Discussion on:

How can Microsoft clean up its bad reputation?

Do you think Microsoft deserves its bad reputation or is the bad image a result of competitors' propaganda? Either way, what could the company do that would change your impression of it in a positive way? What change(s) would make you more likely to buy and/or use their products and services?

It's those of us who have no choice but to buy their products and services who most dislike them...

Its not just the forced purchase ... but the near complete loss of productivity that came about by microsoft changing well known and established functions, keystrokes, and access methods.

Sure everyone could use 2 or 3 ways to access some function or feature in both the OS and Office suites ... but just like CTRL C is copy .. you shouldn't be changing OTHER things for no valid reasons.

Windows 95 through XP ... I right click a blank area of the desk top and do "Properties" ... something I've been doing for what... 15 years? and now no longer does "properties" link to the same tabs and options with 7 and vista as it did previously. Change your screen resolution ... you can't... you have to access a completely different way ...

Office .. that F**king ribbon bar.. its fine that some people like it, find it functional for *them* but to completely destroy your user base .. to remove from the well established business functionality, your key software suite, and change all the key combinations, not give the users a *choice* of menuing system, or to give them transitional menus.. you cut everyone off.

Sure, with office, new users who had NEVER BEFORE SEEN office were able to get some things done ... but those that knew their function keys, knew their ALT+Key menu selections, and didn't have to take their hands off the keyboard were now stuck grabbing the mouse, and cursoring through several menus trying to find what they had previously known how to do..

And that's nothing for the ribbon's complete backwards nature when it came to operating with Laptops that have limited screen realestate ... and before you f**king morons come back with your usual "hide the ribbon bar" doing so means having YET ONE MORE CLICK to make EVEN BEFORE you can figure out where your previous menu item is..

The fact that before Vista ... users had been using an OS that was similar in access methods for better than 10 years, is one of those key mistakes microsoft made in "redesign" ... you don't throw away EVERYTHING you learned before just to start new.. not with an OS, not with a product base that has had 90% market saturation for more than a decade .... you wouldn't suddenly go in and swap the gas pedal for the brake pedal in a car model ... or move the turn signal selector to the opposite side of the steering column.. you don't change key menu functions without good reason, and microsoft NEVER had a good reason..

THAT pissed off just as many if not more people than those required to purchase the product to keep up with the Jones's.

Having started in computing before CP/M and DOS the last 30 years have been exciting and forever changing. Change is inevitable and what comes out of change is mostly improvement. I would not like to be driving a Model-T on today's highways any more than I would like to be still using PC-DOS 2.01 first released on the IBM XT in 1981. Office 2010 is brilliant compared with Office 97 as was Vista compared with Windows 3.11, W7 is better than Vista.
By the way Ford did change the pedals after the Model-T.

and that is good. That a change is good becasue it's a change, iffy propostion at best, a guy who's been around the block as many times as I have should know that.
MS have two sorts of upgrade
They change the wrapper, so people will think the turd inside has changed.
e.g. 98 to ME
Or they go for a complete game changer, but present it as a simple step forward like VB6 to VB.Net.
They are getting better I'll admit, I peresonaly don't think it's through realising they were c*nts for along time.

One of the most effective advertisements I ever saw for a software-development group went something like "We are committed to continuous, reliable improvement rather than constant change." Would that Microsoft took such a view.

Ford adopted a standard being adopted by every other auto maker. Gas pedal, brake, clutch...steering wheel. Dashboards varied, and still do today. But If they changed to a lawn-mower-type Go/Stop/Clutch system every year, there would be more than a few complaints...and wrecks. MS wants to make changes for the sake of change, without regard for users' convenience. People say "change is good". No. IMPROVEMENT is good. Just "change" could be decay, paradigm shift, fade, Obama, anything. Change is rampant. Improvement is rare.

You definately touched on this multiple times. I think that M$ has tried to put it's fingers in too many pies. Instead of trying to make everything I think they should fund new companies to take on new products. For example, let's take the Zune. The Zune could be made by a completely different company with different management. You could actually have customer support (Something that M$ has never done). The money could come from M$ but then they need to walk away.

I am talking about spin-offs. M$ should stick to Windows and focus 100% on it. Spin off every other division in to different companies and let them sink or swim. This will allow for the diversity required to maintain and support a larger number of products. It would also take the M$ name off of other ventures with all the benefits that could bring.

I have been developing in Windows environment for years and just recently moved into Linux & Unix development.

All I can say, Windows will get slow as more and more apps you install in the machine. Thanks to the registry for that.

However, the same thing will not occur in Linux & Unix environment. I can sleep better at nights knowing that my Linux machine hardly crashes and more consistent than the Windows.

Yes developing in Linux sucks as the tools you have is nowhere as close as Visual Studios but again, the stability is the key here. Plus, with introduction of Android, developers are flocking into Java development ,which again, can be developed in Linux.

If Windows is to appeal me again (I am talking about my personal experience here) they need to review how their OS works and make it more stable, more secure, more consistent and better performance.

Right away some Linux zealot admiring Linux in a blog that barely mentions Linux. We don't care. Oh "more secure"? Ever look at the SANS newsletter? Windows 7 is stable. Unsure how you define "consistent".

I was stating purely based on my experience. You want inconsistency in Windows 7?

Sure, me and my colleagues stuck at "Windows is updating..bla bla" for 24 hours without any real progress due to updating our Windows 7 via wireless. Now I am no packet guru but we expect that the update went corrupted due to unstable wireless connection.

Not to mention most of the updates require restart. Do you have experience using Linux as development environment? Only major update or update that involves kernel patching require restart. The rest is just simple, work out of the box.

Linux is no God, it shares its own weaknesses but again, as a development environment it performs well. Of course you have to be picky in selecting your hardware for Linux/Unix but the point is, if and only if Windows can achieve the same robustness as Linux, then I would come back for it.

"Now I am no packet guru but we expect that the update went corrupted due to unstable wireless connection." - Sound like either a driver issue or hardware. You can't blame Microsoft. They don't make drivers - just include them in the OS - and they surely can't be blamed on a wireless connection. That said, I would never trust a wireless connection to do any mahjor install.
As for Linux [and for that matter Unix], yes I used them off and on for the last 15 years or so. Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, ... Yes, you rarely have to reboot. Things have improved a lot when it comes to updating but I remember even to install something as simple as Adobe Flash was a pain.

"Of course you have to be picky in selecting your hardware for Linux/Unix but the point is, if and only if Windows can achieve the same robustness as Linux, then I would come back for it."

If only Linux would could work with the same range of hardware it might be real contender and I might use it.

As the article stated I think you're reflecting the way it used to be. I do internet marketing - under Windows 7 I have never had a BSOD, Vista was a disaster, XP grew into a good product.
I did Unix for many years, love it but sorry even Ubuntu often needs trips to the root it's not for most folk.
I think this article summed Msoft up really well, there's been a ton of disasters but if you look at W7 it's a good solid product, yes it took too long to get this way.
As to updates requiring restarts, very few and far between, so I'm not sure why your environment, as you report it, needs this mine does not

Unfortunately, Win 7 is just as capable of BSOD's as earlier versions of Windoze. And it still gives you little or no viable information on what failed. Yes, it is not as unstable, but by now MS should have found a way to trap failures, stop something, restart and give proper error messages rather then crashing.

There is nothing like finding your pc bsod'd and that the dumps have no useful information on what caused it. Except this happening frequently.

Stopping BSODs in windows would be a huge effort. At the BSOD point, it's so far past the original error it had no idea what went wrong and how far in to it's various sub-systems the error has proliferated, that it can't come up with any restart strategy except reboot.
The dumps may have useful information, but you'd need the code and a lot of patience to find out. When you get there it will tell you that some deep level function wasn't expecting 0 as in an input or siome such, how it got there, educated guess time. Classic problem of a language with no exceptions (or one with and incompetent design (swallowing). Lot of old code still in Win 7, not as much as there was in Vista, so they are getting better, but still a significant percentage, and it stands to reason the deeper and ore common the less likely it is they risked changing it. Real technical debt.
Happens "everywhere", MS's are just more noticeable due to popularity.
Don't expect it to go away anytime soon, as there is evidence for exception swallowing in much more recent code.

Of all the Windows 7 BSODs they all contained enough information to figure out what failed. It was always a driver/hardware issue.

The purple variety is especially famous. I've been in this industry for over thirty years and I've never seen the degree of calcified dogma that's posing as fact these days.

Granted, Win7 IS the best Windows version since NT 3.51. It would be nice if we could compare it favorably against, you know, its current competition?

Linux and Unix is VERY much alive and well. When you really look around, you'll find Linux and Unix are at the heart of significant volumes of enterprises today.

Think about this... could Google ever possibly be successful had they wasted ANY time with Windoze as their server environment? Please!!!

2011: Year of the GNU/Linux Desktop!

TR needs to develop a filter to screen out Win-Vs.-Linux crap. And the Mac argument is now started. No, please, no-o-o!

Your rants and defensiveness show you to be the only zealot. You should leave that bit of commentary out of your diatribe next time.

But nothing running inside it is. Have ya noticed?

Hmmm...let's see...my multi-booting DOS/Win3X/Win95 hasn't crashed
in some 12 years now. My Slackware box? No crash there either.
My WinXP box...well, not since I quit letting my kids play games that
were known to cause problems with nVidia video cards, not a crash in
2 years...so, must be the Win7 NB!! Well, shucks...not a single solitary
crash on it either.
Guess I can continue to sleep well at night!

ps...if your computer is crashing, it probably is NOT the operating system
itself, rather it is probably some software installed by the IATKB.

...regardless if you run Windows or Linux relates to driver issues. Usually the video driver.

I guess you haven't been developing in linux recently. I have been "playing around" in linux since Red Hat 2. The latest Kernel won't run on my 2 year laptop, and I have tried different distros. Gnome three doesn't work at all, and after almost ten years of 64bit processors, they still can't get the 64bit OS working right. My realtek wireless has never worked, and the drivers are still in "staging" after almost two years. AND I haven't heard a lot of good things about kernel3.

Compare Ubuntu 11.04 with 10.10. 11.04 is like a dog on old hardware, can't run unity without a modern GPU, takes longer than W7 to boot. Is it the way of the world or are Linux developers finding the same as Windows developers did 10 years ago. Bloat moves faster than new hardware.

Ubuntu might be linux if you squint real hard, Linux is not Ubuntu though, all their protestations to the contrary mind.

That's like comparing a full crapware out of teh box vendor install, with the carefully tuned one professionals can come up with.

Granted that Vista wasn't the greatest but it [on its own] got a bad reputation because of the initial lack of software, old software would work on it, 64-bit support, etc. But Vista with SP2 is probably almost rock solid as you can get.
As far as Microsoft missing the tablet boat, well, they - after all - make just the OS. They didn't get into the computer hardware business except for mice, keyboards and webcams [and briefly with networking]. Tablets existed before iPad, it's the manufacturers who goofed badly.
But compared to other software vendors [Google, Apple, Oracle, ...] I think Microsoft is doing a way better job in securing their products.
Yes. Microsoft missed the boat [or got in too late] on the smartphone business and probably should of dumped it. At least it's not as bad a companies that joinerd [for example] the tablet business such as RIM, Viewsonic and others but never anything remotely ressembling a table or a PC before [rumor has it RIM will dump the Playbook, BTW.]
If you want to look at a bad reputation look at Google with the buggy Chrome browser [how many releases since it came out?], security problems with Android [makes me ALMOST want to by an iPhone for my next smartphone] and how many free web apps that died over the year [two social networks with a possible third with Google+], a competitor to YouTube, ...
Oh those who use the "word" M$ are showing their true colors. Anti-Microsoft.

Gis, I have to confess, I am unabashedly anti Microsoft, for reasons mentioned in a post below, however, I understand as well as anyone the contribution to personal computing that they have made. What is galling to those of us finding ourselves balanced on the edge of that razor blade, is that it is so readily apparent that it could all be done better for the user.

Step one, spin off the peripheral biz. While quite a success, this move will free up a lot of energy and revenue.

Step two, Focus on a consistent and open OS core between all versions and distributions. Change feature sets by plug ins and the GUI for variances between versions. Charge based upon features which you can add on the fly.

Step three, simplify the product offering and licensing system. I don't mind paying for thing, but it must be a better fit for my uses than a free solution, and I want the purchase experience to make me feel like I solved the problem, not raise more questions.

Step four, when the structure is simplified, it will also simplify updates. make it possible to do most OS updates without a reboot, simply restart the service. We made that leap in networking about 11 years ago, why not the rest?

Step five, quit trying to buy everything in order to grab the market for which you are not suited. Focus on the OS and the Apps.

Step six, quit treating your customers like felons. While we may be innocent until proven guilty by law, MS Licensing's default assumes guilt. The teeth of this were removed in a recent service pack, but it's rather tough to have to explain to a client that the software I installed on their system 4 years ago isn't stolen... it's a hiccup in the validation system.

Step seven, schools are in some real trouble. Help them out. Get the good PR.

Step seven, offer amnesty to IT pros who have bad software and get MS Certs. Give them a license for the software they certified on.

Step eight, tell record companies and other lawyer driven organizations what they can do with DRM. It is another example of presumed guilt. Defend the client.

Step nine, make a affordable IDE for Windows and Office app development. Offer bounties on persistent bugs an publish the coder or team who fixes things for everyone.

Step ten, lose "monkeyboy". He is one of the worst strikes against the company. Either that or get him diagnosed with Tourette's Syndrome and spastic paralysis.

My personal favorite is Step Ten!!! LOVE it!!!

I must recommend the step 2, step 3 and step 4 Well Said.

Richard, this page is not exclusively for technical "repertoire". It is for anyone who uses a computer and who has taken time to read the article. As to the poster's remark about Tourette's I think the point is that no one would hire someone to be the CEO of Microsoft who was a Tourette's sufferer. Hyperbole, perhaps. Out of taste.. I really don't think so, but then, it is a matter of taste, which doesn't seem to be on topic at all. Go read Ann Landers or Miss Manners.

This is a site for IT professionals. Not the average PC user. That's the level of discussion we want.

Do IT Pros care so little re the USERS that they honestly WANT *NO* INPUT from them?
How 'bout it, C-NET, how does that jive with your intent? Are users to be excommunicated? Are you thinking of dumping the vernacular and returning to old Latin?

Whether he has Tourette's, or any other disability which does not impair his ability to work, is not our concern. Results of his work are the concern of the stockholders, and his evaluation is up to the board of directors. It's more than a matter of taste, it's a matter of fairness.

While I agree that the remarks made about Steve Balmer were in fairly poor taste, it is the only real way to explain his conduct in 3 short sentences without visual aids.

Tourette's and Spastic Paralysis are both serious conditions and require the understanding and help of friends and family as well as the ability to deal with bad moments in private out of the public eye. I have had friends with both conditions. My point was that:

1. There's something wrong with Mr. Balmer that should be medically diagnosed, but no one in his immediate circle of acquaintances will speak up for fear of being kicked out of the club.

2. His conduct is undignified and disgraceful to himself and the company. Retention of Mr. Balmer as CEO is an unkindness to the company and its shareholders as well as to Mr. Balmer himself. He is in a position for which he is psychologically unsuited.

3. His judgment in approving projects and stamping things production ready seems to be less based on data, but rather based upon the opinions of those who are involved in the projects. This indicates that he is swayed by his perception of public opinion, not by facts and figures.

4. Those who allow him to act in this manner without letting him know that he is presenting a negative image are like the friends of a Tourette's sufferer who encourage them to pursue a career in politics. Yes, by allowing and encouraging a dream you make them happy in the short run, but you set them up for spectacular, life crushing failure over the course of the rest of their lives.

5. The CEO of a tech company must be able to wear many hats, from PR to sales, to tech to QA. Mr. Balmer has demonstrated at various points that he in fact can do so, but not concurrently. Further his ability to switch between these modes of thinking is slow and he gets locked in a mode, a phrase, or a thought. In many ways he reminds me of the worst parts of Howard Hughes, but with neither the talent or the ability to listen to the talent he pays top dollar for.

While just a lowly non-"IT professional", who does enjoy the information and discussions, I seem to agree with Alpha_Dog.

While I can agree with everything here the problem is more than all this. As a small builder and service provider we have seen far more problems than solutions.
First their pricing system sucks. They cater to the giants of this industry and ignore the rest. They, along with manufactures make new computers obsolete as they roll off the line.
Most blue screens are the conflict between their OS and the drivers. In one particular case they actually gave a free upgrade to a client with windows home to XP as the raid drivers would drop after a week or two in the home version.
The price for these type of repairs must be reasonable or the customer will buy new. Hard to show a profit at times.
Another issue is the updates. Often times an update will solve problems, but no indication from them. Takes a lot of searching and that's time.
Their methods of control leave much to be desired as well. A simple task of registration can be a hour of your time, and if a customer is clueless about the legal issues it just adds to that process. I'm for a one priced, use anywhere OS.
Finally, a problem that was posted earlier about OS. Programs designed to run on one version will not run on newer versions. Now you must go to a dual boot system or live with an older version that adds additional problems.
Yes there is more but that adds a chunk that you IT Pros may overlook.

I too do my share of support, and while the issues with Windows makes me money, We use Linux in house (desktop to servers) and I recommend Linux to clients for mission critical stuff for exactly the reasons you specify. Before I switch someone to Linux, I sign them up for a service contract. On their side, it covers a little training for the learning curve. On my side, it guarantees that I will still see income from these clients.

Step ten - LOL and AMEN!

But no 9 is not true. The Visual Studio Express line of IDE's is both extremely good and free. The few features they are missing, you don't need unless you're running an enterprise development shop.

That aside, I really agree with No. 7 - the more software you give away to schools means the more people that will pick your software when they're professionals because it's what they learned on and are familiar with.