Slashdot Mirror
James Fallows on His Brief Microsoft Tenure
GrokSoup writes, "Writer James Fallows spent the first six months of 1999 on an unnnamed project at Microsoft (a word processor for writers). While he says he can't write about the secret project, he has written this lengthy piece for The Atlantic about life at Microsoft.
It's spooky. Among other things, Fallows compares Microsoft with its "Up with programming" posters and logo attire to the military; says people pull fewer all-nighters there than he thought they would; and discovers the culture is meeting-centric (no surprise)."
If you have all employees clustered in one huge campus, then you inherently need more effort to coordinate everything. Even then, coordination suffers, which is why certain strange features went into Office just because some employee wanted it. :-)
A group developing a small, slick product with all essential functionality can proceed much faster - KOffice has proved this, but also Applixware and (to some extent) StarOffice. MS has just grown too big to adjust itself to the market. Once they lose their power to dominate the market and tell people what they want, they will certainly go through a rigorous downsizing/decentralizing process. Maybe the judge will already do that work for them
the main paying customers for Office are big corporations
I hope Open Source companies (such as RH) can break into these markets. However, When they do, the software they use will probably not be Open Source. The manager at "Chevron" has to believe that they are getting something better than the others. With Open Source, that "belief" is too easily disproved.
I would say what is valuable about this article is that it shows us that MS is just like any other hugely successful company. That leads to conclusions which should be obvious, but turn out to be a lot more obvious when someone goes to the trouble of finding them and pointing them out. *Of course* they have a lot of smart people, and of course they don't kill them with work. So, my question is, someone is in charge of all those competition killing marketing maneuvers; who is it? Does the average employee even know that MS is trying to crush the very competition they are trying to outdo?
Walt
I know we need any excuse we can get to bash Microsoft, but if you read the article, you'll see that GrokSoup has taken the quotes grossly out of context.
The author also brings up a good point:
If there is something you love or hate about Microsoft programs, don't thank or blame Bill Gates; some specific member of the Microsoft team decided to "own" that feature and include it in a program.
Everyone who gets fed up with a program at one point (partly humoursly) says "I HATE BILL GATES!" assuming he's the one who screwed up their computer. People are quick to say that since he's the richest man in the world, and he's in charge of Microsoft, it must have been HIM that wrote every single line of code in every single product -- Therefore, this blue screen is HIS FAULT. Bzzzt, Wrong. (Sure, everyone knows this but too few actually REALIZE this.)
There is even a person who created the "It looks like you're writing a letter" auto-annoyance feature in Word. I had to sign a separate confidentiality clause promising not to name him.
That's because he'd probably be jumped in the parking lot the day this article was published.
Note: No, I DON'T work for Microsoft, I don't worship their software, and I love Linux. So toss your predisposed judgements in the garbage.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Admittedly they have written some great software, (hardly surprising with brains like Bill Gates working there). They have also demonstrated some serious innovations, (such as DCOM, and Active X) which stand as examples of how privately funded research can pay dividends.
However where they excel (apologies for the pun) is the Marketing. Is there anyone out there who has not heard of Microsoft and their great software ? I doubt it.
Well done Microsoft, you are like a shining beacon to Marketers everywhere, of the potential that the science of Marketing has to improve our lives.
Kudos to Bill for recognising this fact.
Thank you.
dmg
Having spent the past two summer vacations as an intern at Microsoft, I can say with some authority that this article is quite accurate. I have to say that the amount of mindless propoganda ("WRITE GREAT CODE!") was exaggerated. Much more frequently you'll find articles from industry magazines on the product being developed in that part of that building (both positive and negative reviews can be found, with the latter's attack at specific features hilighted to emphasize for the team what needs to be worked on in the next release), dilbert comics, wall sized object models, and display cases showing off the earlier versions of the product. People at MS are proud of the products they develop, but they don't wear the branded clothes MS throws at them in armfulls (exaggeration) because of this. It's more of a "hey, free shirt!" attitude than a "I'm going to wear this shirt for my team" attitude. The pride just lets them wear it.
I don't think the downside of the meeting-centric culture was emphasized enough in the article. Of course, there is variance from team to team, but the number of meetings a typical employee can attend in a week can really start to bother him/her. This is especially the case because the type of person that you'll find at MS scores high on the geek scale, and (it's been my experience that) geeks tend to prefer to be working on their machine rather than discussing things in a meeting. It is perhaps because of this very fact that the meetings are so important to the smooth flow of operations within the teams. With the heavy degree of interdependance in a collaborative software design enviroment and the tendancy for the geek to work hard at his or her own feature with little regard for the rest of the universe, the meetings are a neccessary evil to pull team members back and get them looking at the Big Picture again.
Finally, with regard to ". . . Microsoft employees are thought to be haughty, sharp-tongued, and prickly to deal with.": I don't doubt that this is the case. Microsoft has one of the worst public image problems in history. But the people there _are_ acutally nice, as the author claims. They're hackers just like you'd find at any other company, except that as the author points out they tend to work more sane hours and enjoy a great deal of pampering. When the company was out leveraging it's monopoly power in unfair ways, it wasn't the devs, testers, or program managers fiendishly devising ways to force oems to install windows. All that was carried out at the upper levels by the marketing people without the knowledge of the product teams. The people developing the product have remarkably little knowledge or even care as to how the product will be delivered/marketted to the public. It didn't really suprise me to realize this. Pardon my prejudice, but I have a jaded view of the moral character of marketting/sales offices. It seems to me to be an almost unnerringly duplicitous facet of modern business.
Gee, if they're so "big" I wonder why they're not called "big-size organizations" then? Could it be they've seen the slashdot icon for Microsoft?
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
There is even a person who created the "It looks like you're writing a letter" auto-annoyance feature in Word. I had to sign a separate confidentiality clause promising not to name him.
Wow, there must be people really gunning for him if he gets his own separate confidentiality clause just to protect him :)
So Microsoft is one big, happy family ;-)
I think that the problem is maybe that there are a few people within Microsoft who are far too aggressive towards competitors. As the article says, the majority of M$ employees are probably quite normal, likeable people who are not bent on total world domination at the expense of everybody else.
I was a bit suprised that there was no mention of Linux in this article. I would assume that it would be a topic of conversation amongst Microsofties. From the tone of the article, I doubt very much that James Fallows will donate his unused ideas to the open-source office suites, though it would be very noble of him if he did.
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
Great article. It shows microsofties as normal people, which they undoubtedly are. An organization clearly suffering from some of the coordination problems that a large scale corporation has.
But aside from the comments made by others I found it interesting that Microsoft hired a *writer*. Just because this guy had written some wishlist they liked. In the Open Source community it is often said that because you have the source you can alter it and get the features you want. Here is somebody complaining that he doesn't get the right features and he gets hired. This strengthens my beliefs that in the end it doesn't matter if a project is Open Source or Closed Source as long as you get the stuff in that your customers want. Not only the man/woman behind the screen, but also the corporate heads are what Microsoft is looking at. These latter ones influence purchasing, whereas the former ones are left with the results. This means improvements in manageability but a crappy grammar and spellchecker for the Dutch language. If the open source community wants to make a breakthrough they will have to equal Microsoft in terms of (perceived) ease of use AND (perceived) cost of ownership.
This comment not previewed because of slowness of Slashdot
Use Adsense for Charity
He was told by I believe Nathan Myrvhold, who, MSoftie or not pretty much created the idea of the desktop word processor while at PARC, that "Those ideas are great. But people who use word have already learned certain keystrokes and they would have to learn a whole new set if we were to put in your features."
d
I'm just curious, but isn't it the procedure everywhere to have loads of meetings whenever you come across a problem? I know this probably sounds like a gasoline-covered rag flame-fest, but seriously.
I work at a high-tech company, and it actually helps to have a meeting whenever we
rJames.org - illustration
What Microsoft does brilliantly is keep their client firmly in mind. When Im dealing with my clients, I have to admit I often ask myself "What would Microsoft do?" as part of my effort to stay focused on the same issues. I dont like their software. I certainly dont like their approach. However, I admire the way they nurture their client relationships and the way they understand how the people who are going to be purchasing their products think. And I know from experience that they have a lot of really talented people working there (both technical and non-technical)
If we mindlessly hate and fear everything Microsoft rather than learning what lessons we can from the things they do right, then we will ultimately lose because everything we do will be reaction, not action. Methinks you need to learn what you can from any source.
Because the snark was a...
- It is nice to work for a compay that is doing well.
- There is a reason why MS is no 1 (marketwise)
- You don't make it where MS is today without doing things right. Their goal never was to write the best software for everyone, it is to write software that as many people (and LORG's) as possible consider good enough.
- Microsoft's main customers do not use the same criteria when they choose software as the average
/.'er.
I dont like everything fom MS, but I have to hand it to them:Nobody is better at making selling software. They dont rely on clueless marketers they rely on *damn good* marketers.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
This guy seems to despair that Microsoft doesn't treat him like a valued customer, and there aren't any other options. The first part of this sentence is true, but there are certainly a lot of options. Abisource has done a great job with their GPL'd software, but even if this is a little too raw, is there anyone out there who is having trouble finding non-MS software?
They may be a legal monopoly, but there is not a single category of software for which they are the only vendor. There are other office suites if you want a huge monolithic office suite. There are other grotesquely bloated word processors, and there are well-written word processors.
Sure, if this guy wants to fundamentally change the way most people interact with their bloated office suite, he needs to "get inside" at Microsoft, but if he wants to help someone create a better word processor, there are better places to start, if only because Word is a lost cause.
I think the word monopoly implies a defeatist attitude towards Microsoft. We must use their products because everyone else does. We must accept the bloat because there are no alternatives. They're just another company. Use their stuff when it works, don't use it when it doesn't.
It's plain that Microsoft has done harm. However, you look at the coders and geeks within Microsoft and they are not, for the most part, bad people. Does this invalidate the harm Microsoft has done? No, of course not- welcome to the real world. They have helped it happen, certainly did not set out each day saying "Heyyyy! Let's all stifle innovation in this industry (except from us!) and help to lock computing into some technological Dark Ages!". It's just that the work that they do is effectively harnessed to the power of a corporation which has a long history of doing just such stifling. They are not the ones in toplevel meetings telling Apple "Yes, we're asking you to 'knife the baby'. Kill Quicktime for us or you won't like the consequences". But their work enables the upper management to do just that.
Also, I would be very surprised if there wasn't a (military?) sort of elitism pervading the place. In effect, the Microsoft workers may not be frothing at the mouth to eradicate all competition in the industry- but they do, I feel, see themselves as superior to anybody else, which makes it very easy for them to be very unconcerned about their bosses acting to crush and stifle other companies. Somewhere in the back of the Microsoft worker mind is, "That's okay- if they wanted to _really_ innovate and do good things, they'd quit that company and join US!". This is not capitalism, of course- in most industries, competition is seen as a normal and healthy thing. I feel that within the Microsoft culture, competition from other companies is seen as as best a distraction from _real_ innovation, and at worst a positive roadblock- such that one could easily picture Microsoft people lobbying the government to shut down a competitor that stood in the way of Microsoft expansion. "You're hurting the economic growth of the whole country by allowing them to keep operating like that! They're blocking innovation!"
And still, none of this requires that the people involved are evil people: you just have to look at their worldview. It's all very well having elitism. Elitism plus _clout_ equals trouble.
Don't forget that the feature *you* would kill for is the very thing that someone else will call bloat.
Trying to scratch everybodys itches at the same time will not work...
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Fallows made a mistake people often do, mixing the image of the company, with the people working for it. Ofcorse, programmers working for microsoft are not different from people working for any other software company.
I do think Microsoft is a VBT (Very Bad Thing), for two main reasons:
1. It holds too much power.
2. It abuses its power.
From sociological point of view, each group of people that gains power fights to keep others away from it, and thus it is no surprise Microsoft abuses its power. ANY other company that would be at the same position as Microsoft would act the same.
And this is where FREE (beer&speech) software comes it: It ensures no one would hold such absolute power.
Sela
That's so munted.
These "wouldn't it be neat" features are used by many people, and most are god damn useful. All those features can ofcourse be turned off. And bloat? Excuse me, lets see star office, bloated, slower and takes over the desktop. Netscape, bloated slower and takes over win9x's role of crashing.
And now you're saying open source is better cause weird "wouldn't it be neat" things *WON'T* be added? How so? You're saying open source is more restrictive...or what? I don't get where you're coming from.
And now you're copying Linus' change of moods, and saying forking is _GOOD_?
I'd like to hear some more reasoning from you.
Corporate loyalty bordering on fanatacism seems to be a trait that a lot of companies try to instill in their employees. I wouldn't want a career at Microsoft, but I wouldn't mind working there for a few weeks, just out of curiousity. As for the posts praising Microsoft's organizational ability, there isn't really much need to develop a succesful management strategy when your profit margins are unbelievably high. In a less wealthy company employees wouldn't be able to spend most their time "waiting" for someone to give them something to do. Which also brings up the question as to how good are the people they recruit? We've all dealt with the substandard software, how many first-rate programmers can they actually have working there? Maybe the reason they don't release the source as open is because they're too embarassed to show it...(an op-ed piece that appeared in the NYT quotes a former programmer on the issue: there's a copy at http://www.reason.com/opeds/vp110899.html)
On the whole I agree with you, but the timing of your first point is deliciously ironic.
If you surf on over to the Linux Game Tome, you will find that only today a patch was released for e2fsck (the thing that checks your disk for you if you don't shutdown the machine properly), which allows you to play Tetris while the file system is checked. Of course, because it is open source, your second point kicks in: The feature is optional.
I enjoyed the article. It sounds as though the programmers aren't too different to their open source counterparts (but richer). Presumably all the dodgy tactics come out of the marketting department. I guess one of the strengths of open-source is that we have no marketting department!
Umm, which makes it the perfect analogy, doesn't it?
What exactly is your point again????
Do you think M&S said to the programmers that every new version of M$Word should have a different file format? Do you think that M&S said to the programmers that IE should be completely mixed up in the OS?
I don't think so. I am sure most M$ people are nice, but I don't think Marketing & Sales are the only bad people(tm) at M$!
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Can you blame them? I turn that fscking paperclip off, but if I'm typing a long technical document and start a paragraph with the word 'To', the paperclip jumps up and says "It looks like you're writing a letter". Even if I'm 20 pages into the document. Artificial Stupidity at its worst. Microsoft should either fix this 'feature' or remove it.
The development process descibed in the article really does account for the freeping creaturism found in MS software.
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
It would have been funny to see MS convince their biggest customers' IT managers that Win2000 really did need to be delayed yet again to ensure game compatibility in their next corporate "professional" desktop and server OS.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
In 1995, I was still hanging on to obsolete macs for the typesetting featrues in the older versions of word. Then I stumbled across lyx, which let me enter equations easily from the keyboard *and* edit the while displayed. I quickly switched over.
:), then made it work the way I wanted. Within a week, this was part of the main code.
.)
After a few days, I noticed how much I missed the single character insert symbol command. I sent a message to the lyx developers. Within a week, that feature was part of the mainstream distribution.
A couple of years later, I was inserting *lots* of index entries, and the command was kind of kludgy (pop-up with no default entry). I spent a couple of days relearning the c++ I'd forgotten
More time passed, and it was time to send *lots* of application letters for a job. I realized it would take less time to add this to lyx than it would to fight with the current moronified-wysywigified merge in lyx. This one isn't in the main distribution. It works, but needs some work (actually, I'm going to move it to a library, so that very little lands in lyx proper, and it can be used elsewhere . . . someday, when I have free time. Better yet, if I teach a seminar on the economics of free software, it could be the central project . .
Anyway, he might have gotten a lot more of what he wanted a lot sooner, and something like lyx still can vary into the niche project he bemoans the loss of . . .
Fallows said in his article:
There is even a person who created the "It looks like you're writing a letter" auto-annoyance feature in Word. I had to sign a separate confidentiality clause promising not to name him.
I have a rule at home. The only people who are allowed to feel helpful without being helpful are children too young to understand the distinction. It is a good rule for judging features in software. Usually when I apply this rule it is to features that make a list of bullets in a glossy ad or review and are never used. But this particular feature is a pet peave of mine. Useless features that clutter the menu and are never touched can be ignored. But software that automatically guesses what I want is a problem.
I'm perhaps a somewhat unusual programmer. I am a competent, although not blindingly fast, touch-typist. It is not unusual for me to be typing in hand-written notes for a coworker's review of my design documents. When I am doing that, I am certainly not looking at the monitor continuously. And I don't want the software to ever react in an unexpected way to my keystrokes. I don't want dialog boxes popping up and capturing keystrokes. I don't want names of programs corrected to a similarly spelled word.
Don't get me wrong. I am sure that these features please someone. I can't imagine that the programmer(s) who implemented them are completely unique. But the default setting for them should be off. There's nothing wrong with having a dialog box pop up the first time you run a program asking if you'd like to have the program look over your shoulder and try to guess what you really want. But it should allow you to say no once and get out of the way.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I am a Linux zealot because I've been required to pay $150 for Win95 (these are European prices), $300 for Office 97 and $150 for for Win98,
No one forced you to buy anything, there are computers out there without windows and there are certainly other office suites.
<I>my accountant uses Office and needs an Excel spreadsheet of my accounts, </I>
I'm sorry to hear there is only one accountant in your country... what? There is more than one? Maybe you could change accountants then?
Unless someone put a gun to your head, I don't see how you were forced to do anything... whine, whine, whine...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Fallows pointed out the customers that MS focuses on:
What these two big categories have in common is that individuals are not the significant customers.
This distinction is often characterized as the difference between users and choosers. First, there is nothing wrong with Microsoft's strategy. It is not even unique. Think about how many products there are that are used by children and marketted to their parents. If the children made the purchases, I guarantee that some types of children's clothing would disappear from the market forever, along with a number of foods.
But, I've heard the comment a number of times from Linux users. They say that they have no objection to some of Microsoft's applications. The problem they have is that Windows is not a programmer's environment. It doesn't have a powerful, scriptable shell. It doesn't have a text editor with powerful enough programming capabilities that every routine editing task potentially can be automated. My own objection is that I must interact with the GUI even when executing frequent routine tasks that should be scripted and forgotten.
The perception among open source advocates is that Microsoft doesn't care and doesn't even feel it has to care. From Fallows' observation, that is literally true, and not because Microsoft has marginalized us out of any malice. They simply never lose sight of who is really buying their products. Any competitor who can threaten Microsoft's hold on that market segment is a true threat to them. Anyone who can't isn't.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I think this analogy reveals more about the inner workings of Microsoft than the rest of this interesting article. It shows just how much the developer culture has changed within the organisation. :)
In the early days of Microsoft's relationship with IBM, there were many fights between MS developers - who regarded the Institute of Blue Men's programmers as morons, and the IBM developers - who regarded the MS developers as cowboys. Programming geniuses like Zbikowski and Simonyi often found creative ways to solve programming problems (in the true hacker spirit) while the IBM programmers - since they were paid per line of code - would often go out of their way to produce inneficient code. Microsoft developers complained that IBM developers were inefficient while trying to maximise their own efficiency. This is all pretty well documented in Paul Carroll's "Big Blues - the unmaking of IBM" (and elsewhere).
My point? Efficiency is far more important in software than effectiveness. I don't mean the efficiency of the actual running software, but the development process and the motivation that drives it. Microsoft's early developers were loose cannons with raw talent that was used to maximum advantage (along with some hard selling from Bill and Steve). But now they are just cogs - albeit important ones - in the huge effectiveness machine that is out to crush the competition.
By contrast, the OSS movement has little to do with effectiveness since there isn't a central powerful body overseeing everything. But its efficiency is high thanks to the work of small numbers of skilled programmers.
The effectiveness vs. efficiency model works well when applied to say, governments or nation states, but in software, I think it works the other way around.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
If you look at the companies' _environments_, you will see that the idea of capitalism is for different companies to provide products and services to _consumers_. This is unlike communism, where a central authority provides goods and services to consumers. The idea of capitalism is that the consumers, the buyers, expect to have a number of choices. If they only had one choice (the Winner), it would _be_ communism, except that rather than the government taking control and closing off other choices to the consumer, it would be the market leader taking control and closing off other choices to the consumer.
Closing off other choices to the consumer is NEVER capitalism. It's the opposite of capitalism. Companies can fight all they want, but the assumption is that no matter _how_ much they fight they can't really substantially close off other choices to the consumer- that there will always be a marketplace, a whole bunch of choices of basically equal value. That's what capitalism IS! That's why it's often worked pretty well.
In an age where market winners are increasingly able to seize control of the means of production and close off access for other companies, what we're seeing is not strictly capitalism anymore. Instead, it is a sort of decentralised communism in which the governing authority is not necessarily the military or civil authorities- it's the kingpins of economic sectors, the controllers of technology or commerce. Power used to only come out of the barrel of a gun- now _through_ the use of capitalism, power can also come out of the barrel of a contract. Through this development, capitalism gets to be the host for a sort of cancerous growth- only through capitalism do companies get to build businesses large enough to close down the marketplace of capitalism and replace it with a single-sourced sort of decentralised communism.
Capitalism is all about what's out there being available to consumers! You can't even _define_ capitalism without reference to the consumers, they are the whole point of the exercise. The only distinguishing _feature_ of capitalism is this idea that the consumers get a marketplace of comparable products and get to choose among them. Without that, it doesn't matter whether companies are mean or nice- it's NOT CAPITALISM if the interface to the consumers is choked off. The attitude of the companies is quite irrelevant to this...
To me that's just a huge cop-out. Maybe you can't expect the guy to know about the Open Source community and how to get involved here. But he must have heard of WordPerfect. If he truly felt strongly that Microsoft was a monopoly and he didn't like them, why did he decide to go work for them?
He makes it seem that the only way he can help people us a better tool for writing is to become a Microsoft contractor. Huh?? Obviously if he's just trying to make the world a better place for writers he would have just told everyone all the features he'd like to see in a word processor. That way Corel could put them in WordPerfect, Microsoft could put them in Word, and Open Source developers could put them in anything they chose.
So I guess it's clear he didn't just want to improve word processors but that he wanted to make money. He figured making his own word processor to compete against Microsoft wasn't an option. The next money-making alternative was to try to sell his ideas. I guess he then decided that Microsoft had deeper pockets than Corel, so he tried to sell his idea to them.
I don't blame him for wanting to make money off his ideas. I don't even blame him for selling his ideas to Microsoft to get that money. I do, however, blame him for pretending that he went with Microsoft because he had no other options.
Plus LaTeX, Emacs alone can't produce professional quality documents. I recently gave up on Word and switched to vim and LaTeX, couldn't be happier. Word had a nasty habit of crashing just as I finished up the lengthy conclusin to papers. Plus, and this may be just me, but I can type \fontbf{blah} quicker than I can take my right hand off the keyboard to my mouse, move the mouse cursor up to the menu bar, click the b button, put my right hand back on the keyboard, type blah, take my hand off the keyboard to my mouse, click b and put my hands back on the keyboard. I'd guess with latex the command takes 1 second wheras with word it takes 5-6. I feel I'm much more productive with Tex, more than enough to justify the initial learning.
I tend to think word is okay, but it crashes a lot, right when I was doing something like saving... Makes me want to thank the guy who wrote autorecover. But come on, truly great software? And innovation? Such as? DCOM is a horrible example, NeXT could do distrubuted object messaging long before windows, where do you think they got the idea? Active X? I have yet to find a good reason for it's existance other than proprietary ie scripts that represent a large security hole.
Seriously, I can't really think of something MS truly innovated. They did steal a lot of ideas and innovations from other companies and market them better though. SO yes, they are a marketing genious, but I don't see any truly great software and innovation,
yep, and when people in our democracy decide that monopolies are not good for our industry, no one will force Microsoft to compete. They can be a monopoly that doesn't sell their their products, or they can make sweaters, or...
whine, whine, whine...
yep, and cut it out! If we inspect the reasons that we have laws and regulations, we discover that they are good reasons. You don't have to accept our laws and regulations, nobody is putting a gun to your head. You could starve yourself to death, you could depart from the computer industry, you could... nobody is holding a gun to your head.
Have you ever wondered why a lot of MS software seems to be a great conglomeration of poorly-integrated features and functionality? Maybe this is why. There's nobody with a "vision" running the show, and as a result there's nobody to look at all the (proposed) features and figure out how to integrate and unify them. It's just a bundle of features, it's not a cohesive product. Sure, most things in Word are related to putting words on paper, and from a UI perspective there's a common look and feel, but some of it feels like this. For example, I count 17 items under the Insert menu in Word97, some of which are themselves submenus. Maybe this was done just for quicker access... but I think it's just as likely it was done little by little: feature teams realized they needed to be able to have a way to insert <their feature> into the document, and it just got added to the menu.
One of the reasons Linux is what it is today is because of Linus's overall vision and ability to apply that vision to the code. I imagine Linux would be a hugely bloated collection of features if everyone were able to hack on it and add whatever they wanted in whatever fashion they wanted to. Instead, Linus keeps a hand on the rudder and an eye to the seas in front.
I wonder what MS Office would look like if it had a Linus.
The point of capitalism is that *everybody* votes with their wallets. The idea is that everybody will vote for (== buy) the product that gives them most value for their money. There can be capitalism without a free market, it just doesn't work very well.
This is the game that Microsoft has played, and played extremely well. So well, in fact, that the DoJ thinks that they are threatening the whole system, by destroying the market.
MS did not get where they are by forcing their products on anyone (well not really). They got there because all those individual persons and companies found MS products to be the best buy.
Unfortunately, if everybody votes for candidate no 1 you can't survive as no 2. It doesn't matter if candidate no 2 is better in some areas.
Microsoft uses this. Of cource, they would be nuts if they did not. They use the system. The fact that they play the game better than the competition does not make them evil. Nor does the fact that I might gain something if they played it worse.
It is just a case of how the sum of many rational individual choices adds up to something irrational (monopoly)
All opinions are my own - until criticized
...and it's there, right at the beginning. This guy used a Sol! Does anyone even remember what that was?!? The Sol was designed by Lee Felsenstein (from Homebrew) as part of his Tom Swift Terminal, and was one of Woz's inspirations in designing the Apple II. IMNSHO, it remains one of the Top Ten coolest hardware designs of all time. However, it wasn't very successful commercially, and Felsenstein ultimately faded away. (I have no idea where he is now.) But it was really cool nonetheless. Yeah.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Do you have any clue who James Fallows is? He's the editor of the Atlantic Monthly and a well-known author, with considerable influence in policy circles (meaning that policy wonks in government read his stuff and it has serious influence on foreign policy in the US). He's not some free-lancer who needs Microsoft contract money to avoid starvation.
There's no reason to believe that his motivations aren't what he says they are. Working writers don't have much choice about using Microsoft Word; in many cases their editors and clients require it (yes, they could use other programs if they have a reliable converter to and from Word format, but that's risky -- we're talking career damage if the conversion has flaws).
I don't like it but I have to deal with reality, not the world as it should be. Microsoft's market share of word processors and spreadsheets is over 90%.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
That was an example silly. Tell me what the keyboard shorcut is to write a complicated mathematical equation, align it with the equation above it continuing the left hand side from above, adding a reference number that can be referenced later in the text without worrying about what number the equation was, etc.
Sure, if all you want is bold and italic, words ctrl-B and ctrl-I will work just dandy for you. I myself have some more complicated things to type and trying to do aligned equations and properly laid out embedded postscript images in word is a complete pain in the ass to say the least.
One interesting thing about this article is that, near the end, it mentions that MS is concentrating on the LORG (large corporation) market. This isn't the first time I've read this; even last week I saw another article mentioning this.
SOHO (small-office/home office) users and consumers aren't quite the target audience for MS and their products. Which leaves another niche for companies to fill. It looks like Apple is exploiting this, with their iMacs and the Aqua interface to MacOS X, carving out a role not only with page designers, but also with general consumers.
For the Linux centric, this means two things: If you want to compete with Windows in large corporations, you have to be able to also compete with Office and Outlook, not just the server market. Plus, if you want Linux to make inroads in the consumer market, you may have to compete with Apple, plus there needs to be a simple interface and apps that are tight, easy to use, and low on bloatware features.
Right now, all I'm seeing is Linux being hyped as a server system, outside of SlashDot at least. When it comes to desktops, most people and companies would never consider it. Unless someone can market a Linux bundle that includes a decent (and Word compatible) office suite plus an intuitive, simple graphical interface, Linux will never break out of this niche it has carved as a server OS.
Personally, I'm glad MS is concentrating on LORGs, as it gives Apple a better chance with consumers. But I also like BeOS and Linux, and wish they could carve out pieces of those areas as well.
____________________
Tension, apprehension
And dissension have begun
Very few innovations have occured from listening to "what the user wants". Rather, innovation occurs when people with vision implement that vision. This doesn't mean pushing users out of the loop. The designers of the Macintosh, for example, were happy to torment hapless new hire secretaries and marketroids in order to test whether their vision would fly in the real world (that's why the original Mac only had one button, BTW -- they found that the hapless marketroids would get confused about whether to click the left button or the right button, not suprising considering that most marketroids are folks who failed as used car salesmen :-). But there was no big hoard of Apple customers standing around saying "we want an easy to use computer!". Rather, Apple's customers at the time (almost all Apple II users), were standing around saying "we want more gee-whiz-bang toys!".
Substituting market research amongst the company's customers for vision is a common sign that a company is going downhill. At DEC, for example, their marketing department surveyed their customers and said that their customers wanted more and bigger minicomputers, and DEC obliged them, while meanwhile ignoring those "microcomputer" thingies that DEC's customers sneered at as "toys". As a result, there is no more DEC...
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I worked as an intern for Microsoft in the summer of '94. The article is pretty accurate in capturing the zeitgeist of working there, but it misses a couple of things I picked up on while there. There is an instituionalized arrogance and insularity there that made me decide that I didn't want to work there again in the future. Threre is a collective 'Not Invented Here' attitude that I found distrubing. The feeling inside Microsoft is that no other company produces software that is any good. Further, they seemed completely ignorant of research being done both in industry and academia to the point of actively ignoring it. As far as I could tell there were few ACM or IEEE members inside Mircosoft, let alone anyone following their publications. The other thing that bugged me was the inability to understand how others(businesses or governments) might view Microsoft's actions differently than MS did itself. For example, in '94 MS signed a concent decree with the DoJ over tying of Windows and DOS for computer manufacturers like Compaq. The internal propaganda was unreal and proved to be a preview of what we saw this past fall in the trial: total denial of reality. Anyway, three and a half months was more than enough for me.
What this means is that the temps really WILL be temps. You won't have any more of this "permatemp" stuff being used to get out of paying benefits to long-time employees. For the permatemps who get hired full-time, it's a good deal. For others, it sucks. But either way, at least you're not in limbo-land, as you are if you're a "permatemp".
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
So if you insist that Microsoft has not forced their product upon anybody: You're wrong. (Just ask any Linux user, who, until last year, was unable to buy a laptop without paying Microsoft for Windows -- if that wasn't Microsoft forcing their product upon people, I don't know what is!).
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Which only emphasizes the idea that what we have isn't capitalism. It's something resembling capitalism, but publically held companies change the dynamics of the equation drastically. Something strange is going on when a person can write in all seriousness, "The goal of a company isn't to provide a good product, or make its consumers happy", and be right. Only very large companies are far enough from capitalism that they can afford to control entire markets and eliminate choice- and only publically held companies are virtually forced to do this, given the option, knowing that customers will choose 'Give me better products' over 'Increase your own stranglehold' every time, if it's up to them.
Maybe in practice we already live in some sort of entirely non-capitalist system, in which the means of production are controlled by cartels and consumers can be expected to not have any choices to make about their purchases, their options constrained to a bare minimum, with no prospect of further choices on the horizon, only fewer choices. If this is so, hadn't we better wake up to it and start considering the idea that capitalism isn't, anymore- that it faded out about the same time that communism mostly did, and now we have a sort of global combination of both, ruled by corporate interests rather than by governments?
The only thing I really want to know about MS:
Since the program sucks, I wonder whether or not Bill Gates uses Outlook for his messaging needs. You think he runs 98, or maybe Win2K?
How many times a day does Bill have to reboot? Does he fire somebody each time?
Inquiring minds want to know!
Sure, I have a thankless job. That's okay. I have a lot of (non
Errr.. and how much do you have to pay for kernel 2.4.0?
...$300 for Office 97 and $150 for for Win98, all of which has been sub-standard...
None. Are you saying that's an excuse for it to have bugs? 2.4.0 will need patches just like Win2000 and every other OS ever released. Know anybody that's still using kernel 2.2.0?
What I'm saying is that game compatibility shouldn't have been (and wasn't) a priority with windows 2000. So it was added later with a patch. Big deal.
Well, no argument there. I will admit that Win2000 is a vast improvement though. At work, I upgraded over my Win98 installation which had to be rebooted 2-3 times a day. Haven't seen Win2000 crash yet since I installed it last Thursday. A couple of applications have crashed, but I just got an error notification and that's it. I'm keeping my Win98 setup at home until full SBLive support gets into Win2000.
As for the 1990's BMW, I don't think I'd want one...
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
You know, I've got a good friend who works as a developer on Word at MS, and has done since Word 6.0. (He's not the one who made the paperclip). He tells me that the mass of features isn't his fault. I believe him. I've been with him at (non-Microsoft) parties. When some random schmo finally worms out of him what is job is, the response is always "Wow, it would be cool if Word could do this!!
It's kind of like being a doctor at a party and having to listen to symptoms. Of course, the definition of this changes with each and every damn user. Everyone wants to use their software differently. Fine, what we REALLY need is a system that can be:
(1)customized by individuals or small groups, I mean REALLY customized, so one group can use a math module, one a magazine-module, etc. So I get a VERY stripped down basic module, and choose my add-ons. Sounds like emacs, TeX, right? But then there's
(2)the subsets must be COMPATIBLE with each other. That's the problem. Not MS, but that all of us subgroups have to be compatible with whatever the LORGs decide to use. Which really focuses on the lowest common denomimator. That's the creeping evil of the LORGLUDs ("Large Organization's Lowest User Denominator" ;-) )
So how do we get a system that does both? I think that serious thoughts should be given to current Office emulators: don't try to emulate Word, just be able to read Word files in the most stripped down way possible. Then, let each use DECIDE which functions are useful. EASILY.
Yes, and the windows philosophy is make lots of COM objects that work together - proper - fast binary reuse.
You don't go around executing new processes and parsing the output. You go and dynamically link with libraries and communicate using language-neutral binary intefaces.
i heard a few years ago that microsoft fires the bottom 10% of their workforce every year (measured by performance reviews)? was this ever true and, if so, is it still true?
stay frosty and alert