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A Press Junket To Redmond
christian.einfeldt writes "Our very own Roblimo Miller was invited to an all-expenses-paid tour of the Microsoft campus because he is supposedly 'not friendly' to Microsoft. Writes Roblimo: 'I came away with a sense that Microsoft doesn't currently have a clear sense of what Microsoft should be and where Microsoft should be going... I also think, from what I heard during my visit and what other Microsoft employees and customers have told me at other times, that it has degenerated into a series of disconnected fiefdoms that aren't all moving in the same direction.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
"None of the Microsoft people I met had anything to say about their deal with Novell, working with the Open Document Format (ODF), acceptance of the GNU General Public License (GPL) as a legitimate software license, how DRM built into Vista may anger users, or other topics I thought might interest you."
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"There are people who love Microsoft. The company has an active Most Valuable Professional (MVP) program that encourages outside volunteers to help other users."
Now, this doesn't specifically say that MVPs all love Microsoft, but I think that's the conclusion most people would draw from the above statements. As an MVP (C#) I'd just like to say that MVPs don't all love Microsoft. I'm more positive about MS than I used to be, partly as a result of meeting some great and really smart employees, partly due to some good technologies coming out of Redmond (along with not so great ones, certainly) - and no doubt freebies have a certain amount of influence.
However, this doesn't make me a Microsoft shill, and it doesn't mean I dislike non-MS software where appropriate (for instance, I prefer Eclipse to Visual Studio, even though I prefer C# to Java). In the MVP community there's plenty of irritation with certain bits of Microsoft. MVPs are often valued within the community because they're not shills, and won't always say things are rosy. I'm not saying we're completely unbiased - MS treats us very nicely, and we'd have to be inhuman not to be swayed at all by that - but that's a long way from the implication of the quote above. I've certainly never had any pressure put on me to be "nicer" about MS in newsgroup/blog posts.
Just thought I'd try to clarify things a bit.
Well, you could have... wait for it... RTFA and see that clearly his personal opinions did enter into his review and saved yourself the time it took you to type that first sentence.
Finding other idiots on
They're so interested in Linux because they are losing major customers to Linux. I say this as a Microsoft Gold partner in the government sales business - and *MANY* of the deals we go for are now lost to IBM/Linux or Oracle/Linux teams.
Microsoft is friendly to Linux because with SuSE they may be able to win some deals that require Linux - and with close interactions to Linux companies they can tune their FUD campaigns to combat it more effectively.
Also, loyal partners (90% of our sales are on the Microsoft stack) are finding Linux extremely valuable (our prototyping is all done on Linux/Ruby/Rails/Postgresql) - and yes, I've done demos with Microsoft where the server in the sales demo is 100% Linux/Ruby/Rails/Postgresql in a virtual machine. At one point they were even paying us to do the ports of some of our stuff when we said we were having a hard time porting to sql server (some of the extended index types that PostgreSQL has that sql server doesn't).
They see that Linux is important to their customers and partners - and desperately try to understand it.
So why, you may ask, are we such a loyal microsoft partner - we're doing government sales; and their washington sales&marketing (lobbyests?) have been more supportive of us than oracle or IBM have.
First, I'm very biased against Microsoft, primarily for their underhanded business practices in trying to keep their monopoly. That said, I really don't think Microsoft is listening because they really care, they are starting to realize that Open Source is not going away and is really starting to hurt their bottom line. I had to laugh at this whole story because it is typical of Microsoft. When someone is critical of their business, they try to buy good press, be it by lobbying, seriously discounted software or other kickbacks. To me, this is just Microsoft trying to buy some good publicity.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, Open Source advocates don't care about kickbacks, most of them are in it for the true advancement of technology. If Microsoft is really listening, play nicely! I think the biggest thing Microsoft could do to avoid the harsh criticisms from the open source community is to open up your protocols, work with standard groups to develop open standards so everyone can play nicely together.
Now I'm over the major part of the Linux learning curve! The view from up here is much nicer, and I have Microsoft to thank for it.
Well... if I'd pushed Nick and his crowd hard I would have been guilty of the meanness to mid-rank employees I'm being accused of anyway. I saw no point in badgering marketing people who are guilty of nothing but doing their jobs as well as they can. They don't run the company, and their job is to put a positive spin on everything.
What some Slashdot readers seem to have missed (possibly because they read only part of the article, if any of it) is that the negative comments about Microsoft's corporate culture came from Microsoft employees. I said clearly that I asked questions of many "unauthorized" people. I didn't quote any of them by name because I was there to write a story, not to get some poor guy fired for being more open with me than he was supposed to be.
I have never believed that all Microsoft employees are evil. Most of the ones I know personally are decent people. I have seen the company do a lot of bizarre things, and it's still threatening Linux users in an unseemly way, but I don't think Nick White or many of the other 70,000 Microsoft employees are behind any of that or even like it. That kind of behavior comes from top management, which *from what Microsoft employees have told me* may change before long. And almost of the Microsoft people I have talked to "informally" considered Ray Ozzie the most likely successor to Steve Ballmer, and told me they thought he'd be a better boss. I have no idea if any of this is true.
We'll see.
Or, to use the traditional cliche, "only time will tell."
- Robin
It seems sometimes that Slashdot readers think that everybody in a company think the same, eat the same, say the same. ... Microsoft is full of real people that probably cares about their job and just want to show it in the best light.
How nice and diverse they are does not matter. The company sues public schools and is at war with free software. No one in a position to change that was mentioned and no changes should be anticipated. This trip was pure propaganda.
You may be under the delusion that M$ is some kind of democracy and that the opinions of their people matter to them any more than the opinions of their customers and shareholders matter. That this is not true is easy to gauge from the cult like avoidance of real questions, complete with sheepish smiles and scripted answers. Decisions are still made by a very select few at the top. How well mannered, nice, attractive, wealthy those employees may be makes no more difference than what cute cats they may have.
Just how empty a PR move this whole trip was is very well summarized by Rob in the opening paragraphs:
The whole thing was a sales pitch for their second rate toys and company. No substantial questions were answered and no changes should be anticipated.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
From http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/HOWTO/Advoca cy
First of all you must not live anywhere near Seattle if you think letting people know you work at MS is a bad thing to do in a social situation or towards former classmates. Its the complete opposite. Whats really funny is to go online and see that MS critics think everyone feels the way they do or even cares about the subject. It may be stupid but thats the truth. Out of experience I can tell that your quote doesn't apply to most situations. Apply it to a MS employee in a social or business situation in Japan and the idea is laughable. If you meet company man or woman say from Sony etc telling them where you work is about the best thing you can do. I'm not meaning to sound like I like all the products because I don't. But if you wanna talk about the social aspect of working for the company then you have no idea. People are stupid, the majority will think you are rich or want to work for the company themselves. The rest will want to pick your brain and hear what its really like. Only a really mental person would actually back away.
It's not, actually. At my last class reunion (for high school, as my University is too large for this sort of thing to work) people were quite interested and excited to learn that I worked for Microsoft, and wanted to learn more about the company and how it worked. They thought it was really cool. Your mileage may vary, of course. I don't try to disguise my affiliation with Microsoft when I'm out in bars or cafes, either. There's no point. Virtually everyone in Seattle has a friend or family member (or three) who works for Microsoft, Amazon, Real, or Boeing, and it's just considered to be completely normal.
No, but I used to work for Microsoft.
Of course, that meant that they couldn't turn and leverage new trends like modems and ftp and this newfangled http thing,
Ok, I keep seeing this claim that Microsoft was way behind the Internet curve... and I always wonder, "compared to WHAT?" MacOS at the time didn't even supply TCP/IP with the OS, you had to download a third-party control panel called MacTCP. God knows Linux hardly worked at all in that timeframe. Meanwhile, Windows 95 supported ethernet and modems all built-in and came with a browser.
In what way was Microsoft behind the Internet curve, and compared to whom? Let's stomp out this piece of FUD once and for all.
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