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Comment by carlosrg | Hacker News Reader

This thread shows clearly the negativity around everything Microsoft does, especially if you compare to other technology companies. Apple deprecates some API or removes a feature? "It's the future, you have to adapt, etc" Microsoft deprecates a toy program made 25 years ago, but still offers the option of downloading it for free? "How dare they, I want it in the base install, etc"

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Microsoft has a serious and ongoing PR crisis, and not just for historical reasons (90s antitrust, etc).

There are undoubtedly many highly intelligent, well-meaning people working there, but the ongoing occurrence of highly-publicized customer screwage - such as the aggressive telemetry in W10 - and the ongoing security negligence (e.g. in failing to properly audit & fully close SMB RCEs) seems to totally undermine any goodwill created by specific products or teams within the company.

As a result the press cuts them little to no slack, and they do get hammered for things that AAPL/GOOG/FB/... could probably quietly get away with.

At some point, it stops being isolated incidents and starts being a pattern of decision-making. IMO, Microsoft has a crisis in the way that Windows is managed, and part of that is that the C-Level level of the company either no longer cares about Windows, or actually supports the decisions that are made. You may have thought that at some point the reputational damage caused by the way that telemetry was handled, or the fall-out from the unethical Windows 10 upgrade process, would have triggered action by the CEO. In both cases, nothing.

One of the (many, many) reasons I ditched OS X after more than 10 years and went back to Linux and Windows, depending on the task at hand, is the removal of the colored Finder labels.

What an inane reason, you may say.

But IMHO it was one of the best features ever introduced into desktop computing. Simple, easy to see colored backgrounds that you could assign to files to organize or tag them as you saw fit. (seen/not seen, reviewed/not reviewed, good/bad/meh, and so on)

Maybe Mac users are less vocal about the removal of features (or they are simply fewer) but this kind of blatant disregard for the needs and established workflows of your customers has a long term effect on a company's image.

Wasn't removed, just tweaked. It shows a colored dot now instead of a background.

Sigh. My client's file server at the time was full of PSD files that designers colour-coded based on how urgent/finished something was. It was the best Finder feature ever.

It's a good example of how Apple's stubbornness can ruin software: some designers had a misguided idea about the cloud ("file systems are bad, people are too dumb for folders"), so they tried to build iCloud around isolated app silos. Then they realised that it gets messy once you have lots of files, and instead of admitting their mistake, they doubled down on not having folders and replaced colour labels by tags (which require more clicks than labels, and are much harder to see).

Of course, one version later they did give up on app-based silos, and introduced iCloud Drive. But what a stupid journey that was, and you can still see the scars in Apple's UI (app-based folders cluttering iCloud Drive, dedicated "tags" input field in every Save File dialog).

That system is still there, and at the time you thought it was removed actually got some pretty nice usability and searchability upgrades. I use tags extensively to this day. They just have a slightly different appearance in the UI.

Finder still has colored labels. It's just now a dot of color next to the name instead of a background. I think they made this change because you can now apply multiple colors to the same file at the same time (and you can search your entire filesystem for tagged files too).

http://i.imgur.com/mO32PGQ.png

Apple deprecates some API or removes a feature? "It's the future, you have to adapt, etc" Microsoft deprecates a toy program made 25 years ago, but still offers the option of downloading it for free?

The reason a lot of people, including me, chose MS instead of Apple (or now, Google) is because of their reputation for backwards compatibility.

That's also a huge problem with SaaS (e.g. Google docs): the software can break even while using it. In that respect, even Windows 3.1 was actually much better.

Yes that's a good point. Apple and MS clearly have different values when it comes to OS development. Microsoft favors compatibility, at the cost of having to maintain legacy baggage; Apple favours simplification and streamlining, at the cost of compatibility. I'm glad both companies exist and can see value in both approaches.

You know the rule, Apple ALWAYS gets a pass. No matter what they do, no matter how bad they treat their customers, no matter how awful their "upgrades" are, no matter how non-configurable and locked-in their products get over time, no matter the lack of innovation for the past 5 years, they always get a pass. Deal with it, that Jobs residue works its magic for a loooooong time.

It’s their marketing team, best spin masters on the planet.

They get a pass? Really? Then why does it seem like no matter what Apple does, even if it's handing out candy to babies, hordes of people come out of the woodwork to complain about them?

And MS Paint got laughed at for the best part of its lifecycle, and for good reasons too. But now that it's gone, everybody goes mad.

Really, if you dig deep enough you might find people decrying the demise of f'ing Clippy. Well maybe that's hyperbole, but you get my point.

Clippy died for our sins

I poured one out when the Agents Framework was semi-silently removed in Windows 7. I spent many hours building things with that, including class presentations and stupid choose-your-own-adventure game websites with the basic text-to-speech options and the animations of Robby the Robot and Peedy the Parrot, et al.

Clippy was a good idea implemented poorly and ahead of its time. Cortana/Siri/Alexa/Google Assistant is the new the Clippy, RIP Clippy.

I've seen Apple and Google get plenty of criticism for whatever actions they do.

There should be a type of law like Poes Law to describe this behavior.

Do you read Apple threads? It's like nothing but hate once they do something new.

Also, everyone generally liked paint's simplicity, no we have stuff like candy crush default installed on Windows.

Sure, maybe not a huge deal for most people but I can see how some would be disappointed.

People seem to forget the amount of outrage that was generated when they announced the iPad.

It was a strange phenomenon. Everyone railed against it in so many ways, then did a complete 180.

Microsoft owns 90% of the market, there is simply more people to complain.

I wish they would just get rid of notepad.exe. What a piece of garbage.

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