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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."
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/Hey, if the guy who brought the world Lotus Notes thinks Microsoft need to simplify their software, things are worse than - no, correction - almost exactly as bad as I thought.
Notes is a nightmare like Emacs is a nightmare-- the interface's crap but those who know the rationale behind the interface (or can look beyond the not-so-pretty face) will discover a remarkably powerful scriptable workflow engine that incidentally is also an email client. I have personally razzed Notes before (I used it for my email for 6+ years and had to end up learning how to program it to make it bearable) but in the end I do appreciate the amount of flexibility the environment gives you. Add to that the number of good ideas Notes pioneered in the early 80s, and it's no wonder a lot of Notes folk end up like Lisp programmers, muttering 'heh, we did it first' whenever any workflow/unstructured-data 'innovation' is announced.
Back on topic, it's common knowledge among the Notes community that Ozzie was responsible for the Notes engine and backend, not the interface (that was Lotus standards, and later IBM's) -- given that I think he deserves a lot more credit than you give him.
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"one of the top five programmers in the universe"
I know where the other 4 are, they are all in Russia sending me spam and running porn sites.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
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.
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.
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.
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.