Not content with the slashdot reaction
Scoble
asks what sucks about Microsoft products. Oh boy. That's going to fill his hard drive up.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm a generally happy Microsoft user. A lot of my posts on Slashdot get
marked as trolls. I'm currently overseeing a .net migration for a large UK bank and mentoring a few
of their staff. But ....
- IE. If it wasn't for lack of ActiveX controls I'd be on FireFox by now. Oh that and I'm lazy.
- Windows 2003 Server for Windows Media. Swines. Win2k had a great plugin model for
the Windows Media service. It changed, and some of the fun stuff was on Win2003 enterprise only. Hell of
an upgrade cost.
- SQL. SQL2005 was the perfect change to leapfrog Oracle and implement that nice new SQL standard.
Nope, missed it.
- Visual Studio. How long as VS been killing your HTML layouts and it's only getting fixed now?
- Word. Talking of reformatting why can't word ever do bullets the way I want without second guessing me?
- Outlook. Why don't you like IMAP? Really. Outlook's IMAP support sucks.
- Windows for Smartphones. The same problem with IMAP. Oh and the broken S/SMTP (now fixed after I whined a lot).
And the awful PocketIE.
- Product activation. Look just bite me ok? Corporate keys get leaked quickly and you're not losing money here,
the people who pirate would never buy in the first place, so stop pissing off people who actually purchase.
- The codecs setup. Why should a bad codec be so hard to uninstall? Worse, why would they kill DirectPlay so
games crash? (reformat time - hence the annoyance over product activation)
- XP. Oh boy, the amount of useless services enabled and taking up memory when you install. There's no need.
Then there's uPNP. Turn uPNP discovery on kiss your systray goodbye on your first login.
- Lack of high DPI support. It's half hearted at best. Use widescreen kiss your dialog boxes good bye or
watch IE scale badly.
- Then there's longhorn, WinFX, Avalon, Indigo, XAML, Aero, ChocolateFudge (ok I made that up). Aside from the
"Is it in, is it not" there's too much concentration on it and not enough of keeping all the current developer
techs in the fore front. It's what we're using now, so help us damnit. Heck, if we'd all started writing for
Longhorn technologies after the first demo how much of that code would be useless now because MS dropped
parts of it?
- WinFS. GIVE ME WINFS. GIVE ME OBJECTSPACES. NOW. DAMNIT
(Oh and a Redmond job would be nice, just so I can get
stephbu out on the Absinthe again.)