Thoughts on Microsoft

If you read my posts on Diary of a Nerdy Guy, then you know that I'm a pretty big Apple buff, but I thought that I'd give my thoughts on Microsoft just so it doesn't come across that my attitude is "It's Apple or nothing." While I'm admittedly a bit of an Apple fanboy, I don't think it's competitors are bad.

I actually really like Microsoft, at least the Microsoft of 2011. I like WP7, Xbox, and hell, even the Zune. While all these products have problems, The biggest problems I have are with Microsoft's big products, namely Windows, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Office.

Office, as a suite of applications, I don't have many problems with, other than the endless editions of it. Currently in Office 2010, there are 3: Home & Student, Home & Business, and Professional. That's progress from Office 2003, which had Home & Student, Basic, Small Business, and Professional. Ideally, there should be two editions: Home and Professional, which tells the user immediately what version they need.

Internet Explorer has huge problems, as I am sure we are all aware. IE became a better product with the release of IE 9, but that's not saying much. IE still sucks. My advice for Microsoft would be to trash the current IE code entirely and rebuild it for version 10.

Windows has problems too. While I'll admit that Windows 7 is a pretty good OS, but it lacks the polish and consistency of Mac OS X. Viruses and blue screens are huge problems too. The prices of upgrading Windows are ridiculous. It costs about $150 to upgrade with every new major release of Windows, versus $30 for Mac OS X. Upgrading Windows should be considerably cheaper than it currently is, $150 is more of the price you'd pay for a disc with the full OS, not for an upgrade.

Even with all this negativity towards the above products, I actually really like them. Even IE. As a standards-compliant browser it's complete crap, but it does have good ideas. Pinning websites to the taskbar to open up in a color matching browser is a really cool concept. In the future, I think Microsoft will really start to introduce new concepts and great products. Windows 8 looks extremely promising, but only time will tell.