Dell's brand new "breaking of the ranks" with the Vostro product line:

You can buy Windows XP (Home or Professional), with no price penalty relative to Vista. A big firm has finally pointed out the Emperor's lack of clothes....

We all KNOW Vista is sorta "ME-II". But just on Tuesday, a big OEM actually had the guts to put their business on a more sensible track, and offer what most people really want-- a new computer with XP, not Vista. Very "unlucky" for Microsoft, that's for sure !!!

Ok, I will add to the list;

1. The day the Blaster worm hit. Even the US government put pressure on MS at that point to clean up their security act. The result was XP2 for XP, which delayed the Longhorn project, as coders were moved. The Blaster worm work up a lot of Windows users to the fact that Windows just was not secure.

2. The day that Bill Gates decided to become the partners of Hollywood media companies.the RIAA, and fully embrace DRM in the OS. This happened about two months before, the decision to scap the Longhorn code based on XP, and move to 2003 code renamed as Vista, and have to rewrite 60% of the code. Which really only gave them 14 months to come up with an OS, as you now see the result, lacking for most of us.

3. The Xbox360, a ripoff that MS should be paying for until the end of time.

4. The idea behind the Zune and DRM. MS should have learned here that users do not want DRM. But instead they push it on users in Vista, that have no idea what there are getting.

5. MS Vista OS itself. Number one problem is its incompatible with so many previous 3rd party software. I will no list MS Bob, because while it was a failure, at least it worked better than Vista!

6. Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition, and you know why. But there is one important lession to learn here, MS just moved on and never fixed the problems with it. So all those folks that say, "MS will fix Vista," I say, maybe, but maybe not. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, MS will fix some of the problems.

7. Still cannot forgive MS for the very bad MS Dos 4

8. The day they invented Active X.

9. Internet Exploder

10. Outlook Express, the 2nd biggest viral magnet of all time, only behind IE.
-------------------------------------------------

The MS Operating Systems I sort of liked;
MSDOS 5 and 6x, Win3.11, 95B, NT4, 98SE, 2000, XP.

6.

Why is anybody picking on poor Bob?

MS Bob was a great idea whose time hadn't come yet - but its spirit survives in Clippy ;-)

Believe it or not, you can even install&use Bob under Vista...

• Vertical Computer Systems, Inc. Files Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against Microsoft Corporation
PR Newswire (Fri, Apr 20)

Although a settlement and licensing agreements will be on the Luckiest list, making his a mood-point

Yes, allowing executable, root access, code in documents ranks among the dumbest ideas of the 20th century. If Microsoft is ever held liable for the grief and loss of profit caused by this boner, they'd be bankrupt in 60 seconds.

VB -- the millions of horrible VB applications written for use in corporate IT systems are a stain on the human race.

Vista WORKS...all of my old software runs...I have all of the drivers I need and it is stable on both my laptop and main PC. I wish people would get off it "doesn't work" bandwagon.

If I added anything to the list, I would say NT4. While it did evolve into a great O/S, the blue screens of death I got it NT4 were one too many.

Vera,
I hope you did not think I was blasting MS BOB too much by mentioning it in the same paragraph as Vista. But since you pointed out that MS Bob will run on Vista, this could be a way for MS to save Vista, by giving it a vastly improved user interface. One that could actually run faster, and perhaps even be somewhat intuitive. Hey, maybe MS Bob could even restore the hidden settings in Vista that users are complaining about.

Anyway, its nice to now that MS Bob is compatiable with Vista, at least there is one program out there that is.

And Clippy, the trusted, faithful, loyal and friendly, best friend of man, its nice to know he still lives. Clippy should be given a greater role in MS software products. People trust man's best friend, and as such, Clippy could help restore some of M$ tarnished reputation. Although I could see why they did not use Clippy as mascot during the Vista installation. As Vista would have ended up being called a "dog of an operating system." Whoops, too late.

first off all your list should say microsoft mistakes, I wouldn't call it luck or being unlucky as they were choices, decisions not things that actually happened. example would be the government broke microsoft up and yet they did not get broken up now that is lucky. But unlucky for us consumers.
Most unlucky moments for microsoft on my list.

1. Linus came up with linux, which is always nipping at microsofts heels and only needs a turn of luck to shut microsoft down in a matter of a few years. Free os, looks and acts like windows, only thing missing is gaming support, exposing to potential users and oem adoption.
2. Apple came out with the ipod, which has now allowed apple to gain a new foothold in computer and dominate the media player market, now the phone market as well not to mention music, movies and podcasts with itunes.
3. Allowing a toddler company to stomp all over them in the online market for search, advertising and online services, microsoft can't control this no matter how much code and money even tv advertising they throw at it.
4. Not coming up with any profitable products or divisions other then windows and office that actually makes money.
5. The zune
6. Having a code base so large and unsecure it takes years to write a new os, touting its so secure, and yet patch tuesday is no different than with xp.
7. Thanks to the governments "punishments" microsoft can no longer dictate to oem's what products and services can be on the computers they sell.
8. Thanks to governments "punishments" microsoft can no longer allow the installed "integrated" applications in their os completely override any third party apps you wish to install and use in xp. Remember xp pre sp1? Default was everything microsoft with no options to make something else default.

9. Dell now offering linux as an option and making pc's a lot cheaper, and yes it looks just like windows, think an average user who just browses the net and does some word processing is going to notice??

10. Having such a horrible history of screwing customers, partners and being so greedy they find themselves the enemy of the industry. Programmers, esp for vista, third party app broken, Drivers a nightmare. Microsoft doesn't work for the industry the industry works for microsoft and that will be their most unlucky moment, the day the industry says we don't need you anymore.

Most lucky moments.
1. Microsoft has the no 1 used os in the world.
2. Microsoft has not gone bankrupt.
3. Microsoft did not get broken up.
4. Microsoft can make mistakes all the time and never suffers thanks to their cash cow and strnagle hold on the computer os market.
5.

"Unlucky"?

You ought to look up the meaning of that word. Luck has absolutely nothing to do with any of those acts over which MSFT had pretty much complete control. Try incompetence, ineptitude or plain stupidity, among others.

With respect to 7: the $150 mil invested in Apple. That hardly was a factor in Apple's recent success. They have a huge ($5 bil) cash war chest. That was nothing more then a gesture to show MSs commitment to the platorm. Apple didn't actually need the $$$.... And Apple's viability in the market helps MS. A stronger Apple belies the perception of MS as a monopoly.

#1 OF ALL-TIME!! How laughable is Microsofts defense?
http://ragingbull.quote.com/mboard/boards.cgi?board=VCSY&read=190232

(this is just a clip)
I can certainly see the VCSY IP lawyers licking their lips and planning on a response to the 'defense' as presented by MSFT. The VCSY IP Lawyers will have a field day tearing up their accusations and legalese in that weak MSFT defense. The VCSY IP lawyers were probably prepared for this 'claim' of 'defense' of MSFT but I also think they were ready for a much harder 'defense' by MSFT so they must be one HAPPY group of IP Lawyers, ready to jump all over MSFT for this weak attempt to explain why they are using the 'siteflash' patent in almost ALL of their products and also 'INDUCED' OTHERS to commit the illegal activity of INFRINGEMENT

1. Linux always free.
2. Zune is ant , iPod & iPhone is Giant.
3. Open Office is free
4. Dell choose Ubuntu
5. Anti Trust case
6. Steve Jobs return to Apple
7. Google was born
8. Google is growing up
9. Google is next Microsoft
10. Google kill Microsoft

MS DOS 4.0

I have to laugh every time people mention OpenOffice, and claim its superiority because it is free.

OO actually is a prime example of the old rule, "you get what you pay for."

to eidylon :

I have to laugh every time people mention MS Orifice, and claim its superiority because it is cost so much and won't work with anything else.

M$ Office actually is a prime example of the old rule, "theres one born every minute."

-------------------------------------------------

Been using OpenOffice for 2 years now, and will never use a M$ Office product. What for? It does everything I need, and without M$ spying on me.

to chips...

I used OO for a while, and had no luck with it. It was awkward to use, hard to find things, and had compatibility problems with documents.
Not to mention that it felt like i had just stepped into the Windows 3.11 world.

I definitely DON'T say MSO is better because it costs money, it is _insanely_ expensive (which is why i love my free launch-event copy!) ... that is far and away my biggest gripe with MS is their pricing - they could SO easily price it affordably given their sales volume. Them and Adobe both, price-gouge like nobody's business!

For me, superiority is in *ease-of-use*, efficiency getting things done, some look-and-feel, and *compatibility*. ALL of which OO (and also StarOffice) vastly lacked.

To eidylon
I respectively disagree with everything you said, with the exception of MS Office being "it is _insanely_ expensive." But we are both entitled to our opinions.

Most of us will never get a "free launch-event copy," as you have to be some kind of "partner, employee, blogger, and diehard MS fan," to attend those functions. Still, I agree with you, free is nice, which is why I use products like OpenOffice. It works very well for me. Just don't see any reason to "buy" M$ Office and feed the 900 pound gorillia, when there are so many other things I could wisely spend my money on.

There is one feature that M$ Office has that I have not found in OpenOffice, KOffice, or Abiword, that feature is spyware. Yes, Bill has spyware built in Office to "phone home." A lot of people think MS Office is great because its so insanely expensive. After all, a lot of people pirated it. I refuse to use pirated software. But even if M$ Office was completely free, I would still use OpenOffice or one of the other open source solutions. Just don't like Bill watching over my shoulder.

To eidylon:

I first used an MS word processor as Word for Windows 2.0. It was almost great. Styles were almost great, and inheritance was a nice touch. But if you clicked some attribute in a style, you could never unclick it and have it un-inherited. Word 2.0a didn't fix that, Word 2.0b didn't fix that, and Word 2.0c didn't fix that. Word 6.0 fixed that fine, but it broke tables. And then I read some quote from Gates about how Microsoft "doesn't fix bugs" (well, at least he was once honest about not giving a flying darn about product quality).

I stuck with LaTeX, Emacs, and Ghostview (for 100% crash-proof operation and 100% perfect print preview, though arguably a bit arcane for most). I watched folks struggle with MS Word/Office, trying to get their tables of contents un-blue and forgetting what the heck they were actually writing about in the first place.

I tried to use OOo 1.X for real work and hated it. But my daughter, a fashion design major, great writer, and great artist, found that OOo handled the small memos and letters she needed, and never crashed when printing (from her Toshiba/XP laptop), while MS Office often crashed when printing.

I once again tried OOo when it reached 2.1, and this time real work sprang forth with ease. It does styles the way Word 2.0 promised but never quite delivered. It crashed on me once, but then recovered the previous document version perfectly and I went on working without any data loss at all. Most people don't use styles and prefer direct mark-up (bold, italics, font sizes, and tabs directly applied to text), and on those types, OOo's style prowess is lost. But for style purists, OOo is light-years past MS Office's word processor. (Though nothing can touch the typeset artistry of LaTeX, but then again that is also lost on most people.)

OOo 2.X Writer is the only WYSIWYG word processor that lets me concentrate most on what I am writing and least on how to recover from the program's missteps.
This is not, of course, a scientific survey and, like the editor wars, is rife with wildly contradicting and yet perfectly valid opinions. Hey, with Emacs and makefiles, I can program circles around all of the people who swear by MS Visual Studio. To each his own, but... OOo definitely does NOT fall into the "it's free and you get what you pay for" category. For some of us, it's smoother, most reliable, cleaner, and vastly nicer to use that any other word processor at any price.

Chips:
Yah, no, i definitely do not give MSO any due because of it's cost. If it were solely a matter of cost, i would toss it tomorrow no doubt. The cost is insane. As for having to be a fanboy or partner to get a launch-event copy, that's not true either... it's just a matter of watching for the event and signing up. AND - the event itself is free too. I neither work for nor are affiliated with MS. (not sure i would want to either, i like my free time).
-
Brian:
You say OO has made great strides with v.2; i have to admit i know nothing about that... the last i tried it WAS with v.1 which you said you hated. That was my same experience, and it kinda turned me off to bothering with it again.
-
Looking at the site just now, it does definitely LOOK better than it did. Though looking through the specs, i remember one other major reason i dislike it, is it's compilation against Java. I have just -never- found a Java program i could get along with, my experience has always been they are slow, clunky and cludgy. Most of them I've ever had to use don't even support basic things like the mouse scroll wheel (a handful didnt even support the PgUp/PgDn buttons).
Even Java apps from the biggest corporations, e.g. ORACLE, absolutely suck; and little tools and utils I've used in Java didn't do any more to impress me, so i kinda have an aversion to Java software... which maybe is unfair, but in 11 years as an IT pro, I've yet to meet a Java app that can convince me otherwise.
-
I think like people've said above though, OO probably is fine for someone who isn't doing heavy work, ... but the work i do we do custom software and integrations for the general public from small local companies to ivy league schools and government labs, and because of this i need to have absolutely the *highest* level of compatibility possible. So it just makes sense for me to live in the majority world.
Other than one small PHP site, we've yet to meet a client who isn't MS-based. So that's the world i live and play in.
-
To echo chris' remarks, to each his own - whether be according to preferences or needs. :)

To eidylon;
Thanks for letting us know that its just a matter of watching for the event and signing up. AND - the event itself is free too. Where you would watch for the event online would be nice also, as I am sure there are some who would like to know,

Last recent distro I got with Linux, OpenOffice is up to 2.21, so its probably even later version by now. You might be impressed with it. Heck, even KOffice does enough for me, as I really don't need M$ Office compatibility.

The cost of M$ Office is far too much for me, especially when there are very good free alternatives out there. Also, as I mentioned, Bill likes to spy on his users. MS products in general have a negative connotation for me now, and I avoid them like the plaque, even MSN/windows live. I refuse to use pirated software, as well. Not implying that you do, as you stated where you got yours. But I do believe that they are a lot of people out there who are using pirated MS software, and are going to be in trouble as MS tightens up, especially should MS start to lose market share on the desktop. Not that MS has not caused this problem in itself by pricing its software way beyond reasonable value, actual worth, and what the average user can afford.

Chips:
Yah, i was SERiously surprised that the events are free... i guess they figure if you are giving up a day, then that's cost enough.
It's really just a matter of watching say microsoft.com, the office website, msdn website, or other related sites as launch dates near.
This was my first time, and i found it via a banner ad on codeproject.com.
I would guess that WHAT you get free is a Q. for example, this last launch was Office2007/Vista/Exchange2007, ... they gave out free copies of Office 2007 Pro, but not Vista or Exchange.
The next launch i know of coming up in supposed to be in February, which will be more limited in it's target audience, as it is VStudio2008/Server2008/SqlServer2008, so it is more specific to IT types.
Really it's just keeping eyes/ears open;

Yah, maybe i'll play with v.2, and see... at least give it it's "day in court" ;) . It can be fun to play if for nothing other than education... i'm still waiting for the day when i can stick OSX on my PC, just to play around. Though i think that will be a LOOOOONG wait! LOL

eidylon;
Well, you know I won't be hanging around micro$oft.com, LOL. Hey, but others who read your post might like that. And spending a day listening to MS speakers at a rally, just the thought of it makes me a little nauseas. But thats just me.

As far as installing an Mac x86 OS X on your PC, its been done. But not legally, as far as I know, and you have to have the right hardware and newer stuff as well. Which all would stop me. Any way, OS X is basically a BSD Unix variant based on the Darwin/BSD kernel. Which means it really quite similar to the Linux kernel. The programs loaded on top is where the main difference is and of course the licensing and cost.

chips;
yah, i know OSX is now built on some unix/linux flavor... i'd like OSX someday though, just cuz every now and then we get some client "Oh, such and such doesnt look right on my mac."
And i'm NOT about to go spend 3 grand on Apple hardware just to test for them. LOL .

as for listening to the MSies, there actually was some seriously cool stuff... network administration, deployment, security ... cool beans! If it's your field. ;)

Anyone seen the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" ??
What an eye opener !!
Steve Jobs is portrayed as a "right royal" bastard and as for Bill Gates he did the same things as Jobs did on a business level, but not on a personal one.
The other thing that stood out to me was the stupidity of IBM (on microsoft's side) and the ultimate stupidity of XEROX as far as letting Jobs have their GUI for free.
Sure Gates copied that GUI, but boy he made it visibily different and greatly improved (my opinion).
At the end of the movie they showed Bill Gates looking down on Steve Jobs and quoting that he was the worlds richest man !
Which means that Gates did things in a much better way than Jobs did.
Lastly I like the expression that was said by "Gates" in the movie "Keep your friends close ... and your enemies even closer".
He (Gates) did this and it worked !!

Nerds and Geeks and Gomers, OH MY!

Everyone seems surprised when geeks continue to act like geeks. Microsoft's most unlucky moment was when its founder Bill Gates decided to steal and decompile PCDos, regurgitate it and then sell it. (Kind of sounds familiar don't it?) Gates was and is a geek par extraordinaire and still acts like the school kid who got his lunch money stolen and now is extracting his protracted revenge. When a geek gets power, any power, they tend to hire to their weaknesses, (hiring more geeks just like themselves instead of normal humans who can operate within their environment in a functional way, have people skills and can be trusted), expect those they hire to emulate an ever more geeky culture and then use that critical mass of a social skill wasteland from which to attempt to convince the rest of the world that they are "ok" and the world is at fault for their inability to control their world with the strangle hold they crave. A geek is a geek and an entire company and industry full of them is terrifying to those of us in the industry that are good at what we do and also HAVE SOCIAL SKILLS AND A BALANCED LIFE. I interviewed recently for a support job at Dell, and I was horrified at the corporate culture that they hired to. The experience of trying to interact with a room full of self aggrandizing geeks made me feel truly "icky", (sorry the only word that fit). That culture is the root of the problems at Dell I think, and can be easily extrapolated onto the continuing disfunction at Microsoft and other tech companies as well.

Moving tech support to India! Unlucky or just plain dumb? Having just gone through 4 hours of "Microsoft Tech Support Hell" to get Word 2007 to actually save files, I can personally testify that the decision to move tech support to India was one of the dumbest corporate decisions Microsoft executives ever made -- and one of the unluckiest things Microsoft has ever done to its customers. Suffice it to say that these guys never fixed Word 2007 and attempted to make changes to my computer that I would not allow (like uninstall FireFox 2 and IE 7 -- come on guys). The cause turned out to be that my user account somehow had been corrupted (before they got their remote hands on my computer). But they worked off scripts that had them doing the same thing time and time again. They had no understanding of how Word or Windows XP works.

Frankly, by the time they were done I was ready to move to Linux.

Bad things MS did:

Pushing Basic and C instead of Pascal. Ignoring decades of experience with engineering.

some people say vista works and it might work for them, but I have had a horrible expierience with vista. An Os should not crash every time i try to update it from microsoft. And people might say i installed it wrong, but i bought an hp iq770 and vista i guess just did not like the touchscreen. From my whole vista expierence, it made me realize how much better mac, linux and xp is then vista (from my expierence) And chips b malroy is right, MS will probably not fix vista, they will come out with something new that will hopefully will work, and probably work even more like a mac. I personally do not like microsoft cause of there huge share of the market. It is really hard to find a programs for mac linux (thats why im learning how to program.) Oh another thing microsoft did that was horrible was in xp and im sure vista too, they made command prompt pretty useless.