Why is Microsoft the favorite villain?

[tigerwoodKhorns]

Bruce,

 

They have a free tiral.  Maybe this will work.  I just need to be able to control a few symbols, use tables, bullets and most importantly, compare changes. 

 

Mallett,

 

I have 2 screens and am going to 4 with my new computer.  The idea is to speed me up not slow me down.  I am dreading this...

[Jeff Matthews]

I have a perfectly good version right now that I am VERY efficient on.  But I must learn a new version where everythign is different and it will slow me down.  Jeff, you know that every "0.1" is money right out of my pocket.  Why do I need to endure this?  Because they are forcing me to do this to extract more money from me.  The sad fact is that I would rather pay to continue to iuse what I have than "upgrade" to the **** that they are making me upgrade to.   

 

 

this is always the case.  Now, cars don't come with 8-track players anymore, nor do they come with cassette players.  The world moves forward.  Some don't like to move as quickly.  That's okay, but the rest aren't going to slow down for them.

[Mallette]

Well, the Cybermen are right:  "You will be upgraded."

 

Might as well.  We are already Borg as well.

 

Dave

[Jeff Matthews]

Well, the Cybermen are right:  "You will be upgraded."

 

Might as well.  We are already Borg as well.

 

Dave

 

Sure.  You aren't going to find cassette tapes at Wal-Mart anymore.  You either keep-up or become left-behind.

[Mallette]

You consider the ribbon an improvement?

 

This is about the only place I bellyache about MS, and even then I don't know why.  Almost nobody who actually worked with GUI's designed for the application instead of clunky one size fits nobody.   I am thankful transportation dashboards don't have to follow that rule.  Not sure which sounds dumber, a 747 with a Ford dashboard or vice versa. 

 

None of us in the early days ever would have believed that GUIs would be forced to be all the same, and that OS would be designed to force obsolescence.  I can list function after function that Windows still doesn't support that were common before the monopoly.  But it's pointless, both because it won't change anything and people are so brainwashed as to make that original Macintosh Big Brother ad prophetic.  Of course, Apple, then under the gun of Microsoft to NEVER do anything threatening, just pretty much followed the party line as well. 

 

As I've said, I make a pretty decent living off the PC and have no choice but Windows.  As to "keeping up," it's keeping up with meaningless changes that in no way improve anything.  Still no real multi-tasking, drive aliasing, warm boot survivable RAM drives...nope.  My guess is, like caffeine in 7 UP, "Never had em, never will."  If the desktop form factor is dying it is due to a lack of innovation. 

 

Dave

 

Dave

[Jeff Matthews]

If the desktop form factor is dying it is due to a lack of innovation. 

 

We've been down this road.  The reason is due to carving out the toy niche and moving it to weaker, more compact, machines where productivity power is not required. 

[Mallette]

The reason is due to carving out the toy niche and moving it to weaker, more compact, machines where productivity power is not required.

 

There are still a million or more of us requiring stable, raw power.  Stable hasn't been with us now for a couple of decades.  Raw power is probably just going to cost more.  Hard to tell what will become of CAD, 3D, video editing, and the like if MS winds up killing the market with dog after dog.  As you can see above, it isn't just me.  In my case, I have a stable of people working in all the areas I mentioned so I have a strong viewpoint.  Most are working in only one.  

 

However, the cost keeps going up and productivity is really damaged by OS changes that improve nothing but MS bottom line.  Most walked into it willingly not knowing any better...but people are learning. 

 

Dave

[Jeff Matthews]

 

The reason is due to carving out the toy niche and moving it to weaker, more compact, machines where productivity power is not required.

 

There are still a million or more of us requiring stable, raw power.  Stable hasn't been with us now for a couple of decades.  Raw power is probably just going to cost more.  Hard to tell what will become of CAD, 3D, video editing, and the like if MS winds up killing the market with dog after dog.  As you can see above, it isn't just me.  In my case, I have a stable of people working in all the areas I mentioned so I have a strong viewpoint.  Most are working in only one.  

 

However, the cost keeps going up and productivity is really damaged by OS changes that improve nothing but MS bottom line.  Most walked into it willingly not knowing any better...but people are learning. 

 

Dave

 

We never had stable.  I learned <Ctrl>/<Alt>/<Delete> very early on.

 

We have exponentially greater power.  There is no question about that.  Largely, what has happened is that power gains have exceeded most people's needs for power.

 

Cost is cheaper than ever.  I remember spending around $2k on my a 386sx computer with 2 megs of RAM and an 80-meg HDD.  It came with a color VGA monitor.  Now, I spend $700 and get a 17" HD laptop with i-7 Quad Core, 8 gigs of ram, 1 terrabyte HDD, etc.  

 

As regards software, does anybody remember when Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS cost around $500?  Now, look what we get for less than $100.  MS Word and a slew of others with it.  And so.... much better than back in the old days.

Edited March 9, 2015 by Jeff Matthews

[Jeff Matthews]

...

Edited March 9, 2015 by Jeff Matthews

[Mallette]

We never had stable.

 

YOU never had stable, but you don't have much history in productivity computing and programming.  I've run machines for weeks without needing to reboot.  In fact, you only needed to if you were moving the machine or something. 

 

We have exponentially greater power.

 

Totally exhausted in the spaghetti code of a OS whose developers don't have a CLUE what code is needed or not anymore and dare not change things they no longer understand.  Do a little research.  Even MS developers freely admit that.  And it is totally nutszoid. 

 

As regards software, does anybody remember when Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS cost around $500

 

Apparently missed that.  I certainly don't recall paying that much. 

 

As to the hardware costs, irrelevant.  Those costs are in no way related to MS...other than with a ground-up overhaul using nothing of the original code you see machines MANY times faster with current processors.  Of course, still probably wouldn't properly multi-task and I don't think Intel has an MMU in the cards so decent handling of memory space still isn't going to happen...but we still haven't approached the USABLE power we had in 1996.  Seen any real time rendering on a 1000.00 PC lately?  If so, let me know.

 

Dave

[Marvel]

Apparently missed that. I certainly don't recall paying that much.

 

WordPerfect for the Atari ST retailed at US$395 with a student version for US$99.^[37] The price of WordPerfect was significantly higher than most of the other Atari word processors available at the time. Atari Corporation published a version of Microsoft Write (the Atari version of Microsoft Word 1.05 for the Macintosh) for US$129.95 (almost 75% off the suggested retail price of WordPerfect), which did not help WordPerfect's campaign to establish itself as the standard word processor on the Atari platform.

[tigerwoodKhorns]

 

However, the cost keeps going up and productivity is really damaged by OS changes that improve nothing but MS bottom line.  Most walked into it willingly not knowing any better...but people are learning. 

 

Dave

 

 

I think that this sums it up perfectly.  This is not keeping up with the times.  This is losing productivity and money because of a cramdown that forces sales of a product that is intnetionally made obsolete every few years. 

[Mallette]

Bruce, I think the issue is that I never used the IBM PC for anything until my time at the National University of Singapore.  Then and thereafter, I really didn't know what the software cost as the institutions were paying.  WordStar, Paperclip64, and the others I used I've forgotten on CPM, Commodore, TI, and the like weren't anywhere near those prices and worked very well.  I wrote a 150 page technical manual for UNOCAL I started on a Commodore 64 and finished on an Amiga 1000 complete with tables and such.  Must have been a HOST of ESC codes in there, but I remember mainly thinking just how cool it was.  Certainly never crashed...

 

Dave

[muel]

I remember winning a copy of WordPerfect at Comdex when it was in Chicago back in the 80's.  I remember being pretty happy because of the high retail cost and free was pretty darn good!  I think that was before 5.1 though... 4.2 maybe.  

 

For Dave's use maybe the PC was unstable or unusable but I had rock solid installations that simply did not have problems and worked for years until some hardware component died.  Of course, this is back when viruses had to be introduced by somebody carrying it into the office on a 5-1/4" or maybe 3-1/2" floppy disk.  

[Mallette]

Certainly DOS was as stable as whatever program you were running, and as most were very well crafted by people used to working in cramped RAM they were pretty solid.  Most Windows crashes today occur in that spaghetti code nobody knows what does, including MS.  Until it's re-coded from the ground up it won't improve much.  There really should be only VERY rare crashes from an OS, and then only due to poor 3rd party programming.

 

The complex simulations we wrote for ARCO in the 90s never, and I mean, never crashed in use.  In beta, we banged all over the keyboard while clicking all over the screen to test them under the most severe situation we could imagine, and kept cleaning the code until it was as stable as humanly possible. 

 

When I think on it now it's hard to believe those machines, OS, and code were so bleeding stable.  But we didn't know any better.

 

Dave

[Jeff Matthews]

 

 

However, the cost keeps going up and productivity is really damaged by OS changes that improve nothing but MS bottom line.  Most walked into it willingly not knowing any better...but people are learning. 

 

Dave

 

 

I think that this sums it up perfectly.  This is not keeping up with the times.  This is losing productivity and money because of a cramdown that forces sales of a product that is intnetionally made obsolete every few years. 

 

 

This is not exactly the case on all levels.  For example, try getting Bluetooth and wireless networking in Win 3.1.  There are all kinds of upgrades being put into place all the time.  A lot of people don't take the time to learn they exist, let alone know how to use them.  I agree that, with major updates, you are likely to notice some cosmetic changes, which they say are improvements and which you say are nuisances that hinder productivity.  

 

In some respects, I see your point on that, but really, if computing is that important an aspect of your life, then, it would probably benefit you to take a good couple of days and learn what all this technology offers you.  Word, for example, is very powerful and eloquent in so many ways.  Many people do not know how to correctly apply styles and various formatting features in order to make the document flawlessly render and reformat upon editing.  Up until not long ago, I used to cuss Word for its "stupid," unpredictable auto-paragraph numbering.  I used to dislike how I'd have to go and fix carriage returns I inserted between parts of the document at page breaks.  Then, you go back in and add a paragraph (or delete one, or whatever) and then, you have to go find those carriage returns and delete them...  Oh what a pain!  There are many other features I have come to learn that just makes it totally rock!  For what you get, I am very happy to want to stay current.  As much as we are given with current versions, I like getting new things, too.

[Mallette]

For example, try getting Bluetooth and wireless networking in Win 3.1.

 

Sheesh, Jeff.  Try ANY networking with 3.1.  Didn't happen until 3.15.  Windows is, and always has been, way behind the technology curve.  It was close to a decade before native support was added for CD drives.  They stay way behind on useful stuff and make changes simply designed to be just incompatible enough to force "upgrade."   What huge improvements do you see in Office to need to have changed the file type to "x?"  The ribbon?

 

Dave

[Jeff Matthews]

What huge improvements do you see in Office to need to have changed the file type to "x?"  The ribbon?

 

The docx file format.  Changing to xml has really done wonders in the ability to (1) allow other software programs to open, read and convert to/from Word, and (2) allow developers to write programs which manipulate Word documents.

 

Like I said earlier, there are likely many things which are improvements that only a small segment of the population knows exists or understands.  But you can rest assured that this small segment is quietly doing other things to make your life easier which you will not fully appreciate or recognize.

 

Before we had docx, we had rtf.  Even rtf was not first.  I don't know what preceded it.  Whatever the case, docx opened Word to the world in many other ways.  It used to be that architectures like that were not well-documented in the public literature and essentially were proprietary, keeping the system "closed."  By going to docx, the architecture is more open, and as a result, there are, among many other things out there, a lot of plug-ins available.

[Jeff Matthews]

Sheesh, Jeff.  Try ANY networking with 3.1.  Didn't happen until 3.15.  Windows is, and always has been, way behind the technology curve. 

 

That was my point.  It took an "upgrade" to bring networking to all computers.

 

If Windows was behind the curve, who had it first?  I remember Novell and Lantastic.  Both were quite expensive.  If you had 10-15 computers to network, Novell would have cost you about as much as a small Volkswagen.  Then, Windows comes along, and networking is built-in.  From $5,000, down to $150.  If that was not a major improvement, tell me what was.

[Marvel]

Sheesh, Jeff. Try ANY networking with 3.1. Didn't happen until 3.15

I believe you mean Windows for Workgroups 3.11. I don't think there was a 3.15.

 

Wordstar was around $295 in the early '80s, Lotus 1-2-3 was almost $700.

 

Found this report online:

 

Figure 8.14 shows prices (received by vendors) for the major word processors. As in the spreadsheet market, the most important trend is the decline in prices that began when Windows 3.0 was introduced in 1990. The resulting competitive jockeying led to price wars. It is important to note, however, that there is no evidence of price declines until Microsoft Word began its assault on WordPerfect's position.

<Fig 8.14>

In 1990, 1991, and 1992 Ami Pro was more expensive than Word for Windows. These were important transition years, yet Lotus provided no economic incentive for users to pick Ami Pro over Microsoft Word. Both were ranked higher than WordPerfect, but Word had a slight edge in quality, a larger installed base, a lower price, and was part of a superior office suite. Ami Pro did not lower its prices until Lotus was purchased by IBM. By the time Ami Pro became price competitive (1993), Microsoft had 40 percent of the market and the reviews were about to start concluding that Ami Pro was no longer competitive with Microsoft Word.

As for WordPerfect, the price for its late and inferior Windows product was virtually identical to that of Microsoft Word through 1995. After that, it was priced below Word, but the price cut was a case of too little, too late.