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Microsoft in 2008
r.jimenezz writes "Over at Wired there's an entertaining article written by Gary Wolf. It purports to be a memo written by a 2008-Microsoft-employed Linus Torvalds to Bill, arguing against Steve Ballmer's desire to go back to the untenable OS monopoly proposition instead of the 'new order': Windows is now some sort of desktop environment on top of an open OS!"
Can it get any more horny than this?
I've heard of some sick fetishes (I do have access to the Internet, after all), but you take the cake, my friend!
It's entertaining. I don't think I would mod the article 'Insightful' or 'Interesting', but I would mod it 'Funny'. A choice snippet (taken out of context no doubt, but still)
You never made me alter my goal, which was world domination for Linux. I'll never forget your line: "Come on, Linus, infect the mothership." I still believe that was the best recruiting pitch ever uttered. We both took a lot of criticism from our partisans, but look what we've accomplished.
Inflect the mothership? Just writing this makes me chuckle. Seems kind of creepy, and dare I say, 'borgish'. Oh well, I suppose getting co-opted by Mothership Microsoft had somehow warped the psuedo-Torvald's mind.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
"...infect the mothership..."
That's poking fun at the movie "Independence Day". The PowerBook that manages to establish an authenticated PPP session, get an IP address, transfer a virus to the alien host (pun intended), then REMOTELY EXECUTE IT.
Okay, yes, I'm a unix admin, mac user, network engineer, and the mere concept has my dying on the floor laughing as I watch the Classic environment do that.
Anyway, point is....I'm betting the author has watched that movie recently.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
"Windows is now some sort of desktop environment on top of an open OS!"
Wow, so in the future they'll keep copying Apple. That's big news.
~Philly
They finally ship Longhorn.
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
We've built a Windows desktop and application framework around a Linux operating system, and both sides of this equation - open source and proprietary - are needed for our plan to continue to work.
In other news, RMS announces the imminent release of HURD. "I can feel it, any day now, " says RMS.
When asked about the new Winux, RMS suddenly issued blue smoke and sparks, muttering "Freedom, freedom, where is the freedom," before crashing to the floor.
Since I have first-hand knowledge of Microsoft work environments as that's where I'm sitting right at this very moment, I'll enlighten you about the good parts, and the bad. (Disclaimer: I am not employed by Microsoft; however I am on a contract at their Redmond location, and for anybody keeping track: I'm on lunch right now. :p )
First, there's the free drinks. Every building has at least one Kitchen. In my building, on my floor alone, there are 2. On floors 2 and 3 there are 2 more kitchens each, for a total of 6 in the building. In each kitchen is the type of floor-standing refrigerator you'd see at the grocery store or a 7-11, the kind they keep soft drinks in. Well, much like the grocery store or 7-11, just about every soft drink you could want is in there. Every "Coke" and "Pepsi" variant, Root Beer, Nestea, Dr. Pepper, different juices (cranberry, grapefruit, grape, apple, orange, V8), skim/2%/whole/chocolate milk, a variety of Talking Rain, and so forth. Not to mention the 12 flavors of Tea and a similarly diverse variety of coffee. Are you powered by mountain dew? Your batteries will never run low at Microsoft.
Second, there's the hours. Want to come in at 10am? ok, come in at 10. Want to work the weekend? no prob, you've got 24 hour building access thanks to your security badge. When you get sick of sitting at your desk, you can walk down the hall to a fooseball or ping-pong table and take a breather. Or, if you're in a building with an atrium (like mine) you can go sit there and read for a while. They don't micro-manage you, they like assigning people tasks and then letting those people handle those tasks independently.
So I'm a perl wizard (I have a beard and a hat too!) and I can do things with perl that is beyond the comprehension of most of the people I work with. Which is absolutely fine, really, because it takes me about an hour to accomplish something that would take 4 hours for them to do by hand. I tell them it'll take two hours and I've still got an extra hour to read slashdot.
I've never once had somebody look over my shoulder, and I work in a cube farm. There's 40 cubes in this room, and they aren't even cubes so much as the partitioned desks you see in a call center. Nobody is walking up behind me to check in on me. I produce my deliverables and they show me their gratitude.
Now, the downsides... Nothing works, and that's OK. Or rather, when something doesn't work the way it SHOULD work, people just shrug it off and accept it. The internal network can at some times be as slow as a 56k modem, and that's OK. (I'm not making this up, I speed-tested it) When the tools crash persistently day after day? That's OK. There's a standard of established mediocrity within the company's internal tools that probably serves to reinforce their release of crappy products. This is pretty much the only downside really, and I could see Linus doing his fair share to alleviate this problem at least in the division in which he would be working.
A minor downside is the "independent work" thing I mentioned above. Sometimes tasks get subdivided to the point where you've got 4 people working on a one-man job and the only way to accomplish anything is to have all 4 of those people in the same room at the same time, which can be a daunting task to accomplish. But this is really quite trivial compared to the acceptance of mediocrity that seems to pervade the campus.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.