Comments on: Five big things Microsoft got right

It's easy these days to dwell on the missteps and competitive challenges faced by the software maker, but analysis firm Directions on Microsoft points to the big things the company has gotten right.

[linux101]

Yeah inspite Xcode being free Visual Studio Express is free but still easier to use than Xcode. Oh I love Apple but using Xcode is like old MS Quick C 1.0 -- Klunky in areas, clever in other areas. If Apple wants to attract developers they need a Great muti platform solution. I'm not saying wxWidgets is it, but something along those lines where every one would lOVE to develop on a Mac and the final code would run on Linux and Windows as well. But right now its so much easier to develop on win32 :(
Bottom line is Visual Studio is a hugh right on m$'s part.

[Penguinisto]

Err, Visual Studio (the free version) is crippled, and very heavily EULA-bound. If you do anything commercially, you have to buy the full version of Visual Studio .NET, and that will cost you dearly.

(Personally, I use Eclipse - it's $0.00, and does multi-platform very nicely).

/P

[bikerelc]

Why is it that anything about microsoft or apple turn into flame wars with people dismissing linux. As for myself I have to say I would be completely on linux if I had the tablet support and some of the proprietary engineering software that I just can't get away from. As for a mac I just can't get into them, they cost more for the same product but most importantly is my remembrance of macs completely failing for me. I have had it happen when plugging in a disk from another OS it decides to be "helpful" and automatically reformatted my disk or drive did this to several friends as well causing loss of homework and other vital files also note that this was OSX. When apple claims not to crash I have to call bull I have brought down several computers running OSX more than I have with windows by far especially when you consider that by crashing a single mac on a network and I was able to take down every computer attached to the network. I have never achieved anything to that scale on anything but mac OSX. That being said I have had my fair share of blue-screens on windows but at least I was always able to track down the cause. Linux pretty good but when you hit a problem you probably need to put in some work to fix it. As for linux not being for newbies I can say I disagree, I have hooked up my senior parents with Kubuntu and the auto-update features as well as being able to customize the environment makes it perfect for people who only need to work with office programs, web surf, read email, listen to music (amarok) and the such it works great since I can set it up to automatically do any of the non-trivial things for them. Though for the users with more needs linux still has some hurdles to cross but over the past year I have seen it jump miles ahead of where it was. In other words everything has its flaws heres to hoping that M$, Apple, and Linux all keep improving their systems.