A bad influence

The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.world to Memes@sopuli.xyz – 1412 points –
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Honestly, I think that anyone who is this angry about Microsoft products needs to spend some time working with the types of industrial software that makes the manufacturing world go round. Just to get some perspective on what truly God awful software actually looks like.

don’t forget all the crapware foisted off on small businesses – point-of-sale systems designed for Windows XP and the company’s gone belly-up but you can’t switch because all of your data is locked in – manufacturing hardware with proprietary EISA cards and drivers for Windows 98 and there’s not enough installs to justify reverse engineering …

Yummy visual basic apps that have been dragged into the modern era kicking and screaming

My brother in Christ, IRC is a better tool.

Microsoft is failing to meet minimum standards of usability that has existed since the 80s

You mean usability like nick collision, channel takeovers, absence of services, no support for media or files, disagreements in the community that lead to multiple separated IRC networks, fully visible client IPs, the joke the ident protocol was?

I understand not liking teams, or webex, or zoom. But IRC in the 80s is hardly an shining beacon of usability or standards.

There are modern IRC clients like TheLounge and Convos that support media and video. And push messages. You can also have your own internal server not exposed to the internet, this eliminating the problems of takeover, splits and whatnot...

Also the protocol has evolved and there's been integrated options in the servers to hide IPs for at the least a decade.

You may remember those issues and problems when you abandoned it, but it contniues to evolve and endure. I have a private server for my friends and it's been the most stable and direct way to chat and share images for years.

Edit: I have not tested the video stuff in Convos. I use TheLounge and it's perfectly capable of taking an mp4 to upload on the server and display it in the chat. I share images daily by uploading them from my IRC client and they are displayed in the chat... it's not just text anymore!

I have no doubt there are improved clients. But that is the problem. IRC is not standardized at all. Different clients give different results. Also, we are talking about IRC in the 80s, not today.

That's very far away from good usability.

Original IRC also used 8bit text, so no unicode. Note I did not say ASCII, because IRC did not even defined encodings. Do you remember the pain of different Code pages on computers?

IRC as a protocol was basically a dumpster fire that somehow worked.

Don't get me wrong, I loved IRC (using irssi on bash mostly). But I wouldn't praise it for usability. At all. And I would never pretend IRC set standards for usability in the 80s.

With the exception of the great split. And the freenode fiasco. IRC have been consistently fantastic for me since i logged on in ~93

I'm talking software/firmware in general, not just chat clients/protocols. As I said, you seem to need some perspective.

Lol, this is such an absurd line of reasoning.

"This problem was solved in the 80s and then Microsoft bullied an inferior product into business space, and it impacts my work every single day"

And your response is "eat shit, some people have it worse?"

This isn't the fucking pain Olympics and you don't get a fucking medal for working on a worse stack.

This is a wildly toxic mindset and I promise your entire life will start to get better once you ditch it.

Edit:

Also, you seem to be missing a crucial element here. It's not that, like in your situation, things were bad and are still equally bad.

This is the situation where things were good, and then made worse. Completely different trendline.

Wait, so me saying that Teams is not that bad relatively speaking is a toxic mindset? You do see the irony of flying handle at me to say that, right?

Edit: Deleted duplicate

"working with teams isn't as bad as working with some software in a completely different domain"

Apples and oranges, reeks of "You can't be cold because I live in Canada" energy, but ok, whatever.

"You need perspective"

Extremely condescending. Enforces the notion that nobody can dream of better things as long as other people (you specifically) see themselves are enduring something worse.

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I've used fully functional chat applications, and I've used Microsoft Teams.

Teams is so bad it seems intentional

Everything is relative. Teams is a shining beacon of competency when compared to a lot of the utter shit software and firmware that I end up having to deal with.

Sure, but I work much more than I'd like with teams, and it's pain in my ass.

If software gets worse than teams, I'd find a new industry

I think what he is saying is that you'd be jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

It could always be worse. You could be using SAP.

I am so glad my new job had sense to say no. Their cost benefit analysis pretty much said the amount of pain, man hours, and bullshit it would cost to run far outweighed the higher price of the alternative product they went with.

the higher price of the alternative product

Good lord, you mean there's something out there more expensive than SAP?

Probably the worst I've seen was an ERP written in COBOL in 2014.

Why are ERP systems always shit for everyone involved? I've yet to see one that didn't warrant a full time position just to clean it up and fix it when it inevitably breaks. Epicor was the worst offender I have seen.

Seriously. It’s not even the worst videoconferencing/chat tool, let alone all the other industries that thrive on barely usable software. Healthcare software, for example.

If all you’ve ever used is phone software that’s either made to as frictionless as possible to gather as much data from you as possible, then I can see hating Teams. If anything, Teams is a victim of its own success. Everyone hated the bloat in Outlook which now looks stripped down by comparison, because Teams is clearly the MS golden child and if you want your project to live at MS it needs to connect to Teams in some way.

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