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*!%$*!^%*!*#$# Microsoft

Posted: Thu Dec 03, 2009 4:21 pm
by Bill H
I developed a desktop application some years ago for use by model railroaders which I have been selling for a modest fee on my website. I don't sell a lot of them and it has never been for the purpose of making money, so much as sharing with fellow hobbyists. In order to avoid printing cost and to facilitate downloading, the instructions are in the form of the "Help" menu of the program itself.

Apparently everyone who has been buying it has been using XP or earlier os, because I just had my first run in with a purchaser using Vista. Turns out the functionality for running "Help" is omitted from Vista. You can download an addon, but installing that addon is not all that straightforward and even after it is installed there are problems with it. Help files cannot be printed, for instance.

Upshot is I refunded the purchaser's money and discontinued selling the product. Microsoft saved itself some money by omitting the "help" functionality from Vista, but it shafted users of the operating system, and it shafted those who have been developing for the Microsoft platform.

Re: *!%$*!^%*!*#$# Microsoft

Posted: Thu Dec 03, 2009 7:17 pm
by daedalus__
wait the nifty little html help things ?

WAT?

change over to html documentation?

Re: *!%$*!^%*!*#$# Microsoft

Posted: Thu Dec 03, 2009 7:44 pm
by Doug G
I don't know what you're complaining about, dropping winhlp support wasn't a big secret. Most developers that wanted to offer Vista support moved to .chm long before Vista was released.

Re: *!%$*!^%*!*#$# Microsoft

Posted: Thu Dec 03, 2009 7:50 pm
by daedalus__
i don't remember writing a complaint.

i thought he meant chm.

so go do this: :banghead:

Re: *!%$*!^%*!*#$# Microsoft

Posted: Thu Dec 03, 2009 7:54 pm
by Bill H
Well, the app was developed quite a long while ago. In Visual Studio 4, as I recall.

Re: *!%$*!^%*!*#$# Microsoft

Posted: Thu Dec 03, 2009 7:56 pm
by daedalus__
(i wanna see)

Re: *!%$*!^%*!*#$# Microsoft

Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 8:39 am
by Bill H
You can see my application (if that's what you are referring to) at
http://www.sonora-sw.com/railroad

Re: *!%$*!^%*!*#$# Microsoft

Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 10:06 am
by josh
If youre going to stop selling it you should release it open source so people can still use it if they are savy enough

Re: *!%$*!^%*!*#$# Microsoft

Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 11:01 am
by Bill H
good point. I'll put a statement and a download on the site, but I doubt I'll reporgram it to change the copyright statements shown within the program itself, and I'm not sure I want to release the source code. So "open source" might not be the right term, exactly. More "free for general use."

But I'm going to wait a few months so that the people who did buy it recently aren't...

Re: *!%$*!^%*!*#$# Microsoft

Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 12:25 pm
by volomike
Been there. Felt the same thing. I had a successful startup with a M$-platform product. I earned $25,000 in profit in 6 months, working with a power company, MCI/WorldCom, and even had the US Navy interested. But then my company had to fold. The reason was because M$ announced their gameplan for ActiveDirectory, and my product competed with it in some ways. My system synced UNIX, Linux, mainframes, Banyan, VAX/VMS, and Windows NT together on a common directory. Everyone stopped calling me, or they'd call me up and get me to do a bunch of work, and then say, "No thanks, we're going to see how this ActiveDirectory thing goes."

So, here's my complaint list that caused me to switch to Linux and LAMP:

- I developed a successful product in a place where M$ wasn't looking and M$ invaded my market and flattened me like a pancake.

- M$ APIs were getting harder and harder, and the OS was getting more frustrating. In contrast, Linux was getting more and more capable, the APIs in my opinion were getting easier and easier, and the OS was getting easier to use, even fun like a Mac.

- Got tired of trying to remain salary-competitive, paying a lot of cash every two years to renew my M$ certifications, M$ education programs, and MSDN subscriptions. Also got tired of paying for the several OSes and products I needed. And the old salary wasn't keeping up with the high cost of this.

- When Joel on Software wrote that famous article where he said that M$ tends to almost charge you every year for rewritten APIs that almost do the same thing as last year, that was the gospel truth.

- I was working right alongside M$ Consulting as a contractor. We were joining efforts to land big company and big city projects, and repeatedly I was seeing the M$ platform lose out to the Linux platform with either Java, JSP, LAMP, or Java + LAMP.

- M$ Consulting guys played pranks on me one too many times, or were flat out unprofessional and rude. They'd invite me to a conference, get me to do tasks with them, but their badge had more access than mine. One day I was told to stand outside a door and wait on a guy, that he would be right back with more instructions. So I did. I must have stood their 30 minutes before I got the joke. On other projects, I was verbally abused by them in a restaurant as if they were drunk or something, and I was wondering who hired these gorillas. The icing on the cake was in an M$ Consulting manager high up in the Boston area took us all out to dinner in Providence, Rhode Island. He was a married man. The man got completely drunk and was pulling waitresses into his lap in a ritzy restaurant, making sexual comments, and tickling them. Oddly, the waitresses didn't get up and played right along, as if he was a regular there, a big tipper, and known for these shenanigans. The other M$ Consulting guys merely laughed as if this was common in their organization. Me, I was wondering what his wife would think if she could see my mobile video.

- When Bill Gates clearly lied under oath.

- When Steve Ballmer screamed Developers, Developers, Developers and Woooooooh! on stage like a gorilla -- and it showed me how desperate M$ was because they could see signs of Linux, Java, JSP, and LAMP taking over their market. (And now Python and Ruby as well.)

- When one too many viruses walked right on through M$ security controls. First was Code Red that was pretty bad. But then the Blaster virus came out and that was the icing on the cake.

- When the Halloween Documents came out.

So, I switched cold-turkey to Linux and LAMP on all my systems at home and in the office where I used to work. (I now am a freelancer and my office is in a room next to the bedroom.) I even have my wife and kids on Linux. LAMP has made me successful although we're all having a tough time right now because of the current world economic climate.

I have friends on Facebook and it's common to hear them complain about Vista and especially Windows 7, and go back to get XP. I tell them that they'll save money and have less frustration in the long run if they'll buy a Mac, but they don't like the sticker shock -- long-range logic doesn't work these days for some reason. There's always eBay, but they want something new. There's always Ubuntu Linux, but they don't have any friends using it so it scares them.

And it's not uncommon to hear people gripe about the glaring deficiencies of Internet Exploder. IE7 and greater got a whole lot better, but still has some oddball quirks compared to other browsers. M$ is literally restraining the web, not moving it as fast as the other browser vendors and the standards committees are taking it. We could all be on HTML5 and CSS3 by now if it weren't for M$. And thank goodness that jQuery came out and basically equalized Javascript -- without that I probably would be bald from losing so much hair over DOM oddities in Internet Exploder.

Recently I got roped in by a client to work on a project that was a blend of PHP and ASP.NET under IIS on Windows. I wasn't really looking forward to working on that, but I did it. The client didn't realize that PHP could do all that he needed. Well, the registry went corrupt and so the website crashed pretty hard. It took me and several of the other old programmers about 30 days to get it all back online again, and even then it was only so-so to help us ride along until the system would be rebuilt entirely on LAMP. I learned right then how convoluted the ASP.NET and IIS platform has become. It's like a black art to know you need to add other things, and where to download them, to make it successful. The client said he spent a year getting the old system done by cheap offshore coders, and said he regretted it. He asked me to write a prototype on LAMP with some of the functionality, and I had it done in about 2 weeks! (The website was a mobile phone website that included mobile video.)

Re: *!%$*!^%*!*#$# Microsoft

Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 2:22 pm
by John Cartwright
volomike wrote:I have friends on Facebook and it's common to hear them complain about Vista and especially Windows 7
//complete hijack, and my appologies Bill H

I made the switch over to Windows 7 this week, and I must say it is a massive step in the right direction. In fact, it is my most pleasant experience with an OS thus far.

Re: *!%$*!^%*!*#$# Microsoft

Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 5:56 pm
by josh
Windows Vista / “restricted mode”. Why I will not purchase Windows 7.
Cliff notes:
Microsoft gave us no other choice. They actively went out of their way to inconvenience a paying customer, first they spent their development resources implementing the above pain in the ass techniques, rather than fixing bugs that were present in XP and didn’t get fixed with the upgrade to vista. Why not develop a product instead of a licensing scheme, Microsoft? They actively went out of their way to not put any language on the box informing me what I was going to get for my $300 purchase. They actively went out of their way to train their phone support teams to reject requests for help bypassing above mechanisms.

Re: *!%$*!^%*!*#$# Microsoft

Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 6:05 pm
by daedalus__
i read that article the other day and i didn't like it. pirating doesn't bother me, i have .."trial" software :) but i don't think it's okay to advocate piracy. :|

Re: *!%$*!^%*!*#$# Microsoft

Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 8:48 pm
by volomike
Thank goodness for Ubuntu Linux, Sun Virtualbox, and Microsoft OS trial versions. All free. I reinstall Windows every 120 days and use it only for browser testing. When I get Windows loaded, I turn off a bunch of crap and revert the theme to classic with optimized performance. Class dismissed.

Re: *!%$*!^%*!*#$# Microsoft

Posted: Sat Dec 05, 2009 8:24 am
by josh
daedalus__ wrote: but i don't think it's okay to advocate piracy. :|
I'm not advocating piracy, I bought Windows for $300. I can't help if some pirates will happen to read my article though.

I would be more than willing to give up WIndows altogether if someone can help me in getting more than 2 monitors working on Linux