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Microsoft's Not So Happy Family
D.A. Zollinger writes "Reports from Redmond are that Microsoft Employees are not happy with the double delay of Windows and Office being pushed back into 2007. EETimes is reporting that some Microsoft employees are calling for the termination of several top managers Including Brian Valentine, Jim Allchin, and Steve Ballmer for the delay debacle. The report references a blog by Who da'Punk, an anonymous Microsoft employee who asks, where's the accountability for failure? So far the blog entry has generated over 350 comments from Microsoft insiders and outsiders."
Here's the thing. It's not like setting a schedule is going to magically make something happen. Programs are written by programmers, they aren't willed into existence by Gantt charts, no matter what PMs think.
The only problem here is not that the release was pushed back, it's that someone's Gantt chart wasn't updated with good information. So when the real numbers went in, the "realistic shipdate" suddenly met reality.
Should someone get fired? Yeah. Probably the managers who didn't do their job and keep upper management up to date with correct project status. Anyone else? Yeah. Those managers who took a ship or die attitude and will end up burning their teams out in the next year. And finally those managers who knew reality but continued to live in their fairyland (not the Mac one) where products are developed by sheer management willpower alone.
Lots of blame to go around, but the bottom line is that the product was never going to make its shipdate. The question now is whether the revised date is realistic and how much is Microsoft willing to trim back features in order to meet it if further delays are encountered.
Axing senior management isn't going to get Vista out the door any faster -- probably a lot slower because whoever comes it to pick up the pieces is going to have a hell of a job. It might make Windows 2021 (or whatever they're calling Vista 1.1) ship quicker but in the short run, it'll be chaos. Shareholders, for the most part, don't care about the long run -- they care about now.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
... people will buy Vista anyway because they will see Microsoft ads on TV 4 times a day. Microsoft as a company may be rotten, Vista as a project may have failed, but still.
...that their stock options aren't going to be worth as much. The truth is that Microsoft has very good reasons to delay Vista, only some of which they control. Anyone who has installed the beta can see that it has a long way to go before it reaches release quality. Vista is a fairly big update to the Windows code base, and the fact that it is not stable or speedy enough yet for day-to-day use at this late stage must be a factor in their decision to put it back.
Externally, Vista changes the driver model, and the hardware manufacturers seem to be lagging behind. There is no point releasing an OS if no one can use their graphics cards.
Microsoft has a lot riding on Vista, the first desktop OS release since 2001. They will not have decided to slip lightly.
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
My point is that we are in a situation of monopoly that will always by its own nature restrict the choice of users to the monopoly universe. The only way of breaking that stranglehold is through the cracks in the monopoly. If those cracks are plastered there is no way out. Of course the quality of software is more important than politics, but I believe than the quality of anything in a monopoly culture will never be so good as the quality of that same thing in a culture of free competition. So is a matter of short-ter versus long-term quality, IMHO.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
After five years and more than a hundred billion dollars revenue from computer users, Microsoft will revamp Vista at the 11th hour to turn it into a little more than a skin on XP, which was little more than a skin on 2K.
Almost all recent innovations in computing have come from organisations with orders of magnitude less revenue than MS. We are simply not getting value for money. This monopoly must be broken so competition and progress can resume. Formats, APIs, and communication protocols MUST be documented and opened to allow competitors a level playing field.
Anything else will just perpetuate the current stagnant, inbred computing environment.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
There will be plenty of people that are tired XP and its constant security problems by now. They will upgrade the day Vista is out, thinking it will be the solution to all their problems. The advertising for Vista will be *very good*. You can bet on that.
Microsoft will make sure that people using XP will not be able to easily communicate with the new applications on Vista. Companies will be scared of having some computers running XP and newer ones running Vista. Companies loving standardising things.
People will upgrade before too long. If not voluntarily, they will be forced to.
The only thing Microsoft need to do to almost guarantee success is to get the thing released soon before Mac + Linux start getting too popular!
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Even MS employees know they can't sell their crap, they have to force it down peoples throats or it won't sell.
Nonsense, people want Windows. If Dell went 100% Linux tomorrow their sales would drop to near zero and people would buy Gateways, Compaqs, etc.
Also, Apple's Mac OS X has been a far better alternative for regular users than Linux for several years now yet nearly everyone sticks with Windows.
I own a Mac, my PC dual boots Windows and Linux, but I realize I am part of a very small minority. Most people don't want Mac OS X or Linux. That is reality, it may change over time but that it the state of things at the moment.
Another 5-10 years or so and we'll be able to compare & contrast with OSS- ie. letting developers and user community determine where a product goes...
Don't get me wrong, I give MS lots of credit. I don't think PC's would be where they are today without them. It's gratifying to me though that the "good of the whole" can win over a 10yr lead and billions of dollars in "R&D" & marketing.
Axing senior management isn't going to get Vista out the door any faster -- probably a lot slower
It depends on why the Vista project is in turmoil, doesn't it?
I can think of several situations that, if they held, would be counterexamples.
(1) The Captain Kirk school managers: Ignore enginering's time estimates because you don't want to believe them and have unwavering faith in your personal charisma's power to alter reality. Also known as the "assume we had a can-opener" manager.
(2)The "turn-around" style of mamagement: When a manager comes in and turns a situation around, he's a strong manager. Therefore a manager that turns his company around frequently must be stronger than one who turns the company around once.
(3) The "kill the messenger" style of management: On the theory that "no news is good news", turn every instance in which bad news has to be brought up into a game of "beard the lion". Subtypes include "If everyone keeps tap dancing hard enough, maybe nobody will notice and things will sort themselves out" theorists.
(4) The "I'm manager because I can everybody's job better than they could" manager. Hardly bears description. On the flip side, if you're honest with yourself, you'll admit that as an engineer, deep in your heart of hearts, this is you. The obviously awesom weapons of the engineering paradigm can slay any dragon. Management? Pfft. You just take the pot of potential objectives on one hand, and the pot of resources and capabilities you have on the other, build a set of alternative frameworks connecting them, crunch the numbers and pick the best.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If MS makes such a superior OS -- which I doubt, not because it's MS but because it's too dofficult for anyone to do at all -- either FOSS raises it's bar or it dies. That's not because MS is a monopoly. That would be because FOSS would not be able to survive in the free market.
Look at OpenOffice.org. People compare it to MS Office and they say it's slow and bloated. Compared to MS Office. I'd challenge someone to find any application with more needless bloat than MS Office. For years the number one complaint about the entire Office line was that it was always bloatware. Now OOo comes along and bloat isn't a problem? I'm sorry, that's BS and we all know it. OOo is going nowhere until the codebase is cleaned up. The only reasons it's as popular as it is are because it's FOSS and because it's the only thing besides MS Office. As it stands now you decide if you want to pay for MS Office. If you don't, you get OOo. Not because OOo is better than MS Office (which should be why you choose any piece of software, right?) but simply because it's cheaper. This is like choosing GIMP over Photoshop. If you're a professional, you only do it when you lack the money to afford the real deal (which then suggests you're possibly not as professional as you think).
Now look at Linux. People chose Linux because for what they want to do, the OS is actually better than other OSs. Look at Firefox. People chose that over IE because it's better. Hadly anybody used the old Mozilla Suite for exactly the same reasons that OOo rather sucks. The fact that Linux in particular costs so much less is rather irrlevant to the discussion. Now look at things like LAMP vs Windows/IIS/MS SQL/ASP. Again, choice has little to nothing to do with the lisencing costs. It's what solution you know better, and what you want to do with it.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Let's be honest here...as long as windows maintains it's current market share it does not matter.
If you work in a windows shop, and run into your CIO or IT head cheese ask this simple question "What would have to happen for you to SERIOUSLY consider dumping windows for some other desktop OS platform"
Chances are they will just give you a blank stare. That alone should tell you that ANY delay in the next version of windows will have ZERO effect on Microsoft's market.
The development cycle usually consists of sitting in meetings while the architects and project managers hmmm and hah over what features to scope and de-scope for this particular release. This usually achieves nothing, at the very last minute they'll tell us to design something which has a set of features that don't interact well and require others that have been de-scoped. We now have exactly one week to code and module test the thing.
After many late nights the code is finished and the next few weeks are frought with Integration nightmares that the managers failed to take account of in their initial high level design. This isn't usually as bad as it should be as those of us doing the actual coding can often identify issues at the implementation stage and fix them there. When we tell the managers about this it usually offends them.
Integration complete, there is now about 5% of the work left to do in tidying up loose ends and streamlining code. The powers that be deem this to be un-necessary and my name appears on the Gantt chart of another project. Because I didn't get a chance to complete this final 5% of the work I will probably face a Bugzilla email deluge in the next month.
The answer, short development cycles, Extreme programming, unified process etc.>
Design, code, test and integrate in 3 -4 week cycles. Design decisions can't be drawn out and must be made quickly, coding and testing is done in manageable amounts and integration no longer presents a nightmare. Code is good the first time around for the small number of features implemented in that cycle, and far less buggy.
Unfortunately people are too stuck in their ways to change.
There have been huge numbers of rather fatuous comments of the "GANTT chart meets reality" type. My feeling is that these must have been written by people who simply have no understanding of the issues involved in updating a huge existing codebase so that it works to a commercial level of quality and retains backward compatibility with most of what is out there.
It's almost unheard of to find a large mature codebase which is particularly clean. What would have started out as a clean architecture gets pulled out of shape with bug fixes, new features, support for new architectures and so on over time. In particular, many fixes are done in a 'quick and dirty' fashion because there's a need to correct a critical security flaw now, so a quick fix is preferred to a considered refactoring of the relevant code.
Now, the GANTT chart bit isn't so bad: PM asks the developers, who (usually, anyway!) know their codebases well, to say how long it will take to develop a particular feature, and what the dependencies will be. Most people actually get this part somewhere about right. They write their code, unit test it and put it into an integration build. Everything seems fine.
Where things start to go wrong is where you introduce the next level of testing: beta testing out with customers. The messy codebase starts to bite you hard, with obscure bugs which turn out to be due to the presence of some fix which is essential to another area. Fixing the fix turns out to have ramifications elsewhere, and the whole thing can slide out of control quickly.
My guess is that this is where Microsoft is with Vista: they have 99.9% of everything working very well,but there's 0.1% which is a mess, but which is essential to having the stability needed to launch. Problem is that getting the 0.1% right is actually a huge effort, with unknown impacts across the whole codebase.
You can't even really blame the managers for letting the codebase get into such a mess. The issue is an accumulation of short-term fixes, none of which is, in and of itself, a problem, but when you have thousands of these hacks, maintenance becmes a nightmare. trouble is that the managers and developers who allowed this to happen were merely responding to direction from on high (e.g. "fixing security issues is now our highest priority - I want to see our response time down as low as possible"), which makes considered refactoring impossible.
I think MSFT management is just afraid cuz of all the build up for Vista that if it goes out the door and is borked then they'll seriously loose mindshare.
:-)
I'm hoping [as an individual fed up with windows] that Vista is a flop. I'd love to hear about 0-day exploits and the like. Frankly I'm tired of rampant vendor lockin, bloaty OSes and inferior technology.
Like just recently I had to buy a copy of Word for a publishing deal. Cost me $286 CDN. What does that give me? A word processor that only runs in Windows and only edits Word files. The latter bit doesn't sound so bad until you realize the format is not properly documented anywhere and essentially requires me to keep using Windows and Word to work with the files.
Whereas, in the "real world", I can build my own Linux distro [e.g. gentoo] for free, install OpenOffice for free and be editting documents in no time flat. Then I can move those documents to my BSD or Windows machines if I want. Heck, I can even hack the document [ala unzip and sed] if I want to do something not natively supported by OO directly [e.g. substituting all fonts in the document instantly].
So on Vista launch-eve I'll drink a pint in hopes that their initial release is a total flop.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Uh, any chance this has to do with the fact that Microsoft began expensing stock options - http://news.com.com/Microsoft+to+award+stock,+nix+ options/2100-1014_3-1023840.html
? ID_Content=5041?
- or that employees are pissed about the review system or lack of pay increases over the last 3 years - http://www.washtech.org/news/industry/display.php
Until the late 90's, an engineer could work at Microsoft for 10-15 years and retire. That made them a lot more willing to tolerate constant death marches and ridiculously unrealistic product schedules. I suspect the current crop of engineers realized that weren't going to become billionaires anytime soon and weren't willing to make the same sacrifices. This is probably not the last we'll see of this sort of thing from Microsoft.
Upper management is certainly hard at work trying to figure out how to get Indian and Chinese developers working on Vienna.
Hate to say this, but I expect more from Slashdot moderation than for this article to be considered 'insightful.'
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
What is a good scenario, but is destroyed when you put money on the equation. On the reality, engeneers get underpaid, management get lots of money. So, many engeneers want to go into management.
That is also a reason to companies should pay the engeneers well.
Rethinking email
There is a very interesting aspect of delay, that is working to Microsoft's favor in this case.
In another field, note the most recently finished highway project in your local area. You might (if you were paying attention) remember the years of political turmoil before it started, the endless planning meetings, the politician promises. Then, you saw the signs go up, saying things like "This exit will be closed from Nov 11 2003 to Jun 1 2005" or something, and it seemed like forever. A date that far in the future is just a hell of a long time away.
But, note how you feel about the project today? The inconvenience of waiting are just completely gone. You've got a nice new freeway, and you get from here to there without much problem. In a couple of months it seems like it has always been there. All the hair-pulling and outrage that you felt when the finish date was first posted just seems so trivial now.
Anyway, that's the way it works for me.
Vista will be the same in a lot of ways. Microsoft, for better or for worse (mostly worse) is just as much of a monopoly as the Department of Public Works. They'll finish the goddamn highway on their own schedule, and they'll do an adequate job of it, and people will just live with it. And the very sad thing is, they'll like it.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
The thing that Linux has over Microsoft is a shift in accountability. Microsoft has the attitude that if any six-year-old broken as hell 3rd party product doesn't work on the newest Windows, their customers aren't going to upgrade. And they may be right, at that. But this leads to whole DIVISIONS of programmers writing bits into the operating system that detect if the application in question is Defunct Spreadsheet Product version 0.55 alpha, and hacking the registry to work in the old (and quite broken) way that the program expected when it was written back in 1997. Microsoft holds itself responsible for busted 3rd party applications. No such thing exists in open source, that I'm aware of. If the Linux kernel is behaving incorrectly, and fixing it breaks a 3rd party application, the fix gets made and nobody looks back. It's up to the app developer to make it work with the new system. This means that old applications on Linux aren't guaranteed to "just work" for decades to come, which might slow adoption by some businesses that don't want to worry about such things, but it also means they're not tied to being backwards compatible forever. The cost of that compatibility in Windows is huge, and affects all these things like security, filesystems, etc.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
They'll never do the out-of-band raises. Microsoft is too corporate and the corporate class system will not tolerate pay and benefits systems that allow "workers" to be paid more than "management." Ever. Even for one FY cycle.
It only works that way at tech companies run by the engineers that started them, and then only temporarily, until either enough management types are brought in from the outside or until the engineers with stock options and influence decide its not any fun anymore and leave. The latter is a real death knell, since those original engineers are the ones to whom the management guys owe *their* jobs to and it's hard for management to push the corporate class system when their are engineers still there who have both the proven track record and the financial resources to call bullshit on them.
But when it does reach that point, it becomes Just Another Corporation where the corporate class system gets re-introduced and the company is ultimately run by its marketing arm like any other corporation, hoping that nobody sees the mediocrity through the bullshit.
I just wonder how long it will take Google to get like that, or if they have discovered some way around it.