Microsoft

[James]

It's fashionable amongst geeks, coders, mailing list subscribers and forum lurkers to hate Microsoft.

But Microsoft has brought computing and the internet to the mass market, which keeps above mentioned geeks in a job.

I really do think it is "biting the hand that feeds" with all this anti-Microsoft sentiment.

Sure, they have a monopoly, and have abused it in the past. I'm not saying it is perfect.

But it annoys me that some people think it is cool to hate Microsoft without thinking about what it has done for them and the computing world in general.

[francis]

Do I take this "some people" to be me?!

Yes - Microsoft have brought computers to the masses, and for that we should all be grateful. I don't hate Microsoft for that, but what seriously irks me is the fact that nigh on three years after they shipped XP and IE6, I am still downloading security patches for both products. I've also downloaded two service packs for Office XP. How can a company ship very expensive products that are so full of holes and get away with it? (note to JB - I've seen numerous posts in thew last month from XP users saying their brand new unused machines have become infected within about 10 minutes of going online. Don't do this with yours until you have a firewall and anti-virus software installed and running).

Yes, I use Windows. If I could get Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Dreamweaver et al on a *NIX platform, I would use that. It's exceptionally secure and stable, something that Microsoft cannot ever boast about (although XP is very reliable).

Note that Microsoft have abused their position in the past, and continue to do so. Don't ever think that a corporation that large and in that kind of position won't.

Let's have a look at Webstandards.org (http://www.webstandards.org), a site that is OS and browser neutral - they'll comment on anyone they feel deserves it. Have a look at these recent articles:

Browser sniffing Microsoft style (http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2003_10.html#a000234)(October 2003)

Microsoft's new XAML language (http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2003_10.html#a000232) (October 2003)

Microsoft still ignoring web standards (http://www.webstandards.org/buzz/archive/2003_10.html#a000217) (October 2003)

Now, these are "what are MS doing now" type articles that I've picked out to illustrate this point, but if you take time to read the site, you'll find articles on other companies such as Apple.

If Microsoft made a better job of their standards compliance then they wouldn't get bashed so much. If they updated their browser even once a year to implement new code or fix things like their poor implementation of the CSS float property (http://www.digital-web.com/features/feature_2003-02.shtml), support for PNG opacity (see my post elsewhere), support for the abbr element (http://www.sovavsiti.cz/css/abbr.html), then the development community would, I'm sure, be far more positive towards MS. It's not much to ask; Opera, Moz, Apple and others release multiple versions of their browsers each year, and you can't possibly tell me that MS don't have the resource to do the same?

Bashing Microsoft is not done for the sake of "being cool", it's done because of the genuine frustration enountered by web developers that they have to hack their code to get it displaying correctly in IE.

Incidentally, I'd be interested to know which mailing lists you subscribe to, as the four that I'm on don't take kindly to any kind of troll behaviour (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll).

I'd finally add that it was yourself that started this with the "anti-Mozilla" avatar and signature. Also note that my avatar was not added by me and for some reason, I am unable to remove it from my profile.

[James]

Some good points Francis. Wasn't aimed at you personally, just that I have seen such anti-MS postings through my own research, not just your messages.

Remember - never feed the trolls!

[francis]

You see where I said "XP is reliable"? That is absolutely the last time I say that - my PC crashed in massive style last night. I cannot get it to boot at all, it's very badly wrong. To try and repair it, I'm having to create a boot disc from my old ME machine, install file files from that, put it in my MX machine to help XP reinstall istelf! Why I do not know. That ME machine was nearly flattened to Linux a couple of months back - I'm glad I'm so lazy!

[Stephen Bawa]

Francis - would it be fair to say "YHAB, YHL, HAND"? ;)

[francis]

LOL, possibly, but I'll give James the benefit of the doubt this time :)