Hacker News Reader

Comment by mncaudill | Hacker News Reader

Jacob didn't bring money into the equation.

His point was that the quality of open-source software tends to go up, while major closed-source projects' declines. Profit margin and quality don't always correlate, especially in software.

View on HN

You are right that some crappy software is highly profitable, but to say that Microsoft's software products have gotten worse with each release is to have a very non-standard definition of "worse". You still might not like Windows or Office, but on the basis of stability and usability, two attributes that most people would correlate with quality, there is really no question that relative quality improved from one release to the next.

That's a lot more debatable than you think. Vista was crashing all over the place back before they added some patches and service packs, and from a usability standpoint many people despise the new ribbon interface.

Vista was crashing because Microsoft finally changed the video driver model and nVidia, Intel & ATI couldn't keep up.

The ribbon was yet another dramatic change that was long overdue. Everybody loves it once they 'get it'.

Yet Microsoft have an awful lot of research suggesting the ribbon is an improvement, which you can read about from their blogs. You could also try it and give them feedback. I refer you to http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/09/14/467126.aspx and the rest of detailed and interesting posts in his blog about the Ribbon design process.

Anyway, the parent post claims windows has got better and you say "no, it was bad now it's been improved" - that's not debatable that's you agreeing.

I didn't offer my opinion one way or the other. I was summarizing Jacob's point for the person I replied to that subtly missed it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com