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July 15, 2004
Microsoft
Despite recent evidence, I’m something of a Microsoft partisan. Over the years, they’ve come out with products which are consistently better than their competitors’...
The key to MS’s success has been to put the end user’s experience ahead of any other issue. People who dig into MS code are often driven nuts by this, but I’ve never heard my parents complain about Internet Explorer being non-standards compliant. What MS does _very_ well is to ensure that the same operations will reach the same outcomes. Try this: open your web-browser. Find some text. Press and hold the left mouse button, and drag it along that text. Release. Press Ctrl^C. Open anything onto which text can be dumped. Press Ctrl^V. the text shows up!
It doesn’t have to be that way. Programs could use other keys. Programs could not support this feature at all. Programs _could_ make the ctrl key shut down your computer. But MS decided that all their programs would work together, and work the same way. If MS hadn’t done this, my parents would probably not notice that it was missing. They probably don’t notice that its there. But they use it, and their lives are easier because of it...
How about a more extreme example?
I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.(emphasis orig.) Joel Spolsky (read the whole thing)...
Because it served my parents, MS made sure SimCity’s bugs worked.
The problem with MS is that they’re lazy. They work _very_ hard as long as there is competition. They put out products which are better than anyone else’s as long as there is market share to gain. Once they crush their competitors, they pretty much stop. After IE6, they basically stopped work on IE. I don’t know that this sort of behavior will ever go away-- I do know that since I want Internet Explorer to be better, I use Firefox...
What’s amusing to me is how much people who create software (especially in the open-source community) sneer at Microsoft’s efforts to make my parent’s happy. Some of them are starting to understand the connection between my parents and commercial success (Linspire is a good example). Until everyone does, though, Microsoft is going to rule...
Posted by Andrew at July 15, 2004 11:44 PM
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