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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.
I say this with experience: this is what Microsoft has pretty much *always* been, by design. Except for the guy with the lousy haircut, Microsoft intentionally divided into business units that were to behave as independent "companies." Each had their own vision, their own agenda, their own tactics on how to get there. Just trying to get an App's new feature melted into the System side of the house for anyone to use... it was like murder. Nevermind a Systems guy telling the Apps folks why they shouldn't rely on the broken older features like metafiles. And then as the antitrust issues were creeping in, everyone saw this Chinese Wall between the Apps and Systems divisions as a *good* thing. Of course, that meant that they couldn't turn and leverage new trends like modems and ftp and this newfangled http thing, but they figured that once it became ubiquitous, everyone would just naturally buy Microsoft products on inertia alone. We see how that's worked out...
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Having worked for Microsoft's PSS team on-and-off several times, Microsoft truly has no idea where it's going. Even within its own ranks, guys who had been there for 15+ years could barely recognize the company as it is today. Internal wars, endless meetings/bureaucracy and loss of focus are the biggest hindrances. India, of course, is a 4-letter word as far as many are concerned ("It's not about the money...." - Yeah right). People who are truly gifted and could benefit the company are turned away, while politics and buddy-buddy rules bring people in who, honestly, have no clue. It's a downward spiral. I do hope that someday they will regain control of this frenzied beast, and put power back in the hands of the engineers. It's always been a truly education experience working for them, both on a technical and social level...something I wouldn't trade for the world.
Change in Microsoft has to come from the bottom, not the top.
Nope. Microsoft has no shortage of talented coders. The problem is in their management, and that's not going to change until the Vista disaster causes a shareholder revolt, removing their top six levels of deadwood.
Go read The Peter Principle if you want to understand how a company gets this way.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Did you notice how the worst programmers usually end up in big companies? I'm not saying that MS did that in the past, but from what I've learned recently, they have fallen into the "save my job" trap recently as well. It's sad, but unfortunately a very normal trend if you start to let people hire their aides themselves.
Imagine you're a programmer somewhere and are now told to hire 3 people to complete your team. What will you hire? Well, as a good programmer and a "honest" person trying to do the best for your company, you will hire the best people your budget can buy.
The reality is very different, though. Especially in a dog-eat-dog company world, where your boss is monitoring your and your team's progress closely. You will never hire people who're better than you, because you could suddenly end up with one of them being your boss because he gets promoted ahead of you. So you will only hire people who are at max as good as you are.
Even if you try to be "honest", you'll get a lot of pressure from the other teams who resort to this tactic because they want to save their job. Your team must not be better than theirs, which would be easy if you're hiring best material. Try it and you'll be the primary target for any company mobbing. You broke the rules.
And why make yourself your life harder than essentially necessary?
MS is also facing another problem a company faces when such changes set in. Meetings and bureaucracy weigh people down and wear them out who want to create and shape, who want to drive things forwards. The 9-5 guys mentioned above don't care, hey, a meeting is more or less time to let your mind wander and keep yourself busy with more important things (like, what color should your new car have?). But people who are there for the reason that they want to create and shape new and exciting things get bored. Also, MS isn't amongst the top payers in the biz anymore.
So the movers and shakers start looking around for new grounds to play on. And companies like Google are more than happy to scoop them up.
The end result, and so far MS is still far from this, is a company that is plagued by bureaucratic, fearful people who do anything to keep their job because they know themselves that they are unfit to fill the position they have, the position they got after the "good" people left and they were bumped up on the ladder. So they wrap everything up in so much red tape that it LOOKS like they're doing something useful, but essentially all that happens is them trying to protect their job.
MS hasn't reached that point yet. But I can see them moving towards it if they don't find a way to get out of it. Momentum will certainly carry MS further for a while, like an oil tanker without its engines running they will keep rolling for a long while. Unfortunately, that momentum also works against them, inside the company. They'll have to restart that engine soon.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You said that change would have to come from the bottom. It can't. That's the point you're missing.
Let me guess, you predicted the same "disaster" when XP was released, right?
No, I just said that XP was crap, and didn't fix the grievous mistakes of NT.
Longhorn was the biggest software project failure of all time, at least in the private sector. Vista is just a face-saving move to ship an XP service pack and pretend that it's the major update that was promised for the last six years. Vista also differs greatly from Windows 95, which was actually eagerly recieved by customers, because it really was substantially better than its predecessor.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
How is that any different than the state of Open Source Software?
It is different because F/OSS has never had the single-minded goal that MS did in the 80's and 90's. "A computer on every desktop and in every home" has to be one of the best mission statements of any organization anywhere. It is actionable at all levels, from negotiating ubiquitous OEM deals to ensuring user-friendly features.
The problem facing MS now is that they have achieved their mission and have nothing to replace it with. In a decade we've gone from Win3.1's breakout to XP, which is a stable, fully-featured OS that satisfies the vast majority of needs of the vast majority of users. I run Linux (Slackware, which I've run since 0.96 days) on my servers and one laptop, but XP does everything I want on my business laptop and Windows development machine (some customers want Windows apps--go figure.) It's not like I'm a natural MS customer, it's just that their OS actually serves my needs.
MS is like Alexander the Great after his conquest of the East. Far from weeping that there were no more worlds to conquer, he was purportedly thinking about western conquests when he died. But his great mission in life, the conquest of Persia and it's dependencies, was finished. He had to pause and consider what he was going to do next before going on, whereas before that the mission was clear and all that mattered was its execution. (Note to history pendants: yeah, yeah, yeah.)
What we know about MS is: they are sitting on a mountain of cash, and they have a history of flailing around before figuring out what to do next. I expect we'll see a lot of very expensive flailing on the next few years. It'll be an interesting show that we all should enjoy watching.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
In my short experience at Microsoft, everyone seemed very anti everything else. I couldn't say a competitors name without hearing about it. They insisted on saying "Live Search It" instead of "Google It".