Bill Gates no longer world's richest man

[Peanut]

Originally Posted by iris

There are a few things I like about MS stuff, but those don't make up for the overall slapped-together, buggy feel of their products. I routinely use non-MS products, and by contrast MS products are intensely frustrating. IMO, most people use MS products more because of Bill Gates' marketing savvy than because Microsoft product quality warrants a large share of the market. Microsoft is the McDonald's of software companies... not that good, but convenient, cheap, and good enough that most people are willing to compromise.

I never f*cking get this. Am I the only one who's smart enough to not break Windows or something? Vista or otherwise. The only times I ever have any kind of problems is when I'm dealing with shady sh*t on my PC. Other than that, I never have a hook with Microsoft products.

[JameO]

Alot of people love to blame their operating system on their problems. The operating system ain't going to function as it should if you happen to download and end up getting a trojan or a virus, it will obvious fail, yet they believe that it's the operating system. Only thing I have had wrong with Vista was that the installation cd I got from Dell, is not including a crucial update, so when I reformated, I could not install 95% of the software I needed due to the permissions problem, but a windows update fixed that and my vista experience has been smooth. Another great example is people trying to run Vista on a pentium 3 processor with 256MB ram. Time to upgrade people, computers are dirt cheap these days!

[iris]

Originally Posted by Peanut

I never f*cking get this. Am I the only one who's smart enough to not break Windows or something? Vista or otherwise. The only times I ever have any kind of problems is when I'm dealing with shady sh*t on my PC. Other than that, I never have a hook with Microsoft products.

Nothing's broken. There are just things that are very easy to do in other non-MS programs that turn into complicated messes in MS programs.

One example: In order to get 'Data Analysis' to show up on the Tools menu in Excel 2003, you have to take your cursor and highlight the data you want to analyze. Why? Just... because. If you don't magically know this fact, you're going to waste a lot of time looking for the feature. You may even think the feature hasn't been installed, in which case you're going to waste a lot of time trying to install the a feature pack that's already installed.

Most everyone uses Excel because it's convenient and "good enough," even though it can be a pain and sometimes corrupts information through inexplicable "helpful" conversions. Excel's an OK general-use spreadsheet program with some pretty bells and whistles. But the Data Analysis quirk above is only too typical of the strange programming decisions that pop up throughout MS software.

When it comes down to it, I prefer reliability over glitz, and that's just not how Microsoft thinks. Instead, Microsoft writes programs that try to read the user's mind and make "helpful" decisions. The major flaw in this plan should be obvious-- computers can't read your mind. At least, they can't read MY mind. So what should be good programs turn into frustrating, time-sucking agents of the devil.

If this has not at all resembled your experience with MS software, that's great. Lucky you. But I still think Microsoft sucks.

[JameO]

Interesting, although spreadsheet software is hard to figure out from just picking it up anyways so you have to know it pretty good to achieve what you want, but interesting. Not attacking you but what do you use in replace of it? Because all the software I have used is almost the same setup as Excel.

[iris]

Originally Posted by JameO

Interesting, although spreadsheet software is hard to figure out from just picking it up anyways so you have to know it pretty good to achieve what you want, but interesting. Not attacking you but what do you use in replace of it? Because all the software I have used is almost the same setup as Excel.

We don't have an alternative spreadsheet program. We just live with Excel and make sure to monitor things (like this and this, etc). It's good enough as a matrix calc program. But we often use just a text file format for transporting data (and that's often the way it comes out of the analysis equipment). I'd much rather store data in text files than Excel files because MS has compatibility issues from version to version. For advanced data manipulation, we use JMP, SAS, or some other stats software. We use something else to make graphs as well.

[JameO]

Interesting, I did not know that. I personally stay away from Office 2007 merely because I think it's menu system for Word is way to vista-ish, and I hate the menu button that drops down and has everything all in one, and that you have to click the save, then to click save as., way too bubbly for me. And also ever since my Office 2003 subscription ran out, I just went with open source just because it gets the job done just like office, sometimes better, and it's not worth paying for.

[ThirdMarioBro]

Originally Posted by Peanut

I never f*cking get this. Am I the only one who's smart enough to not break Windows or something? Vista or otherwise. The only times I ever have any kind of problems is when I'm dealing with shady sh*t on my PC. Other than that, I never have a hook with Microsoft products.

You're not alone. I've never had a major problem with Windows that didn't result from something I caused. I'll take Microsoft software over Apple's crap any day of the week.

Now, Xbox 3Sh*tty on the other hand...