Linux

I have to disagree with that part but not the rest. Isn't Open source successful because it is Open Source? Many programmers and techno geeks can contribute to the improvment of an Open source project. Can you contribute to the MS closed source project? You can start up a company and make inproved enhansments on microsoft products then sell them but you need to pay money to microsoft for a licence etc.. I also don't believe quality gets sacrificed for profit, they old the quilty back and sell it to you as a solution to all your problems, which starts an ongoing cash cycle. Which I think is standard practice for any major corporate organisation.

I'm a competent and experienced coder, but commercial considerations have forced me into either leaving bad code and designs in or even to implement some horrendous bodges, even though in my personal opinion doing so has cost the companies I've worked for far more money than they would have took to fix.

MS switching to open source would undoubtedly cause an improvement, employing people from the open source community no matter how competent to work on closed source will have an impact so minimal, it's not worth mentioning.

18 years in the business, and I can count the number of successes I've had against the bean counters for implementing quality solutions over cheap ones on one hand.

Over time the quality will improve, with every hot fix MS relase their quality gets better or an improvemnet is made. Surely if the open source guy is at the top the good stuff would flow down.

The organisation I work for are always working to improve the quality of there MS based solutions, and now and then they get help from MS.

I don't work for the link below.

http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/

The above people also work to produce high quality MS products. And they are open to free open source products, they even download them and use them to help with in there own software devlopment.

So MS are getting help from open source on the outside, and employing open source people on the inside.

Open source come up with some good stuff, and I guess Microsoft see the potential in making money from it.

Software gets worse as it gets older not better. It gets further and further away from what you need now, but in terms of customer and business requirements. As a for instance.
Security is a much bigger thing now than it used to be. MS struggles in this area simply because their original OS design and the business marketing plan around it, never had security as a key requirement hence the multiplicity of patches and the multiplicity of requirements for patching.

I'd love to see them going open source, I can think of more than a few projects I'd be happy to contribute to, but while the OS is closed and basically opaque to devlopers, it will be a waste of time. Ther's no point in building a high quality house on crap foundations.

I tought Windows New Technology was MS's way of building a better foundation. moving away from FAT32 which isn't very secure and going towards NTFS more secure than FAT32.

The MS Visual Studio .net platform moves away from interdev and VB6 and gives MS the functionality of C#, java, vb7, aspx etc...

A strong foundation to build better more secure applications.

And should there be a better more secure way to do things, I can't see MS not adopting it in the future.

and NTFS is an improvement on FAT32 aside from it's overhead, there are far better file systems though.
The point I was trying to make is MS Visual studio is not a foundation, it's an application.
As such visual studio is no different technically to any of the applications I write. Given the bucket loads of problems I have working around stupidities in the OS and that I'm using the same OS, I can only assume the poor buggers who coded visual studio had exactly the same issues.

What we are seeing at MS now is a desperate attempt to postpone the enormous cost of a total reqrite in the hope that some harry potter type will wave a wand and make the bad thingy go away.

That particular fight is something I'm very familiar with, even though I'm not cute, wearing little round glasses or a member of Hogwarts' school choir.

1. You are copying a bunch of files from one place to another. There's one file with the same name at the destination. The system asks you if you want to overwrite the file. You say no, which causes the whole copy operation to be aborted and leaves you with no option but to repeat the whole copy operation.

2. If you install programs often, every six months or so you have to reinstall Windows in order to get rid of the junk that tends to pile up until it gets unmanageable. Nobody ever considered the possibility of keeping the OS separate from the stuff that gets embedded in it afterwards.

3. You copy an installed Windows to another machine. It ceases to work.

4. Your Windows is installed on an NTFS partition. A small boot file gets corrupted and you completely lose access to your HD. (I faced this problem a while ago and the only way I found to get the system back & running, short of reinstalling Windows, was to boot with Knoppix Linux on a CD.)

5. Knoppix Linux boots from a CD in five minutes, recognizing all your hardware and implementing a GUI that is better than Windows. Windows takes one hour minimum, requires successive boots and still demands specific drivers for your hardware.

My point here is that (a) Windows is basically a dumb beast; (b) it won't get better because the architecture is flawed. Its success is a huge feat of marketing. What happens here – as we have been seeing for years with the successive irrelevant versions of Office – is that you get to a point where you can only embellish your creature, but it's still the same beast underneath. Windows has reached the baroque era – oh, what if we add a cute little dog that waves its tail to the user and call it "user-friendly"?

Given the huge resources it has, Microsoft could certainly come up with a better OS. But Microsoft, like Bill Gates, is humorless – and humor, as we all know, is a side effect of creativity and intelligence. If you ever tried to read the cryptic help files of any MS product, you know what I mean.