Top 10 not flops

re: Top 10 not flops

stevecla01 — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 19:27:17 GMT

thanks Eileen - how did I forget the mouse?? another thing we didn't invent of course but did a pretty good job of perfecting I reckon. I just got a replacement for my favourite of all Microsoft mice - the Starck - which sadly has been discontinued :( I'm going to add it to my final Top 10 though!

http://blogs.technet.com/eileen_brown/archive/2006/06/23/top_10.aspx

TrackBack — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 18:45:26 GMT

My best Microsoft things - in a list...

Eileen Brown's WebLog — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 16:20:33 GMT

Following on from Steve's blog entry the other day,&nbsp;after listening to James' musings at the roadshow...

re: Top 10 not flops

Matthew Stibbe (Bad Language) — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 08:44:32 GMT

You're blog's really getting good. Enjoying it a lot at the moment.

Are you going to do a ten worst Microsoft things at some point? It would be a traffic monster but perhaps a career-limiting post! <grin> My vote would be the way Word exports HTML with all the crap tags in it - absolutely unusable.

Here are my votes for the remaining three slots:

1) wavy underline spell checking. A people say Microsoft doesn't get usability.
2) Small Business Server. If XP is like a fighter jet, SBS is more like a stealth bomber. It's an amazing amount of technology and capability for very little money.
3) Flight Simulator. The best selling computer game in history. My favourite story about this was that Bruce Artwick who wrote the original version back in the late 70s said that he let Microsoft publish the game because he liked its small company atmosphere!

re: Top 10 not flops

Jeff Parker — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 19:37:24 GMT

well how about the .net framework. I mean come on that is one of the greatest things out of MS.

Direct X? Where would a lot of games be without Direct X

Visual Studio 2005, or at least intellisense since every VS just gets better.

re: Top 10 not flops

Kdbertel — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 17:51:38 GMT

Pivot Tables.

Should I say it again? Pivot tables.

How about a third time? Pivot tables.

Probably the coolest thing in spreadsheets since...the spreadsheet.

re: Top 10 not flops

Adam — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 14:13:04 GMT

Yup, tunneling everything (including email over RPC) over HTTP is great! It lets you get around all those pesky security measures like firewalls and VPNs! Woohoo! They only get in way, and what to the security experts and network administrators know anyway? I'm sure that their refusal to open an IMAP over SSL port to the mailserver was just their way of trying to let you know how important they are.

And the fact that HTTP is almost completely unsuitable as a lower-level layer for connection (as opposed to datagram)-oriented protocols, such as those that you'd normally have to your mail server so it can inform you when you have new mail, meaning that most applications have to reinvent all of the connection-state-maintaning parts of TCP themselves (often badly, and without the "connection" being automatically closed when one side terminates unexpectedly by the networking stack), is also neither here nor there.