Microsoft confuses me

Posted November 18th, 2010 in Windows

This week I have been both blown away by some actual (and quite amazing) innovation by tech's most un-innovative company (despite how much they like to tout how "innovative" they are) and frustrated by the same company when reinstalling their flagship operating system. No, this isn't a rant about Microsoft so read on.

Xbox 360 Kinect - Wow actual innovation!

Microsot launched Kinect over the last few days around the world (officially today in New Zealand) and I saw one in action at a shopping mall last weekend. Wow! This is Microsoft actually being innovative and I am very impressed.

Not so long ago, we saw Nintendo shy away from the "my console will have more polygons than yours" and "my processor has more power than yours" fight and define something new with spatially aware controllers so you could interact with what's on screen. That was revolutionary. And then Sony copied them (at last) rather recently.

Now Microsoft have done one better and done away with the controllers altogether, and created a wonderful new innovation. To be fair, I have no idea just how good the system is, but it looked pretty cool when I saw people playing with it in the mall the other day.

It wasn't so long ago we saw Tom Cruise on Minority Report using gestures requiring gloves to interact with a computer and now in reality we have something in a similar vein than can work by just watching what you are doing.

And on the other hand...

Microsoft have always claimed to be an innovative company, but in reality they tend to be a follower rather than a leader (Zune, Windows 7 mobile, X-Box, etc, etc). Sure, sometimes they come out on top and/or do pretty well but it's not because they necessarily make a better product or a more innovative product.

Some frustations as a web developer - part 1

If you are a web developer (which you almost certainly are you are if you're reading this blog) then you are frustrated like me with obsolete versions of Internet Explorer, in particular that really fun web browser called Internet Explorer 6, the one that just won't go away.

I read an interesting article IE6 dependence - a debt that IT need not pay over at ComputerWorld yesterday which made me ask on Twitter "I always wonder what people coded into their apps that have made them not work on any browser other than IE6 in these corporate environments".

The obvious answer was made by my friends @ElatedDotCom who pointed out that it's all about ActiveX and other non standard crap they loaded into IE6 to keep people dependant on the browser so they wouldn't depart for other web enabled platforms.

Surely instead of continuing to support IE6 and Windows XP, Microsoft could created a simple sanboxed virtual machine style version of IE6 that would run on Windows 7 for those corporate environments that just won't upgrade their in house apps that rely on IE6? Surely it would be cheaper? Then they could make more money getting said corporates to upgrade to W7. Then the rest of us don't have to worry about IE6 any more.

Nice dream ;)

Some frustations as a web developer - part 2

So this one isn't just Microsoft's fault; it's those gosh-darned end users who don't even know what a web browser is, let alone bothering about updating it to IE7, IE8, IE9 and so on.

I use Google Chrome for everyday browsing (and it's all I would use if I wasn't a web developer) and what I really like about it is that it's always up to date. I don't even know it upgrades itself. Sure. those pesky old major and minor versions don't really mean anything (it's up to version 7 already after only a couple of years but at least it does it all without me even thinking about it. And updates are frequent.

Firefox and Opera are similar; there are frequent updates and a lot of nagging when they think you should upgrade so very few people continue using the older versions. Safari isn't quite as good; it's more along the IE line being part of the Apple upgrade process but they aren't so worried about forcing a major version update on you and it's another part of the system software update process.

To be fair, Microsoft does try to push the major updates out through Windows Update in the same way Apple does, but it's the lack of updates I find frustrating. Apart from the obvious huge gap in the we-aren't-going-to-update-our-browser-any-more IE6 time, it's still years between major version releases. It holds the web development community back from doing easy and cool stuff because they still have the dominant web browser.

Come on, you have huge resources Microsoft, so please speed up the release cycle for IE.

Some frustrations as an end user

And finally... the hard drive in my laptop died about a month ago. I was too busy to replace it at the time but bought a new one last weekend and was then subjected to reinstalling Windows 7 on it. OK, so this isn't what a normal end user would be subjected to but I was somewhat surprised that it took me almost 4 hours to get the damn thing installed.

But then... I'm also surprised that MS hasn't included support for Flash and PDFs out of the box in Windows 7. My almost 6 year old son went to go play some games on Tuesday and IE had no Flash support. My wife went to open a PDF today and Windows didn't know what to do with it.

Sigh... surely they could have at least included that nasty old piece of crap that is Adobe Acrobat Reader and Flash support. All the other operating systems I've used recently support PDFs "out of the box" and at least Chrome comes with Flash support already there. Bit of a shame but I suppose it's par for the course. Maybe they couldn't get Adobe to pay enough to bundle their products?!

No this isn't a rant

So to summarize, blown away by Kinect and disappointed by a long install of W7 and then having to mess around getting Flash and PDF installed. No, it's no biggie to install them, but surely Microsoft could have support enabled by default. Apple can. Numerous Linux distros can. Why can't MS?

And why is their development process so slow for important products where the goalposts are continually moving? It's not just limited to browsers.

They employ so many smart intelligent people. They have a lot of money at their disposal. Why can't Microsoft do better? It's a genuine question.