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18 Years in Software Tools, an Insider's View
calumtdalek writes "Newsforge (Also owned by VA) has an article on a talk given by Rico Mariani, an eighteen-year veteran at Microsoft, in which he speaks to the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club, sharing his unique take on the history of, and controversies surrounding, Microsoft and the industry in general. Particularly illuminating are his responses to advocates of free/open-source software. The talk can also be download from the csclub's media server"
Still in the process of watching it, but he has interesting perspective on Windows 95 and it's role as a bridge from 16bit to 32bit programs. He also points out that though it wasnt the best OS they knew how to make at the time (points at NT) it was the best release of Windows that Microsoft ever did (in his opinion). Whether you agree or disagree, it's an interesting look at Microsoft over (nearly) the past two decades.
I think that, in more cases that not, you'd be right here. A lot of the features Vista has been lauded for "stealing" from Apple have been obvious advances for a while (prevalence of search over browsing, 3D-accelerated desktop systems, etc. are all fairly predictable). Vista steals very few design ideas from Apple, in any case (search? that was obvious - it's stolen from Google as much as anyone; desktop widgets? available for Windows and Linux as third-party systems well before Dashboard made people think that Apple "invented" them). As much as I like OSX, I hate the fact that Apple are hailed as so "innovative" to the exclusion of other hard-working companies who do work just as good, simply because they market themselves so well. I feel a lot of companies and organisations doing good work (and I'm gonna controversially include Microsoft here) are being a little hard done-by in this regard.
More widely, though, I'm not opposed to "idea theft" in the IT field. There's a reason so many people are opposed to software patents.
Looking at Microsoft's core business, OS and Office, Google has intruded hardly at all and Apple has intruded into the OS business. To some extent, Apple's OS is based on an OSS flavor of BSD (someone feel free to provide a better explanation; I don't know much about OS X). If an OSS BSD wasn't available, would Apple have created their own from-scratch OS to replace MacOS9 and compete with Windows? Would it have been any good under the hood if it hadn't been *nix-based?
Sun is largely responsible for the availability of OpenOffice (thanks to their StarOffice acquisition and code-release). But even there, would Sun have bothered with StarOffice in the absence of an OSS option? I would wager that in terms of use, OpenOffice is wildly more successful than StarOffice, and that without OpenOffice, StarOffice would go nowhere. Sun's ability to say, "Look, here is a corporate-supported package based on OpenOffice." should give them a boost in sales.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
The people responsible for the whole IE debacle (he actually uses this as an example) didn't integrate IE that way because they wanted to destroy the competition - they made an engineering decision at the time that they thought made sense and ended up causing a big brouhaha.
That's why internal memos and emails from the top brass (Ballmer and Gates, for instance) bragged to each other about how the IE integration was going to kill Netscape. Not because they wanted to kill the competition, but because they wanted to kill Netscape.
I'm not saying the engineers had anything to do with that. I'm just saying, people at Microsoft tend to do what Gates tells 'em.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I'm not quite finished watching the video, but I think the most interesting thing about watching this guy is the unspoken attitude that he seems to have toward users. The most telling thing is when he expresses irritation that developers cheered a "crap" feature that it took him 10 minutes to write in a developer tool (but which those developers thought was very important) but didn't care much about another feature that was very difficult to write and took a lot of time and effort. He seems almost angry that users of his software don't appreciate how hard something was to do. He seems disdainful of the fact that the users have their own needs and desires for what is most useful to THEM. The attitude seems to be that the users are too stupid to understand what's important and what's not.
To me, he seems like a perfect example of a really smart person who doesn't understand that software is judged by how much easier it makes the user's life, not by how impressive the work is to his geek friends.
David