spontaneous expressions of mediocrity
Microsoft will purchase Yahoo. It hasn’t happened yet, but the bid is now officially on the table, and it will happen. My previous experiences with unsolicited takeovers have shown me that they are usually best measured in terms of when—not if.
As a Mac person, I don’t hate Microsoft. They are nearly irrelevant to me. I don’t use any of their products outside of those required for testing website layouts, and playing video games.
As a web developer, and general internet fan, I completely detest Microsoft. Obviously, my biggest gripe with them, and to most of the other people in my industry, is Internet Explorer. The particulars of which, I shouldn’t have to mention again here.
But it goes deeper than that. In every other place they touch the web, they epitomize inferiority. Their .NET platform is a nightmare to work with. Their IIS web server, MSSQL server, and Windows OS are turds in comparison with most of the web platform options on the market. Even if this weren’t the case, .NET applications can only be developed on the Windows platform, which make them a non-starter for me.
I like the versatility of open source solutions. So does Yahoo. Many of their services are built on the LAMP platform that I very much love to work in, myself. Their successes with the platform have helped me make the case for using it on some very high profile projects.
I have to wonder if Microsoft will migrate Yahoo’s services to the .NET platform. They did it with Hotmail after all. And that was a huge nightmare. Taking away some of the most shining examples of how viable, relevant, and elegant open source tools can be for web services would be tragic. I like Flickr. I’d really hate to see them mess it up.
[Update] Corrected some rage grammar.
I saw Yahoo’s stock price skyrocket today on the news. But let’s be honest: Yahoo isn’t going to get any better as a website for the deal, and Microsoft’s benefit will be minimal save for the advertising revenue. I’m still putting my money on Google - I don’t think Microsoft and Yahoo can innovate their way past what Google is up to.
Whoa, I feel like I stepped into a blog entry from 10 years ago…
All of the applications you describe as turds are useful and easy to manipulate (I can’t speak for .NET, which I don’t use but I do know that it supports a number of coding languages and delivery styles).
I’m able to do everything I need to quickly and without incident using IIS, MSSQL and Vista. How could getting your job done efficiently ‘epitomize inferiority?’ I’m not suggesting there isn’t any room for improvement, but your rant is a little surprising to me. These products are more similar to their open source counterparts than they are different.
@dave One of the applications that I spoke of was Internet Explorer. Indeed, IE may be “useful” and “easy to manipulate”, but it is the bottom of the barrel in comparison to the competition, and a complete pain in the ass to work with.
My experience with the .NET framework, IIS, MSSQL and the Windows OS (in the web server environment) has lead me to the conclusion that the quality of Microsoft’s selection of web serving products is about on par with their web browsing products, except for the fact that they are anything but “easy to manipulate.”
There is a reason that IT shops generally favor the Microsoft platform, while web development shops generally don’t.
I run SQL Server, and I also run MySQL. SQL Server 2000 (8 year old product) is only *slightly* behind the current version of MySQL in a few ways. It is better than MySQL in many other ways. We skipped the upgrade to SQL Server 2005, because 2000 did everything we need, but we’ll upgrade to 2008 later this year.
I agree with Dave; saying that the Microsoft products epitomize inferiority is dead wrong. I feel the same way about the operating system and the web server as I do the database- they are solid products that more than hold their own in comparison to anything else on the market.