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Gates' Replacement says Microsoft Must Simplify
Javaman59 writes "This article in The Australian newspaper describes the background and the agenda of Ray Ozzie, Bill Gates'
replacement as chief architect at Microsoft. The creator of Lotus Notes, he's
a high-calibre technologist.
From the article: 'Ray's a programmer's programmer .. He's much closer to an uber-engineer, whereas Bill hasn't been a programmer for a number of years.'
Ozzie is also driving Microsoft to simplify its software: 'Complexity kills .. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.' He's not the only brilliant programmer in the world, but he does have Microsoft's resources behind him."
I would totally disagree that he is a programmer's programmer. This is the guy that brought us Lotus Notes, and then a similar product named groove. Have you ever seen any company really using Groove? And on the lotus notes side - what a nightmare. I can't even think about that software without getting the shakes. The number of problems and issues I had when I was supporting it was crazy. On top of it all the program did not work like any other windows program... Causing tons of newbie headaches. I think Microsoft is in for a rough ride...
Windows Admin Tools
back to DOS would be an improvement. (i am serious)
Then there are probably few survivors at Microsoft. Ozzie has his work cut out. You can brag about Lotus Notes all you want, but that was developed from scratch when you can make the proper design decisions. But with Windows being bloated and out of control, you just can't clean it up and make it more simple... can you? It seems like there putting to much faith in Ozzie... like a silver bullet. Gonna be tough to undo years and years of neglect.
http://psychicfreaks.com/simplify things, like...umm, Google?
Lotus Notes is more bloated and unusable than the worst Microsoft products.
This may be the single best long term decision Microsoft has ever made. At least until Ballamer murders Ozzie with a chair.
So does that mean they are going to leave the high end server stuff to the pros? ;)
I mean we had an article on slashdot talking about Redhat not being worried (yet) about Mircosoft entering the clustering biz....I guess they had good reason not to worry.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
I bet I know what Ballmer has to say about that:
Programmers! Programmers! Programmers! Programmers! Programmers! Programmers! Programmers! Programmers! Programmers! Programmers! Programmers! Programmers! Programmers! Programmers! Programmers! Programmers! Programmers! Programmers!
(Quit aborting my post. Abortion is unethical. Anybody ever tell you that? Geez)
Mr Gates himself was once moved to declare Mr Ozzie "one of the top five programmers in the universe" and revealed that he and Mr Ballmer had wanted for more than a decade to persuade him to join Microsoft. To the outside world, Mr Ozzie's programming prowess is known mainly through Lotus Notes, the e-mail and collaboration software that he masterminded, which was acquired by IBM in 1995.
And we know that if BG says it, it must be true!
There's no doubt that Ozzie has some programming credit and no one will argue (I'm going out on a limb here) that Lotus Notes was genius back in the day, pre-Internet-as-we-know it. But despite his desire to streamline programs, reduce the bloat, and re-establish some respectability, he's not going to get very far. First, he'll have to lock horns with Ballmer and dodge chairs. Then he'll find that Microsoft has become so mired in its own muck that spurring the current crop of programmers who've been indoctrinated in the "Microsoft Way" will prove nigh impossible. He will also have to live in the shadow of BG, who despite the announcement, isn't really going anywhere, and will be haunting the halls of Redmond like some anti-Obi Wan.
I give him 18 months before he resigns in frustration.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I don't know, if I were the person responsible for Lotus Notes, I might want to omit that from my resume. If you haven't had Lotus Notes inflicted upon you, count yourself lucky.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
It was always tricky working with Roman numerals in Lotus Notus; I preferred the Second Millenium AD version 'Notes'.
"...whereas Bill hasn't been a programmer for a number of years."
Years....got it. Lots & lots of years. Agreed, but when you say 'years' is that, like, say, dog years, or light years or long, hard years - as in.... never?
I've developed with Notes for 11+ years (I know I feel sorry for me too), and while the UI is gruesome, and it has plenty of quirks, its great for rapid solution development. You can do almost anything with it, fairly quickly. If anything, the reason I think people hate it so much is precisely because it allows just any wanker to come in and crap out a solution without thinking about it. Its WAY to flexible for anyone but experienced developers to do anything reliable with it. 99% of the headaches in a Notes environment are due to admins or developers setting up stuff they don't have an idea how to really do...or like my company, we have 2000+ deployed seats, hundreds of databases all developed by different people, all supported by ONE guy, part time about 10 hours a week. Wow, no wonder theres so many problems.
If anything, its the poster child of why you *shouldn't* make it too easy for people to develop solutions...and why a solution that does everything does none of it *really* well.
He has a ton of baggage too, it is called "legacy support" the biggest problem with windows is the refusal to break legacy support once and for all, shoot for a secure and easy OS like what Apple did in OSX, then introduce legacy support via a virtual enviornment untill people fully adapt...can this guy do what Bill couldn't or wouldn't?
1) 11 billion or so shares issued over the years. The significance of this fact seems to elude most people for some reason.
2) Stock in slow decline for over five years
3) Revenue growth continuing to slow
4) open document format movement continues to spread across the computing world
5) Office software has reached a saturation point for features
6) Linux continues to step by step become the de facto choice for computing companies to base their hardware on
7) Attempts to create new revenue streams have been failures like the Xbox/Xbox 360 marketplace disasters
8) Can't attract/keep good employees now that the stock is no longer going up
9) Can't keep current employees happy - it doesn't matter how you treat an employee if their options are going up dramatically in value every day and that hasn't been the case at MS for many years
10) Years of poor engineering choices are making progress nearly impossible for their OS
Taking over a company that is in its decline is no fun.
I've found Italian and Spanish people often pronounce it like that.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
If Ray Ozzie is the man behind Lotus Notes, he definitely speaks from experience when he cries out against complexity. I've never been able to get Notes to run quickly and reliably, on anything from an Apple iBook to a Dell Dimension, regardless of the specs.
It's certainly true that programming these days is way harder than it ever used to be. The number of APIs, formats, interoperability options and even the number of languages a single project might encompass is truly bad for the brain of anyone that doesn't spend 24/7 keeping up with it all. Anyone that can push for simplicity gets my vote.
FWIW, any time I find it all overwhelming, I reach for my trusty copy of 'Programmers at Work' by Susan Lammers. Many of the great programmers are here along with the stories of how they created much of the basic building blocks we take for granted these days. Almost without exception, their ability to convey ideas in a clear and concise way is inspiring and after reading a few sections, I'm all fired up again and ready to cut code.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Command Line here we COME!!
As a rule, I never trust dark brown ketchup.
Microsoft has at least 2 really big problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone needs their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.
The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.
The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.
Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.
So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.
So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?
Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the C-Prize:
S = size of uncompressed code-base
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed code-base
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring the code. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.
They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.
Seastead this.
Chairman Ballmer did it in the Conference Room with a Chair
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New application suite Microsoft Simplify due for release in 2009Q2! Register now for beta testing starting 2008Q3!
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
It kind of reminds me of the Captain of the Titanic handing over command to the third mate: "She's a magnificent ship except for a small gash in the side. I trust you to take good care of her."
By the time Microsoft gets its problems sorted out, Linux will be the de facto standard. Engineering the complexity out of Windows will take years.
Ozzie success with Lotus Notes speaks strongly to his qualifications. Why, he single-handedly gave IBM's share of the email market to Microsoft by making a product that was much worse than Exchange and Outlook. After helping Microsoft all these years he deserves to get a paycheck from them.
When do we get a new Microsoft icon?
Is your terror cell living in terror? Is your safe-house not so safe? If so, read the New York Times, the jihad journal.
I can't wait to see how it's gonna be implemented (if it's going to)
It's just extraordinary, there's nothing MS won't do to shoot itself in the foot. The only thing they've done since late 2000 that has been remotely constructive has been .NET, and even then it's worth remembering how despite having an excellent product, they rebranded it and spun it and confused the issue until not one manager in ten had any idea what it was. ".NET is XML," remember that? That's MS on marketing, that is.
The popular perception is that they excel at marketing rather than technology, but the reverse is true. They have top-notch geeks and project management, and then above that, suddenly, there's a layer of utter leaden idiocy that -- well, the chair thing. The chair thing.
It seems so obvious, from outside, that there's a layer of deadwood generic-mulitinational-parasite-management people gradually crushing the company and that they need to put someone up there whose focus is on delivering actual value to actual people. And I think a little bit of that awareness has reached MS itself (I mean the MS boardroom -- it's an accepted fact most other places). And so they decided to appoint Ozzie, because he's handled a real product that involved real software.
It's weird how being a tiny bit right, actually makes the decision so much more glaringly wrong. Of course, I've worked with Notes in some detail (anybody else remember the thing where if the server is too fast, the timestamp on everything starts gradually moving forward, becaues the timestamp is used as a unique ID? It was on thedailywtf.com a while ago) and so to me it's extra specially glaringly wrong.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
the ship needs to sail faster. I find this statement of Ozzie a bit amusing, since to toss out code/functionality and make things simpler now would destroy what has made Microsoft so popular with the masses. People buy functionality, they buy complexity, entire industry (help desk, online and inhouse education, so forth) has been developed around it. Not to mention the 'Service Pack' and virus offerings that make Microsoft the very best of the best of the best. What does Ozzie think he is doing, saying? Toss out the bad stuff first, like all the projects that don't make money for Microsoft, and what is left... XBox. Microsoft and the apps suite, becomes a gaming company while you wait for complex spreadsheets to recalculate.
Lotus Notes was a great innovation. The kind of thinking outside the box and meeting the need would certainly help MS to focus. Right now "Up-Sell is the mother of invention" at MS. Ray Ozzie could get back to "Necessity" as the mother of invention.
On a lighter note, the only certifications I have are for Lotus Notes, does this mean the will transfer? Can I be an MCSE without the hassle of regurgitating facts on a test without understanding concepts?
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
From what I've seen of Ozzie, especially on TV, he is in no condition to go on tour with a heavy metal band never mind run a major company.
"Gonna be tough to undo years and years of neglect."
That's what rehab is for.
Rock on!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Before Ozzie:
#include
using namespace std;
int main()
{
cout return 0;
}
After Ozzie:
#include
using namespace std;
void welcome()
{
cout }
int main()
{
welcome();
return 0;
}
To simplify they have decided to use an amazing new technique pionereed by Lotus Notes creator Ozzie. Microsoft is calling it "procedural" programming and it is rumoured to have increased productivity and ease of programming by over 50%.
Bill Gates commented that only a programming genius like Ozzie would be able to come up with an idea so revolutionary.
>> Bill hasn't been a programmer for a number of years
Was he ever really an engineer? He is clearly a business/marketing guy.
The reason he/Microsoft was so successful is that he was the first person to fully utilise the "if you can't buy then steal" approach to software development.
I don't think he has ever really had an original design concept let alone created any product from scratch himself. ALL of Microsoft's products can be traced back to some other company. e.g. Windows = Xerox, Office Suite = Lotus, IE = Netscape, MSDOS = QDOS/86-DOS, C# = Java etc. etc.
Does this spell the end for Microsoft? I can't imagine how anyone would ever use a computer again with this concept -- bloated software embloating?
I wonder how many Microsoft programmers win the Obfuscated C contect, and how many more will win without entry after this 'simplification' happens.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
It's so archaic it's in Latin, stupid.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
I know LN has had a reasonable amount of success, but I'm wondering whether this was due to technical excellence or to Lotus PR. On paper is sounded like great software, at any rate a great idea. I hear the implementation could have been better.
Anyway, I have never had the direct pleasure of using LN, however a very close colleague had his whole database of contacts and clients in it, shared amongst the other marketing people. Using one of the first versions of LN he was unable to search in it in any reasonable amount of time. I suggested that he exported the list to plain text, and since he was an engineer and had the Unix tools installed on his PC, that he simply used grep.
I'm sure LN has gotten better since, but I'm worried for Microsoft.
back to DOS would be an improvement.
:P
Well, with the current Windows security we have "back to DDOS". That ought to be something
You call all that annoying text-processing simplicity? I say go back to running instructions from punchcards.
Mmmm no, no es correcto
en Español decimos NOTAS, con A.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Ozzie leaves the company and Lotus has completely changed its image and product line.... oh wait...
By that analogy just by knowing how Doom 3 works on the surface that magically makes you able to program the 3D engine's internals. ::rolls eyes::
When are they going to realise complexity is like the cancer they've got. It's not a small thing, something to be tided up, it is THE thing they're suffering with.
Windows is like a house of cards made from million decks, so many co-dependancies. It's why Vista has taken so long and will continue to cause problems.
The only thing to do is 'rip it up and start again' but they can't do that because of 1) time 2) losing customers by the millions along the way, so they carry on regardless and hope for the best.
Apple was in the same situation with Copland and it almost killed them too. Eventually they bit the bullet, trashed it (re-used some sections and ideas), provided the carbon bridge for transition/migration, and bought in proven code (BSD/Mach) and just worked on the GUI experience. This rescued them with literally months to spare before the big bad complexity monster ate them up. Genius, IMO.
Surely, at this late stage, they're can be no doubt that *nix won the OS wars?
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
...And he wants to simplify things?
m ID=99&threadID=174663&messageID=1985360&id=1583166 )
( http://techrepublic.com.com/5254-6257-0.html?foru
Windows doesn't have grep. Says it all really.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
exactly what i've been thinking: if you're business is a caravan site and 53 year old receptionist and site shop lady Dorothy can handle the win 3.1 targetted caravan and facility booking software just fine and, let's face it, it does the job and you don't need or desire to upgrade, then when your old winME box kicks the dust and you fork out for a new box, you expect it to install and just work, because it always has... and Fair enough, i say.
:-)
This is MS's strength and their weakness, Dorothy should not need to learn to use new software, and the company should not be forced to upgrade. I, on the other hand would love a Vista-Pro that only guarantees compatibility with post-vista released compatible and targetted software and drivers.
surely all it needs is a few #ifdef WIN311 statements here and there
(oh and i know that first paragraph is almost one, big, poorly grammatised and speelt sentence. cheers)
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
This guy must be brilliant. How long have we been begging them to simply their bloated quirky wares?
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
...what is he doing at Micrsofot? I mean, toddlers, as they grow up to become techies of honour and glory, prefer the freedom of free software and the (not brain damaged) structure of Unix. Why doesn't he join the Rebel Alliance instead of the Empire?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Hmm, is this quote from Microsoft after the development of Windows 2000 concluded, or when in the finishing touches of Vista.
They're confusingly similar anyway:
So... Microsoft learnt from their mistakes in Longhorn? No, wait a minute!
The next OS shouldn't be as monolithic with things breaking in their own products, or even worse, OS, as soon as they apply a patch.
So now you know what you can expect in Vista -- more of the same?
A funny thing in all this, and a constructive suggestion instead of just whining, is a request for Microsoft to offer install-time choices. Sure, there should be a "novice installer mode" like Vista (and XP) currently features where at the very start, one can say "I'm an idiot, install the OS" in prettier wording. But what about advanced users? Shouldn't they be able to exclude stuff they don't need. Maybe then, *gasp* they won't be subject to security exploits in these non-installed components either.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
this isn't "simplification" like when the IRS "simplified" tax forms.
After watching monkey dance, Ozzie secretly consulted psychologists and specialists in mental hospital. He came to know that behaviours like Monkey dance, Broca's Aphasia, Hallucination can be caused due to damage to Parasympathetic Nervous System due to stress in workplace, resulting Extrinsic Motivation to throw chairs around.
It is learnt that Ozzie has secretly joined karate/kung fu classes, with focus on defending himself from flying chairs. He believes he can get black belt before he joins Microsoft.
hilarious
Even if he were a brilliant programmer (which I think he's not), he still has the extreme inertia of the Microsoft entrenched culture to deal with. This isn't the Microsoft that reacted quickly when the Internet sneaked up on them in the 90's, this is a bloated Microsoft that has as its main goal the protection of a deteriorating monopoly. This is a Microsoft that has not seen a successful, profitable new product in many, many, many years.
Three really big things hold me back from feeling comfortable with M*crosft's products.
... hardware computing devices that a consumer purchased, which incidentally is useless without an operating system. M*crosoft is one of the largest suppliers of the operating system and uses that operating system to dictate very strictly what a user may and may not do on that computer, regardless of what is really technically possible.
1) Aggressive Monopolist
M*crosoft -must- own every computing device in existence. The ends justify the means, including customer lock-in, embrance-and-extend, etc. That attitude is difficult, at best, to consider a M*crosoft solution.
2) Do It MY Way
M*crosoft's street address is "One Microsoft Way", which illustrates their approach to "allowing" people to use their computers
3) Security Issues
This is a no-brainer, but M*crosoft's software is riddled with holes. Partly a combination of #1 and #2 above, but also the overwhelming code complexity and software interdependencies make it almost impossible to release a quality software product that one can feel reasonably comfortable about, in terms of security. Since they are the highest-profile target, it makes it orders of magnitude more difficult to be in their position of perpetuating code complexity.
Notice neither of those three include proprietary vs Free/open source software. I don't feel having unrestricted access to the source is essential, in and of itself. However, it really is the only way to -guarantee- #1, #2, and #3 have been corrected.
Even of Ozzie can force M*crosoft into making strides in correcting these issues, there will always be one lingering issue: trust. Do you really trust everyone involved to be giving an accurate representation of the truth, particularly since it's not required in this capitalistic society?
M*crosoft has worked very long and hard at destroying consumer trust. That's something Ozzie will find very hard to fight. What he, and other leaders, need to understand is that people really would use something else if they perceived that a viable alternative was available. It is because they feel trapped in the W*ndows rut that they don't go elsewhere.
If Ozzie wants to push M*crosoft to succeed, he needs to make their products genuinely surpass the competition and allow the users to make choices, even if that choice is to leave the M*crosoft platform. But that's going to be a serious problem: he would cause shareholders to lose money. If he does this, he will be kicked from the organization faster than a pigeon poops on a statue.
In this capitalistic society, everything depends on increasing profits. Ultimately, Ozzie will do nothing more than perpetuate the same practices that M*crosoft has mastered so far. Anything less would potentially lose M*crosoft additional profits. His supposed "technical prowess" will only be used to stimulate the "must-upgrade" perception for the end-user. Nothing more.
-M
12) ????
13) Profit!!!!!!!
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
7) Attempts to create new revenue streams have been failures like the Xbox/Xbox 360 marketplace disasters 8) Can't attract/keep good employees now that the stock is no longer going up 9) Can't keep current employees happy - it doesn't matter how you treat an employee if their options are going up dramatically in value every day and that hasn't been the case at MS for many years -- What the heck are you reading to get this kind of bunk info? Xbox marketplace is skyrocketing. There have been over 25million downloads, and more than 3/4 of that has been purchases. I also know 6 people who work at MS - all of them are happy. And they tell me that everyone there is amazingly upbeat and enjoy their jobs. I'm not sure who is telling you this info you're posting, but it's flat out wrong.
If the guy was responsible for LN, then MS is going down. LN is horrible and terrible and aweful and a thousand unpleasant things. If LN is an indication of what MS will do, it will go down the tubes.
The guy's last name is Ozzie...
:))
Does that remind anyone else of the Ozzie from Monkey Island 4? How fitting indeed
Yes, it would be simple. All they need to do is use that product they bought. You know. VirtualPC. All it would take is a WinXP and a Win95 preinstalled disk image, a VM that is premapped to the existing hard drive, and some tweaking to the interface so that users don't see a big difference between an emulated window and a native one.
Some difference would be fine because they could just call it 'compatability mode' and people would live with the slight kludgeness. They don't have to allow any new drivers in the images, as they have a fixed target. This would prevent people from moving the image to other machines.
The beauty of this is that VirtualPC is already semi crossplatform.
Am I the only one who thinks the only reason an Australian newspaper was so they could use the "Ozzie, Ozzie, Ozzie" pun in the headline?
Didn't think so.
"driving Microsoft to simplify its software"
THANK YOU GOD!
Thay should make it like xp. Home and Pro and let home use 2 cpus so you can use the upcomeing amd 4x4 with home also let pro use 4 or more cpus.
You can also have a pro that is more geared for home use as well.
Unbeknownst to most, the punchcard was actually modeled (in size) to be like the 1890's US dollar bill! Cool huh! Ok, I'm going back to my cave now...
As a rule, I never trust dark brown ketchup.
I worked in the Exchange group responsible for beating Notes. Its not like Notes made it difficult or anything. Remember VIM? Sure, back in the days when we beat Notes, we thought people were more interested in actually gettting their mail, then whether or not they could all collaberate in trying to figure out where their mail went. Notes sucked early and never recovered. Exchange started out good and only got better. There are 100K+ employee Exchange installations all over the world that work just fine. There has not been a day that Notes existed where it didnt just suck in all kinds of ways. We barely had to pitch Exchange to get businesses off of Notes, we just went down the list of suckage and asked which items applied to their current environment. The rest is history. I wont even go into NotesScript 2.0. My hands might start shaking just remembering the suckage.
^^^ What he said. ^^^
I can only hope that his "Simplify!" mantra is borne of lessons learned from his Notes & Groove experience. If he's of a mind to bring the wisdom from which Notes was born into the Windows world, then, well... good news for Linux, I suppose.
Pi Ran Out
Your story has touched me deeply.
I strongly suspect the Gates decided to bail now while Microsoft is at it's peak. I figure he knows what is going to happen in ten years.
- Whether we like it or not, most people are forced to work with Microsoft products in their day to day office work. This is not likely to change in the near future. Any small improvement in Microsoft's products makes a big difference to a lot of people.
- Open source programmers have big egos. If someone on a Windows box says "I can do this, why can't you do this?", it creates an itch that they want to scratch. Better Microsoft products will lead to more innovation in the open source sphere as well.
Remember, Microsoft doesn't need to innovate to sustain its market share in the short term. In the long run (think 10-20 years), I think open source is going to win out anyway. But for the time being, Microsoft reorienting itself and becoming a more flexible and agile company is a good thing. I have big hopes that Ozzie is the man who could pull that off.The SQL Server guys are in trouble - Ozzie has never understood why anyone would ever need more than one table in a database.
Yeah, I agree things needs to be simplified.
* Get rid of Active Registration.
* Get rid of WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) tool.
* Get rid of WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) notification tool.
* Get rid of DRM (Digital Restrictions Management).
* Get rid of PVP (Protected video paths), encryption for video and audio.
* Get rid of propiertary protocols and file formats and use open ones.
"indubitably"
- Toby
Great idea! Strip out all the stuff people don't use and turn MS Office into OO.o. Then offer it for free!
When I worked for GE they used Exchange for 250K people. It was server-side unreliable (at least in our division) but it was a decent user experience.
I have since been involved with a smaller Notes install - Just 12K seats. IT WAS A HORRIBLE PILE OF SHIT.
IT was elated that they pulled off the config (of Notes/Domino), it was (server side) reliable, it ran on Linux, it fit thier needs.
The users were left in the cold with the brutal Notes interface. Tales of its suckage are all true.
I currently use Notes (at a MUCH smaller company) and am constantly amazed of how bad this software really is.
In my career in the IT sector I've always bitched about MS and it's lousy software. The fact is that Notes , much like windows is and was shit. Having said that though I need to add that I'm glad that products like Notes and Windows exist. Why? Simple, without buggy crash prone software like windows and notes I might be out of a job. So I for one welcome Mr. Ozzie into his new role at MS. I hope he creates an even bigger mess than balmer and gates ever have. If he does then I'm assured of a job for a lifetime.
It was witten by his fwiend, Biggus Dickus. It is cowabbowation softwawe.
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
huh ? Lotus Notus ?
Ozzie, "I can't seem to... Sharon!!!!"
I've always found Groove to be an intriguing product, though I've never been in a position to actually use it. But it seems to have less and less visibility since being acquired. (Notice that the Australian article never mentions Groove, other than a couple of references to the company that created it.) Which is hardly suprising: it's a direct competitor for Outlook. It'll probably disappear as a separate product in the next few years. Hopefully, some of Groove's GUI designers will get assigned to Outlook and impose some sanity on that monstrosity.
Simplifly? Looks like MS is getting scared of Gnome. :-P
A chair never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer's hand. Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Dump the OS. It's inevitable anyway. We're all going to use a Linux derivative or standard/open OS some day, so now's the chance to turn Windows into a window manager / application environment like KDE or Gnome. Or Aero analogous to Cocoa/Aqua with an open underlying OS. They can continue to waste money on a proprietary OS or jump on the train. People are already getting used to the idea that a computer can run windows and the mac OS and windows as an OS has no special advantages - only restrictions. why fight it?
Bill Gates knows this, and he knows he's a product of the early days of the PC / OS wars. He knows he can't transition to the new era, unlike Jobs who has the iPod and loves to make a product. Bill has chosen the perfect time to exit stage left and he has something else he cares about - the gates foundation.
Whatever they do, it's got to be a dramatic step that shows they are in control and have a vision. Apple switching to os X then going Intel showed that they have long term strategic thought. and it's clear that MS has just been coasting on their own past success.
must... stay... awake...
...as well as he can develop. To say that Ray Ozzie can "write instructions" better than someone else, is probably not true and...misses the point. Take Lotus Notes, for example. It wasn't Ray's coding that made this dog hunt. It was his vision. First, he combined an email engine with a database engine. Nobody's done that, even today. What's special about that? Folks can collaborate using the killer app - email - to do so. They can schedule conference rooms, submit expense reports and successfully submit, review and edit corporate documents through a chain of knowledge workers. It's also special that any views/lists/reports of said collaboration can be easily presented AND, when changed, easily updated/reindexed. This reindexing scheme is instantaneous and revolutionary. FoxPro/DBase sucked by comparison! Finally, what makes Notes fly is its innate and simple ability to replicate itself to other business locations. Almost zero conflicts from people updating similar databases at different locations! (Plus, simple rules to resolve those conflicts). Having been a developer and user of Lotus Notes I believe it is still the best business collaboration tool on the market today. And, if you want to create a Website business which has many small businesses using email to sell and communicate, it's virtually an untapped resource! So, dear hearts, Ray Ozzie is a visionary developer, not programmer. Programming is just a tool to express his visionary and development genius!
He can talk the talk! But can he walk the walk? It's nice that some person who I've, personally, never heard of before is taking the reigns of MSFT. It's nice he's saying that simple is the future. I still haven't seen anything to judge, but a simpler Windows is a good thing. They could take hints from the GUI of the Open Source side of life. Perhaps make a Windows Legacy version to support all the Old timers out there and make all new versions not support any legacy at all! Like we've all heard before! "Talk is cheap!"
Blind are we who do not know that we are blind. The world has been boring ever since I got here.
From Bill Gates' bio, and from what I remember from "Triumph of the Nerds", Gates was responsible for coding BASIC Compilers and Interpreters for the Altairs in the late 70s and early 80s. If that qualifies him as an "engineer", per se, I'm not sure, but he certainly has earned his stripes behind the monitor in the days before he became Microsoft's visionary
Need I remind you of Microsoft Bob? Probably, everyone who still has a bit of sanity has forgotten it.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
I could have told Microsoft their complexity kills (and sucks) about 15 years ago!
And M$ has the gall to treat this like news, a revelation, I suppose to avoid irritating shareholders.
How so? I'd see it as a competitor to Sharepoint, maybe, but despite some notification features, it's no more an email client than Notes is.
Exactly. As Ballmer once put it, when asked why Microsoft kept adding functions to Windows, "If we stopped adding functions to Windows, it would become a commodity, like a BIOS. And Microsoft is not in the BIOS business". This is called "strategic complexity". It's a very real, key component of Microsoft's strategy.
Geez, suddenly Sun charging $1/CPU-hour seems like a reasonable price.
Hey, the quote's from Rob Enderle. I'm willing to believe anything he says; he's so objective.
Yes, I'm going spelling nazi on a made-up word :)
Really, the value of big companies like Microsoft is in tackling complex problems than small companies can't solve. It's pleasant to imagine that all problems are simple if you just use the right abstractions to decompose the problem correctly, but I don't believe that. There are difficult tradeoffs between usability, security, backwards compatibility, and the wildly varying needs of millions of different customers. I agree there's no silver bullet... not just to Micrsoft's problems, but to the problem of computing, period.
Actually, this is exactly the direction that Microsoft seems to be taking with Vista. I just got back from the MS TechEd conference and I was able to talk to some of the folks on the Vista team. They are already doing some nice work with virtualization to keep users from having to run with administrative privileges to make an application work. Add to this the recent announcement (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2006/ may06/05-22Virtualization.mspx) of Microsoft's intention to acquire a company called Softricity (http://www.softricity.com/) that sells a product that does application virtualization.
With Virtual PC and Virtual Server in the mix I'd say that MS might well be on the verge of doing some interesting work.
We use Lotus Notes at work, and from my experience it's not exactly a well-designed software. For example: A user's password expires every 30 days. To change my password I have to log in (so I type in my password) and then you have to access my user id (type in password again) and then click on change password (where I have to type in my password once again) and only then can I actually type in a new password. And then it has this web-browser interface that never works right in Firefox or Opera so I had to use Wine to run it on Linux.
It doesn't bode well for Microsoft to have this guy as their main "architect" if his Lotus Notes is any indication of his design prowess.
"Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you?" --Yoda {whips out green light saber}
Bob> _
Do you sometimes wonder why MS has purchased and is investing in virtualization technology? A compelling strategic / tactical reason would be to leverage it to break out of the backwards compatibility problem.
.NET framework gives them the abstraction layer they need to make this work with existing code and without virtualization. You can run .NET code in Mono on Linux ... it should be trivial to make it work in a different Windows OS. Currently, there are only small sets of features you lose when running .NET on old windows versions ... and the framework usually handles these very gracefully. No XP styles? Use a default color ... etc.
... but since when did MS care about that? They have more bundling and anti-trust problems to deal with by integrating another product into the OS ... but MS seems to prefer throwing lawyers at this type of problem.
They certainly aren't doing this so that you can run Linux on Windows. That would reduce switching costs and be bad strategy. Buying virtualization could be just another niche market or attempt to fill the product space - but that's not hugely compelling. It doesn't look like they bought the product to kill it. If that were the case, they'd also need to buy VMWare.
Here's one scenario: Once their virtualization technology is stable (almost there?), they integrate it into their OS. Windows NT 7 (is Windows Vista NT 6 or NT 5.x?) could totally break backwards compatibility, and run old apps in a virtualization layer running the old OS. Maybe NT 7 will include machines and API's optimized and tested to run each specific previous release of Windows.
Pushing the
Indigo style communications layers could theoretically even make communication between a virtuallized Win2K and the theoretical host OS possible, particularly if the virtualization technology is embedded and integrated in the OS. OK, it'd be slow
My motto: "A cat is no trade for integrity."
Well, back in the '70s, he, along with Paul Allen and Chair-Man(TM), did write a couple BASIC interpriters... The hard part (floating point code) was written by Paul Allen.
Actually, most of the code was tested on an 8080 emulator on a PDP-11. I even heard a story a while back (I'm not sure about the validity of this) that he got in some trouble because he stole the system from his university...
How to enable garbage collection on a system without protected memory: #define malloc() ((void *) rand())
are they figuring this out?
.. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.' He's not the only brilliant programmer in the world, but he does have Microsoft's resources behind him."
'Complexity kills
apparently, bill gates didn't have the mental ability to figure this out or listen to people who obviously told him this.
this is bizarre, but it is msft so it is probably only for marketing purposes and it msft expects folks to not put it in context to reach logical conclusions.
KitchenAid -- The last pan you'll ever buy!
HandyKlean -- The last mop you'll ever buy!
Windows XP -- The last O/S you'll ever buy!
Well, it's certainly not Emacs... nothing wrong with Gnus.
I was a beta tester for Exchange versions 1.0 through 3.0 (the total rewrite version).
The original version didn't even support SMTP, fanboy.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
> Ozzie is also driving Microsoft to simplify its software: 'Complexity .. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products
> kills
> difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges,
> and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.'
At last somebody at Micro$oft whose understanding of software approaches that of the Unix way - Keep it simple.
If he really does manage to symplify Micro$oft's software then I think that company will pull through the OSS challenge.
"We barely had to pitch Exchange to get businesses off of Notes, we just went down the list of suckage and asked which items applied to their current environment."
This was of course after you beat Notes. I mean after you beat Notes it was no problem. We all remember when you beat Notes, and often say, "Wow, remember when they beat Notes?" "Yeah, that was great when they beat Notes."
Makes me wonder what else you guys like to 'beat'.
Now go kill some children and take over the Software world - Sith Lord Gates
Yes My master - Ozzie
No, I have no idea, I only worked in the product group. That means I have no idea? Okay. Exchange was a replacement for Microsoft Mail and Calendar, and during its inception, SMTP was not on the agenda, idiot. The fact remains that it did what it was supposed to do FROM THE BEGINNING, and kicked the crap out of ALL of its competitors, while gaining a foothold in corporate America, as Notes servers were kicked to the curb. DENY THAT! I am STILL waiting for mail someone sent me on a Notes server in our test lab 14 years ago. Think the attachment will come through too?
Andressen, is that you?
Actually, I even got a few trainings for that job. After that training, I knew Notes (actually the server component, Domino) was totally unsuitable for the project but we had to use it for political reasons. I had a hell of a time just trying to keep the system going and I was relieved when the client shut it down. It never got past the pilot phase.
After that, I never encountered any company that actually used Lotus Notes (except for one, and they just used it for email). It's hard to find anyone who really understands Lotus Notes enough to build an application with it. Most people try to impose concepts like "tables" and "indexes" on a Notes database but that doesn't work.
WWTTD?
I work for a factory and a bunch of our computers on the production line run DOS, although there are Windows computers in the mix. Frankly, DOS is *much* easier to backup/administer/etc.
There's no comparison, I greatly prefer to admin DOS and the line workers don't much give a damn (they hardly have to hit more than a few buttons, anyhow), save that they like to install some version of pornographic solitaire on Windows (which comes preloaded with spyware, so I have to kill it). They honestly don't know how to screw with the DOS computers (which to me is yet another advantage...)
Christ, you got two replies where you've been disagreed with, and you've left two screaming personal attacks.
People don't always agree with you. The solution may be to keep cool and deal with it.
please tell me of the superior product in the open source realm that does what Lotus Notes does.
The GCC compiler (and the C language). It takes just about the same equal amount of work in C or in Lotus to make the same equivalent application.
Yeah, and when "the Exchange server" serving >100K clients gets taken down for maintenance or disrupted due to unknown reasons, mail gets queued and thousands of people can't get their work done for hours on end. There is a reason why people call it "the Exchange server", and that reason is what Microsoft needs to fix ASAP. The marketing managers have justification too: it allows them to put another set of IMPORTANT bullet points on their PowerPoint slides (i.e.: "You can set up an Exchange cluster that will failover when one dies, allowing mail to continue to be delivered, and calendars to continue to be browsed and updated").
Seriously, Microsoft. Clustering and failover in Exchange. DO IT NOW.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I think you're confusing Exchange with Notes. Exchange is the "I only do mail ... badly, but I look nice" e-mail program and Notes/Domino is the "I Do nearly Everything Well, except the UI isn't reallly nice (though I don't know why ... blame the application developer)" application platform.
The original poster made some statements which were pretty much content free. I just reversed the thesis; it still held together (given that there was NO CONTENT).
In other words, a pure troll.
Now, on to your questions: most people do email, browsing, wp, spreadsheet, calendaring. In most cases, most information is imparted via words.
The "text interface" is a very lightweight, resource conserving approach to these problems. Typically, more efficient in use of compute resources. The "graphical interface" is heavier.
As to which is better? Servers typically do better with a "TUI". Simply because more resources can be devoted to the problem being solved. Clients? These days, computers are cheap, so the GUI tends to win.
But, my original point holds (and was smartly modded "redundent") -- the post I was replying to was content-free and a troll.
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
gosh, gaining a foothold in corporate america, so that's what they call the bill gates monopoly these days? SMTP was not on the agenda idiot - you mean billy bathgtaes was a jonny come lately to the internet and rammed his monopoly up everyone, and now we're stuck with this shit?
lols, you got owned my boy, and badly
Exchange
Benefits
1) It's not Notes! (sorry couldn't resist)
2) Mail handling is it's primary function and it does it pretty dang well.
3) Outlook and Outlook web access work pretty well. Say what you want about the client experience, but compared to Notes... Outlook/OWA rocks.
4) Tight integration with all other Microsoft OS/applications and AD. This is pretty important for user authentication and security.
5) Fast and reliable SMTP engine.
6) Connectors to every system under the sun. If it isn't a built-in Microsoft code connector, then the manufacturer of the third party system will have one (think Rightfax, Call-Pilot, you name it).
7) Backwards compatibility for a whole mess of clients. Although it's a toss-up on whether or not you want to call this a benefit vs a fault.
8) It scales LARGE if you design it properly. It takes a lot of experience and time, but you CAN scale Exchange for a global 100K plus environment (a heck of a lot easier than Notes if you ask me, but YMMV)
Faults
1) Database replication for redundancy is non-existent. This one is a true SUCK. Notes really gets this right.
2) Application level clustering is non-existent. Again, Notes gets this right. Clustering in an Exchange world means OS level Windows clustering, which is complicated and delicate (although it gets better with every patch and OS upgrade).
3) Encryption is an afterthought. S/MIME while supported is a mess to manage in an AD infrastructure and you can forget PGP completely.
4) An awful lot of infrastructure dependencies with E2K and later. DNS, WINS (god help us), AD, the list goes on. That's an awful lot of infrastructure to put in place for one or two servers.
5) Email archival and storage management is weak to non-existent. You'll have to go third party for cradle -to-grave data lifecycle management.
Notes:
Benefits
1) Database replication. Notes works pretty damn seamlessly in replication.
2) Application level clustering. It just works. One of the nice things about Notes.
3) Console window. I love being able to watch the internals of the Notes server scroll through that CLI. Watch the server console for 15 minutes every day and you'll get a REALLY good idea what's going on in your environment.
4) Encryption is strong and built in to the app at every level. Pretty dang easy to admin too.
Faults
1) Horrendous client UI. This is the biggest SUCK I've ever seen in a client UI. God this thing is horrible.
2) Terrible email engine. Notes does application database work fairly well, but it is NOT an email server. I don't care what anyone tells you, email is never supposed to get stuck in a queue the way that Notes does. Have to restart the internal mail queue routers constantly just to keep messages flowing. Second biggest SUCK in relation to Notes.
3) Terrible web experience/access to email. I thought Exchange 5.5 OWA was bad, but it looks like paradise compared to Notes.
4) Client manage-ability from an admin perspective. GPO's and Outlook work pretty well. Notes doesn't have anything close. And again, we're back to the Notes client SUCK.
Look, I'm an admitted Exchange guy. It's what I do. Even more bizarre to most people... I like it. Not just like it, I've made a career out of it. That said, I'm not blind to the fact that it's not the only solution or the best solution. Honestly, there are things that Microsoft Exchange can do a LOT better. I'm encouraged by the direc
"The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been wide
How has anyone faired using Postfix/Cyrus (or insert other imap here)? I used it for a 25,000 customer ISP, and it barely ever hit over 25% on a quad proc system that was clustered (2).
----- I have bad karma for a reason! -----
hows this thought: Bill Gates isn't stepping away from anything, but rather they're trying to dismantle a huge hurdle that is only growing...their horrible relation with people like, well, us. This guy is a "programer's programer", just like a politician is a person of the people...right. In 10 years they'll be advertising themselves as the leader of open source because open source is only bound to get bigger. And Gates will still be giving all the ideas and filling his previous position...just in a more secretive way.
Which company's products are you thinking of, that cannot ?
Had a friend draw this for me. I think it speaks for itself.
Warning, knife is sharp. Please keep out of children.
Yes.....
a nge/guides/E2k3HighAvGuide/99353155-7908-4d44-a609 -48199919f188.mspx?mfr=true
a nge/guides/E2k3DataRepl/bedf62a9-dff7-49a8-bd27-b2 f1c46d5651.mspx?mfr=true
Because no one at Microsoft has ever thought of how to do clustering in Exchange server:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exch
You can scale out an Exchange infrastructure arbitrarily wide at _any point in the stack_. If your bottleneck is in your MTAs, then setup more dedicated MTA boxes. Is the MAPI/RPC front-end bottlenecked, or how about OWA? Well, you can build out layers of servers that do just those.
Need real heavy POP3/IMAP servers? Can build out those too.
Oh and you want geographically dispersed site-to-site replication? Thats well supported too:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exch
The options are nearly limitless.
Unless this guy is way out of the box, how much affect will he have on Microsoft's existing direction? The OS Developers aren't going to start from scratch again - and neither are the exchange or office developers.
Personally, I've seen crappy implementations of Notes and Exchange. I would think that with proper planning and resources both can be effective.
I think that many people underestimate Microsofts existing long term planning. They are a company that can go through a decade of losses and still survive. They are a company that is run much better than other corporate giants that have been around in the last twenty years.
"Hi, I made Lotus Notes, can you make me the Architect of Microsoft".
"Why yes!"
I don't mean to rail on anything, but I don't believe there has ever been a time in recorded history when Lotus Notes was either good, or cool. Notes has always been a lame forms engine talking to a junky database and the end result is a ridiculous compromise. Sure, the vision had some elegance on it, on some level, if you believe that organizations just love to sit around and make up forms. The end result is that Notes is just a junky email client with a bunch of lame database and forms stuff that no one uses.
This is my sig.
You can brag about Lotus Notes all you want, but that was developed from scratch when you can make the proper design decisions. But with Windows being bloated and out of control, you just can't clean it up and make it more simple... can you?
In true M$ style, they will simply purchase Notes to simplify things.
Yes, that's a joke. Thinking they could just buy their way to success by shutting down their competition and slapping what was left all together in one poorly tied knot is how they ended up in this mess. When you add all of the anti-competitive hooks and crazy file formats, what you are left with is XP. Try to DRM it and make it look nice and you get the 10GB boat anchor that is VISTA.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
When I was at Deutsche Bank they were using Notes 3 I think and were tied to it because they'd developed a whole pile of really crap applications on top of it. It was just terrible. Random segfaults, horrific UI, insane processes to back up and restore mail that I could never get working, bizarre hangs, and permanent non-segfaulting lockups. Plus, due to the notes culture, there were people at the organisation who just didn't have email addresses (only notes addresses) so that when Notes infrastructure broke down you couldn't contact them.
Users really need software that is as easy as ATM's (Automatic Teller Machine) software.
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Ehm what happened to the god of programmers who programmed exchange.
Or did he in fact also programmed this guy?
notes are a bit nuts..
thinks that simplicity is the key?
clearly people can and do change!
Lotus Notes is so hard that the Lotus Notes support people have trouble configuring it. In IBM.
Sigh. When they're trying to speak English, I mean.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Communications software judged a success while purposely spurning the most widely implemented form of communication.
Right.... you funny, fanboy.
Lotus Notes seriously sucks but at least I have to agree with him about the problem of complexity. Complexity has been a Microsoft problem, lo nearly two decades now, round about the advent of Windows glued onto MS-DOS. Now if only they can reduce complexity *and* add a little ethics, it might become a company I could respect.
What, you didn't expect anyone to read it?