Ask HN: Will Microsoft ever become cool again? |
Ask HN: Will Microsoft ever become cool again? |
(Says the guy who's been a Mac user for >15 years and bought every new product Apple has come out with.)
Apple is doing this to themselves. As a dev platform, their appeal is waning. (Stop making shit laptops, and make your macOS stable again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
Microsoft, under Nadella, is making the right moves, listening to their userbase. It was enough to get me to switch back.
Maybe it's still too early to tell, and all of these moonshot concepts will result in useable devices, but so far I feel like the device ecosystem and interoperability of devices just isn't at all at the level of apple or even google for that matter.
If you need a UNIX-y workflow the Windows Subsystem for Linux makes all the difference.
That kind of association is extremely difficult to break. Car manufacturers have struggled with similar impressions. You can make the greatest, and cheapest, car in the world, and people won't buy it if it has that kind of negative association.
What Porsche model is a stripped down version of another? Porsche Turbo S —> GT3/2 RS? Cayman GTS —> GT4?
Because in those 2 examples, there’s no stripping down.
I don’t use my Win10 tablet anymore, but it is what it is.
They also put Linux in Windows, released visual studio for free, created one of the most popular text editors ever, and created 3 programming languages that are generally well liked (C#, F#, and typescript).
I'm not sure how cool they are compared to Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and Facebook but I personally tend to compare them to enterprise companies like IBM and Oracle. Microsoft wins that coolness contest easily.
As a nerd, I would like them to do what Apple did: release a new, clean, robust OS (based on OpenBSD would be smart, worked for Apple) and then provide a shim for backward compatibility. That is, allow all existing programs to still run but have a clean platform for future apps. Like ChromeOS I would prefer this to be truly secure, robust and updated with minimal intrusion.
As a consumer, I want systems that are reliable, robust, secure, free from malware, impossible to hack into, cheap and fast. In other words everything that Windows currently isn't.
In this sense a good successor to Windows would be a lightweight VM host running one-off instances of older Windows versions to support the host of software made for that platform, allowing those instances to communicate with each other. That might be good for users but it does not offer a path forward for Microsoft.
In truth, there probably is no way forward for Microsoft in this space. Windows is a dead end, the 'information at your fingertips' idea which Gates spouted has come true but not by way of Windows.
TypeScript and C# are great tools too.
Am i to understand this kind of service is impossible for a multibillion company? You dont have any questions, you dont have any problem and we are certainly not going to fix anything.
Windows 95 and 98 were when the GUI became cool. Well, cool and available - it was cool on the Mac, but nobody had Macs.
People forget that Microsoft sold more copies of Xenix (A UNIX operating system) for both PDP-11 and PCs than all the other Unix boxen suppliers of that era. But then marketing decided that they didn't need a real OS, so they sold it SCO and then later bankrolled them into suing Linux suppliers, etc. That was all Steve Ballmer's watch, during which MS shares also lost half their value.
The PS/2 was a technically better product. It was also IBM's attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, so that it could sell hardware at prices considerably above the commodity level. Technically better? Cool. Not having to pay several hundred dollars more for your hardware? The market thought that was even more cool.