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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.
That it has degenerated into a series of disconnected fiefdoms that aren't all moving in the same direction.
How is that any different than the state of Open Source Software?
not trolling either...
Its not that microsoft is such a "evil company" or intentionally releasing bad product, or not carring about the quality. It is just another case of a company getting too big and trying to do too much. In 10-15 years google will be in the same boat.
"I mean, All you can definately say about a fellow who thinks he's a poached egg, is; He's in the minority." James Burke
gj, you just described any large company (or organization for that matter, as large unis invariably have departments and units which operate akin to feudal baronies)
...it [Microsoft] has degenerated into a series of disconnected fiefdoms that aren't all moving in the same direction.
The same statement can be made to apply to nearly any Fortune 500 company. It's not something unique to Microsoft, but rather a function of size.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I would imagine that it is because they know that they are alienating a large part of their user base (or potential user base). I guess that this is an attempts to win the "hearts and minds" of the people, and it is having about as much success as the US is having with the same plan in Iraq.
The truly sad thing is that they push WPA, WGA, DRM, Trusted Computing, overly-restrictive licensing, etc., and think that a simple junket and a couple of freebies can make up for treating customers like crap.
Hey, Microsoft:
If you are reading this, try treating your customers like you value them. I am about as a law-abiding citizen that you can find. I do not appreciate all of the restrictions that you place on your products in an effort to keep me honest. Your slogan used to be "Where do you want to go today?" Now, it is "You can't go there. We will tell you where we will let you go." Wise up before it is too late.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Well, he expected a little more out of Microsoft. All he got was a huge grope-fest where he got the whole "look how great this stuff is.." without ANSWERING ANY OF HIS HARD QUESTIONS...
What if you went to buy a new car, and tried to ask tough questions about horsepower, reliability, maintenance, but were just told to admire the shiny paint job and leather seats over and over again. Wouldn't you be rightly annoyed and walk out of there with an unfavorable opinion?
Or, maybe you prefer snow jobs?
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
"Imagine working for a company that is tolerated, at best, in many social circles. Imagine being a computer science graduate, going to a class reunion, telling people you work for Microsoft, and watching your former classmates slowly back away as if you'd just told them you had a venereal disease." Hilarious. Anyway... I'm not sure that a disagree with the assessment that Microsoft is going into different directions. There at least appears to be a media strategy similar to that for which Sony is hoping. Recently, HD TV shows and movies were available on Xbox Live. The Media Center versions of Windows interact with the Xbox, as well -- and the Zune works with them both. Certainly, Microsoft is diversified, and not all of its businesses overlap. I doubt that the Office team goes the meetings with the Xbox team. However, there does seem to be some semblance of a strategy, even if, like most corporate bureaucracies, many of the peons working there could not care less about the vision of the company.
Yep, sounds more like IBM every day.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If Roblimo is a good journalist, then his personal opinions shouldn't enter into his review of the tour, i.e. he should be impartial. If on the other hand he's a rabid Linux fan, which I doubt, then I think Microsoft is right to invite him: you'd be surprised the number of pseudo-fanatics who switch side when the "enemy" treats them nice one day. We all know it won't happen with Roblimo, but Microsoft is perfectly right to try.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
When one of the top "security" guys at a company doesn't even know the basics of security, how can their products be "more secure"?
It isn't how many patches are released. It is never about how many patches are released.
It is about the severity of the vulnerabilities.
One remote root vulnerability is worth 1,000+ local app crashing vulnerabilities.
Microsoft is boring. Nobody is really excited by Vista, certainly not IT managers who have to pay for it. Nobody believes Microsoft's security pronouncements for Vista, since they said essentially the same thing about Windows 95, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. There are still many corporate IT installations quite happy with Windows 2000, the last version before Microsoft slaved the desktops to the mothership in Redmond.
Customers don't really want Office N+1, either.
Reminds me of General Motors in the early 1980s, right before the Japanese car makers started eating their lunch on quality.
Truth. Glad that Rob put that in.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
In regards to Microsoft operating as a cluster of separate companies: I have worked in large companies before, and I believe that MS does better than average at working cohesively toward common goals. This is an incredibly hard thing to achieve in such a large organization and it's something we continually strive to improve.
Having said that, I believe it is important to allow our engineers some freedom to take slightly differernt approaches to the problems that they're working on - this encourages innovation. The down-side of this is that some products may not integrate as smoothly as others in the early stages, but seamless integration will come as the products mature. There are heaps of great examples of this - Messenger, DirectX, PowerPoint, PnP, Xbox, Media Center, IE... all of these technologies innovated in a way that may have seemed orthogonal to our other products, and didn't integrate terribly well in the early stages. As these products have matured, they have become more seamless and work better with other technologies.
Bureaucracy? I have heard this comment before, but, to be honest, I don't see it. Microsoft has much less red tape than other companies I have worked for. That's one of the things I love about working here as an engineer - we just do our job and build cool stuff. It's almost like the rest of the company just exists to make that easier.
I know that most of the people who have read this far are thinking "Holy Cow! Check out the Micro$oft fanboy! The PR department has him trained!". I'm the first to admit that we're not perfect - in fact we're a long way from it. But we're self-critical and we're always trying to improve.
Keep the feeback coming. We're listening.
Not too long ago, Apple failed to ship OS 8, and drifted sideways until their mindshare among developers was near zero. At roughly the same time, Microsoft shipped Win95 and some pretty decent developer tools. Believe it or not, for a while, many of the people who would have dreamed of working for Apple - and who now dream of working for Google, dreamed of Working for Microsoft.
Microsoft was a bigger success than Apple. Microsoft still has nearly twice the market capitalization of Google. And yet, it is evident that Microsoft is no longer a "dream company" to work for.
What is the moral of that story?
When a Bad Idea, like favoring content publishers over your own paying customers, becomes ingrained in a company, it is incredibly difficult to excise that mistaken point of view. Bad ideas require smart people to develop intellectual blind spots, otherwise the Bad Idea glares too much. The Bad Idea becomes a kind of passive-aggressive ogre everyone tries to avoid talking about. So nobody does, until the company is in crisis.
The really scary thing is that Microsoft is so big and so profitable, that to mention "crisis" and "Microsoft" in the same breath sounds a little incomprehensible. GM and Ford were destined to have a crisis from the moment they bought labor peace at the expense of future customers. But they didn't really feel it until, 20 years later, their customer were gone and they had to sell their finance divisions to buy a few quarters more time to find a solution. Microsoft could go on into what are now unforeseeable futures without figuring out that DRM and "Trusted" computing are antithetical to personal computing.
I wrote parts of this stuff
1. MS was never amongst the top payers. Their policy has been to underpay and let the stock pick up the rest. Back in the day the understanding was if you stuck around for 6-7 years at MS you'd clean up. As in retire early. Now the stock is shit and the option situation is changing across the industry.
2. The problem at MS isn't some big corp mumbo-jumbo where folks don't want to see other people get ahead. It's the stack ranking combined with the requirement that the individual needs to demonstrate their successes. So as an engineer you need to sell what you've personally done to your boss so he can sell it to the the other bosses when your rank is being decided. Which is a shit ass system. Go read mini-msft for a bit.
3. Generally speaking that 9-5er who is consistently working on the crap code that you're too good to write is the guy that pays the bills. The genius who's always spazzing out and showing up at noon because he was up all night checking in broken ass shit, fuck that guy.
Sorry, this is not ineptitude, it is _Marketing_! A very common practice too. The NDA tells the invitee which parts of the tour are the most "kewl", so he knows what to write about later (anonymously if absolutely neccessary). Don't try to apply logic, as you say, it will make your head asplode.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
True, but why invite people not friendly to MS to the campus and not have anyone there who can answer the hard questions? Either they're stupid and didn't realize the hard questions would come out, which I don't believe, or they knew they were coming, and purposely set it up so they wouldn't get answered. That is MS's right, and it's also appropriate for the author to document the questions he asked and the fact that they didn't get answered.
Reality Check 101.
The Slashdot Geek is not Microsoft's core market.
Your employer likes the idea of Trusted Computing.
To the home user, WPA is Click. Click. Done. He doesn't hate Microsoft. He has never hated Microsoft. He lives in a country where corporate hardball is the true national sport.
DRM is paying $56 for two years of Y! Unlimited through your debit card in a seasonal promotion.
Wise up before it is too late.
Why has Redmond been so friendly to linux recently?
... but where Apple went with Mach and a BSD userland, Microsoft could take a Linux kernel and then wrap an interface and a Windows API compatibility layer around it. They'd still be able to hold on to the control that they're so desperate for, because the Windows compatibility layer would probably not be open source, and maybe they could even find some way to patent-encumber some changes that they'd make to the kernel, so that MSLinux programs wouldn't run on other distos, but they'd be able to claim that other Linux programs would?
Well, they have to do something after Vista. And it's been a long time since I've heard of anything out of that advanced-OS research group they had going, the one that was supposed to totally redesign everything.
Maybe they're thinking that Apple didn't have a bad idea with OS X
Sounds farfetched, but then again if you had told me in 1994 or 1996 that Apple would completely toss out the MacOS kernel and buy somebody else's rather than developing it in house, I would have laughed at you, too.
Even if they never go down that road, the fact that it's been mentioned here means someone at MS must have at least thought about it. If they could find a way to produce a Linux derivative that people could easily migrate to, but not away from, I think they'd jump on it in a second.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
To the home user, WPA is Click. Click. Done. He doesn't hate Microsoft. He has never hated Microsoft. He lives in a country where corporate hardball is the true national sport.
Actually WGA is a pain in the ass if he's using a pirated copy of Windows, which isn't atypical; somebody needs their OS reinstalled and because their computer never came with any installation media, they get a friend to help them out, except that the friend uses some hot ISOs they grabbed from #cablemodemwarez or Kazaa. The person may even be entitled to a legit copy of Windows on their computer, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily running one. A lot of the people I heard complaining about WinXP's WGA were in that category (because people who pirated it themselves are probably smart enough to know why it won't validate and don't try).
Also, a lot of people hate Microsoft. Aside from the IRS, Microsoft probably gets cursed at more often than any entity in existence. Every time a computer crashes, chances are somebody is mentally (or verbally) cursing Microsoft. They just don't hate Microsoft enough to want to do anything different. Outside of Microsoft fanboys, I haven't found anyone who's really enthused about Windows (or most other MS products) in general. They're not terribly exciting. But they're good enough. In fact, Microsoft's corporate motto ought to be those two words: "Good enough." When you're on top, that's the only standard that matters -- the standard you have to maintain so that people won't get fed up enough to leave.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I got a kick out of this comment in the article, "This sort of corporate disorganization might be expected in a fast-moving startup with 50 employees, but in a mature company with more than 70,000 people on its payroll it is not acceptable."
Um, have you ever worked for an organization this large? I have. Several times, unfortunately. It may not be acceptable, but it is , in fact, the norm. It's very easy to communicate a clear, concise corporate vision to 50 employees; it becomes exponentially more difficult as the number of employees rises. An organization of 50 is limber and agile, able to turn on a dime. 70,000 is a lumbering behemoth barreling forward under its own momentum heedless of the need to change direction.
OK, how about, "Hey, all of you:
but neglecting those hundreds paid to astroturf, who's opinion is neither respected or listened to.
The way everyone there danced around "hard" questions, it should be obvious that one or two people are actually making decisions that others must follow or quit. The results of those decisions are equally obvious, a second rate product from a hated company. Those at M$ are going to be the ones who know all of the wrongs better than anyone else. None can miss the summary opinion offered by Rob:
Yeah, it's that bad.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Actually, it is similar to not only free software projects, but businesses in a free market. They each try to optimize their own niche, those who succeeds thrive and the rest die out. It is "How The System Works".
The problem when it happens to divisions inside the same company is that, unlike for free software projects and small companies, there isn't a objective market to determine who is going to flourish and who is going to wither away. Inside the same organization, it becomes a political game of influence and connections. This is much less efficient than a free market, and is in fact similar to a planned economy (which tends to become inefficient once the initial drive dies out.
This is actually also the sound economic reason why large companies tend to outsource as many tasks as possible. By outsourcing it they can create a market of smaller companies trying to serve their needs, and thus regain some of the lost efficiency.
Then your employer is run by idiots. After all, the company doesn't have control over the TPM either! Think of it this way: if it screws up on a home machine, you lose access to your vacation photos. If it screws up on a business machine, it can cripple the whole company. And that goes for WGA too.
What kind of idiot do you have to be to trust your business to a third party? And don't even get me started on governments using Windows..."[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I'm curious what would you like us to infer from your usage? It's harder to type anyway, unless you're an uber l33t typer too.
"Imagine working for a company that is tolerated, at best, in many social circles. Imagine being a computer science graduate, going to a class reunion, telling people you work for Microsoft, and watching your former classmates slowly back away as if you'd just told them you had a venereal disease." Yeah, it's that bad.
I cannot defend Microsoft's questionable business practices but, as a place to work I doubt it's that bad. As long as I work with good people, management is tolerable, enjoy my job, and my children and wife are taken care of then why does it matter what your old college "buddies" think. I'd tell them, FUCK YOU!! Who goes to those things anyways? Probably full of sad, single people.
And the comment about the Zune...
"Tyler Welch, a Zune marketing guy, seemed to understand that there's a delicate balance between satisfying the movie and music companies enough that they'll sell content for online devices and giving customers the unrestricted use and copying freedoms they demand. And instead of giving some sort of flip or PR-speak canned response, he admitted that he had no ready way to solve the conflict between these competing constituencies and that this is something it's going to take a long time to work out."
Well no shit, I could have told him that. It's quite clear that the ball is in the **AA's court. Another comment:
"I'm sure Vista is wonderful. I'm sure XBox is great, too. A Microsoft person said so."
Zing!! He really stuck it to the man there. What about the other couple million people who have spoken with their wallets?
About the avoiding of questions. This is not an uncommon practice when outsiders are asked to tour a company. Think of it as preemptive damage control. The last thing they need is a rogue marketing guy to start spouting his opinion on random questions, especially ones not related to marketing. It's kind of like asking a White House tour guide how our current lobbying system is ruining our government.
My father once told me: "you cannot be neutral between good and evil". Sometimes a report may be called biased when it's just trying to give a neutral description of biased facts. At the risk of pulling a Godwin here, would you expect a report on Nazi Germany to present a description of their efforts on recycling used toothpaste tubes as a counterbalance of their prosecution of Jews?
Roblimo didn't seem to be biased to me, unless he lied about the basic facts in his report. If he actually was required to sign an NDA in order to visit the "Microsoft Home of the Future", if he was given evasive answers to simple questions like those he made about Steve Ballmer's threats against Linux users, or about "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", etc, then his report isn't biased at all, it seems more like a neutral report on a strongly distorted situation.
You are maybe working in a small company that fight for Human/Software Rights or in the right side of the OpenSource Holy war, but I worked in big companies with morality similar to Microsoft (or even worse). And in those companies people are not bad. They have nothing to say in the big picture and they do what they are told, sure. However, after hours meeting at the pub can have interesting "local" results.
So, when the GP said "I'm not sure what MS thought they were going to get by inviting a "true believer""
I said maybe that was just some people inside with respect/admiration for guys like slashdot people that wanted them around. If I was working for Microsoft, I sure could have slipped this brilliant idea to some middle manager. Sure they could not avoid the propaganda, but they would come for free, and I could have the opportunity to show them some cool stuff.