I struggle to understand why people think MS deserves enterprise trust & goodwill.
How many of these technologies still function on Windows 10? As far as I know many of their abandoned platforms are still fully functional. Even in Windows 10 you can still install 16-bit apps. They've always been dedicated to compatibility... try running a few year old app on a modern smartphone and you'll see the difference.
what? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/896458/64-bit-versi...
I have it installed on an old 2006 MacBook, so Microsoft was still providing updates for a 12 year old machine... one that Apple itself abandoned after just 6 years. It's one of my favorite examples of Microsoft's longer support for old hardware.
And for what it's worth, after 12 years and 3 Mac purchases, I've switched & just bought a PC again.
I considered the Surface Book 2, which has an excellent keyboard & trackpad, but the SSD can't be replaced by the user & tops out at 1TB. I was worried about the Surface Book hinge being fragile in my backpack while travelling & commuting.
My 2006, 2007 and even my 2000 Pismo G3 Macs all still work well. I used to love Apple reliability & recommended the Apple Store to everyone, I was that guy who queued for a day-one iPhone 4. But my mid-2012 MacBook Pro (bought in 2015) has been a lemon, the data flex cable keeps failing every few months, causing it to corrupt data & eventually lose the boot drive. (SuperDuper! has been a lifesaver.) Apple have replaced the cable 5 times now, each time with a week of downtime, but the replacement cables all have the same known defect & I just can't trust the machine anymore.
I'm not much of a Linux user, but I've been trying elementary OS 0.4.1 Loki via Parallels and like it a lot. Unfortunately elementary OS 5 Juno has been buggy for me (random black screens requiring a reboot), so I'm stuck on Loki for now.
I was tempted to put elementary OS on my 32-bit 2006 MacBook (the one that currently has Windows 10), but there isn't a 32-bit version of elementary OS anymore.
I'm pretty pleased with the X1E: it's not quite MBP-level thin, but it's still a great balance of power and portability. NotebookCheck has a review that's worth checking out.
elementary OS feels fast, familiar, and refined. It's not quite as fleshed out as other distros like Mint (or macOS itself, for that matter), but it's getting better with each release.
The 4K HiDPI screen on the X1E is vibrant. My biggest concern was that the HiDPI scaling on Linux wouldn't be up to snuff, but I've been pleasantly surprised. The scaling for GTK apps was perfect right out of the box. There were some extra steps to get Qt apps to scale properly and inherit the GTK theme, but they look great now. Wine and Steam basically just required checking a box to get the scaling to work.
Happy to answer any specific questions you have.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on battery life doing anything useful (not watching movies) with your new one. I'm debating an X1 Carbon, HP Spectre, or XPS 13 to upgrade to in the next few months.
I'm more worried about screen issues. I got the premium HDR Dolby Vision screen, and I love the 500 nits & the wide color gamut is stunning & very OLED-like. But the calibration is off, the screen has a red-tint that hurts my eyes and makes the rest of the world look sickly green when I look away from the screen. I fear I'll have to buy an X-Rite and make my own calibration. It isn't like my Dell monitor, which came individually calibrated & with a printout of the calibration.
Also, this X1 Yoga (or Windows?) does lots of dynamic screen dimming, which was messing with Sublime Text in Monokai (dark) theme. It would dim the screen so much that white text would become mid-grey & it was unreadable & low contrast. I was able to turn that setting off, but doing so has reduced battery life to the numbers you see above.
If having a large / replaceable SSD wasn't a priority (and battery was more of a priority), I think I would very seriously consider the Surface Book 2. But hopefully I'll like the X1 Yoga more as I get used to it.
What's the cost/benefit of that? How much would it cost to build it and how much could they make?
You can theoretically do ANYTHING... but a business exists to make money...
Why does Microsoft support 16bit? because - without a doubt - someone is paying them for that "extra" support.
As I said... there are many reasons - and a company exists to make money.
If they decide not to do something that doesn't make them money? It's not a hard reason to see why...
Yes I've seen SharePoints and Skydrives and OneDrives and Yammers but none of them are critical the way Office and Outlook are
Oh, and Office 365 is a blessing. I never thought I'd actually like SaaS anything from Microsoft but it works really well Office. It's also much easier than selling a $6000+ purchase req for 15-20 new office licenses. Especially when the boss doesn't see why office 2003 is obsolete in 2011 if it "still works fine for me". ~$240 a month was an easy sell with "free" exchange email and upgrades. Yea small shops are fun to work at.
I don't like MS (so am not trying to defend them from a partisan PoV) but I believe most of their revenues still come from enterprise, and I think enterprise customers don't encounter the same level of problems.
Most of their customers see that and wanna follow the same path.
In the MS land, I get to completely rewrite my app, because I need the new hotness, which doesn't work with the old API.
E.g. there are still people writing WinForms and even MFC apps, because it works for them, and they don't need anything flashy. And that is a fully supported scenario - not just running the old stuff on new platforms, but even writing new code that uses the old frameworks in the latest-and-greatest Visual Studio.
I spent a few days setting everything up and testing it. I flipped the switch and...silence. No incoming email for a few hours in the middle of a Friday night. CEO calls me at 2am asking why our prospective Hong Kong client's emails are bouncing back. Ooops...flip the DNS back to the old email server.
Call tech support. It's an Indian call center reading the tech support web site. After 20 minutes they escalate.
Wait 24 hours. "We're looking into it." Wait another 24 hours. "We've found the problem and are fixing it." Wait 48 hours.
"There is weird edge case bug with the code that manages the online signups. This affects you and a few dozen other SMBs. Since you are an SMB you are dealing with a third party customer service company. We cannot contact the division that has authorization to fix this part of the codebase. We have tried speaking to our Microsoft contacts but they are not allowed to contact the engineering team behind their product. Speaking from experience, this will only be fixed if someone with 10k seats has the same issue. You should close your account now. Sorry."
Never again.
https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/273493-office-365-adm...
I frequently read worse on HN about Google, where even reaching tech support can be ‘challenging”, and Apple, where app reviews report issues that developers can’t make heads or tails of.
> I frequently read worse on HN
Right, that's why it's funny. The bar is very low here, and that's why you can count it as not being completely broken.
The intent of customer services is to retain a customer in the event of problems. "You should close your account" is therefore broken customer service.
I've never been able to figure out how MS does that, as everything seems to run through an omnipresent offshored L1 support contract. (Aka the "Here's a link to the documentation!" folks)
Yes, totally. When I transferred to work on GCP, I was pleasantly surprised at how much eng/product cares about users/developers wants, needs, and feedback.
Also: Partner companies. They have more direct access too.
20% have been fabulous, so there's that. I'm also still very fond of GCP as I don't rely on support to operate my service.
However, I have also been a paid Adwords user and it is unbelievably difficult to reach a live support person with AdWords. I finally tracked down the contact page (this is years ago fwiw) and it was so intentionally buried it became quite clear to me that Google was like the anti-Apple regarding technical support.
It would not surprise if they still operate the same way. Part of the problem is that Google is a company which is "too good and too smart" for the mortal masses which comprise their user base.
In GCP, if a product is GA, deprecation got announced ahead of time and customers got notified and workarounds generally there.
Enterprise products and consumer products are very different and subject to different terms. Please do not consider them as the same thing. (I really think that Google should name Google Cloud something else under Alphabet.)
Maybe not forever, but some things do live for a very long time. Amazon SimpleDB has been deprecated for over 5 years and Amazon works hard to discourage people from using it in any new applications... but it's still available and will continue to be available for the foreseeable future.
Yes, you are strongly discouraged from using some services (simple db) by them hiding it. Yes, new accounts can't use certain services (ec2 classic). Yes, some old features cost more than newer better features (rrs s3).
But I wasn't able to point to any AWS service that had been shut down.
Also, to be fair, I don't know of any Google Cloud Service that has been shut down (as opposed to consumer facing Google services), but haven't been paying as much attention to that service.
It's still the nicest and most productive way to build GUI apps I've seen. Maybe not the prettiest, but it just works.
actually, I'm wondering at current moment, what's the choice of framework / OS to make a productive GUI?
or just fire those claimed-designer guy (probally your boss) let engineer do there job?
QT looks interesting, if I ever had to care about supporting Linux, but that's not my world.
(.....And of course get cursed by your manager and boss)
They are also bringing WinForms and WPF forward to work on .NET Core 3.0; and its still supported https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2018/10/04/update-on...
Now watch as i consider them the same thing.
Personal anecdote: I had some basic question about their usage policy/pricing for one of their api's that was unclear in the docs. To get it answered by a real person was basically impossible. Our company does have a support contract, but only the person who controls the account is able to contact them. So to answer my simple question about making sure our usage was in-line with policy I'd have to go bug the bosses boss to ask them to forward my question to support and play the telephone game back and forth trying to interpret the answers.
Or try to contact sales since that's the only real person I could reach and have them answer my carefully and precisely worded question with a sales pitch.
Though, fwiw, we have been continuing to move stuff to gcp/gke despite my annoyances, and I do generally hold a positive view of the product.
It is a pain to try to compare stuff though because there aren't good standards for "cloud revenue." According to [1] IBM generated $18.5B over 12 months in cloud revenue. While Forbes[2] talks about $6.1B and $6.9B in quarterly cloud revenue of Amazon and Microsoft (a $24 - $28B annual run rate), and this from Forbes[3] in April of this year that has them at $44B(Amazon), $19B (Microsoft), and $17B (Google). Which would make Google #4 if IBM's numbers hold up under scrutiny.
I try to keep an eye on these numbers to maintain a sense of the shifting landscape, and it doesn't seem like Google has yet found the right combination of goods and services to really be solid in this space yet.
[1] https://www.lightreading.com/enterprise-cloud/infrastructure...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/08/03/1-microsof...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2018/04/30/cloud-r...
IBM is very vague, and I would guess that they are recharacterizing traditional software sales as private cloud by giving away cloud management components.
Google historically had a strange attitude towards enterprise sales and truely and royaly screwed over their search appliance customers for reasons that baffle the mind. They seem to investing, and hopefully don’t repeat those mistakes.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2018-Q4...
Got context? Are you referring to the (still ongoing!) deprecation of hardware search appliances as announced in 2016?
Incredibly stupid move.
I honestly cannot imagine the words ‘sales’ and ‘no suit’ together in a sentence anywhere in the world, much less Japan.
I’m not even Japanese and I think by now I’d consider it more or less an insult.
Amazon is so much better in my experience when it comes to supporting their platform.
[0] http://geoawesomeness.com/developers-up-in-arms-over-google-...
With Maps, there's suddenly a new price and you have no options.
With our scaled up SCCM environment, SQL alone increased licensing cost by a very significant factor, as you need to license SQL Enterprise when you exceed the core limits of the gratis SQL Standard license.
> Google Maps Platform is a part of Google Cloud, but not a part of Google Cloud Platform
I have never felt that I have been confused by something so justifiably.
The basic way to tell if something is part of GCP or another Google product that some marketing whiz managed to have "cloud" tacked onto the name is whether or not you need a GCP project to work with it.
Not true, as far as I know. Many (if not all) Google APIs require a GCP project for access via API key, service account credential, or mobile application.
I'll defend many things about the technical quality of GCP and its appropriateness as a viable choice in many cases, but not Google's branding, external PR, or external perception management.
They've always been bad in those areas and that pattern continues.
(Relevant disclosure I've said in other comments: I used to work for Google, including GCP, ending in 2015. I've never worked for Google PR/comms/marketing and I don't work or speak for Google now.)
Your first example: App Engine price hike happened when App Engine departed preview, not after the service had already been intended for mission-critical production use.
Your second example: what they're now calling Google Maps Platform has never been part of Google Cloud Platform, is only relatively recently in a nearby part of the org chart & branding structure (aka Google Cloud which also includes Chrome and Android and G Suite), and has never been subjected to the Google Cloud Platform Deprecation Policy.
Yes, this is a communication failure on Google's part and I'm not blaming the Internet for the common misimpression. But Google's substantive actions in these price changes can be distinguished from how they approach generally available and policy-covered services within GCP, and customers can plan on that basis. (Similarly with G Suite - one should plan differently for core G suite services covered by the G Suite terms and SLA, as compared to other additional Google services that one might use with G Suite.)
But trust in the stability of products can't be siloed that easily.
I think we're mostly or entirely agreeing?
They can make statements about which things have promises and which don't, but it still causes worry until there's a really good track record.
To be clear I'm not pretending that they've shut down as few things as Amazon (looking at you SimpleDB), but within the product area and lifecycle categories I indicated, they've stayed within what is perfectly viable for lots of companies.
Indeed! Just ~~~last month~~~ 62 months ago they shut down Reader.
(I see that you're hedging with the reference to Maps. But I'd love if this time, we wouldn't make a single event a 10-year talking point)
If Google had killed Gmail we would still have Yahoo mail and Hotmail and what not. We would bitch and moan but life would go on. Reader was... different.
"Oops, the algorithm decided to wipe out your business. No, you can't talk to a human. No, you can't appeal it and there's no review, and we can't tell you why, because the algorithm said so" is something Google has gotten away with for years with many of their services. But it's going to wreck them as they keep moving into spaces where people expect a level of support commensurate with the amount of money they're paying. Even if there is real support available, the reputation for a horrible lack of it is so entrenched I don't see how they'll overcome it.
Their support for small customers could use some improving but their enterprise support is nothing like you describe.
Even if there is real support available, the reputation for a horrible lack of it is so entrenched I don't see how they'll overcome it.