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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."
Not a good day to be a fly on the wall in Ballmers office.
"I'm going to fucking kill Microsoft!"
HURL!
THUD!
SPLAT!
Actually though, chopping the head off the chicken might seem like a good idea at the time until you realise its the arsehole that becomes the new leader.
liqbase
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?
"I've done it before and I'll do it again," he said. "Anonymity has no place at Microsoft."
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
Yes, that rumbling noise in the background, faint at first, but growing louder with each passing moment... yes, soon enough you can tell that it is a crowd of people... they are chanting... what are they saying.... I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU SO
Joking aside, this shouldn't even be news (sorta) its as unexpected as a suicide bomber in the middle east somewhere. Lets see, the EU, Mass., other entire countries dumping MS, Korea, and the response from MS has been FUD and 'smoke and mirrors' for several years now. I think its time for MS to put up or shut up. They have promised to fix all the woes of Internet users for several years now... time they did some of that, or simply hide in their cubes eating humble pie, reading the news about their stock with FF.
No, not a case of Linux fanboi, just observation. I'm rather tired of hearing how MS is going to fix this or that, and all they've fixed is prices in the past. On that issue, I'm rather happy with the way Open Source software is handling these issues, rather more up front about it, and trying to cobble together associations and software to battle the problems instead of promising the panacea of software at the mere cost of one arm and one leg per user.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Who da'Punk is in fact the real enemy. He wants to end the bloat at Microsoft and convert it into a lean and mean machine of productivity. Imagine what options open source would have if people in Microsoft where devoted to create great software for the users, instead of pursuing their own petty concerns in the corporate ladder. If Who da'Punk and others like him had their way, Microsoft would be user-centric, but keeping the users always within the Microsoft universe. He's planning a world of happy slaves of Microsoft. Now we are all slaves, but at least not happy. In the unsatisfaction of slaves the seeds of change lay. If everybody was contented, the chances of breaking the Microsoft monopoly would be nil (on the other side, we'd be happier and have great software, but still slaves).
So help him not. Cheer Balmer instead. He's our real ally in this fight.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
... 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.
you suggest that people should value the politics of their software higher than the quality of it? So why has all Linux advertising/PR/etc concentrated on the quality of the code produced by the OSS model?
If the OSS movement is right, Who da'punk is an irrelevance. If you're right, OSS is already doomed to failure.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Microsoft is filling some recently vacated positions. The time to send your resume is now.
There is one thing that will get Microsoft's employee's moral back up, a Chair-Throwing-Monkey-Dance! I'm sure they'll be able to find someone who can supply.
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
A couple of days back, I read a very good article here on slashdot about how a couple of OS companies were taking the users on a ride by compelling them to upgrade their hardware to meet the minimum OS requirements.
Now we see that many in Microsoft are also feeling the same way though for an entirely different reason. Is it that microsoft is slowly losing its focus by trying to put their fingers in each and every pie out there rather than concentrating on their strengths ?
In many developers and users mind, Google is considered to be a better company both for its fairplay as well as how it treats its employees...
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."
If Microsoft didn't have a monopoly in the OS market, these management problems probably would have crippled the company and product by now.
On the other hand, if they didn't have a monopoly, perhaps everyone would be focused on competing and improving their OS, and these problems would not come up.
Respect the laws of physics, for the laws of physics have no respect for you.
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.
I find it hard to believe the guy who wrote this actually works on windows, MS has very solid reasons for the delay and anyone working on it would know this. The guy probably wanted some publicity for his site or just wanted to bad mouth MS. Personally, I welcome the delays - I don't have the chance to waste my money on the software for another few months.
* See if you can work out why :-)
From the article:
"But even as some on the Mini-Microsoft blog wished for Maria Antoinette-style retribution, other employees defended the decision, if not the people who made it.
"Yes, it's painful. Yes, it's embarrassing," wrote Robert Scoble, a company technical evangelist, on his Scobelizer blog. "But I'd rather have a slipped date than a cruddy product.""
It would have been nice if they had this philosophy a couple of decades ago, rather than trying to transition to a "first in quality rather than first in marketplace" maxim now after all the messes they have institutionalized and all the good, innovative companies that followed the above maxim they have dispatched.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
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.
And it might be seen as motivational.
Yeah, right. Motivational as in "all leave is cancelled until morale improves", or "we'll keep firing people until you ship product"
Unless it's all part of the Linux master plan...
"She's furniture with a pulse"
Look, kicking Ballmer and a few other people just below him upstairs, sideways or out couldn't cause any more turmoil in these critically wounded projects. And the projects that are working fine would no doubt continue fine.
The big problem is that this would be tantamount to an admission of weakness. It would cause a short term dip in the stock price, and more seriously create the impression of a chink in the armor.
Unless... They appointed somebody in Ballmer's place who would immediately wipe away the memory of all that. And boy, do I have a candidate for them. Wait for it... It's...
Jean-Louis Gasee.
Why?
(1) He's soave. He'd be a palate cleansing draught of Perrier to Ballmer's greasy bag of deep fried pork rinds and Gates's Technicolor Pop Rocks persona.
(2) He has the respect of engineers. He's cool. The proof? One word: BeOS. It would help recruiting of talent. The Linux snobs wouldn't have anybody in the MS corner office who was a convenient joke.
(3) He's European. French (duh). I mean, put yourself in the EU's shoes. An American monopoly is throwing it's weight around, and you've seen the frightening videos of its leader's nearly indescribable antics rallying the troops. How could this not evoke the nightmare of torchlit nighttime rallies and different supreme leader's rants?
Of course, his actual track record as a businessman is, uh, mixed. He had trouble getting product out as the head of the Mac development. He missed his opportunity to sell an 80 million dollar company to Apple for 200 million, and ended up selling it to Palm for 11 million . But he could credibly show up for work in jeans, a turtleneck and gold ear stud -- who could put a price on that? Sandwiching him between the board on one hand and carefully senior managers on the other, this could be a major win.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The thing that makes this even wierder is that the betas of XP made it actually look like they might have been getting somewhere, but this time around even the betas are apparently off putting.
I'm relying here on reports from otherwise bright people who actually try to use the stuff, as the weekend provided almost the only excuse I've had to curse M$ software to its face in years. Normally I can just stick with the line which has done almost everything I've asked of it since 1984, but now I guess I might have to revert to evangelising with that client before I'm forced to walk away.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
(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 awesome weapons of the engineering paradigm can slay any dragon.
Okay, you knew someone was gonna stick up for engineers around here, so here I am. I'm going to pick up on your previous Star Trek analogy too, for maximum geek-factor.
There will of course be engineers like this, just like there are managers that think they are engineers. A good crew however, doesn't work like this.
Geordi LaForge doesn't WANT to be Captain. In fact, aside from some minor rank bumps early in the shows career when he moved from helmsman to Chief Engineer, Geordi showed no signs of wanting to move up at all. He was already EXACTLY where he belonged, in the engine room of the fleet flagship, under a great Captain.
Good engineers don't want to be out fighting Klingons and worrying about Ferengi ripping them off and Romulans stealing their toys. That's what good CAPTAINS are for. Picard gave Geordi engineering problems, and listened to him when Geordi said he design a way to tie the holodeck to the warp core and fix the particle of the week. There were also plenty of times they went to that meeting room, and Geordi sat there with his hands in his lap because it wasn't an engineering problem, and the best he could offer was to carry a tricorder on the away team.
This is like a good engineer wet dream -- all the best toys to play with, with a gung ho first officer and an angry klingon between you and everything else that can get in your way, from Cardassians to Starfleet Brass.
~Rebecca
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.
Doesn't that qualify as a death threat?
And your name is actually Rebecca? Wow, I'm in love... oh.
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.
I think for many years, many Microsoft employees have assumed that they are walking on water because, after all, how could they not be, given the financial success of the company.
But I think reality is catching up with the company: Microsoft doesn't walk on water technically, they are producing roughly the same kind of software today as other big software vendors (and that's actually an improvement over where they were a few years ago).
Microsoft is turning more and more into the IBM of 20 years ago, and that means that they are getting technically better than they used to be, and financially less successful. Welcome to reality.
This was a very interesting comment on the blog site:
"
The migration to Vista will be a passive one, as someone else previously mentioned; appearing on new computers bought by companies.
The same for home users; a lot of people do not know enough to figure out what hardware upgrades they need ; so again, it will appear on new computers.
Is this what Windows has become? An upgrade no one wants, forced upon them because the new hardware they're buying doesn't support anything less?
Compare this to OS X, where people fall all over themselves trying to get the newest version running on their old hardware because there's actual value in the new features.
So Vista has its guts ripped out, slips, and we wait another 5 years for a potentially insipring version of Windows, meanwhile Apple ships another 3 updates to OS X.
I hope to God Office 12 steps up and kicks some ass. "
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.
Microsoft has a bad reputation with regard to the quality of their code. But they have a really good reputation for shipping products.
This is news to me. Maybe you mean eventually shipping product, but their general reputation is for always being years late and always dropping features to make even the late dates.
Infuriate left and right
I spent 2 hours reading that thread, and the one thing that dropped my jaw was the post claiming that MS has been unable to stave off six 6-digit corporate desktop migrations.
*blink*
The only one I've heard about is IBM: that's 330,000 desktops. It's more than likely one of the six. This sounds to me like the Fortune 500 is getting really tired of the lack of security, empty promises, endless delays, absurd licensing costs... and has gotten wise to the FUD.
They know that if Apple can put OSX 10.5 on shelves in November, that will start the snowball rolling, and the avalanche is coming.
Sure, when Vista does ship (too late), there will be a huge marketing campaign for it. It seems though that they don't even know how to make a compelling pitch to customers, business or retail. Even with a January launch (I'm not holding my breath), the advertising will start in November, and those campaigns will need to be conceptualized in the next few weeks, if that hasn't started already.
MS has a disaster on its hands that no one seems to want, and they don't know how to sell it. Meanwhile, their enemies (aka the rest of the industry) are circling the bloated prey, waiting for MS to collapse under its own weight before they move in for the kill.
The time to send your resume is now.
I know you're saying this as a joke, but if you realize, many of those Microsoft workers are already sending their resumes ELSEWHERE. They f***ing want to leave. Microsoft is becoming another EA, specially when new workers get paid more than existing workers. So it's more convenient if you leave MS, get another job, and later (IF later) you decide to go back.
IMHO, I'd rejoice the day Mini-MSFT became the Microsoft CEO. Of course, it will never happen.
Have you realized that he CAN'T change the company from inside?
He says it, he LIKES working there, but he needs to point out the problems. If he tries to do something for a change in a draconian environment, he might as well be fired. IMHO you haven't read EVEN ONE of his blog entries. He LOVES Microsoft, and he WANTS to change it.
Do you think you REALLY can change a WHOLE WORK STRUCTURE in a company just by going to your boss and saying "we need to get rid of these problems"? Oh wait, this one's better. "Boss, we need you to get fired".
The real problem is that Ballmer is F**KING BLIND, he WON'T ACCEPT that there are problems in his company. Microsoft is a time bomb. You should be glad that we have Mini-MSFT to alert the shareholders about the precarious condition of the company.
It's interesting to watch the comments as they unfold in the blog entry. Some of them are very frantic. "The company is going down! Abort! Abort! Abandon ship now!!" -- This from a company which has no real competition.
To be honest, I don't see what they're so upset about. It's done when it's done.
It's been a long time.
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
That may be, but most Windows users I know have never, ever installed Windows - any version - on their machine. For Vista to be a retail success, it has to be a flawless install. Have you actually tried installed XP (retail version, Pro or Home) on a machine? Unless you have all the drivers handy, it's a nightmare.
People keep saying it's all about easy installs, but the truth is, not many people have actually done an install from a retail box. What they have done is a restore from a ghost image, drivers already in place. An entirely diferent thing.
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.
I found the following post (on the MS Blog comments) by someone who is probably a MS employee.
----snip-------
Talk around the vending machines in legal is that the delay has nothing to do with coding, slipped schedules or anything else. That's why very few heads will actually roll and most will simply shuffle positions. Actual reasons have to do with no product, NONE, shipping until after the mess with the EU is cleaned up. From what I've heard so far, if there are further major delays with EU that can't be solved by set-asides and scholarships, then expect another major delay beyond what has already been announced. At 25-40% annual compounded growth rates for Linux servers, the last thing that's going to happen is for the EU to be able to do what US-Justice failed to do, which is force disclosure of MS server protocols so competitors can copy MS's IP and gain market share in the market segment on MS's dime. Samba has never been 100% compatible and that's the way its going to stay, come hell or high water. Regardless of how much time/delay it takes, Samba and Vista will never be as interoperable as Samba is with PDC, AD, AS currently. If it takes another 6 month delay, another 9 months, whatever. Eventually EU will capitulate whether Commerce and the WTO has to step in or not. Server space market share has either reached a tipping point, or already passed a tipping point depending on which internal study you read. Whichever study you read/believe, make sure its one of the ones that takes into account free installs of their versions of AS/ES, such as Cent/OS. According to those studies, the server space has already passed the tipping point, that's why we're seeing what's happening with Mass/ODF/XML, and some of the large desktop migrations that have been documented internally. And remember, any large migrations you get a whiff of, you know where to report them, get details and do it. A single 6 digit desktop migration has repercussions far and wide on many other customers and partners (and media), and we are staring at over a dozen of them and have been unsuccessful in turning any of them around so far.
So unless anything settles with the EU in the coming months, expect further delays regardless of what they are blamed on.
--------snip--------------
From the article:
With the convergence of high-tech media, this holiday season would have been an explosive nodal point to get Vista out for a compounded effect.
This is why MS can't seem to get it done. They have people working there who ACTUALLY talk like this! I mean, seriously, can anyone translate that sentence into English, please?
Why do they care about this? Is it their own bonus in jeopardy because the product didn't ship by a certain drop-dead date?
Whether Microsoft continues to sell old Office, or new Office, people are still buying Office. Whether they're selling XP or Vista, they're still selling a Microsoft OS onto the same number of computers.
WHY DO THEY CARE? THEY'RE STILL GETTING PAID THE SAME AS BEFORE!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
From [a reply to] TFA:
"Vista - I wouldn't buy it with someone else's money. Then again What do I know, I've only been testing the dog for the last 2-3 yrs..."
Oy.
So what you're saying... is that Ballmer is an angry Klingon? Thanks, that makes his actions make so much more sense.
That's a recipe for a burnout.
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Exactly the point. Peasants and peons get no voice, they're being treated like other company property. Hire and fire.
I've had my share of working for a company with this kind of attitude. We outsourced everything (but management, of course). What couldn't be outsourced was replaced by temps that you could easily get rid of when you don't need them anymore.
The result was that the "peons" treated their "king" the same way they were treated. The clock hit 5 and he was out the door. Sure, 5 minutes more and he could've checked in the code, but who cares? The company going down a few 1000$ for delay penalties? Pick up your cell and try to call someone who cares.
Moral was LOW. Even lower than the wages.
The few perms that remained (amongst them me) were to take the blame and "motivate" them. My suggestion for motivation ("pay more than 8 an hour") was shot down immediately. Fluctuation was stunning. Average turnover time was less than half a year.
Now, anyone in the biz worth his salt knows what it means to dump someone into a 5 year old project and expect productivity. It takes at least a month to get a good, experienced coder productive. Since we were strictly required to hire temps, and few temps are experienced coders, it took closer to 2-3 months 'til we saw any productive code that didn't require long reviews and debugging processes.
Because temp work has a stunning (and in management appearantly unknown) problem: YOU DON'T GET GOOD PEOPLE FOR TEMP WORK! If they were any good, they'd have a perm job!
And the few perm techs that didn't get sacked leave on their own. Quickly. Because they see what's going on. They know their productivity hits an all time low when half of your team is, on average, training. The other half is busy training them. Or writing meaningless reports for the beancounters so they know what cost center they can put the burden of the untrained and unskilled (and thus unproductive) coders on.
I can't remember a single person that was NOT looking for another job.
I quitted this job in November (I'm not gonna tell which large, German corporation I was talking about. If you're in it, you know which one it is). Now I have a different job. Less bureaucracy. More productivity. More "direct" communication. Quicker market adaption and reaction. And even more money.
Sure, job safety isn't the same. I could've spent my productive years without a problem in the big corp I was in earlier. Up until retirement. But I'd have probably succumbed to booze or stronger stuff way earlier 'cause I couldn't take the incompetence in management anymore.
Now, my current boss isn't much more knowledgeable in technical matters. He's good at selling, but he's no tech. But at least he KNOWS that!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So...the execs want to push a product back to 'get it right', but the employees themselves now wish to just throw it into production, quality be damned
I'm no fan of MS either but I think that statement unfair to their developers at least. I bet quite a few of them are frustrated because factors outside of their control often means they have to build things that suck. Like most of us, I think they want to make things that are cool, work well, and announce to the world how clever they are. It certainly has worked in Google's favor and led to the infamous chair-throwing.
Middle management types especially forget that the really talented ones aren't motivated solely by money. And MS these days seems to be infested with them. If any of their developers are wanting to just "throw it out there and quality be damned" then it is fatigue and despair talking. MS has plenty of good people working for them. Good people take pride in their work. The problem seems to be that MS also has an aristocracy of parasitic middle managers or maybe just a corp of yes-men at the very top. Whatever it is, those good developers don't have good leadership.
First, I can tell you exactly what the "process" the blog post is referring to -- it's not an issue of cowboy coders vs. reasonable process and management. Ask anyone who has worked on longhorn questions like: "how many VBLs are there anyway?" and "do you think quality gates have improved the codebase or not?" and (if they have anything to do with test) "what do you think of WTT?". Work spent to satisfy this process consumes way too much of the average developer's time and contributes little or nothing to the overall stability of the codebase.
Next, I know several MS engineers who are on the fence about leaving after the longhorn deathmarch fisaco and the FY06 compensation package. All I have to say on this front is, again, leaving was one of the best moves I ever made. Not to drag Microsoft through the mud (though that's what slashdot is all about, right?) but I agree 100% with mini about the axe needing to fall on some very senior people. Senior management at MS is compensated extraordinarily well (GMs, VPs all make well over $500k/year total compensation). There are way too many of these people and not only do they not write code or contribute meaningfully to the product, they make the lives of the rank and file harder with their bullshit process ideas and beurocracy. Here's a crazy recipe for shipping longhorn: fire some of the windows leadership, give the rest of the windows management 0 bonus and use the money you saved to give real out-of-band raises to the best engineers in the company. When you give them the raises say something like: "We fucked up, we paid management way too much and have been neglecting our real #1 resource which is smart engineers". The brightest people I know work at Microsoft but if things don't change I suspect I won't be saying this for long.
"That's just a lie. If someone at the activation place told you that, call back. They were misinformed."
OEM windows is not activated, but it is tied to the machine you bought it on. In fact, it's microsoft's view that you cannot legally put it on another machine, even if you junk the existing one. They now force OEM's to essentially do something like BIOS locking that Windows XP disks. If you take a Windows XP disk that comes with an HP computer and try to install it on a homebuilt, it won't install. It will tell you that it's not an HP computer.
Try it if you don't believe it.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I suppose that you have become accustomed to thinking that you are God. If you can't find it on a map, it is none of your business.
More Iraqis die now that the U.S. is in charge than died when Saddam was in charge. Who is the greater destructive force?
"He's soave"
I assure you he is French, not Italian.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
ian
No, Klingons have honor.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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
Doing the former would require that he attach his name to his complaints
And you're Don Giovanni. And I'm the Magic Flute.
Why? It has SPECIFIC REASONS FOR THEIR PROBLEMS FROM THE GUY TESTING IT! Read on:
Ok let's take a look back at the great mgmt decisions in one Windows test org: Not an important group; just appcompat. (It's not like anyone really cares about appcompat - who cares if customers' 3rd party apps (and especially MS apps) really don't work that well on this new fustercluck.
In the last 18 months this org:
1) Cut the number of testers (several times) from approx 50 to now much less than a dozen. Of course, many top performers also left MS entirely because of middle mgmt in this org.
2) Hired more PMs
3) Cut the scope of testing (anyone done any real code coverage testing lately?)
4) Cut the number of promotions in the test orgs - nothing like a little 'de-incentivization' to increase 'bad attrition'
5) Dictate that everything can and should be automated. (Ignore that eyeballs catch more in less time...) way to go Darren. Of course, you were probably lied to by your underlings, so it's not entirely your fault. Uhh, yes it is - you made the call.
6) Hire only a small handful of devs to write automation code. Oh, and don't forget to swamp them with added process and have embittered leads review their code...
7) Hire more PMs
8) Outsource all testing to non-accountable and barely trained CSG firms overseas (Ever try to translate/clarify a bug written not by a tester, but by their lead based on notes? )
9) Limit the number of heads the abovementioned overseas firms can use. > Fewer testers, less experienced, with little training, a much (ahem) 'slower' approach to testing.
Results: Client appcompat % hovering at 75%. No, wait, did I say 75? I meant 85. At RTM it will be 95.6, or whatever other arbitrary happy-happy number they came up with like last time. In reality, last go-around, the appcompat % was quite high, despite the PM lies, just not as high as they claimed.
What? You're going to dispute the numbers that some lower functionaries spun up through the labyrinthine PM food chain? At each 'filter' point one gets to improve his own rep by making his ownership area look better. What's a few % points between bureaucrats?
While I'm in rant mode, why exactly IS MCE so bad? Didn't anyone test this puppy before kicking it out the door and having another PM party?
A brand new Dell with full OEM installed load and almost nothing works in the expected 'just plug it in Dad and it works'.
Sure is great he has a son who works at MS. Oh, no he doesn't. His son left.
Vista - I wouldn't buy it with someone else's money. Then again What do I know, I've only been testing the dog for the last 2-3 yrs...
By Anonymous, at 9:51 PM
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I suspect that WinFS is probably a problem just by itself.
Ask yourself which is more likely to become corrupted: a file system or a database?
About 12 or 13 years ago, I toyed with the idea of a creating a database out of a file system. After much thought, especially about the possibilities for corruption, I decided that it was better to keep them separate.
If they do issue WinFS, you'd better make sure you do regular backups.
I think about WinFS a lot like I think about the Windows Registry -- they make sense at first, but in the long run, they just turn into a bigger pain in the ass then what they are replacing.
Programs are written by programmers, they aren't willed into existence by Gantt charts, no matter what PMs think.
Contrary to what you may think, what managers do actually matters for the quality and timeliness of a project; bad management results in much longer development times and much lower quality than good management. Of course, even if the management was perfect, the managers still estimated the wrong release dates, which is also their fault. Vista has an additional problem in that it's not only delayed again and again, it also keeps losing features compared to what was announced.
And there is little excuse for any of that at Microsoft; both OS X and Linux already ship right now pretty much all the features that were originally announced for Vista (and then some!), those features were developed in less time than Microsoft had and with far less resources.
It is sometimes ok to break backwards compat... However, the way mozilla/firefox does it is not good. As a one time extension developer I can attest to your example. When 1.5 came out, and the entire extension structure changed, I simply abandoned the 6 extensions I was working on...
They are not updated to 1.5, and I have no plans to do so, because I spent a considerable amount of time building, creating, and maintaining these extensions and the amount of time I would have to spend to relearn and redo them is not worth it to me. And guess what! They are doing it again for 2.0 the whole extension mechanism is going to be redone once more, so if I update to 1.5, I'll just have to relearn again in a few months.
On the other hand, GCC has broken compat multiple times, and its relatively painless to go in and fix the bits of code and recompile.... I use apache 2.0 in everything I do, I really doubt your claim that "no one" uses it... It comes standard in all the distros now, and yeah if you have something that is completely dependant on 1.3, maybe you're still running it.
Anyway, your arguments all fall down on the following fact: Hey at least with open source you can keep using 1.3 for as long as you want. You can keep using gcc 2.96 for as long as you want. You can keep using firefox 1.0 for as long as you want. and if you need a fix, you have to code it yourself or pay someone a small fee to come code a fix, but its not like dealing with MS.
MS broke merge letters with dynamic queries in Office 2003. Plain and simple doesn't work anymore (worked fine in 97, 2k, and XP). I work in the legal industry, they use this feature ALL THE TIME. I have spent months in the last 2 years "downgrading" law offices to office xp and 2000 after they upgraded entire offices to 2003 and found that it broke everything... (BTW I did spend the requisite hours/days messing with MS tech support and they finally gave up and said "Yeah I guess that's not supported anymore") and I'm not even talking about using a non ms database (all access or SQL server). There is no fix, the feature is simply not supported anymore, and there is no choice but to keep running the old software, and support/fixes/security fixes will be impossible in another year (2000 support is phased out).
The point is with MS you're stuck, if they break backwards compat (and don't say they never do because they do), you either pound sand and "upgrade" and lose needed functionality, or you keep using the old software that works, but is riddled with security holes that can't/never will be fixed. With OSS you can keep using the old software and at least get security fixes, or someone will code a fix in the new software eventually, and the same features will be available and you can upgrade, either way, you aren't left out in the cold.
> In the free world, GIMP does what Photoshop does
... all he wants is Terminal and GraphicConverter and Firefox and he is good to go for everything.
... I use Photoshop professionally all day every day and can't for the life of me figure out why anybody uses anything else. Yes it costs a bit of money to get started but then after that you pay $150 every 18 months and it continues to kick ass and gain new professional features. You have the whole art kit there ... it's like having a full set of pastels rather than one box of eight colors. The complete thing is more than the sum of its parts. And I can create a file with it and know it will be a professional-level file, not something with the mask inverted or an old kind of TIFF compression or stored with an unusual endian-ness or something.
Please stop doing that, it is a disservice to the GIMP authors. It's like when people say Java can easily replace C. Only if you squint really hard and you have an axe to grind. It's like saying you can go ahead and chuck GCC and everybody just use MS Visual Basic it is the same.
In the free world, GIMP does what GraphicConverter does. GraphicConverter is $39 Shareware on the Mac for the last 10 years. My IT guys swears by it
However, me
There is an interactive element to the tools and tablet with Photoshop that is not matched anywhere else. People sometimes focus on the Filters but that is less than 10% of my daily work. The painting and selection tools, history/undo features, compositing features, automation, color management and many other features are much more interesting and useful. Support for PCX images is lacking but not missed while support for 16-bits per channel camera raw images is available and greatly appreciated.
When people even imply that Linux/GIMP is similar to Mac OS X/Photoshop it is just strange. Like saying a TV and computer are the same because they both have displays. Like an iPod and PSP are the same they are both handheld computers. In all cases these are incredibly complex systems with very different behaviors.