Microsoft love/hate questionaire

I'm not some wierdy beardy anti-Microsoft Linux/Firefox zealot who preaches open source and the way of GNU. I like the company however Microsoft has made some real blunders in the past and I thought why not make a thread dedicated to these blunders and successes. Great idea on a MS techie site! Simple, list the stuff you like, stuff you dislike. No reasons required.Here's a few to start off:

Things I like
SQL Server
MSDN
Visual Studio
C#/.NET
MSN Messenger
Terminal Services/RDP

Things I dislike
Setting the IE homepage to msn.com
Tying Media Player in with msn.com
Indexing service
MMC
COM
MSN
Exchange server

You don't like COM? ... Wow...

Love:

Channel 9
WPF
XAML
Anything Office
pivot tables
configuring .INI files

Hate:

COM
WinG
BSOD

Will,
MVP

Hi everyone, this is my first post.


Love:
Founder, Bill Gates (A generous man and a brilliant visionary!)
Windows, especially 98 and XP
Internet Explorer (Always has been the best in my opinion)
Office, especially Word, Outlook, and Rocky the Office Assistant
XBOX and XBOX 360
Live
Hardware including Digital Sound System 80 (Old now but in its day it was awesome!)
Certification program
Microsoft Update



Love Not-so-much:
MSN Messenger (Not so much the program but the culture it has defined)
MSN Search
MSN Explorer
The confusion of what .Net and passports was
Over-protectiveness of Vista and IE 6SP2, IE 7
Live One Care (Partly because it's only for US customers and partly because its too over-protective)
The idea of subscription-based software

Things I like
* Visual Studio - so much better than trying to debug with gdb
C# programming language, not too lowlevel, not too high level, just right.
*The CLR especially how neat the MSIL instruction set is with no more instructions than you really need. There's only about 30 or so.
*OneNote
*The NT 5.x kernels - pretty much rock solid stability
*ASP .NET - let's me transfer my C# programming skills to making a  website even though i can't make [non ASP] websites.
*Open MP support in visual C++
*Server Core
*Direct X  / XNA
*Smartphone

Things I don't like
* FAT32 - it wasn't designed it was an accident which made trying to impliment it for a toy os project hard.
* Windows 9x - unstable garbage that blue screened everytime i made a pointer related mistake when i was first learning to program in C.
* How asp .NET compiles web apps from the source .cs or .vb file into memory for every execution of the code behind file making IIS virtually unusable on old slow computers that would be fine running Apache.
* Unrealistic seperation of roles between home and bussiness computing. Especially with respect to self employed students, it becomes a licensing nightmare.
*That it took this long to come up with server core.
*Artifically requiring the newist version of windows. Eg direct X SDKs not working any more on windows 2000.

Thinks I hate
* no native CVS support in visual studio
* How accidentally revoking write permission to c:\pagefile.sys forces you to reinstall windows.
* The disparity between having excellent technology but sometimes questionable bussiness and marketing practises.

mrshrinkray wrote:

list the stuff you like, stuff you dislike. No reasons required.Here's a few to start off:

Things I like
Visual Studio 2005
Double Clicking to install a program
Getting applications for one OS
The "start" button
Knowing what hardware is connecting
Microsoft Office 2007


Things I dislike
Setting the IE homepage to msn.com
MSN Explorer
Outlook Express
Lack of official themes
Microsoft Movie Maker

Things I like:

MSDN
Visual Studio
C#
Windows XP
Sql Server
COM/COM+ (only one here apparently:)
IE
Xbox
Office
Biztalk
RDP

Things I dislike:
The stupid names. The codenames are always better.
hotmail spam
Crippled XP IIS (especially annoying when developing Biztalk solutions)
MSDN search
Biztalk 2004 documentation team (was there one?)
VB
Pessimistic source code locking

Like

• Managed DirectX
• Terminal services and Remote Assistance
• Active Directory and GPO
• Windows 2003
• MSN Messenger/WLM
• VS 2005 Express editions
• Windows Mobile
• C#/.NET
• WinFS (if/when it takes off)

Dislike

• Activation-mania
• US-only-itis
• MSDN search
• ActiveSync
• C++.NET
• Passport anomalies (LiveID seems much nicer though, we'll see)
• IE7 RSS implementation
• WMP Library lack of drag&drop?
• Certification system (MCP)

Like:
VS 2005 most of the time.
.NET
Mobile devices.

Dont Like:
VS 2005 crashes.
ActiveSync.

Like:
.NET!
Vista
WinFx
Vs2005
Libraries
C#
Server stuff
Mobile stuff
Anything that says "New"
The new features in C# 3.0

Dont like such much, but dont hate:
Manipulating a UI, from code.

Hate:
BSOD
MSN
The fact that IE sets MSN as default homepage.

Likes

Channel 9
Eileen Brown
Steve Cook
Supporting the community
Web Services (and the WS-I)
Kevin Li (Our new Account Manager)
Object Thinking Book
Software Factories
The Architecture resources (long may it continue!)
Employing cool 9'ers
SQL Server 2005 (all is forgiven about SQL 2000 being left so long)
Visual Studio 2005 (VB.Net is very good now)
Office 2007 (I really like the new toolbars!)

Dislikes

Still way to USA-Centric ! Most of your customers Microsoft aren't American.
The new MSDN licencing model (I hate this with a passion!)
ActiveSync not being backward compatible
Cheesie image, lost it's coolness.
More RSS feeds !!! Some Microsoft sites still don't have them.
MSDN Search, Microsoft site Search, support site search ... still better off using Google!
On10 !!!! (RocketBoom is still the one for me!)


Not bothered about

Beating Google
Beating IBM
Beating Linux
DRM
Subscription Services


Must do's !

Get environmentally friendly now!

Talking about FAT32, anyone have idea whether Microsoft will make NTFS implementation public?

I think they're pushing embedded hardware (such as Digital cameras?) that " firmware writers who cares to NOT use FAT32 but not using any embedded version of Windows" to switch to ext3fs.

Love:
.NET
Avalon
C#
Channel 9
DirectX 10
Exchange 2007
Express Editions
General willingness to give really cool stuff to developers for free
LinQ
Longhorn Server
Lots of Bloggers with great info
MSDN Academic Alliance
Office 2007 in general
OneNote
PDC
PowerShell
TechEd
The fact that so much useful information, videos, etc. is available online for free soon after the conferences
Vista
Visual Studio 2005
Windows Media Player 11
WinFS
XNA

Hate:
That a lot of their websites still don't work properly in Firefox (I don't hate IE, but I'm not yet ready to switch back).
That even though they're capable of doing some really amazing stuff, they still manage to totally stuff up the simple things sometimes.
USA only - itis

I can't say I hate any of their products, but I do hate the fact that I so often get frustrated with one small part of one of their products that might otherwise be great.