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Microsoft Documentation Declared Unfit For US Consumption
anomalous cohort writes "Washington DC judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly announced during the ongoing Microsoft antitrust hearings that their documentation is unfit for US consumption. This is relevant in an antitrust hearing as poor documentation on how to inter-operate with Microsoft's products is seen as an unfair barrier to entry for companies who compete with Microsoft. Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
Acknowledgment is the first step to recovery.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
"...Others see this as yet another example of their crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
In this day and age of increasingly biased reporting, it is nice to see that Slashdot continues to present an objective, fair, and balanced approach to covering the issues.
Scuttlemonkey could work wonders for the Middle-East peace process!
Documentation unfit. Awesome.
Now what about the software?
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
When will this unjustified persecution of undocumenting coders be stopped!? If I can understand 15 layers of recursion with pointers to 8 dimensional arrays and no documentation, you should be able to as well!
For coders, at least. Documentation is for auditors.
And still others realize their documentation is probably no crappier than anyone else's.
Those linked blogs say nothing about "yet another example of [Microsoft's] crumbling hegemony or indolence as their empire burns."
Drill baby drill - on Mars
There is a certain irony that the legal system decides someone else has poor documentation. The documentation of the law requires a graduate degree to use.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but their documentation is ironclad compared to the law. Witness this case, it is only after the fact that it becomes vaguely clear that having poor documentation is wrong (even for a monopoly).
t
Scary thing is, I've always found their doc decent... relative to other companies. This judge needs to attempt to assemble some of the more ornate IKEA offerings - she'll have a new appreciation for MSDN/Technet...
Did Judge Kollar-Kotelly actually utter the phrase "unfit for US consumption"? I think not. After TFA and TFALRFTOA (= Linked, Recursively, from the Original Article), all I see is that she scolded Microsoft for claiming that they had provided the documentation -- a condition of the Consent Decree -- and urged them to finish the job.
What would that phrase mean anyway? I don't "consume" documentation, do you? I use it as a tool in the development process, not a repast. And does "US consumption" imply that the documentation is fit for European consumption? Asian consumption? This article title is not worth of Ars or Slashdot, IMO.
But Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who is overseeing the consent decree, ruled that Microsoft still hadn't sufficiently documented some protocols, despite those documents having been due in 2003.
Five years to produce a document? Is it normal to allow a company such lattitude in the courts? If a rank and file citizen were to take that long, I think they'd have been slapped with a contempt of court charge, or they would have been ruled against, long ago. Why the leniency?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
This assumes that they have an internal specification, rather than just telling n00bs to RTFCode.
In many cases this is better than reading the specification if other developers haven't done exactly what the specification says and deviated just a teensy weensy bit for the sake of (performance | expedience | being a n00b themself etc.) . Of course, if lots of people that can read the code do so and care about the specification, this may not be a problem (and is one of the strengths of open source development).
I've read lots of MS Documentation over the years -- white papers, APIs, and just general guidelines for things.
It's damned good documentation. It may not go to the border of 'special olympics' readers for Apple users, but for the majority of developers that are working on 'interoperability' the documentation is quite good. Not amazing, but the irony is still lost on me that a lawyer decided somebody else's documentation was bad.
Have you ever read the way bills are introduced into law? Jeez.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
The Microsoft people are making fools of her and the court system and she hardly even knows it. If she did, she'd have ripped them a new hole long ago and imposed sanctions on them instead of letting this drag out year after year.
Isn't it getting to the point of irrelevant in this year of late 2008? After all, interoperability is more of a threat to their business than any court Justice and they know this and spend billions annually protecting that. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Why is it Microsoft's responsibility to make it easier for other companies to compete with them?
This is the point of anti-trust litigation. If Microsoft is considered to have a monopoly in their market sector(which they are), they must be prevented from blocking out competitors from their market. If everyone uses their software, and no one can make software to interact well with it, it's impossible to compete with their software, since you must be able to have compatibility with the dominant software standard in order to be able to compete with it. No one will use your word processing software if you can't make a full-featured document that anyone else can open with their software.
A barrier to enabling this competition is Microsoft not properly documenting the most widely used software systems in the world, thus making it difficult to create functionally equivalent software that people will be able to use while having compatibility with Microsoft software, which is necessary in order to compete with them.
It is against this country's best interest to have monopolies controlling important infrastructures like software stacks that people depend on everyday. It becomes an unfair market, which makes our economy mercantilist rather than capitalist. Regulation of this sort keeps the market fair, drives innovation, and makes our infrastructure more secure by not putting all our eggs in one basket(the basket is Microsoft).
If all of Microsoft(people and servers) were to be blown up simultaneously by heavy bombs, and there was no competent replacement for the Microsoft software stack, much of our society would be really really screwed for quite a long time. This is a bad thing. There needs to be more than one option to the services and software Microsoft provides, for the good of our society.
Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon. -Orson Scott Card
Article submitter:
anomalous cohort (http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/)
From the marketing "blog" linked in the summary (http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/cgi-bin/ViewBlogEntry.pl?id=14)
writing and maintaining developer documentation is an important part of any software development project [...] Another reason for documentation is compliance management [...] our collaborative software development project lifecycle management product Code Roller supports compliance management [...]
Nice try!
Let my new 7-digit UID be a lesson to all - write down your passwords.
...and not back-slashdot.
It's not just biased reporting, it's very bad editing both by the submitter and by Slashdot.
This whole story is just link spamming by the submitter. I did think that if the submitter was linking to two of their own websites, they might at least link to something related to the text of the link they provided in the story. In other words, it might have been an "example" of "crumbling hegemony or indolence as [the Microsoft] empire burns".
The first linked blog entry written by some guy called 'Glenn'. That blog entry immediately links to the other blog entry that's already referenced in the Slashdot submission, using text indicating that the same person wrote both. Furthermore, the second blog entry resides on a website for a company founded by a guy called 'Glenn'.
To top it off, neither blog entry really talks about anything like this being an "example" of a "crumbling hegemony or indolence as [the Microsoft] empire burns". The second entry is only a comment about Extreme Programming, with a loose non-descriptive reference half way down to something about Microsoft documentation. That link leads to a "WARNING: You're about to leave our website" page, which then links to the very same ars technica article that the Slashdot submission already links to directly.
It's not only leading people around in circles (via the submitters' websites), it's also failing to back up the submission's assertion that "some people see this as an example of [etc]", given that neither link really does that and they're both very likely to be from the same person anyway. (Okay, we can't tell for sure that the submitter is this 'Glenn' person, but at the very least it's someone who wants to promote his websites and blogs.)
The problem is that the upper echelons steer the company. You're arguing that some of the storm troopers on the Death Star were Bo-and-Luke-Duke good drinking buddies, and I have no doubt that they were. The problem is that those good old boys are not the ones deciding where to point the planet-killing death ray.
Does substituting the Empire for Nazi Germany get me around Godwin's Law? :-)
If you want to integrate with non-windows machines just use webservies which are fully documented by MS and various other sources since SOAP and http are both standard protocols.
And if you want to integrate with Windows machines, and you're writing code on the non-Windows side, what do you do?
I refuse to pay attention to any Anti-trust investigations into MS unless Apple is put to the same scrutiny.
Microsoft: you can see the code that implements these dusty proprietary protocols if you sign an NDA.
Apple: We use these standard protocols, and here's a free implementation of this standard protocol that we happen to be the first to get to market, and it builds on Linux with no changes, and here's the source code to our file system and the remaining legacy network protocols we're still using...
what does MS do that Apple doesn't do when it comes to making your OS the dominate platform?
Let's see, Apple doesn't require people who try to interoperate with them to implement extensions to standard protocols that they don't document, and they don't give their own software privileged access to secret kernel APIs... in fact they give away the source to most of them... even most of the ones that they don't need to.
Lord knows Apple has problems - the way they're handling the iPhone is made of frustration - but compared to Microsoft they're angels.
I can understand and appreciate constructive criticism but are you seriously calling the KB and MSDN "crap compared to other vendors?" The vendors with good support/documentation are few and far between, among them Microsoft seems to be doing quite well. Unfortunately that's not the documentation in question but I suppose you just wanted to bash Microsoft.
Meh... Who am I to stop you? Bash away but, well, the only spot on Microsoft's support site that I find lacking is their inability to actually help people resolve update problems easily. Then, on that section, they thoroughly suck.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Compliance is a very very very difficult problem. This is particularly true when you have more than one compliance specification that you must work with, don't have engineering resources from the team that produced the product that is out of compliance, and are working on a short deadline while trying to deliver documentation for other projects. I have posted a longer response to this on my work blog. Feel free to share the pain...
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.: 2+2 = PI SQRT(1+N)
Minesweeper. The best thing they ever did.
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