The “Anyone But Microsoft” Mentality

I received a nice comment from Manoj regarding my post “This is why Microsoft continues to succeed“:

Lol! Use wordpad mister! I’ve used Mozilla documentation before and have found it seamlessly easy!

My first thought is Did Manoj even READ this readme.txt?  My second thought is well, he might be right about WordPad, so I opened it up in that program and yes, it did actually have carriage returns and was much more readable.  However, it’s still not nearly as user-friendly as *cough* modern developer documentation.

The Open Source crowd — I guess more specifically, the ABM (Anyone But Microsoft) crowd — persists in a few terrible thinking errors:

1. Microsoft is always bad
2. It’s not worthwhile unless it’s difficult
3. Developer documentation should be obtuse
4. Always stick up for your ABM technology of choice
5. Question the intelligence of anyone who complains about open-source

I mean, come on!  I’ve been looking through Silverlight documentation recently and there is NO COMPARISON in ease of use.   That’s true of 95% of the documentation produced by Microsoft.  They’ve had this ethos for years that says “Make life easier for developers, and your platforms will sell better.”   It’s true.