Slashdot Mirror
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.
Why has Redmond been so friendly to linux recently?
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...
I'm not sure what MS thought they were going to get by inviting a "true believer" to their campus, but the article is pretty much exactly what you'd expect.
I think they could have looked a little harder for people "not friendly" to MS.
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...
[
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)
"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."
stuff |
Roblimo goes to Microsoft and there's no itsatrap tag? This is very unsettling.
Have you read my journal today?
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.
IT'S A TRAP!
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.
Wrong on all counts:
- Microsoft can be said to be evil as a company, because they play so rough in the marketplace that they have ruined countless companies in their growing process.
- Microsoft doesn't care about quality, they care about money. They will care about quality (and they're moving in that direction these days) when shoddy products stop making just as much money as good ones.
- It is not a case of a company growing too big: Microsoft has been doing a lot for a long time and has been extremely focused so far.
As for Google, IMHO it remains to be seen if this is not simply an enormous balloon full of hot air... At any rate, Google and Microsoft have very different company cultures, so they're not really comparable.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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."
step 1. Start a Microsoft Hate blog
step 2. Get famous
step 3. Get invited to Redmond for a free weekend and a Zune
step 4. Sell the Zune on ebay
step 5. PROFIT!
--MaxPowerDJ
Yep, sounds more like IBM every day.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"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.
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."
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.
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.
... has degenerated into a series of disconnected fiefdoms that aren't all moving in the same direction.
The executive staff is playing too much Age of Empires, and everyone else is playing too much Gears of Wars. Microsoft was a better company when Minesweeper was the only game in town.
I've been doing business with Microsoft for years. I was an MVP for Microsoft Access in the 90's and these days I run a large .Net user group and work as a sales guy for one of the bigger consulting companies. That said...
You could have said the same thing about them in 1997. I've often wondered, but I'm pretty sure it's that way on purpose.
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.
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."
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
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.
But I thought that nobody uses Windows XP, and nobody has any plans of migrating to Vista.
/., so it must be true.
I heard it hear on
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.
groupthink: It's good for self-esteem.
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.
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."
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.
While I find myself wondering what Microsoft were really hoping to accomplish by inviting Mr Miller to the company site and then not allowing him to speak to anyone other than marketing people, some of what the article said also annoyed me.
As a minor detour here, I'm going to observe that I've noticed that my karma is slipping. There are a lot of areas where I disagree fairly adamantly with the conventional opinion held around here, and it seems to be the case recently that people are losing tolerance for my lack of adherence to the party line. If that's true, my karma level is probably only going to continue to deteriorate, since I am aware that many of my own perspectives are antagonistic to the ideology of the stereotypical Linux user, and said perspectives are not going to change simply because it turns out that they're unpopular. I feel that it is a deeply sad testament to the Linux community's inability to tolerate dissent. Said inability has always been present, but it seems to have become rather more chronic in recent years.
Going back to the topic of Microsoft, I really feel that what is needed is a generous dose of rational objectivity on both sides. Ballmer genuinely might have issues in the area of sociopathy, but as Roblimo seemed to point out, he is only a single individual, and I would not be surprised to find that it is in fact true that he does not have the level of support within the company that he might like. Ballmer is exceedingly bad for Microsoft; not least because he continues to reinforce the image of the company as a whole as sociopathic and amoral, when in reality, it is genuinely possible that said amorality primarily resides with him alone.
The part of the article that primarily annoyed me was where it was suggested that Microsoft conform to Bruce Perens' expectations. I'm still trying to understand who exactly died and made Perens God. There is a lot about Debian which I find enormously vexatious, both technically and politically...not least of which is the truly rage-inducing apparent tendency on the part of the Debian developers to try to insist that the rest of the planet conform to their will.
That however has actually caused me to realise what it is that has brought about my own fall from grace around here, however...not even so much that I express contrary opinions, but that I do so with such a degree of anger. I won't apologise for that, however...there is a lot about the way the more vocal segment of Linux's userbase thinks which genuinely *does* make me extremely angry. Microsoft wanted a software monopoly...at least a segment of Linux's userbase want an ideological monopoly. That's what I'm resisting...and it's why my karma is falling on this site; because I won't simply shut up and get with the program. It makes me wonder how many other people have been exiled from here for similar reasons.
Can you honestly tell me that the one is more morally desirable than the other?
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.
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
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".
Microsoft doesn't care about quality, they care about money.
I'm not so sure about that. It seems to me that they care more about dominating and crushing competition, than about money. For Microsoft, "winning" is not about earning more than the competition, it's about cutting off the oxygen and killing them.
Of course, once the competition is killed, a monopoly is established and profits can be made.
This, of course, makes Microsoft an even more evil company.
)9TSS
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.
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.
Well, why don't we look at the actual questions?
Fair question. Microsoft officials have stated over and over again that they regard Linux and its users as 'cancer' and 'communists'. As recently as a few weeks ago Ballmer declared that Linux was chock full of Microsoft IP, and the Novell deal gave them a way to monetize that "stolen" IP.
Not only is this a good question, but one that demands an answer.
Fair question. He identifies a specific use for the hardware and sofware, and asks if the elevated hardware requirements and associated costs make Vista less price competitive compared to Apple hardware and software. I don't see how you can find anything loaded in this -- it's either an Apple-based video editing system is cheaper or a comparable Vista-based system is.
Again, a fair question especially in light of Ballmer's recent comments on Linux and alleged infringements of Microsoft's alleged IP. It may not be a question that a marketing manager can answer, but it's certainly one he should be prepared for, especially when speaking to a group of Linux users and supporters. The one about software patents is particularly apt given that Microsoft has as much to lose as anyone from loose application of patents.
A fair question. Microsoft has made a pretty nifty little app but designed it deliberately to run only on their operating system and browser. Why lock users of other OSs and browsers out when there's no real technical reason for doing so (not to mention when the product being copied works just as well on Mac and Linux as it does on Windows)?
All fair questions, and all questions that should be answered. They are certainly questions I want answered before I consider purchasing Vista or advising anyone else to.
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.
Poor article I don't think roblimo really went along with an open mind so he seems to have spent his tme nitpicking e.g. he states in his article that you need Internet Explorer to use virtual earth but it works fine in FireFox 2.0 .
Being successful in the marketplace and "ruining" competitors doesn't make one "evil." If I sell better lemonade than the stand down the street and put them out of business through my superior marketing and distribution, that doesn't mean I'm evil. I agree that Microsoft's OEM deals in the 90s were anti-competitive, but that also doesn't make someone evil. Evil is a very subjective, religious term that is grossly misused by Slashdotters.
They do care about quality; their legacy codebase makes it difficult to produce any. Obvious this is something to fault them for, but to claim they only care about money is silly. All companies care about financial returns for their efforts.
"Sufferin' succotash."
If the originator of this post visited Microsoft expecting to hear a single voice expressing a singular vision then he's looking at the wrong company. For that he should go visit an electric company or a phone company. They'll give you a singular vision (more subscribers!).
.NET or SQL Server. The losers quickly disappear and the winners eventually...after lots of hard work and lots of revs...eventually become good and sometimes great.
I can confirm that Microsoft is, indeed, in many ways a set of disconnected fiefdoms that are not moving in the same direction. The irony is that this both one of Microsoft greatest strengths and one of its greatest weaknesses.
It seems that many in the "outside world" (whatever that is) seem to think that Microsoft is this menacing machine being driven by Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer and a small number of leutenants to nefarious ends. The reality is that it is a large company made up of...how many?...75K employees with lots of different ideas and philosopies of life and interests who are given a lot of freedom to pursue thier interests and goals. Sure...there's some top down strategy but in many cases those strategies are obvious (find a way to have the best of the Web in terms of ubiquity and ease of application deployment and management and the best of full fledged client applications). But overall the management at Microsoft seems to recognize (or are resigned to) the fact that the company and the people will be better off if they let the workers pursue lots of different ideas...often competing and conflicted...and see what the result is. Sometimes the result is...Bob or Windows ME. Other times the result is good work like Word or Excel or Encarta or
The fiefdoms at Microsoft have downsides. They spend huge amounts of money developing projects that in many ways complete. They spend too much money on bad ideas because the exec in charge has power or inflence. But I think the people who run Microsoft and most employees are willing to live with that because the internal competition is best for the long-term.
There are some huge examples of blunder that result from this approach. Although I was far from the inner circle at the time, I have the impression that people like Brad Silverberg (who ran Windows 95 development and marketing) tried to convince Bill and Steve that Microsoft should make a bigger bet on the Web before it was trendy to do so...before Netscape existed. Before the guys who founded Google were out of middle school. For whatever reason (maybe hundreds of billions of reason$) the powers that be decided to stick with a Windows-centric approach for longer than they should have. C'est la vie. That is ancient history. How...more than 11 years later...the real excitement and innovation at Microsoft is in developing very cool platforms and infrastructure for service-oriented applications and Web-enabling (jargon alert) "old school" products in intersting ways.
Will MSFT be as successful and relevant in the future as they have been for the last 20 years? Hard to say. Maybe unlikely. But I'd be willing to bet a reasonable sum that the inefficient and frustrating and random and sometimes stupid darwinistic approach that MSFT takes to software development will keep the company relevant. Do I dare say...mark my words?