Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!ubvax!ardent!kmw
From: kmw@ardent.UUCP (Ken Wallich)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Microsoft cuts corners, actually
Message-ID: <537@ardent.UUCP>
Date: 19 Aug 88 17:02:59 GMT
References: <7988@cup.portal.com> <5832@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <1289@thumper.bellcore.com> <6766@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu>
Reply-To: kmw@ardent.UUCP (Ken Wallich)
Organization: Ardent Computer
Lines: 44

In article <6766@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu> imp@crayview.msi.umn.edu (Chuck Lukaszewski) writes:
>
>First, Microsoft has acquired a deserved reputation in the last two years that
>they rush products to the market.  [...]
>
>Also in fairness to Microsoft, this reputation is recent and can be fixed, I
>think.

CAN be fixed, yes, WILL be fixed? I doubt it.

Recent?  Geesh, one gets the impression that you haven't been using Microsoft
products very much.  I have NEVER liked Microsofts' software.  The company 
started by writing hacked code that sorta worked, and has continued with this 
as a business plan.  

On the Mac side, lets take Microsoft BASIC.  This was the first "language" 
available for my 128k mac, so I bought it.  The documentation was mediocre, 
but then so was Apples, so I can't really complain about that.  

It was trivial to crash your mac running Microsoft BASIC.  Within 6 months or
so of it's release (I think I have the timing right), they released an update
that cost 1/2 of the cost of the original package (sound familiar?).  In this
case, however, you didn't get an entire new system, with new manuals and MAJOR
upgrades.  This was suppose to be a significant performance improvement because
what they did was replace the serially scanned symbol table with a hashed one.
This company had been writing BASIC interpreters for a few YEARS before the 
Mac one, and they hadn't learned to HASH THE SYMBOL TABLE?  Geesh, I used 
hashing in my "mock" interpreter several years earlier in college.  Anyway, 
it sped up the interpreter about 5%, which wasn't worth the cost.  By then I 
had a C compiler, so I put away this package forever.  

Of course, when the new versions of the MacOS came out, Microsofts products
all broke.  If they haven't learned how to follow the programming guidelines
YET, then I doubt they ever will.

I figured out then that Microsoft hadn't grown up, just out.  They made more
products for more machines, but the quality hadn't improved over the years.

I haven't bought a Microsoft package since.

-- 
Ken Wallich 			 	
Ardent Computer Corp			uunet!ardent!kmw
Sunnyvale, California, USA		"Slimey? Mud hole? My HOME this is!"