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Developers As Pawns and One-Night Stands
jcatcw writes "At the Comes vs. Microsoft antitrust case, last Friday's testimony included evidence that James Plamondon, a Microsoft technical evangelist, in a 1996 speech referred to independent software developers as 'pawns' and compared wooing them to trying to win over a one-night stand. Last week's proceedings also included testimony by Ronald Alepin, a former CTO at Fujitsu Software Corp. and currently an adviser to the law firm Morrison Foerster LLP. He said that Lotus 1-2-3 was killed, in part, by Microsoft encouraging Lotus's programmers to use the Windows API even though Microsoft's own developers found it too complicated to use." The plaintiffs have created a site that includes transcripts of testimony presented in the case.
The agreement even states that Apple will encourage its employees to use Microsoft Internet Explorer for Macintosh for all Apple-sponsored events and will not promote another browser to its employees. I had no idea Apple had agreements like this.
Were Java developers any better off until the recent open sourcing of Java? Not really. Neither were most independent developers. When you do that work, you are tying part of your future to another company's good will. That's all there is to it.
Well I am shock and surprised . Have you noticed that Microsoft products tend to have features that you can't easily program yourself. Say back in the late 1990s where Office had icons next to the menu options and Microsofts Own development tools didn't allow you to do so. Or crappy grid controls or page controls (in which Microsoft FoxPro had much superior ones that didn't appear until .net) MS Developers tools force use to stay 10 years behind the times.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If you're writing an app for Windows, what is the alternative to using the Windows API? How could Microsoft develop Windows applications without using the Windows API? Was Lotus seriously considering developing Lotus 1-2-3 in Java? (Although that might explain the trainwreck called Lotus Notes.)
Comment of the year
I am guessing you havn't done much Microsoft Development. Did you ever wonder why MS Has features in their programs that you cannot program easily using Microsofts tools. When Office allows the fade in with graphics and colors menus in all their product while your API only allowed the text only popup Menus. MS Does do this. It is not about MS bashing it is about MS not giving us the tools to create modern applications.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
ISV's are, in essence, Microsoft's customers. RMS is not a customer of Microsoft. That's the difference, really.
This is Microsoft employees saying their customers, the ones they're supposed to be developing good API's and such for, are pawns and they should never be catered to.
What more tools than a programming language, and an API for basic operations, are really needed? Office looks the way it does, and has as many features as it does, because MS spends a significant amount of money developing it. Give any other software program the resources used to develop Office and I am sure that it would look 'modern' as well - no matter what API is used.
Ultimately this will/has hurt Windows, as those programs targetting the undocumented APIs -where some MS apps get their features from- will require that hidden API to remain relatively static. And when problems are found in this undocumented API, either you leave the problem in place and work around it (and thereby leave the existing software using it potentially vulnerable), or you have to push an update for all those programs.
Maybe this is part of the reason why Linux's kernel has no fixed ABI?
Indeed!
That's a dumb question. Office menus look the way they do because they're written from scratch to look that way. Hundreds of applications for every OS ever made do this, that doesn't mean that there's some huge conspiracy, just that the Office team spent more time getting their menus right than you did and enough time to QA is so that people like you would be tricked into thinking it's some hidden part of the OS. How paranoid are you? Programming menus isn't some "magic operation" that can only be performed by the OS, any decent programmer can make their own pull-down menu implementation. I'm sure Photoshop and other applications of Office's size do the same.
Now asking *why* Office does this, that might be a valid question. But implying that it's some kind of conspiracy is stupid.
Hell, Apple used to provide basically a plug-in architecture for drawing menus, windows and buttons since they knew overriding the default appearance and behavior would be popular. It was a code resource in Mac OS Classic and if you had one in there, Mac OS would automatically load your code whenever it needed to handle a click on menus. (Obviously a bad idea from a security standpoint... it was disabled long ago.)
Comment of the year
Also, does anyone else get an image of the robot preacher from Futurerama when they hear the words "Tech Evangelist"?
So if working with Microsoft is a one night stand, isn't doing Open Source like doing 500 guy gangbang?
I have high standards, you insensitive clod!
You must be a daemon in the sack.
You must be agile.
No time for debugging your problems.
I will not use a trojan horse.
Time slicing with others is not okay.
Don't ever call my thing a widget.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
It is not really a conspiracy but a well known fact that they do not publish large portions of
their api's. This fact has been brought up in court numerous times. Just recently they tried to hold
back the security api until it became public they where doing so. If it was just a conspiracy they would not be having to produce a actual published api for the EU.
When you develop software for windows you are coding on a platform owned by your direct competitor. The fact that they hold back stuff for internal use should really be no surprise.
Got Code?
I would disagree. Contractors can play a very distinct role: to fill a void (in skills) at a company. If this isn't the case, then they are contracted to fill a void in manpower. Most of the time, however, a contractor is brought on board to lend their expertise to a project.
Many organizations work with contractors because it's easier to hire and release a contractor than it is to hire and release a full-time employee with positional power. With contracting, there's typically a trial period during which the organization has made no guarantee of your employment with them. So the contractor benefits from higher wages, and the organization benefits from one less salary commitment.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Probbably because tricking developers into using the Windows API, (which Microsoft knew to be problematic) is a part of Microsoft's anti-competitive behaviour. Anti-competitive behaviour isn't illegal unless you're a monopoly like Microsoft is. The article references Microsoft encouraging Lotus to use the Windows API, and claims that contributed to the decline of Lotus 1-2-3.
AccountKiller
Rubbish, check out owner-drawn menus in the MSDN documentation. THere's nothing to prevent you from doing kind of thing yourself. I've done it.
Anybody else get the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 ad on this Slashdot article (screen shot below)?
6 /slashdot_ms.jpg
http://i64.photobucket.com/albums/h165/bradley197
Bradley Holt
Citations please?
I've never seen confirmation that MS apps make any significant use of non-documented OS APIs. The Office group writes much of their own code to be sure, but most of the big players do that.
It is easy enough to use a dependency checker and find all the symbols that a program imports from a DLL. If you cross reference the imports with the documentation in MSDN, it is easy to spot something that is not documented. Given all the axes to grind out there, I can't believe someone hasn't done this already, and I dont recall reading about all the incriminating evidence that was found.
A more plausible claim, and one much harder to prove or disprove, is that the Office team has access to Windows source code, so that rather than creating something from scratch they can just grab a copy of the menuing code and create their own version.
Looking at your resume, you haven't done much Windows API work, and in 1996 you hadn't done any. So let me correct a common misconception about Windows API programming:
There is no reason that someone else could not make controls that fade in with graphics and color menus. No secret Windows APIs are or were required to do this, even at that time. Windows has always allowed applications to draw whatever they want in their windows, and that includes transparency and fading. The win32s extensions for Windows 3.11 even offered support for non-rectangular windows. Even easier, Microsoft licensed their Office controls to applications developers who wanted to do it. There are no special undocumented API calls required to do this stuff.
Of course, the whole point of a one-night-stand is to get fucked.
dave
While I agree with you that the current Office developers are simply good and talented coders and aren't simply leeching off of some undocumented API for their spiffy graphics, it's long been alleged that Microsoft has used undocumented APIs for Office. While I can't find the cite, I believe this was a key part of the anti-trust lawsuit.
You can see "documentation" for many of them on the Sysinternals site. One thing I'd warn against is actually using these calls in production code. Undocumented means unsupported -- MS could decide tomorrow to yank these in their next XP hotfix, and your code would be left hanging high'n'dry. Not that they're likely to do it, but what if one of these had a worm come along exploiting it? The quick and obvious fix would be to simply remove it.
John
Even if an API is documented, MSDN is frequently wrong. Just try asking a Wine developer.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!