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Why do people hate Windows?

Let me disclose my bias at the outset. I used to be a developer at the Core OS Division of Redmond. The first thing my managers said during the orientation was: "This is a component that is used by entities as diverse as nuclear reactors, central banks and major corporations. Whatever you do, never ever mess up this component."

Windows gets a lot of hate for being bloated, "crappy", not many features, often crashing, etc. But, the haters don't appreciate the engineering challenge we are given with.

1. Hardware Explosion: Windows is required to support every darn hardware you have got. There is a combinatorial explosion when it comes to options from different vendors we have to support. From the sleek ultrabooks to $200 netbooks and millions of things in-between, the engineers there have to support. Apple never had to worry about such an issue.
2. Software Explosion: When we designed features, we should also think about every darn software in the world that used to run in Windows to provide backward compatibility. Whenever we broke the compatibility, we used to get angry mails from our partners. Many of the compatibilities were broken in Vista and thus it got trashed. Some of these darn programs were last updated in 1990s, but users (enterprise ones) still expected us to stay compatible.
   
3. Channel Explosion: Microsoft sells through every darn channel possible and often Microsoft had little control  over the channel. Vendors like HP often irritated in the kind of  bloatware they added after we shipped the OS to them. Instead of hating  HP/Dell/Best Buy or whomever is adding the crap, blame gets assigned on  the most visible target on your screen: Microsoft.
4. Competing against your past: Every web developer hates IE 6. So does Microsoft. The browser was ok when it was launched. But, the whole world changed since IE 6 was launched and the enterprises are reluctant to move away from the legacy stuff. Although by IE10, Microsoft has narrowed the gap with modern browsers, the legacy stuff gets used by enterprises and Windows get hated for no fault of theirs. Blame it all on corporate America that move like tortoises. On the other hand, there are no OSX "Puma" guys who expect their Mac to work with software released for Mountain Lion.

Every day we analyzed millions of crash-dumps (the little thing that you send when your computer crashed and prompts you to say "send error report") and sometimes it would be mind-boggling to see the kind of errors we get from associated hardware and applications. Also, some high priority support issues get propagated from the support teams to our product teams and it will often be WTF (why are they using it this way?).

In short, in the quest to support everybody, everything, every time, Windows adds a lot of unnecessary crap.

But, when you are supporting a sizable chunk of world's computing infrastructure and have to make your product with the lowest common denominator in intelligence, you have little choice. No other company has to worry as much about the compatibility issues as Microsoft does. In the end, although Microsoft has probably failed to make a mark in online & mobile world, Windows is still the leader in its business. To stay for 20 years at the top, in this business, is no mean achievement. But, that kind of a success is at a price.

Although many of the Microsofties are not always happy with the quality they produce, there is a satisfaction that they are making products that a poor kid in India/Brazil or a grandma/grandpa in mid-west or a small company/local government in Europe can use to get their job done.

Is Windows hated because it is Prone to virus?
Windows despite being world's most popular PC operating system is hated with a justification that it is prone to virus.
Guess why? A subset of the users are actually ignorant that they don't recognize virus and malicious programs. It is not that linux is virus free but that linux users are smart enough to recognize malicious programs and discard them.
 

People hate Microsoft Windows for the same reason they hate Comcast, United Airlines, or Paypal.

Once Microsoft gained a dominant market position, it completely and utterly took its customers for granted. It became arrogant and complacent, causing customers to feel unappreciated and victimized.

This is nothing surprising. Once a company is assured of its market position and no longer has to win its customers, it seldom treats them very well. This causes widespread resentment by customers who know they are treated badly because they have so few other choices.

From Windows 95 on, Microsoft launched a series of products that were:

• Inconsistent - XP and Windows 7 were good. ME and Vista were disasters. We couldn't trust a software company to make good software. We'd pay $99 for a new release, only to be worse off the next day.
• Not secure - for a full decade a Windows user had to buy 3rd party software, patch constantly, and still deal with major security breaches.
• Confusing - the UI was a cluttered, inconsistent mess for years. Bill Gates himself said it best: Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant
  
• Slow to innovate - quick, name the top 5 innovations between Windows 95 and Windows 7. Between Office 95 and Office 2011?
• Resource hogs - want a OS upgrade? Buy a new computer.
• Ran on poor hardware - for decades you received Windows in a form of a crappy plastic box you got from Dell or HP, probably at Best Buy from a clueless sales rep trained only to upsell you crap you didn't need.
• Full of crapware - those same partners loaded the desktop with crapware aimed at upselling grandpa on useless crap by scaring him to death.
  
• Increasingly irrelevant - Microsoft missed search, touch screens, tablets, media players, saas, cloud, modern browsers, and virtually every major technology shift in the last 10 years.

This leads to a lot of pent-up anger. Over the years, the hundreds of hours of wasted time and hassle add up. Consumers have long memories and will dump a company that abuses them like this at the first chance they get.

And then, the fog started to lift:

• People discovered iPods, iPhones, iPads, Android Phones and Kindles. They said, "hey it just works"
• They discovered Chrome and Firefox. "Hey, it just works."
• They discovered GMail, Google Apps, Dropbox. "Hey it just works."
• They tried out Mac OS. "Hey it just works."
• Ex-Windows developers ran the next generation of apps on Amazon Web Services. "Hey, it just works."

Microsoft is now acting like the lover who took his partner for granted for years and got dumped as a result. "I can change!" He pleads.

They have scrambled to support mobile and tablet touchscreens, have added more cloud services, have improved Internet Explorer, and are gaining more control over their hardware and retail ecosystem.

And the new products are very good, but it doesn't matter. It is no longer about products. It is about trust. The damage has been done, and a reconciliation is unlikely.

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

I personally don't hate Windows, but I do dislike it compared to UNIX type operating systems.  It was only recently that Microsoft even bothered to incorporate some of the better, mature and time tested UNIX ideas, and they botched them or they are marginalized by the sheer inertia of existing code written and being used that was authored at a time when the OS was significantly less capable.

Right now, I'm really not feeling good about the Windows 8 moves.  A lot of leverage is being applied to get people to adopt Windows 8 because that's good for Microsoft, but it's not necessarily and arguably not good for said adopters.

Microsoft depends on license revenue and in particular renewal for a very large portion of their revenue and this impacts choices people have and those choices are sometimes quite expensive for no real technical purpose, only to make money.  Lots of people don't like that, because it's artificial value as opposed to real value.

UNIX set the bar for computing before Windows even matured to the point of being able to run moderate applications.  That's not changed, and often things are added to Windows and or changed to either exclude UNIX, or bastardize the ideas in ways that make cross-platform code more difficult than it could be to author.  Overall, this is easily characterized as "shitty" in that people end up with false computing choices and or doing work or spending money they would not otherwise do, if the OS were actually designed to function as an OS, not some sales platform.

Finally, application dependencies make life difficult for everybody, even Windows users in that those limit computing choice for the purpose of maximizing revenue at Microsoft, but that comes at farily high external costs to everybody else in the computing eco-system.  This self-serving behavior, coupled with the increasingly dubious licensing terms and conditions just isn't a value add, and is growing to be a burden.

I dislike these things, because I would much rather purpose my time getting things done rather than deal with false choices and expensive licenses / funky terms.  The messy application / administration space is just extra foul icing on top of a shit cake.

I have spent 16 years in front of PC in the IT industry developing, bug fixing, designing, architecting applications. I dont code myself anymore - I ve become an architect :-)

But when I started my career in 1997, Windows 95 was a craze and I remember my friends who had fiddled with it would wow over it. I started working on Unix dumb terminal and became a huge fan of Unix. I read the famous Kirch Paper and was even more convinced that Unix is the best. Woe betide anyone who says vi sucks in front of me. My desktop wall paper was a clever image that says Windoze NT Doesnt Workstation! But after all these years, and seeing the growth of Apple iOS and Android on the mobile devices I have realized a few things.

Windows came at a time when all vendors (including Apple at that time) were trying to sell everything from disk to applications. Consumers were forced to buy it all from one Vendor. Microsoft popularised the concept of open hardware with device drivers. This greatly reduced the prices of many components and computers became popular - primarlily because they were affordable. Even now, I can buy a Dell PC or have one assembed on SP Road in Bangalore and load Windows OS on to it.

Compare that with an Apple iOS - they control the complete ecosystem. If you want an app, you can only buy an app that Apple approves. You cannot attach any USB device and transfer data. Using iTunes is a nightmare (at least for me).

I also spoke to a respectable CIO who had been in in the industry since 1984. He also confirmed my changing belief saying that Microsoft actually reduced the price levels of many applications and devices making it more affordable for companies.

So, after all these years, I have changed my opinion and do not hate Windows anymore. I do hope they gain a market share in the mobile OS market and breaks the iOS/Android duopoly. It will be better for all of us, IMHO.

For the same reason they hate Mac OS, or Linux. People like to take a side and be proud of their choices. The easiest and less brain intensive way to show their superiority is by hating the alternatives.

This doesn't happen only in the computer industry. Look around, it's everywhere: sports, politics, religion, fields of study, universities, fashion, music... why it should be different with computers?