Microsoft seems desperate
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@blakeyrat said in Microsoft seems desperate:
If Microsoft released it as a new browser today, it might even be well-received
No it wouldn't. As soon as they announced Edge, tech blogs were full of people proclaiming that it was just a rebranded IE and would still be just as shit as the IE they remembered hating 10 years before
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@Jaloopa said in Microsoft seems desperate:
proclaiming that it was just a rebranded IE and would still be just as shit as the IE they remembered hating 10 years before
And they were wrong, it was worse than IE
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We have one internal corporate site that only works on IE (I assume it uses ActiveX controls). It is the only thing I use IE for. Naturally, I gotta click through 11781548354243 "Please use Edge, it works better on everything!!!!!!11) popups the three times I year I open this site up in IE even though the site doesn't and never will work on Edge.
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@Jaloopa said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@blakeyrat said in Microsoft seems desperate:
If Microsoft released it as a new browser today, it might even be well-received
No it wouldn't. As soon as they announced Edge, tech blogs were full of people proclaiming that it was just a rebranded IE and would still be just as shit as the IE they remembered hating 10 years before
It literally was just a rebranded IE. It had the exact same fucking bugs.
Edit: Downvoted for pointing out WTFs in the wrong product. Wow, I didn't even mention Discourse!
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@admiral_p said in Microsoft seems desperate:
The times I have used Edge, it doesn't seem too bad really. What are your issues? FWIW, I use Firefox, I use just a couple of extensions (uBlock Origin? It has been "set and forget" for me, can't remember which I use; and maybe a couple of othe extensions but the only one I care about is the adblocker). I don't do web development (and I hope I never will have to).
Sigh. Your Edge instance is not comparable to most other peoples' Edge instances, since you are from the Microsoft Is Actually Good universe.
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Edge's engine is a fork of IE's so it's a "it is and it isn't a rebranded IE" sort of deal, especially for those who were trying it early on in the Windows 10 preview builds. It's been a few years since then, though.
Edge in Windows 10 1803 seems OK, but I only use it for compatibility testing. Along with the inertia of not liking IE and having only used it for years to download other browsers or view old intranet sites that required it, I'm not a fan of the "tabs taking over the title bar" style and you can't turn that off in Edge. (It's also the basis for Sets, if Microsoft ever unleashes that on the world.)
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get my Insider build VM to show me the "Don't install that other browser, try Edge instead!" prompt, and now they're saying it won't be in the final release. Ah, well.
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@Gribnit said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@admiral_p said in Microsoft seems desperate:
The times I have used Edge, it doesn't seem too bad really. What are your issues? FWIW, I use Firefox, I use just a couple of extensions (uBlock Origin? It has been "set and forget" for me, can't remember which I use; and maybe a couple of othe extensions but the only one I care about is the adblocker). I don't do web development (and I hope I never will have to).
Sigh. Your Edge instance is not comparable to most other peoples' Edge instances, since you are from the Microsoft Is Actually Good universe.
To be honest, when I was a young teenager, I was one of those "I hate M$" kind of people. (Hey, I was 14!). I actually bought Debian Woody, in all its glorious seven CDs (or was it nine? Well, a shitload anyway) with a friend of mine.
It's pointless to be angry at Microsoft today. They've lost. I mean, they're still a huge company and all, but they are an also ran culturally and only Blakeyrat actually likes them.
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@cartman82 said in Microsoft seems desperate:
Chrome and to lesser extent Firefox are kind of shit on touchscreen
I discovered that when I used Chrome to implement a touchscreen for a museum. Chrome appears to auto-detect touchscreens and then gives you all kinds of shit that I at least didn’t want, like zooming. Fine if it’s running on a phone-size screen, but kind of pointless on a screen as large as a medium-size TV — especially because the kids it’s aimed at tend to discover said zoom and leave the thing zoomed in, so subsequent visitors/users won’t see all of what they can do on the screen.
Then you find out there are indeed settings to disable that sort of thing buried fairly deep in whatever that “extra settings” page is again. If you set this, either other stuff doesn’t work anymore or it doesn’t get disabled after all (I forget which of the two it was).
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@Parody said in Microsoft seems desperate:
Edge's engine is a fork of IE's so it's a "it is and it isn't a rebranded IE" sort of deal,
When you have a fork where the original branch is deprecated we just call it a new version of the product
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@admiral_p said in Microsoft seems desperate:
only Blakeyrat actually likes them.
I'm not so sure about that. He probably hates open source more than microsoft though.
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@sockpuppet7 said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@Parody said in Microsoft seems desperate:
Edge's engine is a fork of IE's so it's a "it is and it isn't a rebranded IE" sort of deal,
When you have a fork where the original branch is deprecated we just call it a new version of the product
Initially it was just going to be IE 12 (and the old engine kept for compatibility, invoked when needed) but they eventually decided to make it a new application.
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@dkf said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@Parody said in Microsoft seems desperate:
they
“Marketing”
More than likely. It's not like it's made much of a difference, and making changes that don't make a difference is part of the job for Marketing and Sales. The other is selling software based on features it doesn't have; at my desktop publishing software job we (on the Development side) used to send people to industry shows just to stop them from promising things we weren't going to be adding any time soon.
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@admiral_p said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@Gribnit said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@admiral_p said in Microsoft seems desperate:
The times I have used Edge, it doesn't seem too bad really. What are your issues? FWIW, I use Firefox, I use just a couple of extensions (uBlock Origin? It has been "set and forget" for me, can't remember which I use; and maybe a couple of othe extensions but the only one I care about is the adblocker). I don't do web development (and I hope I never will have to).
Sigh. Your Edge instance is not comparable to most other peoples' Edge instances, since you are from the Microsoft Is Actually Good universe.
To be honest, when I was a young teenager, I was one of those "I hate M$" kind of people. (Hey, I was 14!). I actually bought Debian Woody, in all its glorious seven CDs (or was it nine? Well, a shitload anyway) with a friend of mine.
It's pointless to be angry at Microsoft today. They've lost. I mean, they're still a huge company and all, but they are an also ran culturally and only Blakeyrat actually likes them.
Okay. I'm not, unless I have to work with their stuff, which sometimes I do, and will have to forever, since they still have effectively the only officin' apps.
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@admiral_p said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@Gribnit said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@admiral_p said in Microsoft seems desperate:
The times I have used Edge, it doesn't seem too bad really. What are your issues? FWIW, I use Firefox, I use just a couple of extensions (uBlock Origin? It has been "set and forget" for me, can't remember which I use; and maybe a couple of othe extensions but the only one I care about is the adblocker). I don't do web development (and I hope I never will have to).
Sigh. Your Edge instance is not comparable to most other peoples' Edge instances, since you are from the Microsoft Is Actually Good universe.
To be honest, when I was a young teenager, I was one of those "I hate M$" kind of people. (Hey, I was 14!). I actually bought Debian Woody, in all its glorious seven CDs (or was it nine? Well, a shitload anyway) with a friend of mine.
And then you grew up and and turned into one of those 'I don't hate it anymore, it's honestly just sad' people. It's still just as irrational and stupid.
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@pie_flavor not really.
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@admiral_p Yeah, really.
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@pie_flavor said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@admiral_p Yeah, really.
My argument is that Microsoft simply doesn't have as firm a grip on computing as it once was (plus, the underhanded tactics they used were appalling). You have more choice today. Back in the late '90s personal computing was a bit shit across the board, and Microsoft had total domination (in Europe at least), and Windows up to ME was a mess. Not that other OSs were better (with a possible exception in BeOS, but that was never a thing in Europe). Still, if Microsoft tries to pull off some of the shit they used to do, they'd fail miserably today.
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@pie_flavor said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@admiral_p said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@Gribnit said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@admiral_p said in Microsoft seems desperate:
The times I have used Edge, it doesn't seem too bad really. What are your issues? FWIW, I use Firefox, I use just a couple of extensions (uBlock Origin? It has been "set and forget" for me, can't remember which I use; and maybe a couple of othe extensions but the only one I care about is the adblocker). I don't do web development (and I hope I never will have to).
Sigh. Your Edge instance is not comparable to most other peoples' Edge instances, since you are from the Microsoft Is Actually Good universe.
To be honest, when I was a young teenager, I was one of those "I hate M$" kind of people. (Hey, I was 14!). I actually bought Debian Woody, in all its glorious seven CDs (or was it nine? Well, a shitload anyway) with a friend of mine.
And then you grew up and and turned into one of those 'I don't hate it anymore, it's honestly just sad' people. It's still just as irrational and stupid.
When you grow up you'll understand.
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@pie_flavor said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@admiral_p Yeah, really.
You're right, but you're right in the parallel universe that you are from. In our universe, the only standard Microsoft can implement to is a de-facto standard they make up themselves.
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@Gribnit said in Microsoft seems desperate:
In our universe, the only standard Microsoft can implement to is a de-facto standard they make up themselves.
Like how Edge doesn't render HTML5 and CSS3 but instead renders -- oh wait what the holy fuck are you talking about?
Then didn't implement that stupid Open Office standard in Word, Excel, PowerPoint because they couldn't. The Office apps have a bunch of features that weren't supported by Open Office, and the Open Office file format had no way of actually putting those on disk.
In fact I think if you de-retard yourself, you'll think, 'hey wait, any application with a competitive advantage can't use the same file format as the competing applications because it wouldn't be able to store data related to the competitive advantage on disk!" and then you might also make the small leap to, "that means mandating that a program needs to use a certain file format also mandates exactly which features it can include" and which point it's only a tiny stumble onto, "which would completely kill all innovation."
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@blakeyrat said in Microsoft seems desperate:
Then didn't implement that stupid Open Office standard in Word, Excel, PowerPoint because they couldn't.
They also didn't implement their own retarded "open" format they fucked ISO into accepting. And since nobody knows what "do what Word 95 does" means, nobody else could either.
And of course they could if they wanted. They implement e.g. RTF, too. You just get a dialog telling you that some formatting will be lost.
In fact I think if you de-retard yourself, you'll think, 'hey wait, any application with a competitive advantage can't use the same file format as the competing applications because it wouldn't be able to store data related to the competitive advantage on disk!" and then you might also make the small leap to, "that means mandating that a program needs to use a certain file format also mandates exactly which features it can include" and which point it's only a tiny stumble onto, "which would completely kill all innovation."
If you need these huge innovations in fucking word processing to run your business, then just use Word like you want to.
The point of requiring an open document format was that public offices paid by public tax money don't use a proprietary format that nothing else can read/write, because you don't want your bureaucracy locked into that. There is no innovation required for that.
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@topspin said in Microsoft seems desperate:
They also didn't implement their own retarded "open" format they fucked ISO into accepting.
Why should they have?
@topspin said in Microsoft seems desperate:
And since nobody knows what "do what Word 95 does" means, nobody else could either.
Ok. Well the government assholes signed off on it, that's the bit that matters.
@topspin said in Microsoft seems desperate:
The point of requiring an open document format was that public offices paid by public tax money don't use a proprietary format that nothing else can read/write, because you don't want your bureaucracy locked into that. There is no innovation required for that.
But it means those public offices can't use a bunch of features in Office.
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@blakeyrat said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@topspin said in Microsoft seems desperate:
They also didn't implement their own retarded "open" format they fucked ISO into accepting.
Why should they have?
Well, if you take the trouble of submitting your "open" format to ISO (with all the shitfuckery that came along with it), one may reasonably expect that Microsoft expects to use such format?
@topspin said in Microsoft seems desperate:
And since nobody knows what "do what Word 95 does" means, nobody else could either.
Ok. Well the government assholes signed off on it, that's the bit that matters.
@topspin said in Microsoft seems desperate:
The point of requiring an open document format was that public offices paid by public tax money don't use a proprietary format that nothing else can read/write, because you don't want your bureaucracy locked into that. There is no innovation required for that.
But it means those public offices can't use a bunch of features in Office.
Boohoo? Are those extra features even actually commonly used/essential? Shouldn't public offices which are also expected to interface with the world (at least their country) be also expected to use open formats?
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@blakeyrat said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@topspin said in Microsoft seems desperate:
They also didn't implement their own retarded "open" format they fucked ISO into accepting.
Why should they have?
Why did they submit it as an "open" format for standardization in the first place?
Ah right, to fuck over the process and prevent the adoption of open formats, which would endanger their lock-in. So, yes, after that was sabotaged, implementing it wasn't needed anymore. Just tell the clueless politicians "
look, we are open too now, no need to change anythingshut up and take mymoneybribesdonations".
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@topspin ISO was a bullshit seller of silly certifications long before that. I've seen 2 companies getting iso9000 and whatever the secinfo one is just with pretending, hand waving and even fake reports.
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@admiral_p said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@pie_flavor said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@admiral_p Yeah, really.
My argument is that Microsoft simply doesn't have as firm a grip on computing as it once was (plus, the underhanded tactics they used were appalling). You have more choice today. Back in the late '90s personal computing was a bit shit across the board, and Microsoft had total domination (in Europe at least), and Windows up to ME was a mess. Not that other OSs were better (with a possible exception in BeOS, but that was never a thing in Europe). Still, if Microsoft tries to pull off some of the shit they used to do, they'd fail miserably today.
Right. Now people have choice, and they choose Microsoft. Continue.
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@topspin said in Microsoft seems desperate:
Ah right, to fuck over the process and prevent the adoption of open formats
what?
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@topspin said in Microsoft seems desperate:
Ah right, to fuck over the process and prevent the adoption of open formats,
I like how you're just ignoring the point I just brought up that open formats are shitty and stifle innovation.
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@pie_flavor said in Microsoft seems desperate:
Right. Now people have choice, and they choose Microsoft. Continue.
People don’t necessarily choose the technically better option. With software, they have a habit of choosing the socially better one.
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@blakeyrat said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@topspin said in Microsoft seems desperate:
Ah right, to fuck over the process and prevent the adoption of open formats,
I like how you're just ignoring the point I just brought up that open formats are shitty and stifle innovation.
YOU are ignoring the point.
Nobody forces Microsoft to use an open format. They can use their own propriety format that's oh so innovative if they want to.However, at that time, there was reasonable movement to require documents used by government to be in an open format. Because not doing so creates a host of problems, one of which is lock-in, which certainly also stifles competition and thus innovation.
MS wanted their cake (all the government business) and eat it too (customer lock-in), so they submitted a bullshit "open" thing which wasn't open at all. In the end, they managed to have the whole topic ignored again and nobody cares about openness anymore, so they can continue with their proprietary shit.To make an analogy:
Consider doing your taxes electronically. I'm sure your tax office has a system in place for that.
Now, they could pick some weird proprietary format, say "Quicken tax WA", and then you have to buy software from one company if you want to use it. Or, instead, they realize that there's only so much variability in how a valid tax form should look and specify that it's something like "XML file with schema A, signed and encrypted over the wire". Then any company can implement that format, compete on having better usability / price instead of proprietary format, and you can pick either Quicken or something else.
Now, pray tell, how is the first option the better one?
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@pie_flavor said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@topspin said in Microsoft seems desperate:
Ah right, to fuck over the process and prevent the adoption of open formats
what?
Your reading comprehension bot has posted again.
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@topspin That's not reading comprehension, that's just point-blank confusion. How the fuck do they prevent the adoption of open formats by submitting an open format?
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@pie_flavor said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@topspin That's not reading comprehension, that's just point-blank confusion. How the fuck do they prevent the adoption of open formats by submitting an open format?
- Submit a format that's "open" only because the name says so and entirely unimplementable. That's not what open means and ISO is about to reject this garbage.
- Buy enough seats in the voting to get it accepted against all protest and procedure.
- Tell responsible politicians "look, you can use our "open" format, no need to change anything."
- No third party can correctly implement their format. MS doesn't implement it either.
- Things stay with proprietary formats, as it doesn't make a difference anymore.
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@pie_flavor because the submitted standard wasn't full format description - half of Office features were done as "vendor extensions". Yes, vendor extensions to a format that at the time wasn't even published yet.
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@blakeyrat said in Microsoft seems desperate:
In fact I think if you de-retard yourself, you'll think, 'hey wait, any application with a competitive advantage can't use the same file format as the competing applications because it wouldn't be able to store data related to the competitive advantage on disk!" and then you might also make the small leap to, "that means mandating that a program needs to use a certain file format also mandates exactly which features it can include" and which point it's only a tiny stumble onto, "which would completely kill all innovation."
Bull. shit. I dare you to edit a JPEG in Paint 3D, and then compare that experience to editing a photo in Photoshop.
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@bb36e That's apples to oranges. The real question is would it be a better experience if you used
.psdformat? (And the answer is yes, you get layers, adjustment layers, vectors, undo/redo history, etc.)
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@sockpuppet7 said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@topspin ISO was a bullshit seller of silly certifications long before that. I've seen 2 companies getting iso9000 and whatever the secinfo one is just with pretending, hand waving and even fake reports.
We went 9001 (I think) at one company I was at. You don't have to do anything correctly - you just have to document how you do it and continue doing it that way. If step one is "sacrifice a chicken", then you better damn well do that every time.
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@Gurth said in Microsoft seems desperate:
People don’t necessarily choose the technically better option.
Ah, we're back to VHS vs BetaMax...
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@dcon Betamax had a higher quality image, so it was used by TV stations and in other environments where that is the most important attribute.
VHS had a longer record time, so it was used in homes where that was the most important attribute.
There's no mystery or strangeness here.
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@blakeyrat said in Microsoft seems desperate:
and which point it's only a tiny stumble onto, "which would completely kill all innovation."
You know, even if that were true, which it mostly isn't, I'd take a competitive market of implementations with no innovation over a monopoly.
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@blakeyrat said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@dcon Betamax had a higher quality image, so it was used by TV stations and in other environments where that is the most important attribute.
VHS had a longer record time, so it was used in homes where that was the most important attribute.
There's no mystery or strangeness here.
Plus the fact that if your relatives, neighbours, school friends, etc. have a VHS recorder, you’ll be more likely to buy one of those as well because you’ll have seen it in action there, because it will allow you to borrow their taped movies, because you only see VHS and so may not even realise there’s another option, because if you don’t understand how something works you can ask someone who also owns this same system, and more reasons like that.
Software displays this same phenomenon, and probably far stronger: people want MS Office (for instance) because pretty much everyone else they know uses MS Office, and they want to be able to exchange documents with others. Made even stronger by many businesses having adopted MS Office, so anyone who has a job at such a business will probably want a copy at home as well.
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@Gurth The network effect benefits office and windows. The alternatives all suck, but the reason nobody puts serious money to compete against them is the network effect.
Imagine competing with both free alternatives and a paid one that has an almost monopoly. Nobody is going there.
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@sockpuppet7 said in Microsoft seems desperate:
Imagine competing with both free alternatives and a paid one that has an almost monopoly. Nobody is going there.
Isn’t that what Microsoft did with Outlook? And at least partially (paid but no free alternative) Excel?
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@Tsaukpaetra They used to. I haven't used Photoshop in like a decade.
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@sockpuppet7 said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@Gurth The network effect benefits office and windows.
Yes, that is what I’ve been saying in more words :)
The alternatives all suck
That depends on your definition of “suck”. I’m pretty happy with Pages and Numbers, to a large extent because they don’t feel like half-alien apps like MS Office does on a Mac (I was a pretty heavy MS Word user back when I used Windows, but find it an awkward program under macOS), and partly because they have features that are more difficult to do in MS Office (like multiple tables next to each other on a worksheet, or having column names). But then, I don’t need to exchange documents with anyone who also needs to work on them, so whether anyone else I know also uses it doesn't factor into the choice I make.
Imagine competing with both free alternatives and a paid one that has an almost monopoly. Nobody is going there.
Still there’s OpenOffice or whatever it and its forks are called nowadays. But who really uses them? Linux-users, I suppose, because there’s no MS Office for Linux, and even if there was many probably wouldn’t touch it for ideological reasons.
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@Gurth said in Microsoft seems desperate:
That depends on your definition of “suck”.
For basic usage, even the highly-limited online Google apps work quite well. There's a few things where they're annoyingly limited (specifically around styling in word processing, and page templates in presentations) but they're just fine for banging out the content and printing/PDF-ing a reasonable copy, which is by far the most important group of use cases.
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@Gurth said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@sockpuppet7 said in Microsoft seems desperate:
@Gurth The network effect benefits office and windows.
Yes, that is what I’ve been saying in more words :)
The alternatives all suck
That depends on your definition of “suck”. I’m pretty happy with Pages and Numbers, to a large extent because they don’t feel like half-alien apps like MS Office does on a Mac (I was a pretty heavy MS Word user back when I used Windows, but find it an awkward program under macOS), and partly because they have features that are more difficult to do in MS Office (like multiple tables next to each other on a worksheet, or having column names). But then, I don’t need to exchange documents with anyone who also needs to work on them, so whether anyone else I know also uses it doesn't factor into the choice I make.
Imagine competing with both free alternatives and a paid one that has an almost monopoly. Nobody is going there.
Still there’s OpenOffice or whatever it and its forks are called nowadays. But who really uses them? Linux-users, I suppose, because there’s no MS Office for Linux anreven if there was many probably wouldn’t touch it for ideological reasons.
Actually many people I know don't even take the trouble of pirating Office anymore and use LibreOffice. Most people do not need anything more than that.
In my experience, the Google suite is inferior to LibreOffice, it's sleeker but has fewer features and it's infuriating sometimes.
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@admiral_p
Perfectly acceptable plan ... leave Excel to the professionals
