list of things that Microsoft fucked up :

1. Windows-1250 encoding

2. Microsoft Java Virtual Machine (MSJVM)

3. Windows Media Video

4. Microsoft Windows

You'll have an easier time listing things that Microsoft didn't fuck up

5. microsoft office

6. age of empires 3

7. every single piece of hardware they ever built

@tosensei I did have a Microsoft mouse, that was OK. But that was back when we used to cook a weekly egg so that we'd put the yolk as fresh ball into the mouse.

My only complaint was that switching mouse keys didn't work in DOS games, so I opened the mouse, cut the PCB lines for the switches, and re-soldered them as crossed. Proper left-hand mouse right there.

@tosensei > "7. every single piece of hardware they ever built"

Loved my Zune and Windows Phone.

Something got lost in translation with their "it just works" simplicity. Marketing? Anti-Microsoft marketing from Android/Apple? I don't know.

My extremely non technical (x10) wife barely bothered me with Windows Phone issues. She made calls, took pics, texted, etc. The thing just worked.

She bothers me on an almost on a daily basis with her Samsung. "what does this message mean?" "why isn't her picture showing up anymore?" "what happened to the little blue thingy that I text with?" on and on.

What happened with mah boy 1250? The first command I ever learned was

SetConsoleOutputCP(1250);

because it's needed for the Hungarian version of Hello World to print correctly

Or do you mean 1250 was the fuckup? Text is hard, and other contemporary solutions were bad too. I mean, the Unix locale API is mutable global state! I think it's healthier to accept that our elders were less informed than us and view what they made as venerable attempts despite their primitive nature, rather than judge then based on knowledge we only have because we saw the consequences of their mistakes.

@lorentz it was also a memory issue.

Modern UTF8 with all chars do take a significant amount of memory considering what computers had and then you had the printer interface. Even if you created a better software solution the printer cable protocol had its limitations so you used code pages and had to have the same in the pc as the printer.

It got better over time but it did work, better than some alternative I saw.

I remember printing under unix was a pain in comparison.

@tosensei I never understood the hate for AoE3. Imho it was great.

@Lensflare it might have been good as a standalone game - but it was a terrible part of the AoE-series - because it just wasn't AoE.

8. Skype

9. Teams

@PaperTrail to fix a Surface, i had to install windows 10 in a VM, copy over but not install the driver packages, take the VM image and put it on a 2.5" HDD, insert that and an actual IDE DVD drive into one of those 3-device USB reader things, and boot Linux from the DVD to write the VM image directly to the internal storage. All of this was because the Win10 installer wouldn't properly start on it, asking for drivers before installinh, and feeding in all Setup-loadable drivers for the Surface, provided DIRECTLY FROM MICROSOFT, didn't satisfy it.

Microsoft branded the hardware, has a virtual monopoly on UEFI secure boot keys, made the OS it SHIPPED WITH, and I couldn't reinstall it to fix a corrupted Windows install without involving Linux and Virtualbox. They fuck up the hardware plenty.

@tosensei office 2000/2003 are pretty good by modern standards. 2007 is on the edge of serviceable, and after that you may as well use Wordpad (not Notepad.)

Oh, right. They removed it because people did just that.

@vane don't forget that MS-DOS/IBM-DOS were pretty big trainwrecks when compared to competitors, and DoubleSpace was around for multiple years before they figured out why it ate people's data. We live in the worst timeline.

@Parzi by the way - do you know if notepad on win11 finally supports unix-linebreaks?

or is this still something where wordpad is actually superior? :D

@tosensei notepad has supported them since vista, it's been disabled by default in the registry till windows 10 20xx builds. they have to be the ONLY kind of linebreak in the file or it still doesn't work right, it prefers Windows, then Mac, then Unix style line breaks in that order.

@Parzi for the purpose of a text editor, "is disabled" is basically the same as "doesn't support", tbh.

@Parzi That timeline was a lucky accident because IBM had never intended the PC to be that successful. If they had known, they wouldn't have made it open, and we would be stuck with closed proprietary platforms.

In that way, Apple has rolled back to the past.

@tosensei It could be re-enabled pretty quickly, it's still got an entry in winaero tweaker and such. Though, yes, something like notepad++ would still be ideal.