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Microsoft Programming

New Microsoft Garage Site Invites Public To Test a Wide Range of App Ideas 72

Posted by samzenpus from the give-it-a-spin dept.
An anonymous reader writes Microsoft today launched a new section on its website: The Microsoft Garage is designed to give the public early access to various projects the company is testing right now. The team is kicking off with a total of 16 free consumer-facing apps, spanning Android, Android Wear, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows, and even the Xbox One. Microsoft Garage is still going to be everything it has been so far, but Microsoft has simply decided it's time for the public to get involved too: You can now test the wild projects the company's employees dream up.
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New Microsoft Garage Site Invites Public To Test a Wide Range of App Ideas More

New Microsoft Garage Site Invites Public To Test a Wide Range of App Ideas

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  • .:. fuck subjects .:. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "Microsoft Garage is still going to be everything it has been so far,"

    You mean nothing, as it's being launched today?

    • It's been an internal hackerspace (both hardware and software) at Microsoft for years. Mouse Without Borders (one-to-many mouse/keyboard control), BusAlarm (wakes you up when the bus gets to your stop), and Codeflow (my personal favorite diff/code review tool) all came out of the Garage years ago.

  • Unpaid labour? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by innocent_white_lamb ( 151825 ) on Thursday October 23, 2014 @12:51AM (#48210181)

    Could someone tell me why we would want to do unpaid labour for Microsoft?

    I'm quite prepared to test and help support Linux and open source projects. Microsoft? Not so much....

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Could someone tell me why we would want to do unpaid labour for Microsoft?

      From what I can tell, it's not just QA and bug testing, it's more like "Here's a new thing we might take to market soon, would you buy it? If not, show us how you would change it!" It's a way for them to get a bigger cross-section of their users involved in the feedback process. I don't see this as anything but a positive thing.

      I'm quite prepared to test and help support Linux and open source projects. Microsoft? Not so much....

      I'm vice-versa, but fortunately the world is bigger than the two of us.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Could someone tell me why we would want to do unpaid labour for Microsoft?

      I'm quite prepared to test and help support Linux and open source projects. Microsoft? Not so much....

      I'm sure the Linux distro makers (which often are commercial entities) gladly take your free labor, and laugh at their way to bank.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tqk ( 413719 )

        I'm sure the Linux distro makers (which often are commercial entities) gladly take your free labor, and laugh at their way to bank.

        They're not grabbing my scrotum as they laugh their way to the bank. Oh, you wanted security from malware and viruses and crackers? There are many Microsoft Partners who'd be happy to supply you with solutions ...

        Bite me! Microsoft's ineptitude created that pathetic market!

        Assholes.

        • Re:Unpaid labour? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Thursday October 23, 2014 @03:15AM (#48210641)

          Is your selective memory ignoring all the sendmail and bind exploits that did the rounds in the 80s and 90s?

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by tqk ( 413719 )

            Is your selective memory ignoring all the sendmail and bind exploits that did the rounds in the 80s and 90s?

            No, those were bugs, or things the software wasn't designed to worry about. What produced the malware and spam market? MS' laxity in *everything* system security related, maybe?

            Are you ignoring how little MS bothered to secure itself, insisted that's not its problem, could be handled with bolted on (for a price) software supplied by third party suppliers, and it wasn't MS' problem that Win* wasn't able to protect itself?

            Latest I heard was *the best* AV software supplied by third party suppliers was *at be

            • Wow, you *are* ignoring the sendmail and bind exploits - many of them were due to lax security rather than being coding bugs.

              And you also seem to ignore the thriving antivirus markets that existed for the Atari, Amiga and other non-MS platforms - I wonder how MS was responsible for those!

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by tqk ( 413719 )

                Wow, you *are* ignoring the sendmail and bind exploits - many of them were due to lax security rather than being coding bugs.

                I'll give you that. I should have called them design or implementation deficiencies, not coding bugs. The Internet began as a really "in-house" sort of thing. They didn't anticipate that their collaborators would go out of their way to abuse what was then a shared and mostly trusted resource. The Morris Worm was pretty much a kid's white hat hacking that (oopsie) got out of control, and SMTP wasn't designed to prevent it. The Green Card Lawyers taught us how robust those systems were - jerks in the sys

            • "No, those were bugs, or things the software wasn't designed to worry about. What produced the malware and spam market? MS' laxity in *everything* system security related, maybe?"

              It's probably not related to the fact that MS had around 95% market share, that every ISP was configuring IE (since Netscape cost money), and most people didn't bother to pay for the trial AV installed on their store-bought discount computer.

              OSX started getting targeted by malware when it gained market share (and now profitable for

      • Could someone tell me why we would want to do unpaid labour for Microsoft?

        I'm quite prepared to test and help support Linux and open source projects. Microsoft? Not so much....

        I'm sure the Linux distro makers (which often are commercial entities) gladly take your free labor, and laugh at their way to bank.

        The phrase is actually, "laugh all the way to the bank".

        In any event... You imply that I can't use Linux to make money without selling it. That's pretty silly.

        I make a pretty good living using Linux, in spite of neither paying nor receiving any money for Linux, and I am quite sure I'm far from being the only one. Why should I care that the maintainers of my distro sell a commercial version of it? They're not taking any money from me, and they've bills to pay same as most folks, including me, so it's all goo

    • Absolutely!

  • Make an app, then see if it has a market?? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 23, 2014 @01:01AM (#48210221)

    That's a bit dumb, make an app and then see if there's a market for it?

    For example:
    "Collaborate - This app lets you host or join sessions on canvases made up of text cards and images. You and multiple other users can draw on the canvas to organize content, or manipulate the text and images using pinch, drag, and rotate gestures."

    WTF? Like finger painting for management consultants? Don't they have whiteboards for this? Why would they switch their huge whiteboards for small screens. Presumably for distance communications? So its integrated into some sort of VOIP and video app too?...no?

    "Floatz - This is an app designed to let you float an idea out to the people around you to see what they think. You can join nearby Floatz conversations as well as start your own with a question, an idea, or an image that you share anonymously."

    Now why would people whose opinion you want be required to download the 'Floatz' app for you to communicate with them? Why would they bother to use this?

    "Journeys & Notes - This is a social app meant for the space between an origin and a destination: It connects you to a community of people who have traveled the same path that you’re on. Whether you’re taking the bus to work or jet-setting across the globe, you can both leave behind notes for others to discover and read what others have shared."

    If I'm in Barcelona and want to know about Barcelona, what does it matter what my source point was and my destination point? Is a restaurant different in flavour if I arrived at it North to South than East to West? Does it make great tapas if I came down from Girona, but not if I drove up from Sitges?

    Look, it appears that a lot of fluffy management types got together to think up app ideas, and they came up with some fluffy ideas that are really not of much use.

    • "Journeys & Notes - This is a social app meant for the space between an origin and a destination: It connects you to a community of people who have traveled the same path that youâ(TM)re on. Whether youâ(TM)re taking the bus to work or jet-setting across the globe, you can both leave behind notes for others to discover and read what others have shared."

      If I'm in Barcelona and want to know about Barcelona, what does it matter what my source point was and my destination point? Is a restaurant different in flavour if I arrived at it North to South than East to West? Does it make great tapas if I came down from Girona, but not if I drove up from Sitges?

      Until someone invents instantaneous teleportation, getting from A to B involves things happening in between. If you spent several hours driving from Sitges to Barcelona, other people might be interested in the sights you saw, what the roads were like, how good the roadside cafe halfway was, and so on.

    • It's just the "google 20%" output from Microsoft. They're trying to show that they're vaguely innovative - and the problem with innovation is that quite a lot of the time it doesn't work out (seemingly for Microsoft, more times than most).

      When Google came out with Wave, we all wondered why they'd bothered - they tried it, people didn't get it and so they closed it down. This is no different.

      That said, Floatz looks like a particularly crap idea - if I want feedback from my friends, I'll send them an email (o

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Dr. Evil ( 3501 )

        Google Wave could have stuck around as a D&D app.

        I like these projects, they have a "throw it on the wall and see if it sticks." None of it is going to stick, but we'd never have had Clippy or Comic Sans if it wasn't for MS Bob.

        ... on second thought, MS shouldn't try to innovate.

    • "Journeys & Notes - This is a social app meant for the space between an origin and a destination: It connects you to a community of people who have traveled the same path that you're on. Whether you're taking the bus to work or jet-setting across the globe, you can both leave behind notes for others to discover and read what others have shared."

      If I'm in Barcelona and want to know about Barcelona, what does it matter what my source point was and my destination point? Is a restaurant different in flav

  • Garage? (Score:4, Funny)

    by l0n3s0m3phr34k ( 2613107 ) on Thursday October 23, 2014 @01:02AM (#48210229)
    Awesome, can I leave a giant oil stain in the driveway?

  • Unless microsoft goes back to developing a better OS based off of win 2k or win xp - I'm more likely to tell MS to fuck off and just hope I can port all my games to Linux someday instead.

    Vista Sucked - Win 7 slowed searches and locks up if you have a bad cd - win 8 was just a - well failure isn't anything but kind - so no, not interested in Microsoft wank stuff.

    OS that works. That's what the focus should be. Unfortunately, Micrsoft jumped off the Star Trek movie Mantra after XP. Every other release sucked u

  • Unlocking the Lock (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 23, 2014 @01:50AM (#48210409)

    Can someone explain to me the point of an unlocked lock screen? Take a look at their Next Lock Screen app. It basically bypasses the whole point of a lock screen by letting you launch apps, send emails, and auto-connect calls. What's the point of locking anymore if random users still have access to everything? Their app isn't the only one that does this.

    I understand showing the time, accepting a phone call, and maybe showing upcoming events. But everything else? WTF.

  • Is This Post a Paid Advertisement? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The post appears to be a paid advertisement.

    Please confirm, Slashdot. Open up, come clean. Transparency is good for a news aggregation site.

  • And in the fine print... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Torp ( 199297 )

    ... you indenture your first born to Microsoft in exchange for using their apps.
    Also, you are liable for patent fees.

  • Fuck Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)

    by ARos ( 1314459 ) on Thursday October 23, 2014 @04:55AM (#48210923)

    I wouldn't try any of their lame products if they paid me to try them. The trick to wooing developers [developers developers] is source code, evangelism, and community. Until you offer that, stay in your garage.

  • ob (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hognoxious ( 631665 ) on Thursday October 23, 2014 @08:21AM (#48211551) Homepage Journal

    You can now test the wild projects the company's employees dream up.

    I'm doing that right now.

    They call it Windows 8.

  • "You can now test the wild projects the company's employees dream up."

    Microsoft was never cool, and never will be, besides which, even if you think up an original idea, it'll be sure to turn up in the next iteration of Windows ..

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