The War Of The Word

atari_kid writes "For who didn't know Microsoft has a internal blogging service, which is becoming popular with their employees. And even some of their high level managers have their own blog like Chris Pratley, a group program manager (GPM) for Word2002 (OfficeXP) project. Mr. Pratley just blogged on his 'personal philosophical' conversion from a Mac geek to a Microsoft devotee & his interesting perspective on the 'Word Processor' wars of the mid-90's and why Microsoft won."

Comments

So what?

[twitter]

The silly thing might make the "insane" uptime of 50 days yet. So long as all the M$ bots know better than to DoS it and IIS can keep it up. Oh, how it hurts to sell dog food.

Re:Digging his own grave?

[KrispyKringle]

You know, it's funny that this is a discussion now, because I had the same conversation with a friend of mine last week. My friend--who's really a very good programmer and generally intelligent person--is going off to a promising job at Microsoft in a short while. And just before the conversation, I'd attended a Microsoft recruiting information session. and I have to admit, I was impressed. Their recruiters were intelligent; their corporate culture--if we can talk about such an elusive property--was compelling, and every single person I know who has or does work for them has been far above average for smarts, not just grades, accolades, or resume points, but for true, geeky, smarts.

So I asked my friend, if MS seems to be such a great company--and they really do, from this angle--why are their products so damn bad? His answer was, who says they're bad?

I told him, ``well, I'll admit Windows fills its niche just as well as anything else--if only OS X worked on x86--but c'mon, look at some of their other stuff!'' Like VisualBasic, he said? Sure, you or I wouldn't use it, but we aren't the target market. The guys using it for rapid development in the corporate world aren't coders. They don't care about performance or semantics or control; they care about something they can use and be done with. And (according to my friend--I've barely used it) VisualBasic fits the bill.

What about Windows Server, I asked. I mean, here's a product that simply sucks. Compare it to Linux, FreeBSD, or any number of commercial Unix offerings, and while it might win on usability or TCO, the effort of making it actually work as well as the alternatives is hardly worth it. He said, yeah, or PocketPC, right? I said, absolutely. Hell, I doubt MS even made money on PocketPC.

He agreed with me, but said, well, think about this. They don't want to make a whole new OS--and they could--they want to make a Windows for a server. They're tied to the legacy code. So while it might not be pretty, Windows Server likely truly is the best they can do with that legacy code, just as is PocketPC.

I suppose Microsoft might seem to be the bumbling 300 pound gorilla at times, but I can't argue with results. Can you?