What comes to mind when your hear “Microsoft”? Evil empire? Cutting edge innovators? A mixture of both? Whether you love them or loathe them, there is no denying the force that is Microsoft. The business world revolves around their products, most notably their Windows OS and Office Suites. In addition to their computer operating system of which everyone is aware, Microsoft also produces the Xbox, Windows Phone OS and, as of May 2011, are the owners of Skype. For every anti-trust suit they have lost, they have contributed billions of dollars to their community and various charities. Due to the popularity of Microsoft products with our clients, it is imperative that Peacock Production Studios stay up to date on their evolving technologies. Needless to say, we have spirited opinions on this giant corporation.
We thought long and hard about what we admire about Microsoft and it was difficult to really come up with too much. We like their Windows 7 OS and Xbox Kinect. We like that every other one of their releases is typically good. We also like the fact that they are willing to partner with small, up and coming vendors. As mentioned above, Microsoft (and founder Bill Gates) has been extremely gracious in their charitable endeavors. Domestically, they seek to expand the educational opportunities and access to information technology in poor, rural communities. Globally, they seek to enhance health care and reduce extreme poverty.
When you’re as big an entity as Microsoft, you are going to have many detractors, whether based on reality, fear or a little of both. The Geek in us considers Microsoft to be “the man” and we don’t always want to follow the man. In fact, sometimes we would like to stick it to the man! The number one complaint is that half of their releases are worse than the previous release. I don’t have to convince the Vista and IE9 users of this. Perhaps a major reason for this is because their releases are driven by the marketing team, not the development team. This can lead to rushed launches. Often times, Microsoft’s “releases” are still in beta testing stage, which forces the end users to be the testers. Another issue is their susceptibility to viruses and security vulnerabilities. This is of course in relation to their software being cross vendor compatible, but it would be nice to have a little more security and reliability. It is annoying to have to download patches and service packs after every new install, as well as every month. Our final complaint is that there is no “WOW” factor for any of their new releases or products (other than Xbox Kinect). Instead of looking forward to new releases, we ask ourselves will this help fix issues with the last release. If not, we will probably just skip this one and wait for the next.
What can we expect in the future from Microsoft? They recently announced their latest operating system, Windows 8. Along with the release of Windows 8 will be their latest browser version, IE10. (Microsoft Windows 8 video). Going back to our “every other release is good theory”, Peacock Production Studios eagerly awaits IE10 and we are skeptical of Windows 8. We will test their latest version of Windows, as we need to stay up with Microsoft’s current technologies, but we are confident that Windows 7 will remain our OS of choice. We hope this article has provided some insight into Microsoft from the view of web developers. In the end it comes down to this – Microsoft is simply too big to ignore.
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