As someone with lots of experience reading Microsoft documents I disagree, in my opinion Microsoft was the worst company designing formats because:
1-Their programmers were terrible designers. Companies like Apple design first, program later. With Microsoft it was the opposite. I don't care how good a mechanic(programmer) you are if you are bad engineer(designer) and can't see the forest out of the tree.
2-They were experts breaking formats ON PURPOSE, it is proven that Microsoft actually introduced bugs to break compatibility on things like DOS(to combat competitors like DR DOS)or AVI format so people were forced to use their products.
3-There were too much programmers(most of them not so good). While Netscape put to work 20-40 people, Microsoft employed 1.000 to destroy competition with Explorer. When mission was accomplished and competition was destroyed(and nobody dare to enter the given marketplace anymore) all this people moved to other projects like Office.
4-Perversive incentives. The social promotion under Ballmer incentived people to create lots of bad code fast instead of little good code.
> 1-Their programmers were terrible designers...Apple.
The whole "Apple Good. Microsoft Bad." is really tedious and it couldn't be further from the truth. Apple is terrible at designing software.
Apple couldn't even attempt to handle the size of software projects that Microsoft deals with. They couldn't even build their own OS, they had to buy it from NeXT who stole BSD and Tivo-ized it. Furthermore, if Apple built Office or designed the Office document formats, nobody would get any of the features that they wanted.
That's because Apple designs the simplest thing that works for the majority of people and anybody who doesn't fit that mold is screwed. It takes a company with real grit, like Microsoft, to get this size job done.
> 2-They were experts breaking formats ON PURPOSE...
Oh, give me a fucking break. How about a citation?
> 3-There were too much programmers...
How much is "too much"? Is 20-40 the proper size then? Please tell us, in your infinite expertise...what is the exact number of programmers that is a good size for building Internet Explorer 1.0 through 6.0?
> 4-Perversive incentives. ...Ballmer incentived people to create lots of bad code...
Could you be a little less vague? How about an example?
For someone who doesn't want to get into "Apple Good. Microsoft Bad." level of rethoric you seem to have a lot of grudge against Apple. To answer your points, they built their own OS and they had their own Office suite.
They threw lots of stuff away afterwards, but from my point of view that's the very reason why I use an Apple laptop right now. Had they stick with the OS9 base, I'd never buy their products, the same way I don't consider buying a windows machine.
For your point 2) do you really need a citation about Office versions backward non compatibility?
I wouldn't care to qualify if those were done on purpose or not, fact is there's still product managers that green lit the release of products that would break silently compatibility with older versions in small but critically annoying ways (screwing the layout in a word doc is the last step before plain data loss)
Point 4) about incentives, I always wonder why we ended up with Office version installing libraries that would affect the behavior of internet explorer. For instance as an intern I built a dynamic form for an intranet dedicated to IE (6 I think?), but it wouldn't properly work if a recent version of Office was not installed on the system. Of course I was writing shitty code, but yet it boggles my mind that Office would install system wide libraries affecting the behavior of so many applications. There was no incentive to prevent this kind of problems, or they were just really bad designers, pick your option.
re > 2-They were experts breaking formats ON PURPOSE...
there's quite a good discussion in Wikipedia
>"Embrace, extend, and extinguish", also known as "Embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
> Apple couldn't even attempt to handle the size of software projects that Microsoft deals with. They couldn't even build their own OS, they had to buy it from NeXT who stole BSD and Tivo-ized it. Furthermore, if Apple built Office or designed the Office document formats, nobody would get any of the features that they wanted.
Er, you mean like how Microsoft based DOS off QDOS and Windows NT off OS/2?
Well it kind of is. A modified BSD kernel (open source, called darwin) that can't run without heavy modifications on non-apple hardware, with lots of proprietary libraries bolted in.
So they effectively took an open source software and made it hard to use outside their own hardware. So unless I'm missing something, macOS is basically a "tivoized" BSD.
I agree though that NeXT didn't "steal BSD". BSD is liberally licensed, so NeXT was perfectly within their rights to use it. Legally speaking, I don't think they even needed to open source their fork.
The XNU kernel is not a BSD kernel, it's a Mach kernel. There may be some BSD code in it (the unfinished net80211 wifi stack for iOS, ipfw/pf firewall, MAC framework, some things bolted on to make it traditional unix-y), but it's not a BSD kernel.
Maybe this is true when it comes to the Office formats in particular, I'm not familiar with them at all. But in general this is absolutely not true, or at least there are a lot of exceptions. The work of Dave Cutler's team, in particular, is an example of exceptional design, and do bear in mind that this is praise from someone who's been using and writing code for *nix systems for 15 years.
And don't get me started on Apple's "design first, program later". Most of the places where this still shows are inherited from NeXT. Their only serious attempt at an office format (that I'm aware of), in Pages, was pretty much a disaster.
Why should Apple users have to consider saving documents as a package vs. a single file? Why is this even an option?
Well, the package format proved to be a compatibility nightmare for Apple.
"Design first" didn't really work out. The Apple Pages document format is a compatibility nightmare and Apple fixed it by putting the onus on the user to fix it with abstruse save options.
Could you at least point out the logical fallacy in his argument? Simply saying "you're wrong, but I'm not going to tell you why" is far from productive (and ironically borders on the fallacy fallacy).
1-Their programmers were terrible designers. Companies like Apple design first, program later. With Microsoft it was the opposite. I don't care how good a mechanic(programmer) you are if you are bad engineer(designer) and can't see the forest out of the tree.
2-They were experts breaking formats ON PURPOSE, it is proven that Microsoft actually introduced bugs to break compatibility on things like DOS(to combat competitors like DR DOS)or AVI format so people were forced to use their products.
3-There were too much programmers(most of them not so good). While Netscape put to work 20-40 people, Microsoft employed 1.000 to destroy competition with Explorer. When mission was accomplished and competition was destroyed(and nobody dare to enter the given marketplace anymore) all this people moved to other projects like Office.
4-Perversive incentives. The social promotion under Ballmer incentived people to create lots of bad code fast instead of little good code.