[geeks] can't wait for Vista

[Phil Stracchino]

Mark Benson wrote:
> On 6 Nov 2006, at 06:46, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
>> Personaly,
>> ALL of my experience with Microsoft hardware has been excellent.
> 
> One thing I agree on. MS Mice are the best in the business.

Their first mouse was great, except that it only had 2 buttons.  I
tolerated it up until Logitech came out with some decent 3-button mice.

Their second was the "banana mouse", the bent-sideways thing that was
only available in what was clearly a right-handed version.  Their
response to the requests for a left-handed version was "Actually, this
shape works better for left-handed users too.  Honest.  Would we make
shit up?"  It still had only two buttons.  I stuck with Logitech.

If memory serves, the first three-button mouse Microsoft finally gave in
and made was when they came up with the scroll wheel, because they could
no longer come up with a plausible reason not to have it act as a third
button.  By that time, I'd gotten tired of the problems of early
Logitech mice (about the time they switched to only making bizarre
lump-of-half-melted-butter "ergonomic" mice), but I'd been using Mouse
Systems mice for quite a few years.  Mice Systems mice were good.  They
made mice for Sun.  The scroll wheel wasn't a big enough advantage for
me to make me give up a three-button mouse, because the scroll wheel did
nothing in 95% of software.

Their first no-moving-parts imaging optical mouse was a big step forward
... in mouse mechanisms.  Not in mice.  I tried one out, because Mouse
Systems had fallen behind the curve and I liked the idea of no moving
parts to get gummed up.  I still want to know what absolute CRETIN came
up with the idea of making a smooth, rounded mouse that you had to grip
by the sides when you needed to pick it up and move it, and then putting
buttons ON THE SIDES right where you had to grip it, and making them
look like just part of the design.  And there wasn't even any way to
disable the side buttons.  It was so unusable it drove me back to
Logitech again.  (Fortunately, by that time Logitech had started making
mice again that were designed for human hands, instead of for the
nine-tentacled slug creatures of Planet Zeebrox.)

Logitech, fortunately, had improved a lot in the meantime.  All our mice
are Logitech now.  (Now if they'd just put a few more cents into the
low-friction feet....)


The first Microsoft "Natural Keyboard" was pretty nice.  But trned out
to be flimsy, both in design and construction.  Still, I bought two of
them.  By the time they'd both physically *broken*, Microsoft had
screwed up the design by moving to the Natural Keyboard Elite, which --
to make the keyboard a couple of centimeters shorter -- eliminated
several seldom-used keys altogether, moved a couple of others around
into places my fingers didn't expect them to be (and neither did anyone
else's), shrunk others, and reduced the key pitch overall just enough to
throw experienced typists off slightly.

When they finally came out with the Natural Keyboard Pro, they released
their best keyboard ever.  It had the best ergonomic design of any of
their keyboards, and the best construction, and even though it had a
bunch of extra idiot buttons that were of no use to me whatsoever (and
are still of no use to me whatsoever, except for one that I allocate as
a PTT button for TeamSpeak on my gamebox), they were small and
unobtrusive.  Of course, it was also their most expensive keyboard ever.
 Needless to say, the Natural Keyboard Pro didn't stay on the market
long.  The ones you can still find are almost worth their weight in gold.

Then they went on to all the different "media" keyboards, many of which
abandoned even the ergonomic design in favor of ever bigger "My computer
is just a fancy-ass CD player, and my keyboard shows it" multimedia
control arrays.  Never again would they make anything as good, as usable
and as downright comfortable as the Natural Pro.  I don't know what I'm
going to do for keyboards when my remaining Pros wear out.


Then there's the XBox.  I've never used one, and can't speak for its
performance.  I know when they came out there were whole genres of jokes
about their weight.  Then there was the disc-scratching problem.
"Nonsense," said Microsoft, "XBoxes don't scratch discs.  It's all just
stories and vicious rumors.  And user carelessness.  And users'
imagination.  XBoxes don't scratch discs.  Not even in Japan.  Well....
maybe ... OK, so they scratch discs in Japan.  But only in Japan!  Uh
... well, OK, yeah, they scratch discs in the US too.  Yeah, we admit
that XBoxes scratch discs.  We've actually known it all along, but we
thought you wouldn't notice.  And who knew it'd make the US news when we
admitted they scratch discs in Japan?  I guess this means we have to fix
it now, huh?  Dang those pesky Japanese anyway."



So, I personally tend to regard Microsoft hardware rather as a few hits
in a rather larger string of misses.  They're not really a hardware
company any more than they're really a game company.  The "killer app"
for the XBox was Halo, and while Halo is a great game, the only reason
Halo had Microsoft's name on it is because Microsoft bought Bungie.




-- 
 Same geek, same site, new location
 Phil Stracchino                     Landline: 603-429-0220
 phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net         Mobile: 603-216-7037
 Renaissance Man, Unix generalist, Perl hacker, Free Stater