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Why not to bother with being "loyal" to Microsoft brands

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Renegade:
IMHO the only piece of hardware Microsoft ever really did get right was the scroll-wheel mouse.

And the only pieces of software they ever got mostly right were Flight Simulator X...and maybe (just maybe) Word 6.0. 8)
-40hz (August 31, 2012, 12:23 PM)
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I had an MS ball mouse for about 8 years of hard work. It just wouldn't die. When I went to replace it, I found that you could no longer buy wheel mice. Everything was laser. :( At the time, laser mice weren't really all that spectacular/accurate, and I was rather disappointed. Maybe I've had good luck with MS hardware. Dunno. I'd buy MS hardware again though.

40hz:
^ OneNote :)
-rgdot (August 31, 2012, 12:51 PM)
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^ +1 for OneNote from me. It's a remarkably well-designed piece of software. I was very surprised when I started to use it about 3 years ago. I still keep discovering undocumented features that are quite literally mind-blowing - "How the heck did they do that?" sort of thing.
Mind you, I also reckon that Word and Excel are pretty powerful tools - but we only typically tend to use 20% or so of their functionality.
-IainB (August 31, 2012, 06:06 PM)
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OneNote isn't that bad. I use it although I'm not as sold on it as several of my friend are.

About the only serious complaint I have is how much useful stuff you can do with it goes undocumented by Microsoft. I could understand if it were a F/OSS project. But OneNote costs some decent coin. And Microsoft is a big company. So maybe I can't really get too much behind it because I feel the paying customers deserve better documentation than that.

That said, it is a very nice free form info manager. I use it on project work with some of my clients and it serves its purpose quite well. :Thmbsup:

zridling:
Oh, I'm sorry MS Music people, you just got hosed *twice* in a decade. Let's call it a 5 year Arc.... I don't have time for that $hit. (Front loaded hyped sales PR machine and all.)-TaoPhoenix (August 31, 2012, 09:46 AM)
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I sniffed this customer mugging back in 2002, when I saw that Microsoft kept changing the .doc/.xls formats with every new version of MSOffice. Updating, not a problem. But when I was opening research documents created from earlier MSOffice versions and they weren't formatted the same, I knew I was screwed unless I got out. I couldn't afford to have an entire career tied up in proprietary formats that were being changed to the point of being unreadable a decade later -- and Microsoft made sure no one else could convert them accurately either! By late 2005 I made the move to Linus and open source and by 2006 my transition was complete. Haven't looked back.

But now the cycle is repeating itself for Apple and Facebook users.

TaoPhoenix:
The switch to Docx and Xlsx was particularly bad. I had some contract writing software with a heavy plugin sitting on top of MS Word that *finally* got the patch for the new format ... in 2011. Before that it was only because I have a decent grasp of file extensions that I worked around that glitch.

However I do have to say I like Excel 2010, because the one thing that was missing from the ribbon was customizability. In Office 2010, you can make your own ribbons. So I made one that had my favorite 20 features in approximately the order that a document used them, and it was in fact even faster than the old menus. It was almost like running your fingers down the piano keys. But that's not "loyalty", that's just a user deciding he likes a feature.

Looping back, the Zune debacle was especially jarring because DRM is just tech, but they tried to cash in on the early waves of "social" while getting the entire concept wrong. So for those users who have a Zune, great, hope you like it. But for the ones that went beyond that and tried to "Like being a Microsoft Fan", that's the loyalty that I am talking about that got gutted like a fish.

tomos:
Isn't one of the problems with One Note that you cant export?
... or am I wrong there?

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