How does microsoft do it?
For the past few days now I've been talking to my friends about various software programs and the subject of microsoft has, unfortunately, come up. My friends, and mine, main gripe with microsoft is how they manage to screw everything up so royally. Allow me to elaborate.
Microsoft is suppose to be one of the largest software developers on the parent and have some of the brightest programmers on the planet working for them. So how is it that most of their software products start out good and then turn into utter crap?
Let's work on some examples here.
The windows search feature: Back in Win2000 and before days it searched exactly what you entered. If you put .* it WOULD actually search every file extension. In Windows XP they've modified it (without to my knowledge telling you) that ohh it won't actually search all files anymore just some. WHY? They had what use to be an excellent search feature and turned it into an unusable piece of crap. So it's back to registry editing to make it search all files.
Microsofts search engine: I'm assuming all of you have at sometime or other been on the microsoft website and attempted to search for something. Note attempted. For being one of the largest software companies with supposedly the brightest programmers why does there search engine just plain suck so much. Even the phpbb2 forum search works better than theirs. In fact ANY search I've used has worked better than theirs. I just can't understand it.
Pasting from a website: In all versions of word on various computers I have had great difficulty pasting text from a website into microsoft word. Some simple sites it works fun but others such as www.theregister.com articles word just bogs down, freezes and tries to access the internet of all things. My solution? Paste the website into notepad, reselect it, copy it again and then paste it into word. Such a simple thing and can word perform it correctly without shitting itself or having to access the internet, no. By the way I complain about it accessing the internet simply because it is copied to the clipboard when I press ctrl+c and no other program needs to access the net so why should it? Not to mention it accesses it and still doesn't work.
MSN Messenger: This could be seen as more of a personal grievance but here goes. I've used MSN messenger for a number of years and have always liked it's nice, relative, simplicity. But with the release of MSN 7 they made it completely bloated, full of crap, and run so slow. Now I understand microsoft wants their products to look good but you can't turn some of the skinning and things off which is bad. Thankfully microsoft has sort of redeemed themselves on this on since alot of the crap can be turned off in some way or anything and the only thing that is left is some advertising and microsofts retarded inegrated search feature (which utilising the microsoft search is completely useless). The 'feature' that stands out in ruining msn 7 is the automated blocking of some files (please if ANYONE knows how to turn this off please tell me), and you can't use drag and drop to send files anymore which wouldn't be so bad except using the send files dialog you can't select multiple files at once and it doesn't remember your last location so I have to go through 7 levels of complex directories 5 times to send all my files which takes about 1-2 minutes unlike in msn6 where it'd take 2 seconds.
Lack of standards compliance in MSN: This could be in the previous section but it was getting a bit long so I'm splitting it up (since it's relevant in other programs to). Despite the fact that windows has the option to select the default mail and internet program msn will still always open up internet explorer windows. So why does microsoft bother having these settings in windows if their own programs are going to ignore them. Same goes with themes. Why have all these theme settings in XP if all microsoft programs are going to implement their own skinning anyway totally ruining the visual look of any themes you apply.
Windows copy dialog: For all version of windows pre XP the copy-to dialog box had the option to type in the path manually to copy to. In XP however they decided to remove it. So now despite the fact it's a short path I want to copy to it can take me up to a minute to find it because the number of directories i have to look through is rather long (think a few hundred). And whilst that is rare even if there is only 20 directories or less it still takes time to go down and manually look for the right directory, particularly if your going a few levels deep. If however you know the path you can type it in in around 5 seconds at hit enter and your done, but if you forget the path and can look for it graphically as well.
Notepad EOL issue: This is a little off the point since this post is suppose to be about programs windows has made worse overtime but I think this deserves a mention. In all the times I've been doing file parsing putting in support for differet EOL formats has taken at most 10 seconds more effort. I can understand microsoft not wanting to spend time improving a product not a great many people use but you have to remember it is the only pure text editor windows has, not to mention it would take very little effort to fix this. Infact this issue is the only reason I use EditPad Pro.
I can't remember any other examples off hand but that's a nice list so I'll leave it as is. The point I'm trying to make is that somehow micrsofot can manage to screw up it's software over time, or fail to improve it over time, despite being supposedly biggest and best software company with all the smartest programmers.
I'm not looking for a vs. debate here or a windows vs. linux debate but rather I'm looking for my question on microsoft itself being answered which is to recap incase you missed it the last fifty times I said it 'how can microsoft make their software worse over time (i.e. with each release) despite being the largest software company and having some of the smartest programmers'?
Quote:Original post by RamboBones
The 'feature' that stands out in ruining msn 7 is the automated blocking of some files (please if ANYONE knows how to turn this off please tell me)
Clicky.
Quote:Original post by KazgorothQuote:Original post by RamboBones
The 'feature' that stands out in ruining msn 7 is the automated blocking of some files (please if ANYONE knows how to turn this off please tell me)
Clicky.
Yes I know other people have written patches to perform this, I run one myself. I'm asking where's the option from microsoft to turn it off.
Quote:Original post by RamboBonesQuote:Original post by KazgorothQuote:Original post by RamboBones
The 'feature' that stands out in ruining msn 7 is the automated blocking of some files (please if ANYONE knows how to turn this off please tell me)
Clicky.
Yes I know other people have written patches to perform this, I run one myself. I'm asking where's the option from microsoft to turn it off.
I don't believe there is one. That patch makes it look almost like MSN6 again though so I'm quite happy with it once more, but you're right, they should make a lot of these 'features' either optional to install, or at least easy to remove.
Quote:Original post by RamboBonesYep, or use their official TweakUI powertoy to restore the Win2K utility.
So it's back to registry editing to make it search all files.
Quote:Original post by RamboBonesMeh, I quite like it. It's faster than Google and provides better hits for the way I structure searches.
In fact ANY search I've used has worked better than theirs. I just can't understand it.
Quote:Original post by RamboBonesThis is because it downloads the information (images and so on) before copying to the clipboard so you can paste the HTML. It's really really annoying when using FrontPage's HTML editor to copy some PHP code or something, paste it in and find it filled with extra HTML tags. Gahhk.
Pasting from a website...
Quote:Original post by RamboBonesMess Patch solves a lot of that.
With the release of MSN 7 they made it completely bloated, full of crap, and run so slow.
Quote:Original post by RamboBonesYou'd be amazed how fast I can type Ctrl+A Ctrl+C Win+R write Enter Ctrl+V Ctrl+A Ctrl+C Alt+F4 N Ctrl+V...
Notepad EOL issue.
benryves: I wasn't aware TweakUI was official, still think there should be an option in windows itself for it, but it's good to know there is something released by microsoft to change it. On MSN as I said it can't be done without patches. And on Notepad yes there are ways of working around it just likes there's ways of working around my problem with pasting from a website, would be so much better if it just worked though.
The options is "accessible" from inside the search dialog actually, just not really directly:
Open the search pane.
Click on "Indexing Service".
In the dialog choose "Advanced".
In the new dialog choose the toolbar button to show the tree in/as the left pane.
Right click on the root item (indexing service on local machine or similar), choose "properties".
Finally check "index files with unknown extension".
You do not have to have indexing enabled.
This is one of my griefs with XP too.
A) Why is such an F***ING important option not directly in the search view?
B) What the hell does indexing have to do with what file extensions to search in?
Other than that, i'm very happy with XP (pro), after a few practise turns it takes me only about half an hour to turn off all the useless gimmicks and themes.
Is there actually any tool that lets you save the state of all these options (which are pretty spread throughout the system) and restore them on another PC?
Open the search pane.
Click on "Indexing Service".
In the dialog choose "Advanced".
In the new dialog choose the toolbar button to show the tree in/as the left pane.
Right click on the root item (indexing service on local machine or similar), choose "properties".
Finally check "index files with unknown extension".
You do not have to have indexing enabled.
This is one of my griefs with XP too.
A) Why is such an F***ING important option not directly in the search view?
B) What the hell does indexing have to do with what file extensions to search in?
Other than that, i'm very happy with XP (pro), after a few practise turns it takes me only about half an hour to turn off all the useless gimmicks and themes.
Is there actually any tool that lets you save the state of all these options (which are pretty spread throughout the system) and restore them on another PC?
Quote:Original post by RamboBones
I can understand microsoft not wanting to spend time improving a product not a great many people use
Actually, notepad is probably one of the most-use text editors there is. But in reality, it's just a very simple wrapper around the standard EDIT control (just like WordPad is a simple wrapper around the RichEdit control), so making notepad behave differently would affect not only notepad, but everything that uses an EDIT control and the back compat issues would be horrible.
Quote:Original post by Endurion
What the hell does indexing have to do with what file extensions to search in?
Because it actually use the IFilter interface, which allows you to write extensions to the indexing service for indexing other files, than just plain-text files. For example it'll search in .doc files and .pdf files and so on. And you can add your own IFilters for your own format if you like.
The indexing service not only indexes the file system, but it also helps with the full-text search features of SQL Server 2000 - indexing your tables in the background and providing an interface to issue queries with.
The problem with a company as big as microsoft is that you simply can't please everybody. Unfortunately for us power users, the vast, vast majory of microsoft customers are not power users and they have to market their software to those people.
Hmmm, had to be something like this.
It's still weird, since the option is deep inside the indexing service, but it also affects the search if indexing isn't enabled in the first case.
As far as i've read from "The Old New Thing" Microsoft has to do a lot of back-hacking to keep older apps running on a new system. They rather put in some code to keep a program running from some dumbwit who hacked himself through the Win API instead of letting it crash. They do so because people tend to say Now look, MS made my leet program crash which worked fine in the Windows' before this version.
Backward compatibility is a bitch if you try to add new features without breaking old apps.
It's still weird, since the option is deep inside the indexing service, but it also affects the search if indexing isn't enabled in the first case.
As far as i've read from "The Old New Thing" Microsoft has to do a lot of back-hacking to keep older apps running on a new system. They rather put in some code to keep a program running from some dumbwit who hacked himself through the Win API instead of letting it crash. They do so because people tend to say Now look, MS made my leet program crash which worked fine in the Windows' before this version.
Backward compatibility is a bitch if you try to add new features without breaking old apps.
Seriously I'm sick of the microsoft bashing. If anyone says a single thing against Linux an avalanch of posts erupts saying how it's so good. You say you're not looking for a debate... but you're bashing a program for having bugs. Not just any program... probably one of the biggest and complex programs around.
Why is it you can bag even the smallest of problems in XP or their website or a corperate decision... but you can't even say a single compliment about it's biggest features? Or how it's essensially revolutionalized modern computing?
And if everyone hates microsoft... how does everyone love X-Box? (everyone isn't to be taken litrally BTW)
Heh, well... Imma gonna sleep.
Why is it you can bag even the smallest of problems in XP or their website or a corperate decision... but you can't even say a single compliment about it's biggest features? Or how it's essensially revolutionalized modern computing?
And if everyone hates microsoft... how does everyone love X-Box? (everyone isn't to be taken litrally BTW)
Heh, well... Imma gonna sleep.
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