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Gates' Replacement says Microsoft Must Simplify

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the planning-the-future dept.

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."

17 of 405 comments (clear)

  1. He is not a programmer's programmer by IntelliAdmin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:He is not a programmer's programmer by GoatMonkey2112 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Not working like other Windows programs is not necessarily a bad thing. Of course working like a failed platform such as Lotus Notes would not be all that great either. With a little luck he has learned a few things from these experiences. Simplification of Microsoft products is obviously not a bad idea.

    2. Re:He is not a programmer's programmer by Golias · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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...

      So what you're really saying is that he's not an internal help-desk worker's programmer, because none of your points really demonstrated that he was a bad programmer, just that you didn't enjoy supporting the software from his company.

      I think the guy might be a good fit. It's actually refreshing to see them going out and getting some new blood. They have a history of being a very inbred company, after all.

      --

      Information wants to be anthropomorphized.

    3. Re:He is not a programmer's programmer by IntelliAdmin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A programmers programmer knows how to create programs that are easy to use, and easy to support. They don't crash all the time, and break everything when you upgrade to a new version. Lotus notes makes windows look like it is the best software ever made. I have been a developer for over 20 years, and just because I do support also doesn't mean I don't know what makes a good programmer. Windows Admin Tools

    4. Re:He is not a programmer's programmer by manifoldronin · · Score: 3, Insightful
      What you said was exactly my first reaction, too. But then I realized that IBM had taken over Lotus Notes for over a decade by now, so maybe it's IBM who f'ed up Notes, instead of Ozzie, which shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. //grin

      Unless, of course, you were describing your experience with pre-1995 Notes.

      --
      Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
    5. Re:He is not a programmer's programmer by sjcollier · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Your thought process is exactly what got Microsoft "stuck." Lotus Notes spent one year without the market share of end-users. Does the interface lack Outlook - yes Does it do more then Outlook - yes, its a mail platform and an application platform. Does IBM have bad UIs - yes Does Microsoft have good UIs - yes So you can buy Exchange/Outlook that looks sexy, but can't failover and cluster worth a crap or you buy Notes/Domino that clusters and failovers like there is no tomorrow. Work at a real company where millions of dollars change hands on a daily basis and Notes/Domino is the only solution. Work at a 500 to 2,000 employee company and Exchange is the way to go.

    6. Re:He is not a programmer's programmer by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      On top of it all the program did not work like any other windows program... Causing tons of newbie headaches.

      Funny, Picasa works very different from any other Windows program and yet newbies catch on to it almost instantly.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    7. Re:He is not a programmer's programmer by cmacb · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "I am sure Microsoft did an unbiased evaluation of what mail server to run internally? Lol... yeah right.

      Give me another company that uses it for 60,000 employees and you'd have a point (not saying there is no such company, I have no idea.)"

      Here is my experience with a large (I think it was probably in the 60K range or better) company running Exchange/Outlook: Yes, they do it, but they don't do it well.

      You have some company information stored on file servers, other information stored in Outlook folders (or maybe the proper terminology is Exchange folders). None of it is indexed in any way so that it can be found without a brute force search. Some of these folders are out of date and pretty much read-only because they don't want to hire a team of gatekeepers to ensure that it is otherwise. Other folders are more up to date by allowing just about anybody to update them, which occasionally leads to them being updated with bad info or being wiped out altogether: "Let's see, was the last backup done recently? Did any important changes happen after that? Oh well, maybe it wasn't that important. Just to be safe, I'll load a copy of everything I might ever want to use onto my company laptop and take it home, leaving it in plain view in the back seat of my car for a few weeks. Ooops, now where did that laptop get to? I wonder if it would be better to report it stolen or just forget about it. Those company inventories aren't very reliable anyway, after all, they keep the results in a public Exchange folder. HAHA!"

      The inmates are running the asylum in many corporate DP shops these days, both large and small, and we have Microsoft (first among many) for providing idiotic tools for idiots to use to so efficiently mishandle important data. I don't see anything changing soon, with kids in grade-school now being required to turn their homework in as Powerpoint presentations.

      The PC paradigm shift that allows us all to do things with computers at home has infected the thinking of most companies these days, simply because so many new employes of such companies got their computer education using home PCs for both personal and school work/play. They don't know any better, they don't know any different, and if you try and explain it to them you just get a blank stare, or worse, a "knowing" argument, that as long as we "encrypt some stuff" all will be OK.

      I predict the inevitable collapse of much of this infrastructure. I'm not Ludite enough to avoid using computers, but I'm going to avoid being at the epicenter of it all by not using Windows and much Windows based software whenever I can avoid it. My exposure to Notes mostly second hand, observing a friend use it where he worked, was that it handles workflow issues a lot better than Exchange. If it works the way it appeared to work, then yes, it would be harder to administer, because it does more. There would be concurrency and validation issues that Exchange handles by ignoring them.

      I bet what brings Microsoft to its senses more quickly than a change at the top will be a change in the way home users use their computers. Yes, today grade school kids may be submitting homework in Powerpoint on floppy disks, but tomorrow they may be using a web based tool and not know what a floppy disk is. Those web based tools will have to deal with validation, backup, encryption and a few other things in order to even be viable solutions. In the mean time, local PC oriented programs will not have changed in any fundamental way since the days of DOS.

      Whether it takes a disastrous collapse of this bad infrastructure, or just a generational change, back really, to robust centralized server solutions, there will hopefully be a day when people look back at our day of data loss and corruption and laugh and ask themselves: "What WERE they thinking?"

  2. If Complexity Kills.... by gasmonso · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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/
    1. Re:If Complexity Kills.... by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But with Windows being bloated and out of control, you just can't clean it up and make it more simple... can you?

      They used to say the same things about Mac OS 9 and Netscape Navigator 4...

    2. Re:If Complexity Kills.... by g2devi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Backwards compatibility is extremely important for Microsoft. It doesn't matter if VistaNG (the non-backwards compatible Vista) is 100 times better, if it's not 100% compatible with most applications, it's dead, simply because:
      * the demand for portable apps will grow (apps like OpenOffice and Firefox look a lot more attractive since they can be phased in slowly)
      * the demand for portability programmer skills will grow (programmers who know Vista, VistaNG, Linux, and Mac portability will have the edge)
      * the migration effort will be compareable to switching to a non-Microsoft alternative, so why not investigate them, especially if you're starting to use portable apps?

      I'm not sure if you were around in the early 1990s, but back then Borland ruled to developer tools world. Microsoft wasn't even close. It wasn't just Turbo Pascal. It was also in the C++ arena with the OWL 1.0 framework that made Win32 programming a lot easier (although it used a proprietary C++ extension to get things done). Borland decided to make their next version of OWL standards compliant. It was a beautiful MVC architecture that was head and shoulders above thin kludgy MFC. However, OWL 2.0 was completely backwards incompatible with OWL 1.0 and the more standards compliant C++ compiler couldn't compile OWL 1.0 programs. At that point, companies revolted. OWL 2.0 was the right idea, but since companies had to migrate anyway, they chose to migrate to the inferior (though more API stable) MFC. VistaNG could face a similar revolt too if it make migratiting to it too painful.

      Here's an alternative that's a lot more likely to me.
      * Microsoft ships Vista.
      * Microsoft starts writing a new high performance core from the ground up or takes the FreeBSD core or the Darwin core (since they can reuse the Mach experience) and adds its new and improved Windows API layer above it (that API might even be completely written in .NET so it can be backported to Vista to easy the migration)
      * Microsoft ports all their apps to the new VistaNG API
      * Microsoft writes a WINE-like app that uses their new cleaned up API layer in order to run Vista apps.

      The consequence of this are:
      * VistaNG apps run fast and programming for VistaNG is a lot nicer than Vista
      * Most Vista apps run smoothly on VistaNG (at a slight performance and memory penalty)
      * People who want don't care about backwards compatibility will not have to deal with the bloat and cruft, while those who do, can get it.
      * At some point in the future, (2 releases after VistaNG), Microsoft can throw out the VistaNG layer or just let the code break over time, like they have with the Win16 API

  3. Simpler times by clickclickdrone · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  4. Quote... by HydraSwitch · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I've been programming for more than 20 years. I keep this quote stuck to all my desktops using knotes:
    Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
    Brian W. Kernighan
  5. Yes, it would be simple. by Belial6 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:From the horse's... uh... well... by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 4, Insightful
    There's no doubt that Ozzie has some programming credit ... But despite his desire to streamline programs, reduce the bloat, and re-establish some respectability, he's not going to get very far. ... 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. ... I give him 18 months before he resigns in frustration.

    I'd seriously consider taking that bet.

    I submit two simple points for consideration.

    1. Microsoft has a lot of very smart people working for it. They may have drunk some corporate Kool-Aid in some cases, but they're still very smart. If Ozzie comes up with the goods, I think they'll recognise that pretty quickly and back him up.
    2. Major changes in direction are possible in the software industry, even in flagship products with a huge user base, within a relatively short period of time. Apple did it with OS X. Just a few years ago, no-one had heard of Google. MS has more than enough money in the bank to take a hit for 2-3 years and do things properly, if the guys at the top are willing to buy into it and can take the shareholders with them.

    I think it's been widely acknowledged that the biggest problem with MS is the sheer scale of what they've tried to do in recent years. There's little experience in the industry of how to develop projects on the scale of Windows or Office effectively, no handbook of how to keep the bug count down and avoid introducing security flaws, performance hits, or whatever other scalability problems in software with dev teams of the size they use.

    With that in mind, I find it strangely reassuring that the first comments from the new guy at (almost) the top involved simplifying everything down to reduce the dangers in these areas.

    --
    If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
  7. Re:Good plan! by fuzznutz · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Oh sure, DOS was easy to work with. Do you remember trying to free "conventional memory" so you could run a certain app? Or trying to get access to any RAM beyond 1M? Some programs used "extended memory." Some wanted "expanded memory." Some wouldn't run with EMM386 loaded. Some required it. It is a good thing that DOS 5.0 (I think) introduced multiple boot configurations, because I needed them. I had to reboot my computer differently depending on what I wanted to do with it that day. And talk about braindead shells..
    You are complaining about hacks to work around specific hardware limitations of Intel CPUs running under real mode and these limitations only popped up near the end of the useful life of DOS (mostly due to code bloat). They are as much a Windows 1.0 and 2.0 problem as they are for DOS.

    DOS was still easy compared to Windows. I'd much rather hack memory limitations than fix registry problems any day. Next time somebody drops a machine on your desk and complains that Windows blue screens on boot, remember how easy it was to fix a DOS machine.
  8. That's exactly right, painful though it is by Animats · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.