Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitmasher9 | Hacker News Reader

When did the offshoring happen, because Microsoft has been bad for a long time. Even in the 90s there were so many BSODs.

View on HN

Well, the classic BSODs were not all Microsoft's fault, many of them were on 3rd party driver developers.

I think the worse thing here is all the subtle breakages and inconsistencies in Windows, as well as in the MS Office suite of products, constant redesigns of things that worked, adding layers upon layers of "make-up" on top that obscures functionality, etc etc.

I think “The Operating System is fundamentally Unstable” is a much bigger problem than “First party applications are redesigned too frequently.”

You're right, of course. The point I was trying to make (badly) is that people have hatred for Microsoft for a lot more than just BSODs of decades ago. There has been bad engineering upon bad engineering for many decades, manifesting in all kinds of ways. And that's what this subthread was discussing, Microsoft being bad.

Microsoft in the 90s was doing things that hadn't been done before with Windows. And the NT line, converging to consumers at XP, solved many of them, and by now they don't have an excuse any more.

I’m genuinely confused about exactly what Microsoft was doing for the first time.

Not the first gui.

Not the first web browser.

Not the first spreadsheet/word processor/slideshow.

Edit: I’ll give credit, NT is good kernel, and had some novel qualities.

I would argue that the initial development of windows 95 incorporated one of the most extensively researched and evidence-based UI designs ever, before or after. Far from perfect, but nearly everything about the UI was examined in context of the user experience. Arguably better than Macs ever were... less revolutionary, but more solid.

It's a far cry from the current chaotic chimera of elements and themes that make up windows 11.

I would argue that they where tge first to try and do all that at once while on non-specified hardware systems. Yes Apple, Amiga etc will similar stuff but they at least had set target hardware.

Microsoft tried to do everything for better and worse on wildly varied commodity hardware.

The first one that pretty much anyone could use and was useful for them. We credit Apple for popularizing the GUI, too, even though they stole it from Xerox.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com