Published 2005-04-23 14:30:07
I had to laugh the otherday reading one of the Microsurf's blogs about how they suddenly had to deal with customer comments, and suprisingly enough, not many where positive. I think the guy was from the .Net team, and I considered he probably get's it easy, at least he's not on the IE team..
I gave up microcrap years ago, and only now use it for interoperability testing, where most of the time it fails, (XP included..) but I was supprised this week, when working with a new team here, when someone asked me why he should use linux rather than microsoft.
Youth and alot of Microsoft giveaways had ended up with the impression that this stuff fulfilled every need and desire. I have to admit I was a little shocked, I rarely find people who actually like what microsoft attempts to deliver. Most are resigned to the fact that it's a pile of crap but they are either to lazy to learn something new or, blindly believe that the next version will be better.
I started explaining the concept, that as a developer you have the ability to actually fix things with linux. Where he seemed to think that microsoft actually fixed things, especially as his old company had some developer/partner package.. But digging deeper it was pretty clear that solving problems just meant news about workarounds comes faster.. Actually fixing stuff still required something close to a miracle. (CSS fixes for IE came to mind)
But what really would have been a killer example was reading about Webdav support on XP, basically it's completely broken (there are even Knowledgebase articles saying so from 2003). Yet again re-inforcing my view of Microsoft as a company that may fix bugs in each release, but breaks just as many new things with each effort. So however many blogs you see coming out of microsurfs, the knowledge that they will completely ignore their customers (which thankfully I managed to remain from being), means that they still have a long while before anyone actually expects their software to work.
