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Why do programmers hate Microsoft?
Why do programmers hate Microsoft so much? A search finds hundreds of anti-Microsoft rants in source code comments, ranging from personal attacks on Bill Gates to frustration with supposedly not following standards and putting out buggy, insecure code.
- mhd 16y agoThere are lots of programmers who like Microsoft, mostly those whose primary (and often only) target is Windows. Most of the comments are about cross-platform issues and kinda boil down to "…because it's not Unix". Which is the "The whole world's a VAX" of our times.
- JoeCortopassi 16y agoI think a big reason why people don't like Microsoft, is the anti-competitive behavior they used to get to the size they are today. A lot of people dream of starting a business one day (especially around here), and when a company was built by crushing start-ups/small businesses in illegitimate ways, people aren't going to be too happy about that. Plus, they have that little paperclip thing that pops up whenever you ask for help...
- Tamerlin 16y ago"I think a big reason why people don't like Microsoft, is the anti-competitive behavior they used to get to the size they are today." That's completely nonsensical. Microsoft didn't act anti-competitively to become big, they did it AFTER becoming big. You can't abuse power you don't have, and when Microsoft won the OS contract with IBM, it was a tiny company, and Apple was by comparison huge. Microsoft got big by taking advantage of the fact that the guy that wrote DOS didn't think it was worth anything, so he was happy with the $50k (or whatever) that Bill gave him for it, and IBM didn't think that the PC market would go anywhere, so they didn't think anything of giving MS money for every PC sold. When Bill started licensing DOS to every company that wanted to make a PC, Microsoft became big. THAT is how Microsoft acquired the power to abuse that they then proceeded to abuse.
- JoeCortopassi 16y ago"That's completely nonsensical. Microsoft didn't act anti-competitively to become big, they did it AFTER becoming big" I didn't say that's how they got started, but rather one of the ways that allowed them to reach the size they are today. Even if you know nothing of the antitrust case, you'd have to admit some shady stuff was going on when you see a browser like IE6 last so long :p
- Tamerlin 16y agoThe shady stuff they did with IE6 mattered because MS was already so big when they did it.
- smackfu 16y agoBecause the only programmers who post on the various forums are all web programmers.
- steveklabnik 16y agoNo, application programmers dislike Windows, too. For example, see the hell one of my friends went through for me recently: http://github.com/shoes/shoes/commit/95fed5e6310cb0174ba80b8d4a5225a16e27c14b http://github.com/shoes/shoes/commit/95fed5e6310cb0174ba80b8... And it's still not totally fixed.
- aseem 16y agoI don't think Microsoft executives are losing sleep over "Microsoft Hatred" as much as they are losing sleep over "Microsoft Irrelevance". How many college students know how to program on Win32? How many even know what Win32 is? In 10 years, these college students will be the senior developers at their respective companies. Certainly, any good engineer will choose the best tool for the job. But I find it unlikely that those that know little of MS technology will promote those tools later in their careers. /* What is Microsoft? */
- rahoulb 16y agoBecause I lived through the 90s and early 2000s
- keithwarren 16y agoAlmost every person I have ever met who hates Microsoft was either ignorant of the matters (meaning they just read what other people said and never had original thoughts) or had a specific beef in one area that they let inform their thoughts about the company as a whole. Lots of web developers, especially those who were not professional developers in the 90s see and hear this horror story of a big mean monopolist who set out to destroy Netscape. It is funny how history chooses the more salacious of headlines, easy to forget that IE4 was a breakthrough browser that ate Navigator's lunch heads up. Certainly the OS integration made a big difference but this picture of an evil lurking monster hoisting terrible code and practices upon us is and never was true. The other thing I think which happens is group opinions get formed. Microsoft is strongest in the enterprise, which is more apt to say - big businesses. Big business and the entreprenuerial hacker/dev dont get along, bigbiz in large part wants and fosters a need for programmers. Their hierarchical and red tape laden structure destroys creative spirit so what you get is lots of people who accept this, learn within that framework and dont really develop beyond the skills needed for their job. They latch onto Access and VB and do it badly because no one with great skills taught them any better and their bosses just need X to work and performance or elegance dont matter at all. This mindset gets associated with Microsoft people and the non-MSFT crowd begins to think anyone who does Microsoft work is some mindless noob with no skills. It is sad really, because Microsoft is years ahead of any other company in the way they treat developers. If you havent used Visual Studio you wont understand that.
- msy 16y agoWeb developers don't hate Microsoft because they destroyed Netscape, they hate Microsoft because their proprietary standards and er...unqiue take on w3 standards has and continues to waste a measurable percentages of people's lives and retard the progress of the web.
- iamdave 16y agoritard, in this case.
- ryanwatkins 16y agoYou might wish to consider that during roughly the same period IE4 came along to destroy Netscape, it was Netscape that was busy inventing proprietary tags - <layer>, <multicol>, <spacer> and the like.
- naner 16y agoAnti-competitive, design-by-committee, aversion towards open source, corporate culture, bureaucratic, etc. I don't hate Microsoft but I avoid targeting their platforms. EDIT: Oh, and there's the malware thing.
- smackfu 16y agoYou have described every company.
- pjscott 16y agoSure, but this one was the 800 pound gorilla. Most of those companies don't have the power to really screw us over. Microsoft did. To some extent, they still do.
- ryanwatkins 16y agoWe have a new 800 pound gorilla intent on screwing us over. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/cq?d=v1&s=AAPL,MSFT http://finance.yahoo.com/q/cq?d=v1&s=AAPL,MSFT
- mattmaroon 16y agoGenerally I think programmers hate Microsoft because programmers hate Microsoft. It's a self-perpetuating meme, and let's be honest, if your goal is to hate Microsoft (or any extremely large corporation) it's pretty easy to come up with reasons. Especially IE6, which is the Exxon Valdez of the programming world.
- mhd 16y agoI think there's some truth in that. Besides factual reasons why one might dislike a particular company or piece of software, there's also the old tribal system. Back in the days, it was Amigas vs. Ataris vs PCs, or SGI vs HP vs IBM vs Apollo vs Sun… Now, we all run the same hardware, so the operating system seems to be the only pièce de résistance left. Even the arguments between vi and Emacs lost their fervor, considering the size of both RAM and vim nowadays. At least one item where your average geek ain't that different from a football fan…
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoLinux comes with Apache, Python, C/C++, Perl, AWK, sed, vi, emacs, and more. Windows comes with Minesweeper. When I was starting out there was no Microsoft or Linux. I got a machine that had a programming lanuage built in to it, and I could write programs. Pretty much the first large program I wrote was a compiler to convert a subset of BASIC into Z80. It was written in its own subset, and could compile itself. I hacked into the cassette save routines, smashed the stack, bootstrapped into a machine code monitor (not even assembler) that I wrote, and I was writing games for people to play. It's always seemed to me that Microsoft almost actively prevented me from using my own machine. I couldn't get into it without buying more. And more. I wrote my own OS that sat on top of DOS, then write a compiler for that, and suddenly I could write games again. And finance applications. And mathematical explorations. I found some of the first Perrin pseudo-primes that way, bypassing Microsoft's systems because they prevented me from doind what I wanted with the resources I had access to. I don't hate Microsoft, but every time I use a Windows box it fails in interesting ways, costing me time, effort, patience and occasionally yet more money. I'll use Linux. ADDED IN EDIT AFTER RE-READING: And I'll continue to contribute to various open-source projects.
- gaius 16y agoSo what? If you want developer tools, they're a free download on microsoft.com http://www.microsoft.com/express/ http://www.microsoft.com/express/ Microsoft can't win here, if they shipped all that with the base OS there'd be haters hatin' on them for "bloat".
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoI wish I'd never answered. It's a religious war - no one will win. Lots of people will end up bloodied. I should've known better. Still, I did reply, so let me tell you of my personal experience, and then I'll leave. My experience is that working in a Microsoft environment as I have in the past, everything seemed bloody awkward and more annoying. Working in a Linux environment I've had far fewer hassles, and the system just doesn't get in the way. My experience, my circumstances. I don't hate Microsoft, I've just found I'm more productive in other systems. And I'll say nothing more on the subject. I can't care enough to do so. In fact, I couldn't really care less.
- geophile 16y agoI'm a programmer. Going back a few years, I hate Microsoft because: * 8.3 * 16-bit address space * Insanely complicated and needlessly POSIX-incompatible access control lists * Registry * Path separator: \ vs / * Very expensive dev tools * MSC++ isn't C++ * Handling of Java * Management via GUI instead of text files * Absence of usable shell Yes, this list is way out of date. But these are the issues chased me out of the Microsoft world into Unix, Linux and open source. The few times I've had to deal with Microsoft software more recently (e.g. ACLs), the experience has served only to renew my loathing.
- msg 16y agoIf you want an eye-opening education, go read Mini-Microsoft (including the comments). Some groups are better than others but... The performance review system causes corporate politics and backstabbing that beggar the imagination. MS has Darwinian competitions of very similar products that result in massive waste (see Kin that should have rolled in to Windows Phone). They do not manage dependencies well, leading to excruciating effort just to check in code. And they are basically headless.
- iterationx 16y agoI hated Microsoft because their OS would always crash, but now I don't mind them since the MS Dev job market is so good.
- runjake 16y agoProgrammers generally don't hate Microsoft. They have one of the biggest (if not, THE) developer communities in existence. Developers have great access to outstanding developer documentation, engineers (channel9.msdn.com), and Microsoft lets its engineers blog candidly (blogs,msdn.com). The same complaints the article cited could be levied against gcc, autoconf, and so on. And you could levy the same trollbaiting against Linux, *BSD, and Mac OS X. Because for any given thing, there is somebody out in the world who feels the need to hate it. I do a lot of .NET development and I love it, but I prefer developing on a UNIX environment because I started there and ended up on DOS/Windows later on.
- xiongchiamiov 16y agoDepends on lot on which community you're looking at. Being primarily in the IRC/slashdot/web dev/scripting language/sysadmin areas (as well as a student of a rather Linux-centric university), I was amazed at all of the Windows-centric stuff when I found StackOverflow. I honestly didn't realize that there were good programmers who preferred to work on the Microsoft stack. Now, of course, I realize there are, but I'm still a bit confused when I talk to one... our worlds are just so different.
- jackfoxy 16y agoMy main beefs with MS 1) Bloating Office products with each successive release and discontinuing the old menu structure. I finally did something about this and switched from Outlook to Thunderbird. 2) MS has alienated small and independent developers by making Visual Studio in a bewildering number of versions and charging too much for it. They're completely focused on enterprise computing, but the enterprise has been off-shoring development for the last 15 years, so bright young developers have no interest in MS technology.
- bitwize 16y agoProgrammers don't hate Microsoft. Many hackers do. (No, not that kind of hacker. Those guys love Microsoft: plenty of vulnerabilities to exploit!) But programmers, in general? They love Microsoft. Microsoft keeps food on their tables by providing Visual Basic, C#, and other tools that they can use to shovel out PoS or ERP code or whatever. Most of the fun and innovation is in the realm of the hacker elite, though, to whom a Microsoft monoculture is both stifling and suffering from a chronic case of doing-it-wrong.
- grogers 16y agoI hate a lot of the tools/libraries/frameworks/software I am forced to use on a daily basis, because a lot of it is complete crap, or has some very annoying misfeature that I run into constantly and there is no way around. I'd wager that this is part of the reason many people hate Microsoft. They are or were forced to use windows at work, programming apps for windows using Microsoft tools or languages, etc. And many of them probably found it a pain in the butt.
- jbarham 16y agoThis claim is absurd. In the last few years Microsoft has done more to advance the state-of-the-art in programming languages for practicing developers than any other organization. In terms of industrial languages, C# and the .NET framework are a huge advance for client-side programmers developing Windows GUI applications compared to C++. They sponsor the open source development of IronPython and IronRuby and make a genuine effort to maintain compatibility w/ the reference C implementations. As for functional languages, they largely sponsor the development of Haskell by paying Simon Peyton-Jones who works for Microsoft Research (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/), and have released F# which is by far the best commercially supported functional language. Of course the trade off is that their languages work best, or only, with Windows, but if you are stuck programming on Windows, Microsoft is going out of its way to give developers a lot of options in languages.
- sgentle 16y agoMicrosoft has done a lot of harm in the last 20 years. They succeeded through a strategy of continually expanding into new areas (operating systems, office software, web browsers, email, programming languages, etc) and producing products that often worked poorly and only with the rest of their platform. They succeeded at this for a time, creating a monstrous shambling behemoth of software that was powered entirely by its own momentum. But it wasn't very good, and everyone knew it. I assume that others, like me, were very frustrated during that time. We knew this wasn't the right way. Software folks tend to see the world through software eyes, and we know that an incompatible proprietary mess only comes back to haunt you. But what could we do? They had the money and the influence. To misquote PG, we bought it with misgivings. We made our sites work with IE, we made our code compile under VC++, we gave our servers and clients special_microsoft_spec_exception flags. And we bitched on Slashdot and spelled Microsoft with a dollar sign and dreamed of a day when we wouldn't have to deal with it anymore. Well, now we don't. Apple's eating Microsoft's lunch from the hardware up, while Google chows on it from the web down. They have way too much money to fail fast, or maybe to even fail at all. But they have to play ball now. Why do programmers hate Microsoft? Justice, I suppose. They certainly didn't treat us well when they were in charge. Programmers have long memories.
- hardy263 16y agoCross browser compatibility.
- Tamerlin 16y agoI suspect that it's related to history, because there is a reason that the term "Microserf" exists. Microsoft used to operate like amazon does today -- burn the developers out and who gives a $# about turnout, because EVERYONE wants to work here... ... which was true, but it was for the money; Microsoft stock options were making people rich. The proof? The year that MS stock values dropped for the first time, MS started having trouble hiring people. They treat their own developers a LOT better than they used to, in fact almost as well as Google does. But it's hard to live that Microserf thing down... partly because that sweatshop method, replacing process with extra hours, leads to terrible, bug-ridden code. What irks me more than people irrationally disliking Microsoft is people who spout about how bad Microsoft's code is, and how asinine their processes are, while making exactly the same mistakes that even Microsoft learned from and has been fixing.
- zackola 16y ago1) Internet Explorer 6 2) Internet Explorer 7 3) Price/quality of Visual Studio compared to other offerings - we can talk about memory footprint, MSDN subscriptions, odd versioning conflicts when trying to develop for SharePoint - oh wait. 4) SharePoint 5) http://i.zdnet.com/blogs/fake-steve-ballmer.jpg http://i.zdnet.com/blogs/fake-steve-ballmer.jpg Honestly, this man disgusts me. His attitude and public reactions as the figurehead of Microsoft make me want to have nothing to do with Microsoft 6) Lack of POSIX compliant shell. 7) In small companies (and most families), programmers end up being IT staff. When was the last time any of you had to reformat or spend hours of your life cleaning a Mac or Linux machine because of malware? I'm not ignorant enough to think the gilded age of Mac and Linux being virtually malware free will last forever, but hey, enjoy it while it lasts. 8) http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/compare http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/compare Which one is right for you? Fuck you! It's a desktop or a server. The consumer should have one choice, appropriately priced that lets them do everything they can. 9) The ridiculous price of MS Office Suite. 10) Webforms, VIEWSTATE. Seriously, fuck you VIEWSTATE, whoever designed this dumb ass approach should have their computing license revoked.
- beagle3 16y agoBecause they spit into everyone's well all the time. e.g. - OOXML and the related perversion of the ISO process - Wilful violation of standards (web, others) - Hurting users for hollywood (Protected media path etc.) - Broken security (by design) that has enabled all the botnets and spam you could ever think of, and then some.
- namekuseijin 16y agoit's actually a very small vocal minority who hates microsoft. They hate microsoft because microsoft means ubiquitous standardized flatten programming environments the way managers like, with sheeple programmers properly strapped and assembling programs from paid frameworks.