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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"
Good talk but man that guy is whiney. He sound's like my four-year-old.
Is this "Unique" in terms of "unexpected, enlightening and nuanced" or "Unique" in terms of "The 'Unique' Opinion Held By This Guy As Well As Everyone Else Who Has Been Immersed in Microsoft's Corporate Culture For Two Decades!"?
It's kind of hard to tell. Since this talk is, unhelpfully, only available as an audio download, (1) I can't easily listen to audio where I am right now (2) I can't skim it (3) it's slashdotted. In other words, I have no idea what this talk says. A transcript would have helped a lot.
This said, I can't help but shake the suspicion if I could listen to this talk, we'd come to the altogether shocking and unexpected discovery that veteran Microsoft executives don't actually think that Microsoft is the bad guy! Who woulda thought? You mean Microsoft doesn't internally hold the opinion that they're evil, world-dominating bastards? Wow! And here I always thought that bad things were only done by people who go home at night, polish their monocles, and cackle gleefully at their own evil while murdering cats.
I'm not a psychologist, but surely 18 years in a single organization is going to brainwash you to some limited extent. You will either be (a) the corporate lovebug, touting everythign you do as infalliable, or (b) the corporate naysayer, whose sole response to anythign the company puts out is "it isn't read" or "this won't work".
makes for an interestign thought though -- how would one get objectivity (or a close approximation). Someone outside the organization could never truly understand the internal workings, but someone exposed to the internal workings would always hold a pretty strong bias (one way or the other).
For those of you who are new to .Net, Rico Mariani used to be the performance architect in the .Net team. His blog Performance Tidbits, will give you tons of insight into making that .Net application run faster. For the naive, it also tells you when performance matters (which is not all the time).
This feed sits right at the top of my subscription list.
Life is a conviction.
They could've saved time and simply set fire to their server themselves.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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.
There seems to be no transcript, nothing to read.
The only option is a couple of media files to download - at least they have options that should work on a variety of platforms.
He must be new here...:)
The programming is important, everything else is secondary. He isn't against doing things as a community and has embraced a Wiki. His comments about it are quite positive. http://msdnwiki.microsoft.com/en-us/mtpswiki/defau lt.aspx
"I'm not a psychologist, but surely 18 years in a single organization is going to brainwash you to some limited extent. You will either be (a) the corporate lovebug, touting everythign you do as infalliable, or (b) the corporate naysayer, whose sole response to anythign the company puts out is "it isn't read" or "this won't work". "
God I love the cynical attitude early in the morning.* One (+5:insightful) for calling someone a shill.
*The thing about cynicism and hate is that they both get into your bloodstream and poision your entire outlook on life.
I attended Waterloo for a few years back in 96-99, and just as an interesting side note (since I can't seem to access the CSC media server, probably due to the /. effect), while a lot of people were members of the CSC to have access to another UNIX system and the tools they provided, the active CSC members were perhaps the most looked down upon people in the entire Math and Computers building. They epitomized everything negative about being a CS geek: essentially, they were a group of perhaps six guys and one girl, and while they were all incredibly savvy, they required emergency remedial lessons in personal hygiene (people actually avoided the stretch of 3rd floor hallway off which the room was located because the... aroma... was so potent), and even more amusingly, the girl, who was perhaps the antithesis to Natalie Portman (think grotesquely overweight, sporting a healthier quantity of facial hair than one would want in a woman, and entirely lacking any grooming whatsoever) was the entire focus of the males, who appeared to be trying to woo her in some sort of hyperCS ritual which involved much talk of network topologies, UNIX, and computer programming.
:-).
I don't know if the author is admitting an active membership in that club (as I still can't seem to be able to access the server), but if so, it's nothing I think I'd be bragging about
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
That when you objectively listen to what *real people* from Microsoft are actually saying (and look at what they're doing), rather than apply biased feelings to out of context soundbites and "media analysts" with chips on their shoulders, they're just a bunch of geeks writing the best software they can.