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Windows Chief Steven Sinofsky Leaves Microsoft
CWmike writes with this excerpt from Computerworld: "Steven Sinofsky, the executive in charge of Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system and the driving force behind the new OS, is leaving the company effective immediately, Microsoft announced late Monday. Sinofsky was also the public face for Windows 8 and its new Metro interface, posting constant updates in a Windows 8 blog that charted its development. His last post, fittingly, was entitled 'Updating Windows 8 for General Availability.' The OS was officially launched at the end of last month. According to the All Things D blog, there was growing tension between Sinofsky and other members of the Microsoft executive team, who didn't see him as enough of a team player. But Microsoft's official position is that the decision was a mutual one. Sinofsky had only good things to say about his former employer." Also at SlashCloud.
that the new interface in Windows 8 bombed at the box office....
the beginning of the end, indeed.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
3. They've gotten over the moron factor. Apple used to be able to claim its GUI was so simple a child could use it, in contrast to Windows which was "complicated" and Linux which was "hard." Windows 8 is braindead simple as a GUI and has let wizards take over many of the less intuitive tasks of computer maintenance.
It's hard for me to compete with a corporate PR department, but here I go...
Windows 8 is braindead simple? How? It's exactly the same as Windows 7, except they added a whole new interface in addition to the old one. In other words, it is nearly twice as complicated! Worse, the two environments are nearly blind to the other. "Metro" apps don't show up on the taskbar and desktop apps don't show up on the (hidden) Metro taskbar replacement. Magic things happen when you move your mouse to certain corners, and some items don't come up unless you know the secret gesture. It is an unholy mess. You want to talk "computer maintenance"? There are now two places to find all of the various settings. How that got through your meetings, I'll never know. So now tablet users sometimes have to use the finger-unfriendly desktop interface to set up certain things (and to do file management), while desktop users have to go into the Metro interface for certain settings.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
For Windows 8 -- we all pretty much knew it was going to happen -- there was no external testing at all. I guess after Vista's performance issues and the poor handling of 7, it was pretty easy for them to decide testers weren't helping them.
Look, the logic is pretty simple. If no bugs were found during testing, it just means there are no bugs in the software. That means the software quality has improved and all the line managers, middle managers, executives, vice presidents and the executive vice president all deserve huge bonuses.
The seeds for this was sown years ago. They came up with quality metrics for software. That quality metric was "number of bugs found during testing". That number is the metric. That is the number to watch. That number must drop for you to make bonus. First few years it works reasonably well. But a few managers fall short of the number, and they find unmotivated lackadaisical unprofessional people and move them to the testing group. Slowly the bugs found during testing drops, and they make bonus. It starts small, with just a few managers. But pretty soon everyone is doing it. Once everyone is doing it, the early "game the system" guys double down, and pretty soon, they cancel the entire testing program and meet the holy grail, "zero bugs found during testing".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There might be more to parent post than just "4+ Funny".
Ballmer has become increasingly vulnerable. Basically, nobody much likes having a potty-mouthed, chair-throwing monkey dancer as a CEO, either inside or outside the corporation. He got the job not because he rose up through the ranks or had demonstrable skills but because he was Gates' chief sycophant, loyal to the core. It is long past time for him to be replaced by someone who can steer the monster resources of Microsoft in an appropriate direction, rather than just sitting there in the driver's seat while the huge earth-mover rumbles around without a definite direction.
By encouraging his most likely internal replacement to leave the company, Ballmer has done the one thing he could do that most reduces his risks of getting tossed out like a chair. There is no question that Microsoft lost a valuable asset when Sinofsky walked, but his continued presence as Win8 becomes a success would have been a major personal threat to Ballmer.
Will