Quote:
Originally Posted by McG
i actually feel kinda sorry for m$. people yell and complain about what microsoft doesn't do...ie the 360 or vista vs xp. so they extend the warranty and give the consumer choices. what happens? they get lambasted for doing the right thing.
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A note on the 360 extended lawsuit... MS never admitted to higher than average defect due to the red ring of death until they were faced with a class action lawsuit. It was in light of the lawsuit and the atrocious return rates that they admitted that defects were "higher than usual" and extended the warranty from 1 year to 3. They never released figures, but I've heard numbers that ranged as high as 20% defect rate on the first gen 360, which is terrible.
I don't consider myself a MS hater. I consider myself a consumer purchasing a product with expectations that it delivers what it advertises. I have never owned a Mac and never will simply due to 2 things:
1) Apples proprietary attitude and their approach to closing hardware.
2) Lack of software support. A computer is useless if it doesn't support the applications you want to use.
Examples of things I really give kudos to MS is the following:
1) Excel is the best spreadsheet application bar none. It never ceases to amaze me what people can do with that application.
2) DirectX is the best thing that can happen to the industry with providing a common API for developers to write code for the incredible host of hardware out there. I hail back from the DOS days and I know the difficulties companies faced with hardware support. DirectX took what VESA did for graphics and extended it across the board and encompassed all the perimeter hardware manufacturers which. I might also add, aside from major low level optimizations to the code base and customizing it specifically to the hardware, you'd be hard pressed to write an application that yields better performance than the library functions provided in DirectX. Same with MFC, though .NET seems a little fat. I've written code for both MFC/.NET and DirectX as well as alternatives provided by Borland, the legacy Win32 API and other API's such as OpenGL. MFC/.NET and DirectX really are a pleasure to work with and the performance is absolutely delightful given that they are general purpose APIs. Trust me, setting the view and drawing to the screen with DirectX is like playing with Lego compared to using x-lib, which back in the DOS days, was hailed as "the" graphics library.
3) X-Box Live! should be a model that all console and gaming should mold itself after. Everything works great and it consolidates everything in one nice, efficient, and easy to use system (take note, Sony).
4) "Games for Windows" is an absolutely fantastic idea. In particular, one of the things offered by this initiative, is the ability to use my X-Box 360 hardware on my PC. Though I do have my gripes with the d-pad on the 360 controller, it is still better than any offering available on PC. And I don't need to buy one for each system.
Anyways, you get the idea. I give credit where credity is due and I have no reservations for calling out things that are subpar. Vista, much to my disappointment at this time, is subpar. It's unfortunate, since I really like the Aero interface and everything MS did to modernize the OS, too bad it just doesn't work.
