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Microsoft Employees Critical Of Their Employer
bonch writes "BusinessWeek is running an article on internal unrest at Microsoft from their own employees. 'Once the dream workplace of tech's highest achievers, it is suffering key defections to Google and elsewhere... Much of the sharpest criticism comes from within. Dozens of current and former employees are criticizing -- in BusinessWeek interviews, court testimony, and personal blogs -- the way the company operates internally.' In related news, Steve Ballmer has pledged to make changes inside Microsoft to avoid the embarrassingly long development cycle of Vista, including a 'revamping of the engineering and the processes.' Is it too late?"
Sounds like pretty much everywhere I've worked which at one time seemed a dream job. Eventually things change. Workers set in their ways and expectations grumble the loudest. Truth may be, it still may be a dream place to work, it's just that many people don't like change, where others thrive on it (hint: Change is often an opportunity for promotion or to shift into another position you prefer.
Like my experiences, I fully expect some people will anonymously gripe, but still stay put because the change of finding a new job, fitting into a new workplace, doing work in new and different ways is often a bigger challenge then standing pat.
As for Ballmer, he's going to have to go through the kinds of things IBM has done many times over the past few decades. Competition is out there (notably Linux) and Microsoft really is stagnating. Windows Vista may well be their Edsel.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"Developers, Developers, Developers!"
We can only hope.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
As the saying on leadership goes: "A fish rots from the head down." If the report about the chair is true, then I would suspect that this is where it begins.
(Again, we don't know if the story is true...)
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
http://minimsft.blogspot.com/
All employers have employees who hate the company and or boss.
Also on BusinessWeek there's an interview with Ballmer where he dodges every question he's asked (and re-asked) regarding morale issues at Microsoft, competition, release delays with Longhorn/Vista, etc.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_3Oddly he didn't jump around screaming "Developers, developers, developers!!!" this time around.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
I have dealt with people at Microsoft in the past, and found that their problem is not with their engineers or with the guys in the trenches, but with the business development guys. Seriously, how many of them does it take to screw a lightbulb? It's pathetic ... So much schmoozing and nonsense, no focus on real results - everyone is always trying to get that one big deal, not focusing on the incremental stuff that is vital to actual innovation taking place.
... Which they can totally do, as evidenced by the tremendous amount of innovation seen in Office 12, for example ...
The best thing Microsoft could do is make a statement that they will stop issuing statements, and let their work/products speak for themselves
This is no surprise. Microsoft has gotten so big that they have become a jack of all trades but no longer a master at anything. When you try to do everything you expand so large that its hard to control the growth of the company and management policies. Microsofts sole power was in being able to compensate people well but people are leaving not because of money but because they do not like the job. This could be a big problem for Microsoft and we will watch Google and other companies slowly eat up some of the top devs from MS.
When you're working for a universally hated company you need to be well treated. Personally I'd prefer to lump shit all day before working for a company like Microsoft, but that's just because I have a little self respect.
Free software will always be the better alternative to closed source such as Microsoft!
http://83p.unitedti.org/
All companies have internal employee gripes about working there with very few exceptions. Those exceptions tend to be companies that are flush with cash and are able to treat their employees as they should be treated. But when it comes to "brass tacks", the niceties are the first thing to go. Now, I should also say that I can't stand Microsoft or Windows, I think they're both shite. But, Windows isn't going to suddenly disappear and niether is Microsoft. Witness the auto industry. There are companies out there that make shitty autos but you don't see them dying out. You also don't see consumers russhing out to buy a new car every time the auto industry says to do so. The same thing applies to Windows. As much as Microsoft might wish that people will flock to Vista (whatever flavor) the real truth, and they know this, is that there are people who are STILL going to be running Windows 95 out there if it still works for them. So, none of this article warrants gloating about the demise of Microsoft. It ain't gonna happen. If it were, then Chevy should have disappeared decades ago.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
With some of its key breakthrough features gone, Vista's improvements include better handling of peripheral devices, such as printers and scanners, and cutting in half the time it takes to start up. Those are needed improvements, and there's no doubt that hundreds of millions of copies will be sold as people upgrade to new PCs. But the changes are hardly the stuff of cutting-edge software engineering.
Indeed. Microsoft is going to have to rely heavily on its marketing dept. in order for Vista to sell. I mean, seriously, what does it really have to offer that is a big improvemnt on XP, or even 2000 for that matter. Sure, the fanboys will all buy it becasue it is the "new and exciting MS Operating System" and joe sixpack will get it with his new computer, but what businesess will be able to justify the cost of a meaningless upgrade.
If MS is really going to be pushing better printer and scanner compatibilty, a new GUI, and faster startup times as the big features in Vista, they might as well just let all of their top programmers go to google and start hiring all of the top marketing people in the world to replace them.
In other news, Ballmer announces that Microsoft is halting all other work for a month to concentrate on security. We can all be assured that the Microsoft that emerges will finally be secure. Because when Microsoft does something, it does it right, even when that something is not just abusing its monopoly.
--
make install -not war
I'm a MSFT stockholder. All you layabouts, get off your duffs and get back to work. Whaddya want, more free Cokes? Give me a break.
You want to be smurfy, get good enough to work for the research arm and then we'll talk. Otherwise be thankful you aren't stuck in a cubicle at Symantec or somewhere lame.
Youse don't know how good youse got it.
Well, I guess that's better than internal unrest from someone elses employees
And where are we now? IE7 is the same browser it's been for, what, 4 or 5 years now... they just added tabs. Did they even write the code for tabbed browsing themselves or did they send the CrazyBrowser guys a couple dollars for their code? At a time when CEO's and programmers alike should be getting exciting, we have reports of pissed of workers and incidents involving Google-cursing and chair-chucking. And what's the deal with WinFS anyway? We hear that we'll need a gig of RAM to run this thing, but what the heck is it going to be used for?
I can't see how they could release this for, as Balmer puts it, an embarassingly long time. If Balmer is 'revamping of the engineering and the processes' this late in the game, things must be pretty rough. Development seems pretty stale right now and the pressure is on Microsoft -- if this OS isn't as popular as it has historically been people (and distributors) might take a look at Red Hat or Ubuntu.
So yeah... this alleged change comes a liiitle bit late.
To put this in perspective MS has 61,000 employees. If MS has 200 disgruntled employees then that's 0.003% of their staff. At a former company we had 150 employees and it's safe to say that 10% of them were disgruntled, if not more. If you want to find a disgruntled employees, look not at Microsoft but at the DMV, Delta and Northwest airlines. /devils advocate
The culture just isn't what it used to be, and besides that, people are getting burned out, considering the kind of hours we've kept for the last howevermany years. Not to mention that management has made some bad decisions lately that have hurt the company, and there's a murmur of concern going around that Cars is going to be Pixar's first ho-hum movie.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Chairs will continue to fly until morale improves.
... reminded me of Randall Flagg in The Stand. Neither of those guys seem to take bad news well. I wonder what else they have in common?
As a soon-to-graduate senior, I can't possibly express how much I want to avoid Microsoft, but I can try. For one, you have anti-compete clauses. Although from what I've seen and heard these are pretty common, but MS is in everything. I think the only IT industry they haven't infiltrated is porn, and while it is a very richeous and worthwhile industry, that isn't what I'm trying to do with my life. Combine that with the fact that their development is very dictated: 'this is what we want, we just need manpower to actually type the code in.' Microsoft, you used to be cool. What happened to you? You fell off and started making things quick and cheap (no so quick in Vista's case) to make as much money as possible. While this may be a smart approach to business, it isn't a smart approach to customers. These problems are what net you all the criticism
Perception is the thin dividing line between reality and fiction.
No one has mentioned anything bad about the xbox division, I would love to work there. I think it would be kul to work alongside artists/graphic designers. Anyone here work for the xbox division? I can see how it would be boring working on the team that does windows updates, the same stuff all the time yawn...
All empires fall.
(We can only hope)
What does that mean? Throw a few more chairs around?
I think you mean .3%.
Well... some people just never get it.
Employees critical of their employer?!?! Surely NO OTHER company on the planet has this problem! M$ truly must be teh sux0rz!
Microsoft has so much money that besides the screw ups we KNOW about, it could screw up on numerous unknown projects without ever having a hit to it's bottom line. Thus you get a culture where stupid is as management does. The end result is lack of true innovation which also results in lack of choice for consumers and businesses.
They will either make it through successfully or they won't. They've made it through several others, my money would be on them making it through this one.
Google, if they are ever as successful, will face the same challenges as they grow.
One final thing. Microsoft hasn't issued stock options for quite a while now, something the BW writer missed.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
About 20 years ago we have various vendors come in and pitch their Big Iron to us. We hardly needed DEC to show up, because we already loved them. We had to let IBM show up because the boss always had a soft spot in his heart for them and people with suits and ties who know nothing about operations or programming think IBM=Answers.
So these IBM guys come in and pitch to us like they were made in the Gotti family. A few questions are fielded semi-informatively, but the tone said "listen you stupid moron, stop wasting our time, just buy the the thing because we know and you should know, there's nothing better and you're just a damn fool if you don't".
We didn't. Ironically we ended up with Pr1me, because our new software would run on it. IBM eventually went through a few years of real housecleaning, as everytime I tried to contact Sales regarding an order for an RS/6000, I got a different salesman or an answering machine with "I'm no longer with IBM please direct your call to ..." Finally getting the order through a district sales manager for the state(!) and even he had to be told what we were ordering and not to keep trying to tack on color monitors and laser printers we didn't want or need.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Ballmer smacks his meaty hands together for emphasis
I wonder if he would take that as a compliment.
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
Microsoft was once a giant, but now there are many other giants with much more integrity. I read some years ago that Bill Gates was responsible for creating the most millionaires over anyone else. Will this still be the case with companies like google on the constant rise?
Need cheap, customized, and quality bandwidth or hosting on any business scale? Visit www.ENetpresence.com
...to change a lightbulb?
Seven.
One Project Manager...to write up the requirements.
One MBU Intern...to report on how Apple engineers did it in Tiger.
One Marketing Droid...to call CNet and tell Ina Fried that it'll be changed in an innovative and exciting new way in Windows Vista.
One Software Engineer...to begin work on it and then take a job at Google implementing Lightbulb Beta.
One CEO...to throw his chair around his office when he finds out.
One PR Flack...to explain to Bob Enderle how "although the lightbulb won't be changed in Windows Vista, it will be released in 2007 as a separate, more refined technology."
And Paul Thurrot, who will receive a private demostration of the lightbulb, devote one week on SuperSite explaining that Apple's lightbulb in Tiger is dimmer, Google's Lightbulb Beta is "limited," and MS's solution, while late, is indeed superior and "Highly recommended."
Unbreakable office furniture!
One can only hope, my friend. One can only hope.
1. All use was free for personal use.
2. All use was free for charities(except religious, but thats just me)
3. No armed forces use(or any organisation connected to use or manufacture of arms)
4. For any company see pricelist.
It worked excellent. some ppl loved the sw and made their bosses buy it so they could use it at work to(profit!!)
How about MS doing the same? They would still make lots of money?
Or
Or why just not open up the source? If they just make/use a licence that keep them in control, they would probably even get Vista out the door with scripting, journaling filesystem or whatever they are scrapping to make the deadline.
It would absolutly give back MS its cool. It might even make the workers proud to be a part of it.
with what it wants to be true. Microsoft has for a long time gotten away with aggressively telling its own story. Not everyone has believed it, but most people equate the size and wealth of Microsoft with... a "they know what they're doing" perception.
Once upon a time, Bill Gates shot from the hip and made some PR blunders. With the right coaching, he came to sound like many politicians and CEOs - speaking while saying very little, always staying on message and never acknowledging weaknesses.
After awhile, when you start talking like that, it seems like people actually start to believe what they're saying. Gates and Balmer forgot how to say "we need to radically shake things up" or simply "it's hard to be this big."
Microsoft is facing a major crisis - and Steve and Bill are too rich, too coached and too insulated to realize they have no idea what the fuck they are doing anymore.
God I hope so!
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
It's just like Apple when Jobs was ousted and Scully took over. The pinheads don't know how to inspire/lead/challenge the techies.
Same thing with HP when it was no longer a place for engineers, run by engineers.
You can probably find the same pattern repeating at lots of high tech companies.
I doubt they have any idea what's going on in MS.
"If you take a look at where we're going with innovation, what we have in the pipeline, I'm very excited. The output of our innovation is great," says Ballmer. "We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web."
They won the server? How the hell do they figure they won the server? And how does one "win the Web"? You might win webbased email, or search engines, but how do you "win the web"?
From the article:
After the ruling he praised Google, noting, "the culture is very supportive, collaborative, innovative, and Internet-like -- and that's bottoms-up innovation rather than top-down direction."
Why do I get a mental picture of a row of Google engineers mooning Steve Ballmer?
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
.. I don't understand what's going wrong with Microsoft. They sure a lagging behind when it comes to shipping Vista but they are not getting into this for the first time - Shipping NT was similar or more mess than this and considering some new features are none the less going to be in Vista it's understandable that it will slip schedules.
Apart from that if you see, they are doing a lot of good things - Visual Studio, WinFX on XP, Antispyware (it sounds not so great but it's a great strategic thing for sure), Office 12.. etc.
I don't see the point - in a company of 60000 some people are bound to be unhappy while others are motivated and produce great stuff.
I worked at Microsoft for a few years. I never found it to be a dream workplace. Many of the largest complaints I had (that of feeling like I was the victim of interdepartment turf wars) turned out to be extremely widespread.
The basic problem is that despite a huge amount of effort on the part of senior management pushing a message of "help beyond your department," departments still have to justify budgets, and are very unwilling to cite cross-department contributions in this process. So you get a message of "go do this: it is important to the company" and then when you are done you get "I wish you hadn't taken the time out of studying for more MCP exams to make these admittedly great contributions."
The problem was so bad in my department that the General Manager went to great lengths to make himself available on the floor and break down any image of him as being inaccessible. And yet he was entirely unsuccessful in this endevour.
When I left, it became clear that my entire department was not long to remain in the US. About 2 months ago, they finally committed to lay off those in my department.
I never found Microsoft to be a dream place to work. Politics of the worst sort (yeah, politics are everywhere), and in particular failure to recognize outstanding performance lead many blue badges in my department to feel very unhappy with their jobs. In short, we never felt valued.
By nearly any account, I was a steller contributor. I was asked to provide leadership roles in various ways, from conducting training for my coworkers to acting as a technical lead in the response to the Blaster worm. Yet again, even though these roles were done at the request of management, I never felt that my contributions in these special projects was appreciated in any way, shape, or form. May have just been my department though.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I was a Microserf in Support... that's right; not all Microserfs are developers.
Here are some problems with Microsoft:
1. Training - There's a phone; now go do that support stuff
2. Customer satisfaction surveys - Customers got mad when you had to tell them "Windows doesn't work that way". You had to get a 8 or 9 out of 9 on everyr survey or your manager would get mad. Unsupported product? Third-party issue? User error? Tough!
3. Managers - I had 5 managers in one year. One manager skipped free training because it interfered with "Survivor" on TV. Only manager had atechnical clue; the rest might as well have managed a pizza parlor
4. Co-workers - they regularly backstabbed contractors. Why? Because they could
5. No internal processes - Support engineers have to just make everythingm up. There are NO processes for escalation
I am glad to be gone from that madhouse
"Company X Employees Critical of Their Employer"
Wow. What stunning news.
"Me fail English? That's unpossible." - Ralph
I was speaking with a buddy of mine who took a temporary job with Microsoft's Auto web group. He told me that the #1 search at MSN.com was....
...Google
Google is currently causing Ballmer and many other Microsofties to throw the occassion hissy-fit.
"Me fail English? That's unpossible." - Ralph
*In a huge seminar room*
(Ballmer)"Ok people, I know you're angry, I know you're disgruntled, I know you need to relieve a little stress, and I'm here to help. Now everyone pick up your chair, let out a big shout, and imagine it hitting whoever you want...yeah...that's it..."
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
See here is the problem. Microsoft's historic earnings record has made the leaders more or less beyond reproach from shareholders. The early participants largely control the company (Gates is still the Chairman, IIRC), so it would take a large change to make this happen.
Since Balmer and Gates have been involved in the company from the beginning, though decades of extremely strong growth, there is a strong tendency to defer to them.
Furthermore, Balmer isn't that far out of character compared to Gates re: management and competition (too bad the court record in Caldera v. Microsoft was sealed; it was interesting to read before then). So the default idea is that they must be doing something right.
If Microsoft had the right CEO, I think it highly likely the company would begin introducing some very compelling products again. Their technical products are still good (Yukon, VStudio, etc.), but public has a bad view of the company now due to IE/Windows vulnerabilities.
IE/Windows problems are largely due to design flaws and cannot be fixed without breaking backwards compatibility. This is why many of us see the new emphasis on security to be laughable at best.
I used to work at Microsoft. There is a strong corporate cult mentality there, even in departments like mine where morale was quite low. It is one of those paradoxes you have to experience to appreciate.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The stock isn't flying like it used to.
Most of the top employees may be with them.
Steve Ballmer has pledged to make changes inside Microsoft to avoid the embarrassingly long development cycle of Vista, including a 'revamping of the engineering and the processes.' Is it too late?
Does anyone remember why win95 was called win95? Due to embarassing long delays, the product was officially named win95 to assure consumers that it really would be released in 1995. Even then, it didn't hit the shelves until November 1995, just barely making it!
So, yeah, it's about 10 years too late. Ballmer talks like this is a recent problem.
I tested hardware for Win98se, WinMe, Win2k & WinXP. And main annoyance I had with my job was that it was far too boring. I would often email in sick Monday, Tuesday, & sometimes Wednesday. When I came in, I was able to easily catch up and log all my test scores by Friday afternoon. The job was just too slack, and it showed with management who would take our entire team out to Hooters resturant, come back 2 or 3 hours later drunk off their asses. The boss would invite me to go with them, but I really dont like getting drunk in the early afternoon. We had mini-fridges in the lab and occasionally people would start drinking at noon.
.ini files which got Lotus Notes to work (call after call to internal support didnt work). My boss accused me of hacking the operating system, and I got dinged pretty bad on my evaluation. So while I did have some fun at MS, it set a bad example of conduct for future jobs.
While some may think this is great, it really creates horrible work ethics should you move on to a new job. Lots of young people thinking that this was normal, and when they moved onto a new job outside the company they might assume that its ok to eat, drink, sleep, & shower at work. This is basically what happened to me, I moved on and ended up getting fired from two jobs, for doing things that were considered very tame at Microsoft (swearing in a casual way, using email for non-business related purposes like talking a friend down the hall). I came really close to getting fired on my current job for creating a batch file to copy
Policy and proceedure are radically different at Microsoft compared to companies like Starbucks, or Blue Cross.
The irony for me was that MS was going to hire alot of entry level testing positions (they lost the perma-temp lawsuit). I didnt think I was qualified, but my boss pressed me to apply. I never got the job because im not very good at answering Brain Teaser type questions, if only the interviewers had asked me questions relating to my job, maybe I would have been hired. But most of the people in my lab, the ones who didnt really care about getting hired on full time, got hired full time. Including the potheads and alcoholics.
I had one guy who couldnt take the stress of working at MS get hired on full time, and he would duck into the parking lot to smoke pot for 2 hours when he told everyone he was over at the developers office testing. This one guy was responsible for testing Digital Video devices, and he was just too fucking stupid for words. The developer however was the smartest, nicest guy I ever met there.
It's always too late to improve the past, and it's
never too late to improve the future.
The article seems to raise the spectre of two distinct kinds of issues: management problems and engineering problems. I think Microsoft manages its business operations very well, and perhaps could use some improvement in its management of human resources, but I won't comment about that substantively.
Realistically, the windows source base is vast at this point, and being needlessly complicated by the demand to build a dozen different versions, and by the need to maintain support for legacy applications. This is a real problem, but it's a good problem to have. The open question is what is to be done for it.
The conservative position held under Ballmer's leadership appears to be "throw more time/money/people at it" and stay the course. But there may not be enough time/money/people. Complexity compounds combinatorially.
One reasonable alternative is to maintain a Win32 legacy compatibility operating system, and fork an incompatible version that breaks backwards compatibility, in order to make the development of new technologies much more managable. For a smaller player, fragmenting a market they need to grow would be suicidal. But for a monopoly like Microsoft, whose monopoly position is threatened by rising competitors, it is a good move, because it will fragment markets which OSX and Linux would otherwise gain, while keeping their installed base secure. Moreover, with a faster release cycle they can collect more "Microsoft taxes". A faster release cycle requires a less complex technical base.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
That's precisely the problem! Ballmer can only think of "winning"---as in somebody else has to lose. OS/2. Novell. Netscape, Sun, whoever, and now Google.
Did Apple "win" the whatever? Never. They made an iPod.
They did win affection. Like Google.
Where's Microsoft's iPod? Whatever it is, it's going to be made in Gooogle Labs now.
They ought to think what's the coolest thing they can do with a comptuer----hardware and software included.
(MS hardware---mice etc---is more innovative than their software)
Well, what about porn? Has anybody put in a billion in research into making the orgasmotron really work? Make the iPod for the dick.
No doubt what you say is true. But ultimately it will come down to the quantity of unhappy institutional investors. If enough of them begin to complain loudly enough, Warren Buffett will say to Gates, "Well Bill, MSFT did pretty well when you were CEO. I'm not saying you should take that job again, but it's time to start looking..."
A side thought: I think Ballmer would be an excellent CEO for a company like Nike, Carl's Junior, maybe even a car company *cough*GM boring designs*cough*. They offer totally marketing driven products, which SB is very good at promoting.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
IBM was supposedly going to stop Microsoft from ever getting where they have.
IBM's OS/2 was going to kill Windows.
Netscape Navigator would eliminate Internet Explorer.
Oracle would stomp SQL Server.
AOL would plow MSN under
Linux would replace Windows everywhere because it was server strength with a useable desktop and above all free.
ALL the while, aspersions were cast on Microsoft's internal politics and atmosphere from the head of the company on down. NO ONE it was said could possibly be all that happy without being crazy and sooner or later seething disconten would stop Microsoft from within while their enemies would overtake them from without.
People play the lottery on the same theory that eventually the random number generator of life's chaotic side would just go their way. This is business however, and gambling is something for companies that have nothing to start with and nothing to lose. AOL, Linux, IBM, Orace, Netscape, and all the other forces which DID have something to lose have.
Gambling doesn't work. Actual facts do. Windows XP was adopted in far larger numbers than any of the naysayers wanted to believe would happen and despite all the problems, people aren't dropping it in record numbers for Apple or something else. History is on Microsoft and Windows' side and anyone continuing to gamble on the RNG IS building on a house of cards to agree with Balmer.
MS is in the game to win and their opponents aren't. Those employees who are looking down their nose at the company that has provided their wonderful salaries, perks, and benefits should consider what kind of past successes led to those things being in Microsoft's hands to offer them in the first place. MS doesn't play the RNG, it plays to win. That's the kind of company you want to be with.
Google looks shiny and cool now but that will fall apart like the idea of working at Big Blue and suddenly being a made man in a pinstripe suit simply based on the name. Eventually people will learn there's the faddish playing the numbers and then there's the tried and true playing the game seriously to win. I don't see Google being that and if I worked Microsoft, I'd not be ignoring a certain Aesop's Fable involving a dog, a bone, and an illusion.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
There are critics inside every organization... I bet there are critics inside Google too. This is nothing new, other than they got some folks inside Microsoft to talk about it.
Wait a while....they'll be writing the same article about Google.
Cut out the security reviews they implemented several years ago.
Eliminate debugging cycles...
Oh, and cut out the design phase..."Gotta get that code out the door and if we don't start coding now, we'll never get done in time..."
Oh, wait, they never had a design phase...That was actually the "marketing feature list" phase.
Oh, and last but not least...postpone the "Universal Searchable Filesystem" until Windows 2010...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
That things were going well under Gates was an accident of the market. I don't think that Ballmer can be blamed for most of the current problems. After all the issues of market saturation, and emergant competition were nacient when Gates left the helm.
I don't discount what you say, but there are so many other companies out there that are interesting and trading is still active enough for Microsoft, that most of the critics today, can simply sell their stock carefully and invest elsewhere. Note, however, that Microsoft stock is not performing well by any standards, and that Microsoft appears to be losing investor faith left and right. So it could happen, but I think that most investors are likely to simply say "Hmm... I think it is time to take my money elsewhere."
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Nearly everyone where I work is critical of their employer too. People bitch no matter what.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Well, I can give you a yes with a very long but, or a no with a "except".
That things were going well under Gates was an accident of the market
I disagree with you here. I think Gates is a better businessman than that, and his competitors were not his equal.
I think that most investors are likely to simply say "Hmm... I think it is time to take my money elsewhere."
They already have, That's why the stock is at a low PE. I think of MSFT as a call option on the unrealized potential of the company. A new, effective CEO could make all sorts of changes - spinoffs, new product lines in hardware (an area where Microsoft has a very good reputation), and other forms of restructuring. I think Gates is also buddies with Jack Welch. No idea if Gates listens to him. Of course Ballmer is supposedly a student of Welch, but he must not be turning in his homework.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
IBM and Microsoft are organizations that adapt to change at a rapid pace. Stop this useless flaming! Go back to coding instead of getting involved in politics. What is this the 6pm newscast? Propaganda rotting the minds of otherwise right thinking individuals. Slashdot is becoming just like the dying Broadcast networks. Propaganda and hatred, never a good word for their fellow man. Google, the dot bomb will be eliminated. Sure riding a wave of cash is fun, but get back to work for gods sakes. Whatever happened to having pride in your work? The top people at Microsoft believe in everything they do. Unlike some rotten brats who want to be googlers but cannot because they don't cut it. Microsoft will find out who you are and eliminate you. Just like the tribes of earlier man, the diseased elements will be eliminated. Go back to working at McDonalds you rotten brats who cry about working at one of the greatest corporations ever created. Microsoft is a visionary organization and they know what it means to enhance other ideas the correct way, just like the Japanese workers did in the 1980's.
Microsoft Employees Critical Of Their Emperor.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
Former employees? Criticizing?
Seriously, it'll be the ones that had an axe to grind that will 'come forward' when given the chance. What about the thousands of employees that have gone through Microsoft's doors and have good memories of it?
I'll listen to current employees moan and bitch because their ultimate goal is probably constructive, but a past employee moaning just tells you what was wrong.
I disagree with you here. I think Gates is a better businessman than that, and his competitors were not his equal.
Sorry, I meant "compared to things under Ballmer."
The company was clearly built by people who saw the market clearly and were able to capitalize on that. The competitors often missed important market needs and so you have a point. This being said, I don't see that big of a difference to the way things were run under Ballmer as opposed to Gates. Gates' main advnatage over Ballmer is really that he is better at addressing the cameras. He has a better public personal, but internally, I don't think they managed things that differently.
Also, the emerging competition from Linux is not like you had with DR-DOS, OS/2 or anything like that. This is the one competitor Microsoft has ever had which is both serious and cannot be destroyed by targetting the vendor. This is fundamentally different than things in the past.
When you add to that the market saturation challenges, I said in 2000 that Microsoft was in for tough times ahead and was largely a victim of its own success. Even in the absense of competition, Microsoft has problems that cannot simply be attributed to the change in management.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Microsoft's has always been a catch-up company.
Their formula for success has always been integration niched me-too products combined with four parts ruthless competition that skirted the lines of legality.
The problem with morale in the company at this point is that they have so thoroughly captured the OS and business application market that they have no one to defeat and no one to catch up to.
Development groups in areas that were sewn up for the company ten years ago are not going to get top notch resources (money, material, or folks), will be discouraged from innovation, and will not receive compelling leadership. The reason is because all of that is bad for the bottom line. Never understimate how flat stock prices and the almighty market analysts can foist the most insanely suicidal practices on even the most profitable companies.
As soon as a viable competitor business competitor emerges, those groups will snap back to their usual rabid selves. (It will have to be a business competitor though, because it doesn't pay to steal business from a competitor that isn't getting paid, but that's another thread altogether...)
Also, I'd be willing to bet that in the areas where Microsoft has viable competition (gaming console market, internet services, etc.), the resources, leadership, and morale are much better.
Hey Balmer! How about putting the Engineering department in charge of deciding the feature set for Vista, instead of the Marketing department! That would do wonders as far as making sure Vista ships on time, or even ships at all!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Also, the emerging competition from Linux is not like you had with DR-DOS, OS/2 or anything like that. This is the one competitor Microsoft has ever had which is both serious and cannot be destroyed by targetting the vendor
But Linux has the same problems the commercial unixes did in the 80s/early 90s. (Fragmentation) Microsoft had to compete with *much* better OSs (Unix, OS2) then and succeeded. The threat from Linux to Microsoft is overrated, IMHO, though this may be a controversial opinion... ;-). But it doesn't matter - Google is a threat, Apple is a threat, IBM is a threat, etc. Nothing new there. Dealing effectively with the challenges and opportunities is what makes good management. I think Microsoft has stagnated much more than it would have with a better CEO.
That was fun. You'd think one of us would get some mod points!
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
Come on, try to hack my 31337 firewall! [127.0.0.1]
I think someone already has. I mean, I can ping it, but when I click the link, my browser spits out "Connection Refused."
j00 just got pwd!!!
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
I'm posting anonymously as I am a former IBM software engineer who recently quit to work at a smaller, more interesting company. The sentiments and some of the examples presented in this article are very close to the sort of things I saw going on at IBM, and the reasons I decided to leave.
Make what conclusions you will from that.
Also, the emerging competition from Linux is not like you had with DR-DOS, OS/2 or anything like that. This is the one competitor Microsoft has ever had which is both serious and cannot be destroyed by targetting the vendor. This is fundamentally different than things in the past.
I question how much Microsoft's lack of success against Linux has to do with Open Source Magic(tm) verus just poor product positioning.
For years, Microsoft had great success with NT selling it as "Not Unix", but what they failed to realize was that in certain segments (finance, ISPs), there's a huge demand for something that "Is Unix", and Linux fit that bill on commodity hardware. When MS attempted to sell to these markets, they largely failed because they couldn't understand why the customers didn't see NT as the obvious replacement for something supposedly obsolete like Unix.
As a tangible example, SFU/Interix has been around since 1998 or so, but they've only recently started integrating it into the base OS. Had they seriously provided a Unix application environment years eariler, they would have cut off a big chunk of Linux growth.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
...says Ballmer... "We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web." When did Microsoft win the Server? I must not have been paying attention when they handed out that award! (I will give them credit for owning the desktop for the foreseeable future. However, I beleive the desktop will become less and less important in the future as more people use network appliances to accomplish most computing tasks.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Either Ballmer, Allchin, and Gates give up control of the company, or Microsoft will be irrelevant (if not bankrupt) by 2012-2015.
Something I've said many times before, and will maintain, is that Microsoft have never had a concrete, long term operating system strategy after Windows NT 4. That is evident from the fact that 2000 and XP were both merely incremental upgrades to NT 4 for the most part.
Vista is going to be comprised of leftovers...Things which Microsoft would have incorporated years ago if it hadn't been for them having to make ship dates. It is also going to be Microsoft's last release that the majority of the computer-using public care about.
Microsoft need to do what Apple have done; move to a BSD core, and thus allow each group to play to its' own strengths. The BSD people are very good at making a core, underlying operating system. Microsoft on the other hand have proven that they're good at UI and glitz. If the two were to be combined, we'd have a system unlike anything we've yet seen...the best of both worlds. This is where the GNU crowd need to see that the BSD license is useful in the grand scheme of things...because it gives companies who want a closed-source product a competently-constructed base.
However, I know that realistically, Microsoft are not going to do this. Gates, Ballmer, and Allchin are going to stay in control, and the company is going to become irrelevant, because they won't let go of their usual, failed way of doing things.
...the embarrassingly long development cycle of Vista, including a 'revamping of the engineering and the processes.'
Translation: Gate's "Security is Job 1" pledge just got yanked.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Disney used to consistently be on the list of top 100 companies to work for. The corporate atmosphere changed, not the people. If you mean "change" being a switch from focusing on the needs and interests of their employees and customers to "shareholder value", then yes, you're quite right. People don't like that kind of change, except for the shareholders of course.
Same thing happened at EDS, which used to be a really great company to work for. The focus shifted from quality service to executing contracts as cheaply as possible. Morale tanked, service went to hell, contracts impoded, downward spiral began.
Dell is currently experiencing the beginning of its slide. One of the first signs is a shift away from quality customer service. That's how it begins.
The only thing surprising about the MSFT internal distress is how long it took for people outside the company to find out.
If you want to test my theory, then watch SAIC. Currently an employee owned company, but they're about to go public. My bet is their IPO will lead to a period of rapid growth, eventually shifting to a focus on making money for the stakeholders. Service will suffer, the employees that have been there the longest (and hence make the most) will get forced out so they can be replaced with lower cost replacements. Turn over will increase, service will suffer, contracts will be lost. SAIC will turn into EDS.
I think it's funny how bean counters see the old guys as a liability to be replaced. Forgetting that the reason they have been with the company so long and make the most money is that the customer likes them and they get the job done.
When bean counters get ahold of your business, the same thing is going to happen as when Republicans get ahold of your country.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
My ass Vista has taken too long, Windows versions come out too often
I realize I'm leaving ME out and this isn't exact dates
95 - 98 3 years
98 - 2000 2 years
2000-2001(late) 2, nearly 3 years (late 2001)
2002 - 2006 (early) around 4 years
This is much more pleasant for me but I've got clients who still run 98, lots of them!
They don't want to upgrade, they still do the same stuff with their computers they did in 99 when they got them. They still work because their not loaded down with junk. It's like security through age.... Anyhow their JUST considering upgrading to XP, they still install 98 on brand new machines because it works and they know it well. How about a new OS every 8 years? That'd be good, then we wouldn't have all this hastle of upgrades
And don't say use Linux because I have to upgrade my Linux computer more often than my Windows computer and it's more work. To most of my clients the cost of Windows is peanuts, and a write off so that's not the problem it's the pain in the ass
ever worked for a large firm (before or after) to compare your experiences at MS with?
I have worked for at least five and the experience is pretty much the same everywhere, except for one that was a wholly family-owned private bank (despite being rather large by the standards of the day).
I tend to chalk up the issues I have with large organizations due to the soulless nature of publically owned companies. If they have an owning management, that controls the fate of the organizations, their focus is less on internecine warfare between executives. The focus is more on doing business, which requires having and keeping quality employees, which requires loyalty and attention to their development. This kind of attitude spreads downward from the management and infects the whole organization. In both cases.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
who wouldnt wnat to work there.
parties at Hughs place
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
1. You worked in a call center.. thats the norm
2. You worked in a call center.. thats the norm
3. You worked in a call center.. thats the norm
4. You worked in a call center.. thats the norm
5. You worked in a call center.. thats the norm
Not sure what you were supporting, but it probabably wasnt development or big things like Exchange... Ive contacted MS support 3 times (expensive if you dont have a contact..lol) They are more then compentant, not like your normal call center. Ive worked in a call center before, you couldnt train those people to use email properly, not to mention configure a custler of exchange server spanning a WAN.
In short, low tier support is the lowest of the tech industry. Congratz!
Is that surprising? The "how-to" books may tell all about the external look and feel of a well-run company, but they can't tell you how to capture their soul. That must come from within . Fiorina used all her MBA tools, and ran HP into the ground. By relying on the silver bullet management fad handbooks, Ballmer risks doing the same at MSFT. Say what you will about Bill G.'s business practices: at least he understood the product and the people who created it.
Clue: The theme "the secret life of [nonsentient/mythical beings/objects] where they turn out to have lives just as mundane as yours" was great THE FIRST FOUR TIMES YOU DID IT.
Unfortunately for you, every other CG animated production in the last ten years has traded on the same exact theme. Christ, it's done, stick a fork in it and turn it.
If Pixar's next big thing is going to be 90 minutes about the secret life of Luxo lamps, pack it in while your rep is still shiny. Chris Ware's "Bunny" got an Oscar because it was good storytelling, not because it had great diffuse lighting.
When I'm buying "Incredibles" even though I hate the "government good/lawyers evil" pap because it has sexy hair shaders, you're hurting.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Well, yeah, a guy who admitted that he would be working as an insurance saleman if it were not for M$ is not the best man to be running a tech company. Then again, M$ is not much of a tech company as it is a sales and marketing company.
You can see how nuts Balmer is from the article himself. The complaints are that people are not being rewarded by a company that's got poor organization and infighting that interferes with getting things done. His response is ludicrous:
Employees' complaints are rooted in a number of factors. They resent cuts in compensation and benefits as profits soar. They're disappointed with the stock price, which has barely budged for three years, rendering many of their stock options out of the money. They're frustrated with what they see as swelling bureaucracy, including the many procedures and meetings Chief Executive Steven A. Ballmer has put in place to motivate them. And they're feeling trapped in an organization whose past successes seem to stifle current creativity.
Worse is what he has to say about those problems:
"We have as excited and engaged a team of folks at Microsoft as I can possibly imagine," says Ballmer. "[Employees] love their work. ...[cites Xbox and MSN as successes and might as well have farted] says Ballmer. "We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web."
Won the server? He's losing the desktop and what does that have to do with NOT PAYING PEOPLE WHEN YOU ARE BURSTING WITH MONEY or STUPID FUCKING INTERNAL SALES MEETINGS WHEN YOU SHOULD BE PUTTING OUT PRODUCT? Steve, baby, being second rate was good enough for Windoze 3.1 and 95. For all the money your company has you should have something on the desktop 6 times better than KDE, Gnome and all that have, but you don't. You've got a piece of shit that has not fundamentally changed in ten years. That and the bad attitude of thinking he can cram that second rate junk down people's throats is pure lunacy.
It is so over for that company and that's good. At last the closed source nighmare of the 80s can die. The greed heads and control freaks can go back to insurance sales and the business can revert to key banging and hacking among equals.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
But Linux has the same problems the commercial unixes did in the 80s/early 90s. (Fragmentation) Microsoft had to compete with *much* better OSs (Unix, OS2) then and succeeded.
/proc) for manipulation via text tools. This means that a good Linux admin can *always* continue to work on other distributions even if he/she is completely unfamiliar with the management tools and scripts can work across distros much better than they can work across UNIX variants.
Actually, I disagree. You do have substantial differences regarding management tools, but Linux distros are all more similar than UNIX flavors in a number of ways:
1) UNIX liked to claim the POSIX standard, but many people would go and install the GNU tools which had a number of important differences. LSB OTOH is based on an assumption of the GNU tools.
2) While you have substantial differences in management tools between Linux distros, your user-mode command-line tools are far more consistant in important ways-- i.e. you can use iptables to manipulate the firewall rulesets regardless of distro. Additionally, many more settings are exposed by the kernel (via
So.... Linux does deal with these problems. Not completely, mind you, but it does deal with them.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The job was just too slack, and it showed with management who would take our entire team out to Hooters resturant, come back 2 or 3 hours later drunk off their asses. The boss would invite me to go with them, but I really dont like getting drunk in the early afternoon. We had mini-fridges in the lab and occasionally people would start drinking at noon.
No wonder "Microsoft employees are critical of their employers". Who would really want a job like that?
By the way, in an unrelated question, what's was the email id of the hiring manager?
The not invented here syndrome is crippling microsoft. Why outsource when you can leverage worlds best opensource to your advantage? MS could be 50% BSD modules, with no impact to sales or consumer mindspace.
Give money to these institutions to develop opensource. They just pay the developers to put in binary flags saying 'reserved for future MS use' sprinked in the code. MS can tinker and extend these modules later if its BSD, and use scare tactics. Policy worked well when they looked for a stack.
If they had decided to invest and use Reiser filesystem, rather than re-invent their own, maybe Vista would be out on the streets now, and the money rolling in. Same goes for every subsystem they choose to do it themselves - delay and setbacks.
MS would have considered risks - they are betting people do not get upperty over lockin, and lack of alternatives. Interestingly Apple reached a different conclusion over its OS, which was the right decision - different but modular. Maybe MS does not want Apple or Linux/BSD to to get recognition - but that cat's out of the bag now.
Many years ago, IBM pinged Fujitsu over the VSAM file system, and there was a settlement and a clearinghouse. After that Fujitsu lost, as people feared incompatibility. IBM then lost ground bigtime, and let MS waltz in on price factors.
They say that once a standard is universally adopted and accepted, it is hopelessly out of date or irrelevant.
Food for thought.
Doesn't anyone remember that when MS caught the dotcom bug and made instant millionaires out of several hundred or thousand employees they couldn't wait to jump ship. I think MS has probably always been both a rewarding and difficult place to work and people will leave as soon as the opportunity arises. Of course we're talking about the most highly skilled and placed employees and let's face it, MS hasn't had any serious competition for top flight employees for many years - now that Google is around it's likely they'll leave.
I question how much Microsoft's lack of success against Linux has to do with Open Source Magic(tm) verus just poor product positioning.
Microsoft hasn't really developed a coherent strategy against Linux. It is, however, a long-term strategic threat that causes headaches when dealing with the clear and present challenges to Microsoft's bottom line. If Linux did not exist, perhaps Licensing 6.0/Software Assurance would have been something they could have shoved down people's throats. However, Microsoft discovered very quickly that Licensing 6.0 was going to push a lot of people to Linux, so they revised it, added additional benefits, and made it optional as Software Assurance.
Before I left Microsoft, I wrote a memo (won't tell you what it said) that laid out what I thought would be necessary to compete against Linux. It was based on the no quarter principle-- the idea that if Linux has any protected market, it will continue as a strategic threat. This means that one has to target every single one of Linux's markets regardless of how unprofitable or uninteresting it is. Many of my ideas have been implimented in some way or form. So the strategy is taking form, and I had a strong hand in it (for better or worse) but it will take some time before real leverage is brought to bear. However, I do believe that it is likely to be too late to create a real lock in.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
FLASH: Employees of Evil Empire Say Organization Empire, Evil. Film at eleven.
Ive contacted MS support 3 times (expensive if you dont have a contact..lol) They are more then compentant, not like your normal call center.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!
Ahem. Hrm.
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
OK.
About a week or two ago, I was working on a server for a client in the area. I work for a consulting firm; we do everything from initial planning to wiring to building computers to support. This client had a 2003 Small Business Server, which basically ran as a file and MS-SQL server for their accounting software.
Well, dumbasses got hacked. The machine was on a public IP, and they saw fit to change their administrator password to "admin" while we weren't looking (with remote access enabled). Anyway, rootkits galore. The crux of the issue is that they basically needed a Wipe and Reload; BUT, their accounting software cost them $10,000 to have someone flown in from the software provider and install the software. So, wipe and reload is not an option - they can't afford to reinstall the financial software.
Oh, and their backups are corrupted. That's what they get for keeping them on the hard drive with the OS, but who's counting? Oh, plus, we set it up for daily backups, and then a weekly one - so it has 7 days, plus weeklys for a month, plus monthlys for a year. I had to go back 3 weeks before I even found a partial backup without the r00tkit, and they can't lose 3 weeks of financial data.
So, I take the server back to the shop, put it on the tech bench, and try to clean out the rootkit. Nothin' doin - it's got its fingers into everything. Luckily, I was able to get the Cam screener of "The Cave" that had been uploaded from efnet. Anyway... I can't get rid of the rootkit. I boot up off of ERD Commander, attach to the install, and flush the pre-fetch directory. Reboot. Can't log in. I do this and that. Can't log in.
So - I call Microsoft. Not only do I call Microsoft, but the shop I work for is a Preferred Partner, so we call the super secret number. Not only do we call the super secret number, but we call the super secret "BUSINESS CRITICAL OUTAGE / SERVER DOWN 24 HOUR AVAILABILITY" line. Granted, it costs $250 per incident, which you have to pre-purchase in packs of 10 ($2500 at a time)...
And get someone in india. Who takes down our information and puts us on hold for an hour.
And then someone else in india picks up. He has us try this and that until he realizes we have 2003 Small Business Server, and he says that the receptionist told him we had Enterprise Server (we told her Small Business, but who knows if she understood a word I said), and that's not his department (are they really that different, if you can't even get a login prompt?). He transfers us to SBS, where we sit on hold for another hour. So now we're at 3 hours, and we just got ahold of the right person.
Then, Habib (or whatever) talks us through the same steps. Then he tells us to install a 2nd windows install (in C:\Windows2\). Then pull files out of that install. That doesn't work, so we install SBS SP1. Same thing - doesn't work. Nothing works. But, we've spent another 3+ hours on the phone installing and configuring SBS and SP1.
SIX HOURS. I didn't once talk to a native english speaker in SIX HOURS on their BUSINESS CRITICAL OUTAGE phone line. My problem didn't get fixed.
The Plural of Anecdote is Data, but Microsoft's tech support still SUCKS.
~Will
sig?
The exodus of good employees from MS and their inability to attract top talent can be easily explained. Microsoft's stock price has been flat for the last five years.
People didn't flock to Microsoft from 1990 -2000 because it was such a wonderful place to work. They went there to get rich on stock options. Working for MS now is no different than working for GM or Dupont. The massive growth phase ended five years ago and will never return.
The reason people are leaving for Google can be explained by this
graph.
I interviewed there a few months back for a senior research position. The interview focused on "why are manholes round" think-on-your-feet type of questions. This is for a position for which the job description was to think for long, sustained periods of time on very difficult problems and come up with a solution.
This is like selecting your olympic marathon team by having candidates run 100 meter sprints! The people doing the interview couldn't even see the incongruity of their approach.
To top things off, Microsoft was balking at a salary figure which was less than 50% of what Google ended up offering.
p.s. I'm also very good at mental "sprints", but the whole situation was so surreal that I couldn't get myself to concentrate on them. The whole time I was thinking "are they really that much out of touch in Redmond?"
Frankly, working for a big corporation is not a dream. It's a crying shame. Do you think you have value to the corporation? Think again. Do you think loyalty is rewarded? Hardly. Look at the airline industry. All those United employees put in all those years, and in one day, their pensions were gone. Money, socked away for 20, 30, or 40 years. And that was part of their compensation.
Who's to blame? Wallstreet. Demands by investors. The press. If you're in this for the long haul, you're disrespected... and your stock price plummets. The market wants a quick return. You can't go around with 20 billion in assets, and maybe a 1 or 2 percent profit. The market won't like you. Stock will plummet, shareholders will vote out the directors, CEO will get fired.
It's just like revolving debt. The market doesn't respect savings. They only care about debt and the interest on the debt. If you're cash heavy, you're a target for breakup. So you have to carry a lot of debt as a poison pill. It's sad.
Now it's "We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web."
Now if that quote doesn't say "MONOPOLY" then I don't know what does.
www.linuxpenguin.net
It's getting to be less about money, and more about the culture at Microsoft. More money can help compensate for a miserable culture, but even then there's a breaking point. Microsoft isn't the only game in town any more - whether they like it or not, they're sharing the stage with Linux, and even though Linux has a proportionately small share, Linux share is poised to grow. Since Microsoft already has most of the market, there's really one of two directions available....straight ahead (little or no growth), or down.
That'll teach Microsoft for not blocking slashdot on work computers.
"Before I left Microsoft, I wrote a memo (won't tell you what it said) that laid out what I thought would be necessary to compete against Linux. It was based on the no quarter principle-- the idea that if Linux has any protected market, it will continue as a strategic threat. This means that one has to target every single one of Linux's markets regardless of how unprofitable or uninteresting it is. Many of my ideas have been implimented in some way or form. So the strategy is taking form, and I had a strong hand in it (for better or worse) but it will take some time before real leverage is brought to bear. However, I do believe that it is likely to be too late to create a real lock in."
Murderer!
Funny, I was about to post higher up that Microsoft's biggest problem is that all the easy profit in the software business is behind them. Balmer goes around saying the the world needs a $200 PC (I think the truth is closer to $100) seemingly without thinking about how much of that should go to MS vs the hardware companies. Up above someone tells a sad tale of bad support from Microsoft on a server issue. Microsoft is squeezed in the middle. They need to somehow produce a $10 version of windows that runs flawlessly like my TV set and at the same time replace IBM mainframe and Sun systems that don't get eaten by viruses.
Sun and IBM, who are still thought of as mostly hardware outfits support customers in a totally different way than Microsoft. Yes they may have farmed out call centers to India too, but because they are in the hardware business they also know how to fly a person, or a part across country to rescue a business (ven a small business) who gets stuck. IBMs consulting division plays a far greater role in setting up complete applications (not talking about just software here, but design, staff, documentation, high level management). This is hard work, and when it fails, IBM can be sued for misfeasance. Microsoft on the other hand just wants to develop the OS and middle-ware and stamp out CDs and wash their hands of the rest. They've done as good a job of that easy-work as anyone could have done I suspect, but that work is behind them now, and I don't think Steve or Bill have the stomach for the lower profit margins, higher risk, and harder work that will allow them to move to the next level.
What is Bill interested in? From the Channel 9 interview: Voice technology. So when will MS perfect voice technology? Will they be able to use the cookie cutter approach to locking everyone into only MS products just to get voice technology? I rather doubt it. First I think that technology, in a really useful form, may still be 20 or more years off. We are talking artificial intelligence here and I think the real solution is going to be some form of hardware/software and a whole lot of programming that doesn't fit in with any existing Microsoft PC strategy. Bill just wants to be off in a room somewhere full of smart guys who can make dreams like this come true. But that has nothing to do with making money in the IT industry here and now. If Bill day-dreams any longer that industry is going to pass him by. In fact it may already have.
Similarly Microsoft looks pretty pathetic when they go head to head with the likes of Sony. There IS money to be made on hardware, but its cents on the dollar and somehow I think MS would be better of just doing software for the Playstation rather than trying to replace the Playstation. And while we are at it, why not provide the full suite of MS applications for Linux, Sun, OS X? Why not have a consulting group that would go in and get the job done whether or not it involved any Microsoft products? Why not bid on government contracts that, again, didn't necessarily involve pushing MS products as much as managing projects and getting them done on time and under budget?
Microsoft wants to be the company that makes sausage making machines, but they don't want to make sausage, they want the rich cream of the IT budget, not the part
So here's an ironic departure:
Stephen Walli, who worked in the unit set up to parry the open-source threat, split for an open-source consulting firm.
When the guys you hire to combat threats and understand deeply what they are about decide the threat is a more pleasant place to be, you know you have issues.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think think the real reason morale is low is people are still biking to work and Microsoft has stolen all the towels, thus preventing bountiful showering! Let me tell you THAT is demoralizing.
See article for details of towels (cut as a cost saving measure).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You are an idiot... thats the norm here at Slashdot. Trying sticking to subjects that you have a clue about.
>>but it probabably wasnt development or big things like Exchange
Actually, I supported some "small" product called Windows 2000 server. Also, the only tier above me was debug. The outsourced helpdesks called my desk for support. Maybe you might work your way up to working on one someday.
I've since moved on and up from Microsoft.
I bet you, with your poor attitude, are still at the IT level of "Want fries with that?"
The trailer (and what I can make out of the story) is really not doing anything for me as a moviegoer.
I still have a lot of faith in Pixar though. I just figured they made a sub-par movie to stick it to Disney, and like you say get the chrome rendering all figured out for Pixars next REAL movie (The Secret Life of Bling?)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How do you "Win the web"? Convince people to use XAML instead of Ajax for dynamic web development. At least that's what they are trying.
Too little too late I'd say though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Oh, but it takes the slashdot l33t "hackers" eight years to fix the fucking HTML on their site...
So tell me again, who's lame?
Murderer!
:-)
:-) I run a consulting firm that is pretty much everything that Microsoft is not. We may be opening a call center to offer people tech support in their own areas (no commitment yet). And we want to get the majority of IT budgets by promoting open source and services. Why would we want our customers to be buying *licenses* when they could be paying *us* for additional value? But of course, if one must use proprietary software, we will help with that too.... Already we have a number of home users and small businesses running Linux in various roles from desktop to small server.
Er... Sorry..... I will share with you the view I had when I was at Microsoft regarding what the company could do to compete before I get to my viewpoint.
Sun and IBM, who are still thought of as mostly hardware outfits support customers in a totally different way than Microsoft. Yes they may have farmed out call centers to India too, but because they are in the hardware business they also know how to fly a person, or a part across country to rescue a business (ven a small business) who gets stuck. IBMs consulting division plays a far greater role in setting up complete applications (not talking about just software here, but design, staff, documentation, high level management).
When I was at Microsoft, I also advocated a much larger role for Microsoft Consulting Services and Rapid Onsite Support. The resistance I ran into was that Microsoft had invested so much in the partner programs that they did not want to lose the goodwill of these partners. However, I still felt that there were plenty of cases where we could offer superior service with fewer legal hassles than we could be encouraging partners in many areas. However, although I think many at Microsoft share your insight, I don't think they will ever do anything about that one.
They've done as good a job of that easy-work as anyone could have done I suspect, but that work is behind them now, and I don't think Steve or Bill have the stomach for the lower profit margins, higher risk, and harder work that will allow them to move to the next level.
The real problem is that they don't want to feel like they are competing with their partners. They are worried about antitrust litiation, and other things. They are not in a good position to do this.
And while we are at it, why not provide the full suite of MS applications for Linux, Sun, OS X?
There is such a thing as a barrier to entry. This is why I advocated integrating SFU into the OS to reduce the barrier to migrating *to* Windows from UNIX and Linux....
Why not have a consulting group that would go in and get the job done whether or not it involved any Microsoft products?
See above. Competing with partners is not what Microsoft wants to do. That being said, this indicates that they are really dense regarding consulting services. Everyone partners with their competitors in that industry
Following your strategy of "target every single one of Linux's markets regardless of how unprofitable or uninteresting it is" will, I think, cause the company to fail (which it seems to be gradually doing).
Why? Most of your labor is in the generalize programming tasks. Most of the markets could be targetted using existing products and new licenses. For example, why not a low-cost Windows license for ISP's? The high performance computing market is not useful enough to target because scalability trends will bring Windows there eventually anyway. Microsoft already does this regarding web servers, so why not extend it to other areas as well?
And even in the HPC market, if one must target it, maybe a version of CE? Otherwise, I fail to see any market where Windows is limited by anything other than licensing concerns.
So much for Microsoft's point of view.
I am now self-employed and largely on the other side of the conflict now
My business runs midrange ser
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
or on other versions of unix - or a Solaris/AIX/SGI/SCO admin can work on linux.
/proc. This is the sort of thing I am talking about.
To some extent, but with more frustration. For example in Solaris/AIX/Irix/Unixware how do you increase the maximum number of shared memory segments? Every varient of UNIX has a different way of doing this. Every varient of Linux exposes this setting in
Linux distros are different to administer only to the extent that you rely on distro-specific tools. But with UNIX flavors, you often have no choice but to use tools specific to the UNIX flavor. This was my only point.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I've done two 6 month contracts @ Microsoft and everyone asks what it's like to work there.
To this I say:
The low level managers are perhaps the most egotistic lazy douche bags I've ever met under one roof. The engineers are the biggest cry baby bitches I've ever met.
Everyone that was cool got out before '97.
I don't blame upper management one bit for outsourcing their jobs to someone who must might be slightly thankful for a job without all the surly horseshit.
I'd call the general work environment barely civilized. The way I see it Microsoft could fire 1/2 the headcount of worthless barnacles and no one would notice.
"organizational model"
einhverfr, there is a simpler explanation of the same thing, in my opinion. Microsoft was never relationship oriented. Mentally, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are still the socially disfunctional teenagers they were when they started.
Microsoft has never been a trust-based company. Anyone who tries to manage without examining the quality of relationships must manage by constantly testing the limits of what he or she can push other people to do. "Testing the Limits" management makes employees feel disrespected, because they ARE being disrespected. Before, programming was so exciting that employees were willing to be abused. Now that is beginning to change.
Microsoft has always sold mediocre products. The company has always been organized around taking advantage of technical ignorance, and around examining just how little people will accept. Think how miserable it is to work at a company that never does a good job!
Microsoft Basic was the first major product. It was poorly implemented and poorly documented. For example, there was no way to write a strictly binary file! An ASCII Hex 07 character would ring the bell rather than be written to a file.
Microsoft Assembler was provided with manuals printed from a dot matrix original. The assembler was unreliable. It would sometimes just not produce the correct instructions. The world had to wait for Borland Turbo Assembler to get a reasonably good assembler.
In an hour of testing the first version of Windows NT, which I had bought, I found 3 pages of serious bugs. My money was totally wasted.
The first version of Microsoft Access had huge bugs.
Microsoft Word in Office 2000 sometimes destroys its own files. (Tip: Open the Microsoft Word file in Open Office and save it as a
ChkDsk.exe (Check Disk) supplied with Windows XP Professional has a log file parameter. ("/L:size NTFS only: Changes the log file size to the specified number of kilobytes. If size is not specified, displays current size.") However, according to Microsoft technical support, Chkdsk does not actually produce a log.
Many other Windows XP command line interface programs don't actually work completely with Windows XP. The CLI is very incomplete and toy-like.
Microsoft software has had incredible numbers of very severe security vulnerabilities and Microsoft has been very slow to fix them. The vulnerabilities have cost customers hundreds of billions of dollars. If Microsoft had to pay for the destructiveness of all the vulnerabilities, Bill Gates would be the poorest person in the world, instead of the richest. Microsoft is like the cigarette companies. If the cigarette companies had to pay the total cost of cigarettes, including medical bills, cigarettes would not be profitable. If Microsoft had to pay for the damages caused by its mediocre software, Microsoft would not be a profitable company.
Apparently in an effort to create copy protection, Microsoft designed Windows XP to save configuration data from most programs in one huge file called the Registry. If that file somehow becomes corrupt, it can be impossible to repair for a reasonable amount of money.
Microsoft is managed around taking advantage of technical situations rather than managed around trying to develop good products. Microsoft is, in that way, more an abuse company than a software company.
I never worked for MSFT, but I interviewed with them and turned them down to take a position in a small software-related service company. About 10 developers and 40 tech support guys, an IT supervisor, a couple of sales people, and a bigwig. It was definately the right choice.
It's a challenge, and there's always something new and exciting for me to do. In the last two years, I've designed and built a high-availability server solution solution based in Linux, including writing all the server software, shell scripts, monitoring systems, etc. (no small undertaking). I've built a number of database interfaces using C# and .NET. I created a remote administration tool (admittedly based on free software :). I've created a web front-end to an application, done artwork with Photoshop, and have recently moved on to video/audio editing for marketing materials. And that's less than half of what's been on my plate in the past 24 months.
If you haven't guessed, I'm the wildcard at my company. I do the jobs no one else knows how to do simply because I pick it up the fastest (and often becuase I volunteer). I feel very much appreciated at the office. My coworkers (and particularly my boss) are generally quite astounded by the depth of knowledge I have over such a wide range of topics, and the work I create is publicly admired and appreciated.
This sounds like opportunities that you'd only find in a small company. What sort of corporation would lest on person such a wide variety of jobs?
Well, contrast that with my wife. She works for a major retail corporation that I know you've heard of. She started as a seasonal employee, was promoted to department manager in 3 months, and in 2 years has been promoted so many times that her salary has more than trippled.
She's an excellent manager and a very hard worker. She can motivate her employees to do twice as much as the company average, but with half the time and resources. And still her employees all love coming to work for her. On her own, she generally can do the work of about six people. Even early on, she had managed to accomplish so much with so little literally every manager above her paid her a vist to ask her about her methods--all the way up to the CEO.
Now she has recently begun travelling about the country making the company a better place; fixing broken methods, motivating employees, and creating innovative soulutions to difficult problems. What she does in her job is kind of similar to what I do in mine, but transposed to a retail environment on a corporate scale.
So what's my point? Well I think it's all about attitudes and people (particularly you). A lot of people who work at my wife's company hate their job. Typical "corporate America" attitude. My wife started at the very bottom (not even a "real" employee). But she became an expert in everyone else's fields by volunteering to do their work for them; just because she thought it would be fun to do. She then shot up through the ranks so fast that only corporate policy kept her from being promoted faster.
I think there are a lot of companies that are just plain bad. When brilliant and innovative minds feel trapped, your company can sink no lower. However, the majority of the time, the problem is that most people are dumb, and most people are lazy. Whatever side of the fence you're on, it takes a lot of intelligence to recognize a brilliant solution, and it takes a lot of brilliance to create something intelligent.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
The Big Lie is a great technique to compete against Microsoft, and MS uses it just as much against Linux (and other competitors) with issues such as security and TCO. Why do people use it? Because it seems to work. Do you think Balmer and Gates trash talk because they are petty?
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
After re-reading what I wrote in the parent comment, I realize that it is excessively pro-Microsoft, in my opinion.
There are entire huge areas of abuse that I didn't mention.
Several years ago I accompanied some friends to a computer store to help them buy a computer. We were offered Microsoft Office for $50. That's why Lotus SmartSuite and Corel WordPerfect lost market share. There was always a two-tier market for Microsoft Office. You could pay full price, or you could pay $50. It seemed to me that Microsoft was less than intense about stopping the pirates, because that ran the competitors out of business.
Microsoft did the same thing with DOS. At one time, 5 local and national distributors with which I did business all carried pirated DOS. I visited one distributor that indicated they were genuinely concerned, and showed them that it was easy to detect a pirated copy. Microsoft verified that. Other DOS-like operating systems were not able to compete with broad-scale piracy.
In 2002, Microsoft implemented a plan it called "Software Assurance". At the time, Ed Foster, who writes a famous column called GripeLine, called Software Assurance "manipulation
In his column released on September 15, 2005, Ed quoted one customer as saying that Software Assurance was "one of the biggest sucker jobs of all time".
Ed said, "The thing that Software Assurance has always assured is Microsoft revenue -- what the customer has gotten is risk, and lots of it. Expecting Microsoft to deliver value when they've already got your money is just not a very good bet."
Those are just two short examples. Some people believe that there are hundreds of Microsoft abuses like that, but, as far as I know, no one has counted all of them.
Once the dream workplace of tech's highest achievers,
I think everybody used to like the stock options.
Microsoft research started being a hot place in the late 90's and has a lot of good people, but they usually ended up going when their current employer had to close down their research labs after being driven out of business by Microsoft.
I suspect all the non-technical people, marketing, HR, PR, finance, administration, shipping, writers, etc., must love Microsoft: great benefits, great work environment, lots of power, great stock options, young workforce, etc., although they have good jobs available to them in some non-high-tech companies as well.
The main people who seem to have thought of Microsoft as the "dream workplace" seem to be recent college graduates with little prior industry experience: Microsoft gave many of them a lot of responsibility and power early on and often made them rich. For better or for worse, are the people that built Microsoft and Microsoft software.
Quote from the Forbes article: "The Xbox game console is hot, but its division has lost $4 billion in four years and isn't yet in the black."
The business press is often full of baloney. "Hot", but lost $4 billion? It's easy to sell things for less than they cost.
It was based on the no quarter principle-- the idea that if Linux has any protected market, it will continue as a strategic threat. This means that one has to target every single one of Linux's markets regardless of how unprofitable or uninteresting it is.
Now that's the Microsoft thinking that many of us remember! Probably their loss you don't work there anymore.
But, yeah, Gates is talking about beating OS/2 and WordPerfect, but he's apparently forgotten how. It was the Checkbox Marketing principle -- copy every competitor feature and make it better, and then add your own features on top. Except going up against Linux, MS has left a lot of empty boxes on the comparison chart.
However, as to your point about MS Consulting vs Partners, I would say the current arrangement is the most significant reason MS is attractive as a vendor. They deliver complete products designed to minimize the amount of help needed versus maximize it. I've read a ton of slashdot posts spooging over IBM's services model, but none of these people are running out and buying Lotus Notes. Ultimately that Services focus limits Linux to it's core markets where the Unix talent pools are.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I don't think so.
The big business secret of Microsoft was to capitalize on other companies work. PC-vendors make only razor-thin margins to put out cheap hardware which made DOS/PC a lot cheaper and often also a lot better (because when you are "good enough", cheaper is the same as better) than Apple or Unix or Amiga.
The only serous previous challenger was OS/2 which had 2 big problems: The biggest problem was that it was made by IBM and no PC-maker in their right mind would use an OS made by the competition. The second problem was that despite the popular myth that "good compatibility killed the OS/2 platform", the reverse was true and while Win16 compatibility was OK, Win32 compatibility sucked.
Linux also has the latter problem, however it comes with a whole slew of advantages: It runs on the same hardware, it is cheap and it's available from many vendors.
So Linux will take away markets where it is "good enough" and little backwards-compatibility is needed. For example Novell said they would concentrate on call-centers to sell SUSE Linux to. And I see no reason why they shouldn't be able to do it - Linux can do everything that is needed (call centers don't need any Win32-games and MS Office) and is cheaper.
A similar situation is seen at governmental computers: With Linux offering the additional advantage of being able to be 100% supported internally, makes it great for governments outside the US. Even if Linux is twice as expensive, half of the expenses come back as tax-dollars, that's what makes it so great for governments. Anyway, of course there is still the problem of backwards-compatibility, that's why pioneers like Munich will take a couple of years to do the switch. However, once the software is ported to Linux, other cities and governments can do the switch much faster and easier. While Munich and a handful of other governments won't do much harm for Microsoft's bottom line, the NEXT round, when Win2K becomes unsupported, will already hurt them a lot.
It will certainly take a very long time (there will never be a "year" of the desktop, it's more like a decade or even 2 decades) but one market after another will go to Linux and Microsoft can't really do anything about it.
Wrong, they had great succes with NT selling it as "runs on cheap hardware".
That was the only real advantage NT had and Microsoft knew that well. And it worked, Windows/PC is often so much cheaper than Unix/proprietary that it's also better, despite the shortcomings.
Linux changed all that.
Now Microsoft sounds like a Unix-vendor: "But TCO is lower"
Microsoft biggest selling-point ("good enough but cheaper") isn't working anymore.
You have been really unlucky. Your company sucks.
But then announces that they're going to 'fix' Vista by spending $100 million on marketing it. He must be betting that his engineers don't, you know, read the news.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
This argument comes up every time.
Listen Pal. Calculate how many emploees are there in redmond*average salary. You'll see that MS spends about $15+billion per year just for salaries. Add advertisement costs and payoffs and you've got it.
This is a statement to keep the investors. Because if the investors lose confidence in MS and start selling, MS can go down in ONE MONTH.
Next time, try the Psychic Friends Network. They don't know the answer either, but they are friendlier, cost less, speak English, and won't waste your time.
In related news, Steve Ballmer has pledged to make changes inside Microsoft to avoid the embarrassingly long development cycle of Vista, including a 'revamping of the engineering and the processes.' Is it too late?"
I actually don't think Vista would've been so delayed if it wasn't for Microsoft suddenly, sometime between build 4083 and 5048, decided: "OK, let's throw this XP SP2 kernel out of here and base Windows Vista on Windows 2003 SP1 instead!", essentially forcing them to start from scratch in many areas, which the public build 5112 showed. Lots of interesting stuff previously in was suddenly gone, and it was curiosly looking much like XP/2003 Server again. The look of that build was what made even Windows and OS X evangelist Paul Thurott say the Longhorn project had the markings of a shipwreck.
This, and that XP SP2 development took a lot of developer time from the team that should've been working of Vista, and that SP2 became delayed, probably forms at least about a year of delays.
As usual, there are two sides of the coin with things like this -- it's not simply bad for a Windows user; it's good that they take their time to not rush things out.
Interestingly, if Microsoft had done a less of a sloppy work with Windows XP so it wouldn't need a supersized SP2, Vista would probably have been able to be released earlier. And they can hardly hide behind that the age when XP was released wasn't a virus-infected Internet age, so it should've been predictable XP would've needed a strong security given its audience and being a major hacker target. In hindsight, that should've been the focus of XP, not a fancier UI. Instead, only now is Microsoft understanding this, and are pushing for e.g. a stronger firewall in Vista, and a new account system *nix always had. Their first clearly security-oriented OS is arriving in 2006. It's hard to stop yourself from laughing.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I think there's a bit of both going on here.
Yes, yes, the genius is in the storytelling, and that ought to be completely separate from the quality of the animation.
But... my impression is that when people are pushing the envelope in one direction, attempting something that's never been possible before, it often seems to affect the whole project. I'm sure you can think of great, genre-defining movies, albums, books, gadgets, TV programmes -- often, they remain impressive after umpteen successors and imitators, have appeared, even when those successors have better technology/knowledge/facilities at their disposal.
There's something about pushing up against limitations and trying something genuinely new that spills over into other areas. You can't restrict that raw creativity and ingenuity.
Toy Story would probably have been as successful with the same storytelling but mediocre animation. But if the animation had been mediocre then I don't think the storytelling would have been the same -- the buzz from the originality of the animation probably lifted it too.
(But then, I'm not in Pixar, so this is all speculation.)
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
About the time of the antitrust case a book came out about Microsoft called BREAKING WINDOWS.
In a nutshell, the book showed how there were(are) a lot of creative, talented innovative people at Microsoft who constantly had to pay what Microsoft Employees called "the windows tax".
In other words, if you created something that threatened the dominance of windows, Microsoft would kill it.
Is it any wonder that Microsoft is having trouble with innovations and losing its star baseball players.
Creative like to create.
Nothing turns them away more than having their inspiration and their hard work squashed. More meetings and rules are not a substitute for these people.
FYI. This one touches slightly on the same subject: ways in which big companies fall. See The Innovator's Dilemma; describing "When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail".
Interesting read, though not perhaps directly applicable to Microsoft since it's really huge, multi-faceted and monopolistic which makes it less subjected to the competition and disruptive technology.
Chkdsk needs to provide a log file! We had two Windows XP computers recently in which the NTFS file system was self-destructing. We need to run Chkdsk every night and have the log sent to us by email immediately if Chkdsk reports anything besides perfect health.
One area that I didn't criticize above is Microsoft's terrible, terrible, sloppy, incomplete, scattered documentation. Nothing in Microsoft documentation that neither Microsoft technical support nor I was able to find explained the Chkdsk log file.
About those computers I mentioned above: The problem in one seems to have been caused by a bad contact between the IDE controller and the hard drive. The problem in the other was never solved, even after 30 hours of hard work. We restored from a month-old backup. My experience with Windows XP SP2 is that sometimes it begins degrading and can only be fixed by re-installing the OS.
Chkdsk is a toy. A much more comprehensive, integrated, file system health tool is needed.
"Nothing in Microsoft documentation that neither Microsoft technical support nor I was able to find explained the Chkdsk log file. "
Correction: Nothing in Microsoft documentation that either Microsoft technical support or I was able to find explains the Chkdsk log file.
Instead of abusing people, you need to recognize that Microsoft should supply better documentation.
I forgot to mention that, if they think they can mislead customers, Microsoft employees often lie. This article provides today's example: IE flaw puts Windows XP SP2 at risk. It is quoted in this Slashdot story with the same name: IE Flaw Puts Windows XP SP2 At Risk.
Here is a quote from the CNET article: "A Microsoft representative confirmed that the company had received the report from eEye and said it will be investigating the issue. Because the details of the vulnerabilities have not been made public, users are not at risk of an exploit being developed to take advantage of the flaw, the representative said."
The statement "users are not at risk" is a lie, and I'm guessing that the Microsoft representative either was completely aware he was lying, or was completely aware he was too technically ignorant to make an assessment.
If one company can find a new vulnerability, other people can, too. The fact that eEye found the vulnerability means especially that well-funded organizations, like the U.S. government's NSA department, could find the vulnerability, also. If your government uses Microsoft products, your government is vulnerable to spying.
Wrong. The perception is that NT management is significantly easier than Unix, and that's why they still own the small/mid-sized business segement despite Linux.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
One manager skipped free training because it interfered with "Survivor" on TV.
Survivor is on at 8 PM, long after nornmal working hours. Unless the manager in question was being paid to work at 8 PM, I don't blame him at all for skipping "free training" in favor of watching TV.
and that's why you should never hire consultants that dont' know how to tie thier own fucking shoes.
Hey, if they're only willing to pay us to build the machine and deliver and plug it in, there's not much we can do.
We told them that their firewall was not doing anything, and that half their computers had viruses, and the other half did too, but they didn't want us to clean it up - they thought we were selling snake oil.
You can't protect them from themselves.
sig?
Lies are more than just statements. Sneakiness is dishonest, also: Why C# and Mono are currently unnacceptable risks"
.... if companies (MS included) did not pretend all the time that the compnay is a surrogate family to which you have to give unconditional love and loyalty.
Many companies demand loyalty in many forms but then can't be arsed to give that back in the form of a little respect.
Altough people know what their obligations are they are not robots, you surely are not expecting that a place where you spend 1/3 of your time or more will no be the subcject of some emotional investment.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
More: Remember Ed Curry!
The Court's Findings of Fact in the Microsoft antitrust case lists 207 pages of abuses.