" - https://www.artima.com/articles/the-trouble-with-checked-exc... | | |
| ▲ | Cpoll 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | In the linked article, Hejlsberg considers adding a new checked exception a breaking change (true), but adding a new thrown exception to not be, because "in a lot of cases, people don't care." I think this is obviously open to debate. You're conflating "incorrect" with "mistake," no one is saying the C# team forgot to add checked exceptions. | |
| ▲ | breadwinner 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I have a lot of respect for Anders Hejlsberg. But that doesn't mean he is never wrong. Hejlsberg doesn't think anyone would want to recover from exceptions. "There's a bottom level exception handler around their message loop. That handler is just going to bring up a dialog that says what went wrong and continue." Okaayyy... I think we know a bit more about exception handling than that today! Real-world applications often need more sophisticated exception handling strategies. | | |
| ▲ | p_ing 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | "Something went wrong." <insert correlation id> [no option to continue] Those are our error messages of today. And yes, even the brightest can be wrong from time to time or frequently | | |
| ▲ | breadwinner 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Those are our error messages of today. Is that in your .NET code? Time to switch to Java! |
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| ▲ | neonsunset 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Surely you're not arguing in favour of checked exceptions, which are widely regarded by Java programmers as a mistake, are you? (not sure but I think I saw you argue in favour of that previously before getting quickly pointed out all the issues with checked exceptions) In either case I encourage you to try out .NET before making a statement, there's a good chance it will pleasantly surprise you. |
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| ▲ | lvl155 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That’s fair. For Microsoft, I think they trailblazed on how to be a global tech monopoly. The dotcom companies (ie Amazon, Google, etc) all followed those footprints to dominate. | |
| ▲ | robertlagrant 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | By that measure iOS and Android are copies of Windows Mobile, no? | |
| ▲ | zvrba 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Check out work by Microsoft research. Examples: Z3 solver, project Orleans. | |
| ▲ | UberFly 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Absurd comment. Microsoft forged the desktop space into what it is today. You clearly don't like them but their contributions and market decisions quickly outpaced Apple and everyone else in the 1990s. They created the dominant PC experience that remains to this day by a large margin. |
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