You know, that's one of the absolute best ways to spot an argument with nothing solid to support it: making fun of the other viewpoint in an attempt to distract the audience from an actual rational evaluation of its claims. "No, that idea's too silly to take seriously, so don't waste your time bothering. (I sure hope they buy it...)" It plays on the lower aspects of human nature and, unfortunately, is successful far too often. Shame on you, Emperor Kaworu. If you have some real clothes, let's see them.
Wait a second. If someone writes a program that works just fine under the operating system it's written for, but then doesn't work on the updated version of that system, it's his fault? His fault for what? Failing to properly anticipate and plan for future changes to the operating system? I'm sorry, but that just doesn't make any sense. Assuming something works in the first place, the blame for breaking backwards compatibility lies entirely on the shoulders of the creators of the new system.
Microsoft broke Hotmail when they acquired it. I left after it started sending 30+ copies of all my mails to people. Only a few months after that, a friend of mine's Hotmail account got hacked. (This actually ended up happening to her 3 times, once by some random script kiddie and twice by a jealous ex-boyfriend whose mom worked at Microsoft.) She tried to reset her password and ended up unable to access her account at all, so she asked me to take a look at it. You know what I found? The new password it assigned to her wasn't an a valid password under MSN Hotmail's password policy, so it was being rejected even before it was checked to see if it was actually the password to her account. This is the sort of left-hand-doesn't-know-what-the-right-hand-is-doing idiocy we can expect from Microsoft.
And Hotmail still has serious problems. Ever try to use it under OSX? And its spam filter regularly throws away legitimate mail, especially registration emails from small communities. It's gotten so bad that some forums won't accept Hotmail addresses anymore. And it takes forever to load anything when I go in there, even on a broadband connection. (I still use the Hotmail account for a few minor things.) Yahoo!Mail, even the feature-rich Yahoo!Mail Beta, pulls things up almost as fast as I can click on them. I don't want to see that ruined.
I don't have any real clothes, instead I wear concepts. at the moment, my tshirt is an idea, my trousers are but a mere notion. My socks... oh boy my socks are made of visions and dreams. And also I'm not making fun of you, I realy believe that Microsoft are targeting you.
There's a thing with progression, where if things get better and improve that requires serious reworking of the inards. This will reach the point where backwards compatability is impossible for some things. Yet most others work. Microsoft haven't said "We don't want non-vista programs to work". In this day and age of constant consumer support in IT fields, companies should be willing to provide patches and updates to enable their programs to work. Again, many do, and because of the very nature of software this is something we should expect, and companies should readily provide.
I've used Hotmail since 2000 and the only "problems" I have encountered are more to do with either me forgetting my password or silly amounts of spam comming from the fact that I signed up for dodgy sites. Hotmail is kinda fast (near instant load) and I have no troubles with reliability.
So yeah I am judging Microsoft based on my experiences with them. I honestly couldn't care less about how over people find their services because it doesn't really affect me. If I'd have had troubles with them then I'd be annoyed (though not jumping on the anti-microsoft bandwagon). But Genuinely they've got better products than yahoo, and hotmail is in my experience so much better. Microsoft are only known for buggy programs by the kind of people who spend 50 hours a day on their overclocked PC using enough power to send Ireland into space (and so are likely to recieve bugs due to how much they use it). To most people who don't spend their lives reading the articles on slashdot or whtever, things like this are meaningless, and we will see very little change. the guys behind Microsoft's business practice aren't idiots. They know that if they turn yahoo into "MICROSOFT PRESENTS yahoo email AN MSN PRODUCTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY BILL GATES", then they will loose people over to google, especially with how "stable" the current market is.
masonwheeler... this IS what most companies do when they can afford it. In almost every field, every big company will do what it can to try and get the highest share. Like half of all entertainment in America is owned by like 2 companies because they have brought everything and are still buying shit out. EA Games is buying tonnes of game studios so it can have the monopoly, GAME brought Gamestation last year meaning they own all major gameshops in England. This has both positive and negative effects, it causes competition to work harder, so then they have to work harder to equal than beat the competition, and when they get so big, crap like "Micro$oft" happens where people suddenly turn against them and deliberately shop at alternatives, thereby stimulating them and making a competition which can't be brought out as easily. They are breaking anti-trust laws, but they aren't the only company. Companies break laws all the time like really badly, yet it rarely gets any media attention. Microsoft are by no means the exception everybody seems to think they are.
Edit: Also please call me by my full title, The great honourable Emperor Kaworu of the Shore
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