Open source boss hints at Microsoft thaw

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I think MS products are great, they don't need the bully tactics

I hope Microsoft are realising that now.
MS Products I find very useful:

MS Office XP. If you get a PDF writer add-on like SolidPDF, this makes WordXP quite a good option for documentation in small companies, since you can password protect files for read & write, and just present the issue as PDF. Not as good as a full blown XML repository with XML editor and transformation, but then that's not easy to get right now. I haven't done enough with master documents yet to see if the equivalent to fragments works with word.

Excel - light use for me.

Windows Media Player - not bad
Windows Movie Maker - not bad. The WMP9 codec I don't like much.

MS Money - sorry I think this stinks. I just couldn't get my account to balance. Never had this problem with Quicken.

MS Project. Good tool.

MS Outlook. Never really liked. Too non-standard compared to other email systems. This product feels to me like it needs a total rework.

MS Exchange - From what I've seen, very messy. Rework needed.
MS SQLServer - haven't seen recently, but from memory was messy.
MS IIS. - configuration is the most rotten thing I've ever seen. Security wise was cheesware for a long time. Not sure of status now.

Windows Powered /CE or whatever. Well it worked. My PDA ate the juice too fast though. I'm waiting for it to be ubiquitous on cheap mobile phones with batteries that last a long time.

Windows 98SE. Seems to be fairly secure now with all the millions of patches over the years. (as long as you have antivirus).

Windows XP Home. Good product. Suggest making Admin account first, then user logins.
I've just bought a Microsoft (toshiba rebadged?) fingerprint reader that I hope to hook up for fast user switching.

XBOX. Actually this has been great. I've bought a lot of cheap great games. Including second hand Halo and Halo2. I want a more Saving Private Ryan (but free roaming) style war game next.
The Sony PS3 game Killzone looks good, so maybe I'll get both the PS3 and XBOX360 in time.

Windows has improved security wise in the last two years by a phenomenal amount. I no longer regard it as inferior in this way to OSX and Linux.

Visual Basic 2003 .Net (there is a more recent version now). Excellent as always. I'm going to explore this more.

I still like Linux and OSX, but Microsoft products have gone off my "hate" list. I think they listened, and improved the products.

The thing I find most annoying about Microsoft is the anti-trust stuff. Microsoft, your products are good. You don't need restrictive file formats, and bully behaviour. Play better with other codecs and standards.
How about Microsoft have an easy way for you to install Apache, MySQL and PHP.
They should make a Windows XP Server Lite version where you can install Apache, MySQL and PHP.
Then they could sell a PHP development tool in the visual studio style.

many times, you'll have seen me rant at Microsoft for various things, but I think/hope they are coming good. If they play nice, less people will have a beef with them. Their products can stand for themselves. Some suck bigtime. They should fix them.

Posted by: hipparchus2000   Posted on: 07/14/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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