Microsoft - Love 'em or Hate 'em?
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If it all worked - how many of us would not have a job
Tim
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If it all worked - how many of us would not have a jobIf it all worked how many doctors, massuers, pharmacists, councilors, stress therapists & drug dealers would be out of work...
I wonder if Bill is getting any kick-backs from the medical profession for the work he's generating for them?
"It makes me want to run around the Server Room in a Super-Hero Costume"
"It makes me want to run around the Server Room in a Super-Hero Costume" -
I think we'd all still have jobs - just that we'd spend our time doing something productive rather than fixing random odd nonsense problems. BTW, I've just come upon yet another random odd nonsense problem that prompted me to post here again. Why on earth does a process run successfully for weeks (or months) then out of the blue decide to start crashing?
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
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I gotta love 'em!
Back in '89, I learned the concepts of RDBMS, data modeling, etc, but couldn't find a tool to practice on (there was no way the IS people would let me "practice" on the mainframe. I tried all sorts of products -- dBase, FoxPro, Paradox, R:Base, etc, but none really worked correctly in terms of how a relational database *should* work.
Then, almost 10 years ago, along came Microsoft Access - a revolutionary desktop product that changed everything. Here was a real relational database for about 100 bucks. Along with ODBC a few months later, it turned out to be a highly programmable product and a great way to get and clean up data from all kinds of sources.
I became an Access guru at work, and even made some money as an independent consultant.
In a few years, I also became a VB and SQL Server developer. So for some years now, I've been housing and feeding my family, paying for a Bar Mitzvah, college tuition, etc, etc, thanks to BillG and the good people at Microsoft.
Whenever I need technical assistance, my problem is that there is often *too much** free stuff available on Microsoft's website. Have you ever tried looking up something for free on Oracle's site? Ha!!
Most of Microsoft's competitors, including Netscape, suffered not so much from Microsoft's size or business practices, but from bad management and bad decisions on the part of themselves. For example OS/2 just had too many flaws and omissions to become a mass-market OS, and IBM never did the hard work of evangelizing 3rd-party developers, as Microsoft did. Netscape started hitting the skids when they repeatedly ignored AOL's pleas for a componentized browser while Microsoft did the hard work of rewriting Internet Explorer 3 from the ground up, so that in 1996, they had just what AOL needed.
With a perspective of 2 years, even the antitrust trail raises a number of new questions. What did the public actually gain? Are you or I as consumers or developers any better off as a result of the trial? Would the country have been better served had Justice Dept been looking into some of the incredibly damaging corporate shennanigans revealed over the past few months?
Seen in light of Enron and Ken Lay, WorldComm and Bernie Ebbers... even Stanley Tools and their patriotic plan to re-incorporate as a Bermuda company, Microsoft and BillG are starting to look pretty good.
I say let's make BillG's birthday (October 28th) a national holiday 🙂
Best regards to all,
SteveR
Stephen Rosenbach
Arnold, MD
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This is a fun topic to talk about but I'd have to say I feel removed from the love or hate. Like any tool or any product from a company, I like to approach it dispationately. We should strive to be like lions loooking at a herd of zebras; love or hate doesn't factor into the equation, they're food. At times I get irritated with the religious fervor groups get into about how superior their "thing" is compared to the other "thing," e.g. Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux or IE vs. Netscape or Sybase vs. Informix vs. Oracle. It seems that often times these people think their perspective is the only valid perspective, which to me is short-sighted and intellectually limiting. Ultimately, products need competitive products to become better and I like to have some knowledge of what those other products have to offer so I don't totally throw myself into Microsoft's camp or any other company's. I think all software has limitations and at times those limitations are frustrating, but the world won't stop spinning because of that, sometimes we have to suck it up and deal with the problems. If we weren't dealing with the limitations of SQL Server or Microsoft we'd probably be doing the same with another company's products. To paraphrase Ash from Army of Darkness, "Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun."
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At times I get irritated with the religious fervor groups get into about how superior their "thing" is compared to the other "thing," e.g. Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux or IE vs. Netscape or Sybase vs. Informix vs. Oracle.Preach on, brother. The right tool for the right job.
Some tools will work for just about every job. Some tools will only work for certain specialized jobs. Some tools are dependent on the craftsman. And since each craftsman is different, different tools perform with different results in different hands (now say that 5 times fast). What I utilize SQL Server for, another might leverage MySQL. Another might go with Oracle. And still another might head over to Exchange (don't laugh, I've met 'em). If the tool's right for you and you can get the job done, that should be enough, right? So what if another guy uses a different tool to accomplish the same thing.
K. Brian Kelley
http://www.truthsolutions.com/
Author: Start to Finish Guide to SQL Server Performance Monitoring
http://www.netimpress.com/shop/product.asp?ProductID=NI-SQL1
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley
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