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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

More to the point: Technical sophistication is one way of keeping ahead of the competition, and probably the most appealing to hackers; but it's not the only one. You can be very successful selling complete garbage; just look at Microsoft.

Edit: Yes, I'm being facetious in poking fun at Microsoft.

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That Microsoft comment is both trite and undeserved. Microsoft doesn't particularly sell "garbage"; no, it undercuts application vendors for its platform, copies their products, delivers a freebie/cheap knockoff to the market to compete with them and drive them out, but works very hard to improve it as time goes.

Microsoft is evil but it's not incompetent. Sometimes it even puts its market dominance to good use; MS whipped hardware vendors into shape and gave us a truly uniform PC platform with Plug and Play.

Also, many Microsoft products are actually quality products. The few bad apples give the rest a bad name (also, some of the 3rd party apps give Windows in general a bad name).

Agreed. The UI for the desktop just gives me a headache but there are some really cool projects coming out of Redmond. There is some really interesting work in computational photography:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/au...

http://livelabs.com/photosynth/

I wouldn't give up my Mac or my Linux PC for anything, but over the years I've found that Microsoft products are vastly superior to what they were circa 2000.

BTW, you can blame Microsoft all you want, but they're the ones holding 90% of the desktop market, not our Macs and Linux PCs. Their consumer products might not be top-notch, but they did many things right - things which Apple and Sun and Linux vendors failed to do.

One of the central points in "20 years of high tech marketing disasters" is not that Microsoft are so smart, but that they had fewer major screwups than everyone else. I think it's a sensible point of view and highly recommend the book.

My summary: http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/10/in-search-of-stupi...

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