It can throw around a decent amount for a machine that is almost a decade old... except Halo 2 anniversary, the framerate is cooked on that one but does resolve a native 4K image, so there is that.
But the system software quality is absolute rubbish. I have never seen any other system just trip over itself for just random reasons, it can be UI hang ups, installation issues, network connection issues, that it is constantly pinging their servers just to do basic things, endless random crash outs or any manner of similar problems. I never had that issue on their previous consoles or any other console for that matter. I mean once the software is going in a straight line, you can see the magic but the amount of junk to get to there is comical.
an aside, the only game I can consistently have fail on Switch and PS4 nowadays is Quake 2 when you use their own hand picked mods, and yes, Microsoft owns Bethesda who releases it. Something is very wrong in Redmond. Yeah MS has always had a history of software quality problems but this feels very different. It is like they are just stacking abstraction layers on top of others and ending up with a rat-king of technology debt. Not just that but there seems to be a vibe of just general complacency, that is dragging it all down.
Oh and their online web potart is some of the slowest most bug riddled trash I have ever seen online.
Make sure to get Java Edition. The other one is just an ad-riddden slopfest where they also ban you if you say swear words.
Which raises an interesting question, If I legally have a license for the game but they shut off the license servers, is it actually copyright infringement? (or piracy as people like to call it because copyright infringement sounds lame)
Which is why coming at this from a legal perspective a farce. Most of the world is like this, actually. You can assume that if some action brings money to large corporations then it's legal and if it takes away their actual or potential revenue then it's illegal. Go with what you feel is morally correct.
Ended up on Minecraft Education on the computer, eventually.
Not really in the cards, though I can appreciate your dedication to pirate advocacy.
I switched to Mac with the Intel change around...2006 maybe? Converted my entire family.
I personally switched to various flavors of linux around 2016-2017 because I wanted more hardware options.
Eventually, my son got into gaming and eventually we let him get an Alienware laptop maybe 2-3 years ago. Then my wife had to get one for work this year. It's like nothing has improved in 20 years.
Back in the early 1990s you'd get Microsoft Office from the store, as a box containing 10 floppy disks. And they had to put a lot of effort into testing it, because patching was impossible. And of course it was fully offline. Perpetually licensed, with paid upgrades.
The problems were instead things like "this notionally multi-user OS is just a single-user OS with a decorative login screen" and "any application can crash the entire OS" and "spreadsheets auto-run macro viruses" and things like that.
I never had problems with cyberpunk but I think I know why: I built a new PC right around its release and it was good enough to play it smoothly on 4K medium or HD ultra.
When I checked to see what 4K ultra looked like, the graphics latency caused a bunch of scripting to fall apart and the game glitched really bad.
IIRC the console release was notorious for bugs, so I assume consoles were not performant enough to run the game buttery smooth nor could they be easily upgraded.
On the business side, with M365, they use lock-in tactics and extremely aggressive bundle pricing. The only competitor is Google Workspace, and it's missing features you get bundled with something like an E5 license. So your choice becomes: just pay Microsoft $60/user/month and get Identity, Office, Intranet, MDM, EDR, DLP, ZTNA, the works. Or, buy Google Workspace and then also buy Slack, Okta, JamF (or Jumpcloud or similar), some ZTNA product, etc. and you are now at double or more the price of an E5 license.
On the consumer side with Windows, they secured their monopoly via internet explorer, and predatory OEM contracts to prevent machines being sold with anything else. Now Windows is just an ad-delivery network disguised as an OS. People don't leave Windows because its still, through those shady backroom deals, the default OS on every off the shelf PC, and because of existing software.
Microsoft has zero incentive to build a good product now, they already won. People use it because they have to not because they want to.
Bill gates also understood the value great programmers. The whole business revolved around this premise. this was different from other software companies at the time. Read the likes of Gabe Newell and Joel spolsky said about their time there. It was in a league of it's own.
There are a lot of great things we got from Microsoft, a zero fee platform to target, a platform that would run on what ever cobbled together pc parts you threw at it. An unbelievable attention to backwards compatibility. Compare that to what we have now in the app store and play store.
> Google Workspace, and it's missing features
Sounds like Microsoft got there by having the features.
I mean it's a good deal. As you say, when a company goes above a certain size, it does not make sense to pay for GSuite + Slack + Zoom + RMM/MDM + Zscaler
Windows is still good for gaming PCs, and it will now handle and update itself reliably. No I don't need to hear anecdotes, I work in the IT desktop space. IT janitor monkey if you will. There is no way an enterprise will convert laptops to linux or chromebook.
You see it as malicious, but well, even Google have trouble in this space. Because it is hard.
I don't think I've used a MS product in at least a decade. At least that I was aware of.
Edit: did some research and I have used LinkedIn. Other than that, nothing.
Companies over 20 staff are on Windows laptops + Office 365 E3 or E5.
Android and iOS? Sure on the phones...
What "clients" are you talking about? Edit: Re-reading I think you mean clients as in general computers, not business clients. Yes, more of the world is on phones but that is due to cost and society (ipad/iphone kids or third world on android). Real work is all done on PCs/Macs.
Schools are on chromebooks for the kids and Windows or Mac for teachers.
This used to be the case when Apple was in dire straits and MS abused their monopoly position to gain 95% of browsers market share. Grim days.
But those days are thankfully long done and there are plenty of people who are completely Microsoft-free.
The one thing people are using one way or another is Linux, because it's now in just about everything. Even those in the Apple ecosystem, with an iPhone and Mac computers, very probably have a Linux router and Linux TV at home.
The number of devices in the world running one version of Linux or another outnumber Windows devices by something like 10 to 1. Maybe more.
Microsoft is a despicable company producing turds since forever. I hate them and the crap they produce with a passion since the DOS days.
As the saying goes: the day Microsoft shall produce something that doesn't suck is the day they'll start selling vacuum cleaners.
Also MS stuff has always been slop. Hate their business practices too. But without Linux we'd be choosing between MS, Apple and Oracle Solaris or something...
Last time I remember them doing something similar was on the last days of XP / earlier Vista time. But it wasn't so bad at the time.
I think they completely let it go when they laid off the testers and let users pay $$ to be testers, starting from 2010s perhaps. Maybe earlier.
(Not that I would know, I don't touch Microsoft's shit with a 10-foot-pole)
P.S. My personal opinion is that Windows could be a great OS but MS keeps intentionally saddling it with more and more shit in the name of getting more from the user, instead of giving more to the user.
Some other things have been baffling over the years (but I belive they are now at least somewhat solved). For example in Windows 7 and older Windows would spend tens of seconds on "installing drivers" for a USB stick every time a new stick was inserted (or even an old stick inserted into a new port). I don't remember seeing this on Windows 10 (or 11), but I barely used those.
But yes, compared to the userspace the kernel is way less jank. (Like how Windows Updates takes minutes to run to conclude that there are updates, and dozens of minutes to install them, while pacman -Syu on Arch can be done in second if there are no updates, and maybe 2-4 minutes in the worst case of a kernel update with dkms modules being rebuilt.)
Windows NT (including Windows 2000) was considered to be a workstation OS by Microsoft. From Windows XP on, the NT-based Windows operating systems (except for the server ones) were targeted to consumers.
I don’t see that as support for the claim that Microsoft’s products were half-baked in the 80s and 90s.
If Linux had sufficient market penetration in small business, I bet you could run a successful business fixing problems with Linux products, even today.
(It may be a bit of a stretch but you could even argue Amazon is making serious money supporting big companies with their Linux problems)
They're weird to this unix-head, but generally not as buggy as in MacOS.
But I don't think it contradicts your point. This is just a rare exception to the true general rule.
I find Windows 10 and 11 really good once you tweak it a bit and remove some cruft and tweak regedit/GPO settings. Both for modern software. Not to talk about backwards compatibility, Steam games from 2009 run just fine. Windows is also the standard for online games with anti-cheat. Also, for companies, Excel is a must. Yes, still is.
The whole ecosystem of AD+GPO+ Exchange since 2000 is unparalleled, Novell had something like AD but AD won. That continues with Office 365 where it's not just an office package. It is Identity/accounts/SSO (Entra), MDM (Intune), EDR/"antivirus", Storage (OneDrive), Sharepoint (docs + storage), Teams (Slack + Zoom).
You can buy Okta, Zoom, Slack, Gsuite, an EDR, an MDM but at that point you are paying a lot more for your stack...
I understand if you are a smaller company, then Gsuite + Slack and Zoom is a good choice. But go over 100 people and it starts to not make sense.
I also hear developers liking their IDEs, both full VS and VS Code.
/IT admin
I'd say somewhat fine depending on the title, they broke a lot of backward compatibility recently
> You can buy Okta, Zoom, Slack, Gsuite, an EDR, an MDM but at that point you are paying a lot more for your stack...
I'd also say that's where they won, because it looks like an attractive option for the executive and people in power who can purchase these.
As if you're asking me, sure it's cheaper but these MS products are nowhere near as good as any of the alternatives you listed and you'd have to factor the productivity loss.
It's kind of a cheap all-in buffet, sure it's cheap but quality isn't there.
Part of the revisionist history these days is making IBM out the be hero that was crushed by Microsoft but nothing could be further from the truth. IBM was the lumbering giant that evaluated developers by lines of code produced, had 14 levels of management, and wanted to protect their hardware interests more than anything. Microsoft hated working with them because they sucked. OS/2 was so buggy that the first patch was almost as big as the entire original install.
It has been a while since I read a book on NT kernel - "Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft"
NT kernel was "supposed" to run OS/2 apps and Windows apps. But the NT kernel is of MS making, NOT IBM.
The connection to VAX/VMS is due to MS hiring Dave Cutler, who worked there before.
NT was entirely a Microsoft project. They hired the prism team from DEC and started completely from scratch.
Mach and microkernels were hot at one point despite having many issues with performance.
You cannot find a single one that was good, or better than whatever was the alternative at the time?
Examples: Edge (bloated with ads and Copilot), Office (now a subscription, hasn't evolved, annoying integration with copilot), Skype (dead), Halo (virtually dead), Doom (studio gutted), Visual Studio Code (locked down marketplace, replaced plugins with their own, now a giant GitHub copilot ad), Flight Simulator (massive regression with 2024)
Several of the games are good, but those were mostly made by game studios they own (or later bought). Those are not really part of the core Microsoft culture.
Old versions of Office (pre-ribbon UI) were perfectly usable (if you ignore the years of Clippy, or you disabled that). But in recent years, not.
VS Code was good but it has been getting worse. Every new release is 90% AI features rather than useful things. And it is an open source project anyway, so they aren't the only contributor.
I guess Minesweeper and Solitare are still pretty good (unless they messed them up in Windows 11, which I have stopped using entirely).
But that is pretty damming isn't it? Pretty much everything on that list is bad currently. And the majority was never great.
Later they abandoned consumerware after losing the mobile space but that's a different story. Microsoft isn't really a consumer software company any more so there's no point judging it on that basis.
10 redirects to get to the portal, when creating an account/etc. if you do one thing wrong it might just disappear from a tenant or not bind properly or something and then you gotta do it all over again (happened last year)
I just don't know how this is possible, why is everything so broken?
It’s so bad that Occam’s Razor should suggest malice; because an organisation that large and that profitable surely cant be that incompetent at managing the sign in process for the world’s most popular game. Yes here we are.
Back in the early 00s I coined the phrase “everything Microsoft touches turns to shit”. A reverse Midas touch. And unfortunately this is still proving true even into the 2020s
All this is supposed to be the peak of game dev prowess. We've had like 50 years of game dev just to evolve to this. It's not just huge launchers - almost everything AAA that's made today feels like it was designed to appear flashy at first glance in some meeting for people who have no idea what they're looking at, while performance, technical features, and the most basic user experience considerations are thrown out of the window.
You already own it, so it's not even immoral.
They gutted QA in 2014, ending their software development engineer in test positions, and suggesting the developers should test their own code to get velocity.
Subsequent releases were worse than before, and things have compounded since then. Hard to say that laying off the rest of the team made a noticable difference.
Blame Satya Nadella. He fired testers and turned customers to helpless beta testers.
QA doesn't get enough love :(
I've edited my comment to correct this. Cheers!
But according to the other replies, it seems Microsoft has been purging QA for years now.
And you wonder why that system would to freeze up when ever you put a CD in and it had to spin up.
They have always tried to cheap out on this stuff.
Is it? People are buying this crap, why should MS spend more money to increase quality? They will receive the same quarterly revenue but with lower profits. Shareholders will not be happy!
Or, you'll find the official Microsoft documentation, but will just be out of date, or wrong, or otherwise will not reflect the actual Microsoft product in front of you. It's baffling that people say Linux is hard when I never need to work so hard to get basic things to work as I do with a normal Microsoft product.
Engineers are not serfs, they have enough income and agency to be responsible for the fruits of their labor.
I can't even imagine the chaos they must have going on inside for them to be failing the way they are on the outside. I'm also curious what started it. They've never been a pinnacle of engineering, but things went really went downhill hard in more modern times.
> There's something seriously wrong in Redmond.
I'd say: There is something seriously wrong with the people buying this shit since over 40 years.
It's not like Microslop products weren't pure utter trash already decades ago. They got worse over time, especially lately with "AI", that's true, but nothing ever changed substantially.
It all has been looking like a deliberately ill intent for quite a while.
When you try to save a short-term buck by offshoring your workforce, you end up with long-term problems and brand damage.
And now vibe coding is the new offshoring, so we can make things worse at scale!
I think the worse thing here is all the subtle breakages and inconsistencies in Windows, as well as in the MS Office suite of products, constant redesigns of things that worked, adding layers upon layers of "make-up" on top that obscures functionality, etc etc.
Not the first gui.
Not the first web browser.
Not the first spreadsheet/word processor/slideshow.
Edit: I’ll give credit, NT is good kernel, and had some novel qualities.
Microsoft tried to do everything for better and worse on wildly varied commodity hardware.
AKA: Slop. Microsoft was publishing slop before LLMs were even a thing, it's no wonder they were so eager to jump on the AI bandwagon once it showed up. Their company is uniquely set up to take advantage of a slop generator.