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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...
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...
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"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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Roblimo goes to Microsoft and there's no itsatrap tag? This is very unsettling.
Have you read my journal today?
My thoughts exactly.
What I was going to say was:
Newsflash: Pro-Linux reporter invited to visit Microsoft and gives biased report.
Later on in this show: A group of nuns visit Amsterdam and don't enjoy it.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
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.
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."
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
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
"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.
Hey, Microsoft:
If you are reading this...
Corporate anthropomorphism still sucks.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
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.
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."
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.
groupthink: It's good for self-esteem.
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.
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."
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."
"If you are going to kill someone, you should be able to smile at them when you pull the trigger."
Ring any bells?
Novell Headquarters: "Hey! We just got a cool wood horsie from Microsoft! Lets put it in the Board room!"
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.
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".
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.