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Microsoft Fires 7,800: Second Biggest Mass Layoff In Its History
It has been almost exactly one year since Micorsoft announced it would fire a record 18,000 people (surpassing the previous all time high layoff round of 5,800 in 2009) form a company that one upon a time seen as infallible as AAPL. So perhaps in order to release more funds with which to buy back its struggling stock, moments ago Microsoft did what it had to do to make corporate executives richer, and reported it would lay off another 7,700 workers.
From the press release:
Microsoft Corp. today announced plans to restructure the company’s phone hardware business to better focus and align resources. Microsoft also announced the reduction of up to 7,800 positions, primarily in the phone business. As a result, the company will record an impairment charge of approximately $7.6 billion related to assets associated with the acquisition of the Nokia Devices and Services (NDS) business in addition to a restructuring charge of approximately $750 million to $850 million.
Today’s announcement follows recent moves by Microsoft to better align with company priorities, including recent changes to Microsoft’s engineering teams and leadership, plans to transfer the company’s imagery acquisition operations to Uber, and shifts in Microsoft’s display advertising business that enable the company to further invest in search as its core advertising technology and service.
Today’s plans were outlined in an email from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to Microsoft employees.
“We are moving from a strategy to grow a standalone phone business to a strategy to grow and create a vibrant Windows ecosystem including our first-party device family,” Nadella said. “In the near-term, we’ll run a more effective and focused phone portfolio while retaining capability for long-term reinvention in mobility.”
Microsoft will record a charge in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2015 for the impairment of assets and goodwill in its Phone Hardware segment, related to the NDS business. This charge has no impact on cash flow from operations and is nondeductible for income tax purposes. Based on the new plans, the future prospects for the Phone Hardware segment are below original expectations. Accordingly, the company concluded that an impairment adjustment of its Phone Hardware segment assets and goodwill of approximately $7.6 billion is required.
We hope Satya Nadella at least has the courtesy to wait a week before announcing a comparable $7.6 billion or so buyback authorization.
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Luckily unemployment is only 5.3% in the land of the free.
All fired employess will find jobs at twice their current salary
Forward
"lower gas prices will be good for the economy"
moar bullish news !
MOAR blue screen of death coming
Don't forget to add 1,200 jobs fired at Microsoft last week in the land of the manipulated statistics!
At this speed, 330 million will be unemployed by next year in drug induced ....gun toting ...gay land ....where blacks are killed with reckless abandon ....as a sport!
Microsoft Said to Exit Display Ad Business, Cut 1,200 JobsMicrosoft has a phone business? Who knew?
We will see more of this from other firms, after the Bilderberg meeting I am sure many people left with their marching orders.
Nice to see this malware manufacturer selling off.
Paraphrasing: The more people we have on welfare the better it is for the economy - Nanny Pelosi (D - Braindead, CA) - At one time third in line to be the president of the U.S.
Also don't forget how an Indian patsy was put in place to oversee the bloated demise of microsoft.
Windows 8 fails in EVERY REGARD. Forget their not-so-Azure offering in the cloud, bloated software, god-awful UI...Skype that went for easy to use to a frigging screen and memory hogging piece of shit...
Na Dell, Na Della...
Hindi joke for the few other original indians here ;-)
Keep your eye on Skype for business as it coupled with an Asterisk based VOIP/PSTN gateway (free) can replace many phone pbx's with very little cost. It integrates with your cell phones (Windows, Android, IOS) as well, bottom line its a very affordable, very powerful communications suite that is very cheap in comparison to other phone systems. Its not for the home user its for large Corps and written very well.
We use Skype for Business at my company and it is crap.
It's not bad, but it uses far too much memory for what it does. Probably leaks like a bitch.
They've totally lost it post-NT. every new OS since NT has been worse than the last, to the point where its almost unusable. What's worse is they're losing their corporate clients, the ones that want a simple, secure platform for their employees to use as a pass-thru to the actual work.
Totally.
And that is why we still have 30 million users of XP. Everything after that is annoying, cumbersome .gov spyware.
@toady
Maybe so, but I wish I had a nickel for every minute waiting on NT to boot. I'd be telling Jamie D "that's why I'm richer than you"
Microsoft hires a buttload of Temps, in Redmond. And the once very rich Gates fucked them in every way possible-kind of like Walmart: poor pay, short hours, no bennies etc etc
Finally the temps did a class action lawsuit on MS and got a small increase in better working conditions
Not here; Linux Mint only, here. What I wonder is, what's he going to do with the 350,000 little Niggra Chilluns he's gonna save every year with his Malaria Vaccine ? Are t hey all gonna come live at his house ? That's the trouble with playing God; you're supposed to be in charge of the whole movie, not just the part that makes you feel good.
Nah, count the Microsoft new hiring in the near future in South Asia and South Asia's proxy-hub Toronto sweat shops ... just a transfer of the social enclave wealth building work who was good enough before to grow the same Microsoft but for maintaining the same growth and yield for the few owners isn't enough anymore, so the social enclave well being is getting sacrificed in the name of greed of just few.
Maybe they shouldn't just give Windows away....maybe charge like $40 bucks for it or something.
What? They should pay people to use it to offset the support costs and time wasted installing updates and patches.
Do what RedHat does with "free" Linux. $100/year, plus, for support per install. The most expensive "free" software out there.
Windows is a bargain, costing about $100 for life.
RH Linux has always been aimed at the corporate market. Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat and is free and user supported.
no problem...their debt level is only $31,960,000,000 (NOT /sarc)
Your comment is a trap! You failed to note how they also have $85,709,000,000 in cash and short term investments. almost 3x? Looks like we have a future politian here, give us the scary facts without the rest of the truth
I didn't fail at anything...there's a plethora of financial data I did not mention. Doesn't make me a failure. and if you don't think $30 billion in debt is any problem at all then by all means, buy another 1,000 shares in your 401. I don't care....
Now it makes sense why they keep demanding higher H1B numbers....their business is just too growthy!!
It Is Time, Texas!...Operation Texas: www.OpTexas.org ... Associate with awakened Texans, and help in awakening others ... Read our Mission Statement on our Homepage ... Our site is fully secure with all the latest encryption ... Operation Texas has a plethora of information ... Most important, we have our own totally secure Operation Texas Forum where members can interact with like-minded and preparing Texans ... Join us, Texan!
How to ENSURE that your secure web forum will be broken into; just anounce that it's secure and un-breakable on the inter-net, thereby attracting t he attention of 2,397 professional site hackers who will penetrate it just for fun.
He has a "totally secure Forum"--- except that the NSA has his wife's OTHER cell-phone number, the one he doesn't even know about; and evverything else, too.
This is what happens when you hire curries for officers, they love laying off Americans. I mean more than your average C-suite.
Tyler must have pissed the wong people off yesterday. All of your servers bewong to us.
In the very early days the site would crash or freeze up constantly.
Microsoft Servers?
It was the fucken Norks. First they got Sony, then ZH.
Tylers are gonna have to get a .onion for the site to keep it hidden.
zerohedgequnctrylopx.onion
This website was the best on the web when I first joined. It is now EVEN BETTER! ZH is ripping the Evil Forces a BIG ONE, each and every day. So, batten down the hatches Tyler!
Damn doc, you beat me to it.
I was wondering who Tyler pissed off this time.
Speaking of AAPL:
Opinion: Apple Watch sales plunge 90%http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-watch-may-not-be-ticking-with-cus...
if "unemployment is the best form of stimulus" this should, therefore, be bullish for the economy.
hattip: nancy pelosi
In case you hadn't noticed, Microsoft is going through a major business refactor. I suppose, in the authors view, it would be better for them to continue down the road toward irrelevance thereby "laying off" the entire workforce.
EDIT: *retracted insult*
They're already long past irrelevant, they just don't know it.
You mean like AAPL before Jobs came back?
Microsoft is the Unisys of it's day. Or Digital Equipment Corp (DEC). Or the IBM AS/400 platform. Take your pick.
None of the IT companies you mention have come even close to Micro$oft for stimulating the economy. Legions of technical support people have raised families and enjoyed a high standard of living keeping their crappy desktop and server software patched and limping along.
I personally run linux - even on my laptop.
Everyone, literally EVERYONE, is going this route. Linux/UNIX variants (android) keep the base OS simple to allow the user to decide what they want, while MS jams up the OS with so much junk that it renders it nearly unusable.
Yep.....Linux is not only the future it is our present
95% + of all Supercomputers run Linux
Every smartphone both Android and iPhone run a variant of Linux (Android) and iOS (BSD form of Unix). Does Microsoft even make a phone anymore......<snicker>
The vast majority of servers running the internet are Linux or Unix based.
All your tablets with the tiny minority of Windows slabs run Linux (Android) or Unix (iOS)
Smart watches run Android (Linux) iOS (Unix) or RTOS (open source Real Time OS)
All your eReaders run Android or Linux outright.
In car entertainment systems run on Android, iOS, QNX (Blackberry). Ford kicked Microsoft to the curb for QNX.
VMWare and Citrix and AWS (Amazone cloud) are hosting Linux ( Red Hat, Suse and Ubuntu ) prepackaged for industry, banking, research. There numbers are blazing compared to Windows.
Microsoft will contined to shrink until they are forced to split the company in two like HP. One for hardware (Xbone) and software (well.....Office.....what is really left ? )
Then they fade away. Good riddance.
Sony PS4 runs a varient of Unix (FreeBSD)
Of course. all intelligent people do; you can do without Adobe Products too; they're another bad actor that you don't want in your local memory.
Hopefully.
Never thought I'd say this, but MSFT's continuing decline makes me worried. Nowadays they're the last sentinels between Apple and world domination and Apple is pure Hitler-grade evil.
You are missing the greater point here - you need a few more weeks reading on ZH it would seem.
No. Not really. I've been around for a while. The point is the share-buyback price manipulation but the article only ends on that note and trades on a sophomoric populist anti-business attitude.
Once again...
I was very nervous for a moment...I am certainly glad to see that MSFT will ensure that their Senior Executives will not miss their opportunity to sell their options at a "profit"...we all know that if it weren't for the most senior management every company would immediately collapse... /sarc off
See above. I got it.
They're mostly irrelevant as it is. Their software is grossly huge and slow even on today's faster machines. IE has become a joke. Crashes on a daily basis. XP was the better of their attempts. A little tighter and faster code.
I have been on Linux for ten years now,,, not just because it's free. It's a good operating system. Far outclasses Windows.
No yearly subscriptions to those rip off Norton and McAfee junk ware that quarantines malware they probably had a hand in making.
I'm waiting for my MintBox Mini to get here.
http://www.itworld.com/article/2871313/mintbox-mini-coming-in-q2-for-295...
Nothing says prosperity like firing a few thousand employees. Oh well, I hear they can get $15 an hour at McShitfoods.
Buy back moare shares.
Well Gates, who HATES White folks, hired an Indian and a black to run MS. Whites will be fired and Asians hired.
Ever wonder why MS updates ALWAYS are BUGGY?
Now you know. Outsourced and H1-B programmers = shit software.
Boy, you don't know just how right you are about the shit software. I seen better and tighter programs in the late 80's.
But here in the ufsa we like c h e a p.
If Windows were a car it would crash twice a day just sitting still in the parking lot.
Bring Back Windows XP - at least it worked!
H1-B's pretty much destroyed Motorola. I knew one or two American programmers there. Also had friends who had to fix shit at 3 am USA time as the Indians were running jobs overnight for big banks.
It will not be the first company destroyed by H1-bs.. MS is shit and Gates loves his H1-Bs.
My experience with them: 1 out of 50 are good. The 49 others produce garbage. They can answer most technical academic questions, but can't produce quality, functional code. In my company, we keep saying, it's the high cost of a cheap price. The managers know they suck, but they are 5 for a dollar, and they won't make one complaint about anything, so they won't get rid of them.
In my experience, the failure at communication was the worst part of working with most (but not all) foreign Indians/etc. I worked with in IT, making me wonder just how insanely bad their school system must be.
The horror of doing IT with someone when you basically sense he doesn't understand even half of what you say, nor half of what needs to be done (as per written specs), and yet doesn't ever say so but instead goes and does incoherent stuff, and after doing all the wrong stuff continues to fake understanding and ARRRRGHHH!
But then again, once you understand how all our 'Research and Development' is fake (we already have a cancer cure in Rick Simpson Oil, we already have free power with Tesla towers, etc.) and how the system doesn't want to do anything but prey on humans and degrade them, then you understand how and why there is actually no need for functional, efficient engineers and developers...
TPTB want us to be cunning and insanely subservient like the Chinese (who accept work conditions that would make us rebel) and as dysfunctional as the people I see coming from the Indian school system.
So rather than waste my time building BS IT for fortune 500 companies/govt/etc. with a bunch of dysfunctional pods, I'm switching to teaching Muai Thai (which I practiced for dozens of years) - so much more fun, and I can help quite a few people get back in shape with confidence. (And I actually like the fact I will be making less, since I spend nothing nowadays anyway, and even wish to make so little money that I don't pay taxes, hehehe)
Remarkably, I have a similar experience. I started training Tae Kwon Do several years ago. It's been the most rewarding experience of my adult life. My master is from somewhere south of the border, and he has more integrity than most anyone I have ever met. He makes us train very hard, and I love him for it. His love and friendship is something I value very highly. I train four nights a week, and actually told my employer that I would be working a fixed schedule so I can go.
It's very clear to me now what is most valuable in life, although I admit for a long time, I was asleep like most everyone else. Now I am wide awake and ready for this system to end so we can begin again.
But the media tells us there is a high tech skills shortage in America..
The Zune should take off soon. They'll be calling back those waiters and waitresses before you know it.
More than ever
BTFD
It's not surprising considering Nokia's market share is crap, nobody wants a Windows phone...
These parasites all doing gods work.
At least until the sheeple wake up and there is another french revolution .... 3 .... 2 .... 1 ....
So much for free markets ... to steal and cheat and do whatever you want - as long as you stick to the law - or are above the law.
I came here for the blue screen!
Will you settle for purple? www.purple.com
Microsoft makes overpriced malware and bloatware.
There's really no reason for anyone to be running any of their code.
or
XP SP2 forever.
Linux and freeware has surpassed most of their products. The only thing that keeps their brand functional is product support, and they have almost succeeded in ruining that completely. They should implode on themselves but I suspect they will be bailed out by the Feds because they continue to roll over for the NSA.
What Linux or other alternative(s) do you consider best?
For the new Linux user, I would recommend Linux Mint or Ubuntu. Linux Mint has essentially the same layout as Windows, so it will be easier to navigate. Ubuntu is more similar MacIntosh in its layout. On Linux Mint, out of the box you get a complete office productivity suite, Libre Office, Mozilla Firefox, Graphics editing package (GIMP), and many others. Your folders and files are encrypted, and no third party holds an access key.
I've personally have used Red Hat, Suse, Ubuntu and it's variants such as Kubuntu, Lubuntu, and Mint.
Just stick with plain 'ol Unbuntu. I actually like the look and feel of Mint better.....but they are always WAY behind updates to the main system and packages ( programs ). I know their philosophy is stability first....but after being on Mint for two years and plain 'ol Ubuntu for a year, I can say there has never been a time with Ubuntu I felt my system was more or less stable than Mint.
Plus all the variants of Ubuntu are just geeks looking to do thing different for the sake of difference or to satisfy a personal use case itch. That is the GREATEST and WORST thing about Linux. Everybody is free to do things his or her own way and that causes fragmentation and potential instability.
If you are new to Linux then download and install Ubuntu and stick with it for at least a year.
http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop
If you want to just try it out without installing on your Windows computer, I would download Virtual Box which virtualizes an entire PC in memory and you can run Ubuntu inside Virtual Box on your Windows computer without blowing out Windows.
https://www.virtualbox.org/
Here are tutorials on how to use Virtual Box and Ubuntu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_ustCy4Ks8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgryi8q63FI&index=20&list=PLUjYB3rHxfvq8...
Very helpful; thank you.
Ubuntu sucks ass since they switched to that Unity desktop pile of shit.
Go Mint. Who cares that it does not have the latest updates. Everything works.
WRONG !
Mint is NOT as stable as everyone claims it is. I've used it on my Thinkpad laptop and a homemade PC with Intel Core2 Duo CPU and an NVIDIA GPU on an Intel Motherboard. Pretty bog standard and supported for Linux. The GUI for MINT is call Cinnamon. It is a fork of the GUI know as GNOME, which gives a more Mac OS X flavor to Linux. For the newbies out there.....a fork means that someone took a program or GUI and because the software is open source is free to tinker and modify it before releasing it back into the wild. Cinnamon arose from some folks getting very hyper about some changes to the 3rd version of GNOME. So....the guys who put together MINT forked GNOME 3 and made a hybrid which keeps some part of 3 and keeps most of GNOME 2.
Anyway......it's nice.....really nice. But it has its issues like ALL software. Your mileage will vary. And in Linux Land.....because a lot of the firmware on motherboards, GPU's and such are proprietary YOUR mileage may vary A LOT.
UNITY on Ubuntu like MINT is also a fork of sorts of GNOME 3. However......I have YET to have a problem wth the stability of the entire vanllla version of UBUNTU unlike Mint. Particularly when it comes to Mints custom made software installer. Not many problems....less than most......but MORE than Ubuntu.
Plus.....more manufactuers like Dell are prepacking laptops and desktops with plain 'ol UBUNTU.....not any of the variants. There is WAY more support for UBUNTU than any other flavor of Linux at least when it comes to the desktop. Red Hat and Suse rule the server, mainframe and supercomputer world.
For newbies.....trust me.....just try Ubuntu first. But the best thing about Linux is......some Geek out there may have already made a distribution just up your alley. And since all of them are free.......well.....have fun.
...another vote here for LINUX Mint. Totally idiotproof. Painless installation in about 10 minutes or just burn an Image off their downloaded iso file and try it out without installing it to yout HDD.
Prior answers all are good for the typical user.
If you want to do some serious gaming, you still have to stick with Windows (7 or 8) because the video drivers in Linux are not up to snuff for serious gaming. The manufacturers still devote most of their time to getting Windows drivers optimized. Linux support for embedded graphics (AMD APUs, Intel's Core stuff with onboard graphics) is sometimes not equal to the Windows versions. Similar issues probably apply to some audio cards and chipsets, although the typical user should (again) have no problems. There are also occassional issues with network chips not being properly supported in Linux. For some reason, one chipset supplier, used on numerous motherboards, has an overabundance of different parts, and some that operate fine under Windows at gigabit speeds are throttled back to 100 megabits under Linux. At least that's been my experience.
For the geekier user, there is always FreeBSD if you like the command line interface and PC-BSD for those wishing to use a GUI. BSD is a variant of UNIX and doesn't necessarily have as large a variety of apps available. It is claimed to be more secure than Linux and is the basis for many specialty solutions like network attached storage setups. It suffers from the same driver problems I mentioned above for Linux.
Just my luck not to be a typical user, or I wouldn't have to be aware of all this stuff.
... "Microsoft Fires 7,800: Second Biggest Mass Layoff In Its History"
... here's the first-ish ? ... >>> "US Army to cut 40,000 soldiers over next 2 years – leaked document" >>> http://rt.com/usa/272311-us-army-cut-40000-troops/
Probably 3/4 or more are foreign workers on H1B visas. Maybe they will go home, and the next lousy OS will be delayed. Call that a two-fer.
Luxury products fly high and fall hard.. remember you macro economics...
Maybe Bill Gates can put those laid off in his euthanization program err "Charity"
If Bill and Melinda are happy then we should all be happy.
... Melinda might not be happy ... it's in the name 'micro' 'soft' ... ;)
Melinda might have been selected years ago to be where she is right now precisely because she is not interested in that sort of thing.
Another beautiful comment. Neither of them are going to win a prize for being one of the the world's sexiest/vibrant people.
If I recall, one of the early products that put Bill and Paul on the map was called 'tiny' 'basic'.
MOAR vaccines (and eugenics) for the Poor ---- YAAAYYYY...!!!
rich and respectable have not time to solve your problems/s
Beautiful comment
Tyler, between the outtages today isn't a good day.
Couple of typos in the opening paragraph, underlined below and bolded.
"It has been almost exactly one year since Micorsoft announced it would fire a record 18,000 people (surpassing the previous all time high layoff round of 5,800 in 2009) form a company that one upon a time seen as infallible as AAPL."
Sorry to be a pedant!
We're used to the typos. It's part of the charm along with run-on sentences that always entertain and inform. Wouldn't change a thing as it's part of the ZH Gestalt.
Replaced Americans with H1Bs and Indian outsourcing.
No Surprise. Just a failed business model trying to sell the same bloated code with a different ugly color of lipstick over and over again.
Good to see that ZH has continued their fine tradition of not proof-reading their articles.
... it would fire a record 18,000 people (surpassing the previous all time high layoff round of 5,800 in 2009) form a company that one upon a time ...
"form"?
Is this the new standard of journalism in America? Smartphone typos are just fine?
14 weektard
Yeah, actually been commenting on ZH since 2008, but ZH keeps cancelling my accounts for some reason. Can't figure it out ... lol. I think this is my 4th account ... expecting to get booted again any time now, since, based on your reaction, ZH seems to be a little thin skinned.
Oh, and in the same line the word "one" should be "once". Two typos in the same line ... NICE!!
Where are the old Tylers who cared about the quality of the work?
"expecting to get booted again any time now"
Can't fucking wait....
Maybe they should just proof-read their articles, Mr. potty-mouth. Ever think of that?
Maybe you should just ask for a refund of your subscription.
You did pay didn't you?
Every time I have to look at one of their pop up ads.
they need 8000 people for phones? jiminy....
No problem, with EBT and "Free Healthcare" these Mericuns will be able to enjoy their life moar better or something.
Arrest bio-terrorists Bill and Melinda Gates.
From many moons ago in the Onion when IBM laid off a similar number of workers:
"IBM Emancipates 8,000 Wage Slaves"
"You are all free, free to go!" said IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano to the 600 men and women freed from the corporation's Essex Junction, VT, location. "No more must you live a bleak, hand-to-mouth existence, chained to your desks in a never-ending Monday-through-Friday, 9-to-5 cycle. Your future is wide-open. Now, go!"
http://www.theonion.com/article/ibm-emancipates-8000-wage-slaves-806
Right on Banzai! Good comment directed at Bo!
Right on Banzai! Good comment directed at Bo!
Why did Microsoft buy Nokia? Are the layoffs an admission that it was wrong?
The sale of Nokia's mobile division to Microsoft was an admission that Windows Phone was a disastrous platform strategy. They had to buy the division because Nokia had decided to dump Windows Phone and jump ship to Android, they even managed to release several Android devices before MS bought the phone division.
90% of Windows Phone sales were Nokia devices. The other producers are insignificant. Without Nokia this meant Microsoft had no future. PC sales are dropping, and along with it, sales of Windows+Office. This round of layoffs, is basically the end of Windows Phone, and the end of Microsoft. They have no future strategy. Sales of Windows Phone now are insignificant. It's a dead platform.
But...but....but.....CNN said the economy was doing great.......
Instead of firing the worker bees - Microsoft should be firing the executives that poo-poo'ed going heavy into tablets and smartphones. Google's Android and Apple's IOS are clobbering Microsoft. Partnering with Nokia was more an attempt to get its flawed smartphone software onto some (any?) cell phones, but Nokia was already dying. Failure to hit the tablet and smartphone operating system market - a decsion made YEARS AGO, opened the door for the competition to innovate and pass Microsoft. It's been catch up since -- and Microsoft might want to fire the executives that have given us the current tablet and smartphone crap that Microsoft is peddling today.
Actually Nokia was increasing sales and profits before Elop came on board. What they were losing was market share. But nothing like as fast as they started losing it after Elop crucified their entire product line before there was any replacement in place.
Justice is foreign purchases of Microsoft products collapsing because Microsoft loaded their software with NSA Spyware. Microsoft has lost the entire China, Asian, German, Russian, Argentinian, Venezuelan, and many other markets. I hope NSA paid them well.
This is a good thing. They're axing the Nokia purchase - which was a TERRIBLE decision by ballmer. Most of these jobs are international. Good for the company and good for jobs here in the Seattle area.
I'll probably get crucified for this, but here goes anyway.
When I first started using a PC back in 1982, I had a Tandy Radio Shack model 4P. It was a portable machine, if you can call sewing machine sized monster with a 10 inch green on black screen, a wopping 64 K memory and two floppies, portable.
My next machine was an IBM clone 286 with 256 K memory and a 12 inch monitor running Windows. It was the greatest thing since sliced bread. It had color! A Graphical User Interface, and was upgradeable. By the time I finished with it I had upraded it to a 486 with a math coprocesser and 256 MB of memory running Windows 3.1 with a built in modem.
Some of my friends bought Macintoshes, but they couldn't hold a candle to my machine, and they weren't upradable at all.
My latest machines are now all laptops. One, has 500 GB HD and 8 GB Ram, with has a touch screen monitor running Windows 7 64 bit, the second has basically the same configuration but has a 21 inch flat screen monitor, which I use to play around with my Arduino and Raspberry Pi which run various forms of Linux.
The 3rd Laptop has 16 GB Ram a Terabyte HD 17 inch screen with a 500 GB dedicated Graphics card running Windows 8.1.
What I'm getting at is that I have been using Windows based machines for 3 decades. I have heard many horror stories about how bad Windows is, but except for Vista, I have not had any of these experiences myself.
Windows got me into computing, as a dare say, the same for the most of you. What with Social Media, to which I do not subscribe, Smart phones and Tablets, the landscape is changing. Microsoft, to stay relevant, needs to adapt.
To fault them for this is ludicrous. Sure they have their H1B issues, like all of silicon valley. They are buying back stock, as is Apple and many of the largest corporations in the US. And if you think that Microsoft is any more cooperative with government agencies that the rest of the OS providers out there you are niave.
So let's call it what it is then. It's America's cultural pastime of rooting against sucess. Oh how we long to see the mighty fall. Too bad, because, and I can say this with absolute certainty, If it wasn't for Microsoft we would not be here today.
While not everyone has bad experiences with Windows, lots of people do. When you really look at alternatives such as Linux (which is what I use), you really begin to see the difference between ok software and great software.
One of the reasons I got my friends/neighbors into Linux, is because the average person is stupid and Windows takes advantage of that. Partially to sell you programs that you shouldn't need (anti-virus/anti-spyware/"crash protection" <-whatever the fuck that is), as well the need to upgrade every few years for a bit of coin to fix things that should have been fixed for free.
If you have an extra laptop handy, I highly suggest giving a Linux distro such as Linux Mint a try. They have different GUI's for you to try out (MATE, Cinnamon,XFCE, KDE) as well as 32 and 64 bit versions. You can even use WINE to run some Windows programs if you need to. It's worth the time invested to learn IMO.
As for Microsoft, their business practices are the stuff of legend (and not the good kind). Now that they can't bully companies around like they did 15 years ago, they're dying.
Apple is not much better, but they have better PR and a captive user base.
Bill and Melinda Gates made a sizable contibution to the then spanking new multi million dollar Seattle downtown central Library-a "world class" library
Their only catch-the only OS allowed in there would be Windows
When i confronted the Head Librarian about the lack of at least some Macintoshes, her comment....wait for it.....wait for it.....
"We really dont understand that operating system" I kid you not, "World class library"
You are certainly a troll, and a stupid fuck at that.
Every version of windows for the past 2 decades is the same bloated, buggy crap with a slightly modified coat of makeup applied. Like an old hag trying to look like the girl she once was.
Office is even worse. No more useful than the 80s versions that fit on one floppy.
Idiots buying the same crap, over and over and over.
Don't worry they will just replace with their stinky ass Indians from Mumbai bringing along their wife and two kids to enjoy our free educational system.
Don't worry they will just replace them with some stinky ass Indians from Mumbai bringing along their wife and two kids to enjoy our free educational system.
I believe the right term is "right sizing" or as management says... you got no rights and I need to increase the size of my wallet...
Elop has a lot to answer for. Is he still alive BTW?
Looks like dumping 7k Americans to hire the CEOs family to save on cash.
the way theyve been pushing their SURFACE combo ie: ads on tv every 30 seconds-it must be sinking, like their ZUNE-and the thing looks like a Fisher-Price childs toy computer anyway.
Didnt know that the Windows phone was sinking also