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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)."
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
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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 :)
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
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- They have grown beyond the size to adjust - true.
- But they have grown even further when they do not need to.
They are the market. They dictate how things are done. Look at the meeting rate increase in all industries and correlate it with Microsoft Exchange sales. No wonder NASA used to land its equipment on mars before and cannot nowdays...Or read Parkinson's laws chapter 2 (If I recall correctly) on meetings and commitees...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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
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 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.
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.
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,
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
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