The appointment of a Chief Ethics Officer means you'll need to complete online training every year to ensure that you understand the ethical dimensions of your job.
Here's an example verification, which I found by hacking one of the servers:
Suppose a supplier offers to bribe you with a pair of World Series tickets to increase your purchases from his company. Should you:
a) Say yes! Baseball is America's game, and give-and-take is good business.
b) Refuse the offer and report the incident to top management
c) Ask about the seats. Might as well watch the game on HDTV if it's the bleachers, but infield grandstand starts to get interesting
Historically, Microsoft has not been a big proponent of winning through patents, either by preventing competition or extorting usage fees. They like to win in other ways. The big software houses see Web Services as the key towards the next great era of business software, and they all like their chances. But that only happens if they can avoid getting stuck in a mire of standards dueling and IP litigation (see: Blu-Ray/HD DVD).
Notice that the pledge includes the standard defensive measure - if you sue Microsoft for infringing one of your patents, it's void. But it was carefully crafted so that only Microsoft code used to directly implement one of the specifications is covered by the defensive clause - not all of Windows and MS Office for example. That's perhaps the most impressive part of the pledge.
Companies the size of Wipro or Infosys need to hire some foreigners who are better attuned with their home markets, and for customer facing roles. They may also open sites in the West to tap into a different base of talent and/or respond more quickly to customers; also for political reasons, to stave off protectionist measures. None of this is surprising.
It'd be more interesting if the Indian firms started flipping contract work, or delegating portions of it to independent contract software houses based in the West, without publicizing it, i.e. it was not a political/PR stunt. That would be reverse off-shoring.
Picasso said, "Mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal." I think he meant that real advances require an imaginative leap from the artist, which is almost the opposite of how the quote was interpreted here.
How about "I'm Feeling Much Better Now, Dave: The Future of HCI" instead? Nah... borrowing.
Anyone else notice this person has almost the same name as the woman who sang the theme to Poseiden Adventure ("if we can hold out through the night..."). In fact, I looked it up and the song ends with a search reference ("we won't be searching anymore").
I'm surprised that got by their executive recruiters.
Now this is really cynical - but they may have planned it this way. It looks like Vista may blow by even the latest (January 2007) deadline to resolve a raft of useability bugs, and this gives them the perfect cover to extend the ship date without looking totally inept. "We were ready to RTM at the end of 2006 but some late-breaking vulnerabilities were discovered, and we decided we couldn't take chances with the security of our customers' systems."
This is not just a matter of losing face. If the Windows team blows the revised date by several months (say April or later) AND it ships what is considered to be a lackluster product, many people will start considering the Windows codebase as a sustaining mode project. They will assume that Microsoft is busy preparing a brand new code base (based on FreeBSD plus.NET and DirectX, let's say) to debut five years from now, and will work out a transition plan for Win32 apps. Windows will be a lame duck in the minds of both customers and MS engineers. Alternatives will be sought.
The benefits these legislators receive from lobbyists aren't restricted to campaign contributions. Take a look at this (which didn't involve Pacheco).
This is the kind of crap that we Massachusetts taxpayers have to put up with. And the worst part of it is that these jerks get all huffy when they talk about their "public service".
The format wars - hey, nice going guys - will ensure that sales get off to a slow start. But 2-3 years down the road, there will be action and science fiction movies with special effects that will knock people's socks off. And when that happens, many will want to own a copy, and they'll buy if the price of these players is right. It's a matter of when, not if.
Gates is an avid card player so he might even appreciate the analogy. He's done some evil things, but it came out all right in the end because he's donating practically all his winnings to charity, and doing so at a relatively young age. Had he not been so greedy and obsessed, a much broader spectrum of people in the software business might have become wealthy or affluent, and we would undoubtedly have had a more interesting marketplace ecology in the personal computing business over the past 15 years. But I doubt that the incremental contributions to charity would have had nearly the same impact that Gates and Buffett are making now.
He and Buffett will be remembered as great Americans for their charity, while his past role as founder and leader of Microsoft will be debated for decades.
Yeah, that thought crossed my mind too. But wait... this Hase dude just quit after 16 years w/o another job lined up! This gets to be madness, where every high profile departure leads to another round of speculation. With companies the size of Microsoft, people come and go all the time.
Taylor had Ballmer's ear and his star was rising rapidly inside Microsoft - not the logical profile for a disgruntled Mini type. Still, there have been stranger things.
I've finally managed to convince myself that General Haig could not have been Deep Throat, though.
Cygnus and MKS Software have separately implemented Unix shells, utilities, and system call emulation software for Windows. Cygwin is free software and is now owned by Red Hat. I think Microsoft's SFU (I call it STFU, for "Services and Tools For Unix") add-on pack is a rebranding of the MKS Toolkit, which is still separately available as a commerical product.
Both products are mature and work well, but expect some glitches when you try to port a complex Unix app to Windows.
He was a sort of newspaper ombudsman as well as their connection to the blogosphere. Someone who could take heat from the public without stonewalling it, who could act as a cheerleader for company products without coming across as too much of a shill. He built credibility by praising competitor's hit products early and often. Likeable enough to get lots of people inside and outside the company to talk. Interesting enough that readers came back the next day. Ambitious, but not so high and mighty that he would leave in a huff.
They must have figured out early on that he was only going to stay with them 2-3 years, and are relieved that he didn't move on to Google. I wonder if they'll replace him with another high profile type, or opt for the safer blog-by-committee.
The telcos actually tried to implement a layered architecture for differentiated services in the 1980's and '90s - it was called the Advanced Intelligent Network and was being rolled out in stages along with a last mile interface stacks known as ISDN ("it still does nothing"), and eventually B-ISDN (broadband ISDN, or "basically, it still does nothing").
Then usage of the Internet began growing exponentially, and we stopped hearing much about AIN, although it's out there taking care of 800-number lookups and a few things like that on expensive, synchronous mode, mainframe-like switch hardware and software sold by Northern Telecom and Lucent. But we still needed a separate phone network to handle phone service (and business videoconferencing, etc.) with acceptable quality and robustness, or so thought the telco executives. A senior engineer at Bell Labs named David Isenberg decided to take a closer look at the two approaches and had an epiphany - all the economics were in favor of the open, decentralized IP approach, where service innovation occurred at the endpoints via the free market mechanism, rather than the monolithic architecture and business model where the monopolist providers controlled the rollout and pricing of new features (sound familiar?). His paper The Rise of the Stupid Network is a considered a classic, and he now blogs as an independent consultant. Once you read his "stupid network" paper, his position on net neutrality will not be a surprise.
1. Chicks won't be impressed because it's so nerdy
2. Geeks won't be impressed because it's so VB
3. Microsofties will explain how your language is "deprecated" unless it's VB.NET. Trust me, it's bad to be deprecated on.
4. Enterprise programmers will explain how C# (or Java) is better than VB.NET, has more constructs, etc.
5. (An elaboration of point #2.) To a programmer, "dim employees() as integer" just looks goofy.
6. You and your company will be a one-man profit center for Microsoft (their tools are priced so that they don't come cheap when you need to do real work). Here it's not so much big bad Microsoft that's a problem, but I hate being someone else's one-man profit center.
7. If it's Visual Basic 6, try to get a hold of Ted Pattison's (out of print) book on how to use Visual Basic with DCOM. It's a great book, but my takeaway was that it's easier and wiser just to say no. (I suspect this may have been Pattison's POV too).
Microsoft is clearly trying to reinvent itself, with the elevation of Ray Ozzie, rebranding of MSN as Windows Live/AdCenter, and the surprise announcement of a major investment in server infrastruture. It's trying to be a lot more like Google. As owner (and frequent abuser) of the Windows/Office monopolies, they realize they have both major advantages and disadvantages relative to Google: they can offer "integrated innovation", but many business partners and consumers no longer trust them. So the business model they're trying to get to won't be the same as Google's either. I can see moving towards a hybrid model where consumers and very small businesses can use their software over the web for free, supported by ads (i.e. the Google model), while larger companies could alternatively buy it as packaged software and install it behind their corporate firewall and administer it themselves, to protect the privacy of their data.
Meanwhile they'll still be selling desktop software of course, but this area will start to decline in profitability. Windows and Office are their cash cows and the software-as-service stuff is their new direction which will eat cash for a number of years.
As far as Cringely's suggestion that MS offers a lean and mean, high performance, secure version of Windows, fully compatible with XP applications and peripherals, that could be sold for $49 without major loss of revenue and internal disruption, well, would that it were that easy. That's Cringely's advantage of being a blogger.
"He walked him, Millar's going to first base, and in comes Dave Roberts to run for Millar as Bill Mueller steps in the batter's box. The Yankees are just three outs away from a trip to the World Series and a sweep of the Red Sox. Roberts definitely has Rivera's attention, he's drawing a lot of looks from the mound. There's a throw over, runner back. Another throw over, runner back. Here's the pitch.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it was an advertising malfunction.
They're doing it all for their kids.
Specifically: "My dad's useless numbers are bigger than your dad's useless numbers."
The appointment of a Chief Ethics Officer means you'll need to complete online training every year to ensure that you understand the ethical dimensions of your job.
Here's an example verification, which I found by hacking one of the servers:
Suppose a supplier offers to bribe you with a pair of World Series tickets to increase your purchases from his company. Should you:
a) Say yes! Baseball is America's game, and give-and-take is good business.
b) Refuse the offer and report the incident to top management
c) Ask about the seats. Might as well watch the game on HDTV if it's the bleachers, but infield grandstand starts to get interesting
d) Giants in the Worlds Series? AHAHAHAHAHA
if this country didn't start taking World Cup soccer more seriously.
Heh, guess so. Or as Charles might put it, "short ack to mission control, Copy on that".
I've often thought, whoever came up with this convention for naming variables ought to be shut in a Russian spacecraft and sent far, far away.
Historically, Microsoft has not been a big proponent of winning through patents, either by preventing competition or extorting usage fees. They like to win in other ways. The big software houses see Web Services as the key towards the next great era of business software, and they all like their chances. But that only happens if they can avoid getting stuck in a mire of standards dueling and IP litigation (see: Blu-Ray/HD DVD).
Notice that the pledge includes the standard defensive measure - if you sue Microsoft for infringing one of your patents, it's void. But it was carefully crafted so that only Microsoft code used to directly implement one of the specifications is covered by the defensive clause - not all of Windows and MS Office for example. That's perhaps the most impressive part of the pledge.
Avoid K-mart's parking lot in October.
Companies the size of Wipro or Infosys need to hire some foreigners who are better attuned with their home markets, and for customer facing roles. They may also open sites in the West to tap into a different base of talent and/or respond more quickly to customers; also for political reasons, to stave off protectionist measures. None of this is surprising.
It'd be more interesting if the Indian firms started flipping contract work, or delegating portions of it to independent contract software houses based in the West, without publicizing it, i.e. it was not a political/PR stunt. That would be reverse off-shoring.
Picasso said, "Mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal." I think he meant that real advances require an imaginative leap from the artist, which is almost the opposite of how the quote was interpreted here.
How about "I'm Feeling Much Better Now, Dave: The Future of HCI" instead? Nah... borrowing.
Anyone else notice this person has almost the same name as the woman who sang the theme to Poseiden Adventure ("if we can hold out through the night..."). In fact, I looked it up and the song ends with a search reference ("we won't be searching anymore").
I'm surprised that got by their executive recruiters.
Now this is really cynical - but they may have planned it this way. It looks like Vista may blow by even the latest (January 2007) deadline to resolve a raft of useability bugs, and this gives them the perfect cover to extend the ship date without looking totally inept. "We were ready to RTM at the end of 2006 but some late-breaking vulnerabilities were discovered, and we decided we couldn't take chances with the security of our customers' systems."
.NET and DirectX, let's say) to debut five years from now, and will work out a transition plan for Win32 apps. Windows will be a lame duck in the minds of both customers and MS engineers. Alternatives will be sought.
This is not just a matter of losing face. If the Windows team blows the revised date by several months (say April or later) AND it ships what is considered to be a lackluster product, many people will start considering the Windows codebase as a sustaining mode project. They will assume that Microsoft is busy preparing a brand new code base (based on FreeBSD plus
The benefits these legislators receive from lobbyists aren't restricted to campaign contributions. Take a look at this (which didn't involve Pacheco). This is the kind of crap that we Massachusetts taxpayers have to put up with. And the worst part of it is that these jerks get all huffy when they talk about their "public service".
Instead of basing the successor on OS X, maybe MS will come out with Plan X OS
The format wars - hey, nice going guys - will ensure that sales get off to a slow start. But 2-3 years down the road, there will be action and science fiction movies with special effects that will knock people's socks off. And when that happens, many will want to own a copy, and they'll buy if the price of these players is right. It's a matter of when, not if.
Gates is an avid card player so he might even appreciate the analogy. He's done some evil things, but it came out all right in the end because he's donating practically all his winnings to charity, and doing so at a relatively young age. Had he not been so greedy and obsessed, a much broader spectrum of people in the software business might have become wealthy or affluent, and we would undoubtedly have had a more interesting marketplace ecology in the personal computing business over the past 15 years. But I doubt that the incremental contributions to charity would have had nearly the same impact that Gates and Buffett are making now.
He and Buffett will be remembered as great Americans for their charity, while his past role as founder and leader of Microsoft will be debated for decades.
Yeah, that thought crossed my mind too. But wait... this Hase dude just quit after 16 years w/o another job lined up! This gets to be madness, where every high profile departure leads to another round of speculation. With companies the size of Microsoft, people come and go all the time.
Taylor had Ballmer's ear and his star was rising rapidly inside Microsoft - not the logical profile for a disgruntled Mini type. Still, there have been stranger things.
I've finally managed to convince myself that General Haig could not have been Deep Throat, though.
Cygnus and MKS Software have separately implemented Unix shells, utilities, and system call emulation software for Windows. Cygwin is free software and is now owned by Red Hat. I think Microsoft's SFU (I call it STFU, for "Services and Tools For Unix") add-on pack is a rebranding of the MKS Toolkit, which is still separately available as a commerical product. Both products are mature and work well, but expect some glitches when you try to port a complex Unix app to Windows.
The only way Microsoft would EVER even get my attention again is if they came out with "Microsoft Linux" with Word/Excel
Then we could all download it and tell their reps, "I shall gladly pay you Mundie."
He was a sort of newspaper ombudsman as well as their connection to the blogosphere. Someone who could take heat from the public without stonewalling it, who could act as a cheerleader for company products without coming across as too much of a shill. He built credibility by praising competitor's hit products early and often. Likeable enough to get lots of people inside and outside the company to talk. Interesting enough that readers came back the next day. Ambitious, but not so high and mighty that he would leave in a huff.
They must have figured out early on that he was only going to stay with them 2-3 years, and are relieved that he didn't move on to Google. I wonder if they'll replace him with another high profile type, or opt for the safer blog-by-committee.
The telcos actually tried to implement a layered architecture for differentiated services in the 1980's and '90s - it was called the Advanced Intelligent Network and was being rolled out in stages along with a last mile interface stacks known as ISDN ("it still does nothing"), and eventually B-ISDN (broadband ISDN, or "basically, it still does nothing").
Then usage of the Internet began growing exponentially, and we stopped hearing much about AIN, although it's out there taking care of 800-number lookups and a few things like that on expensive, synchronous mode, mainframe-like switch hardware and software sold by Northern Telecom and Lucent. But we still needed a separate phone network to handle phone service (and business videoconferencing, etc.) with acceptable quality and robustness, or so thought the telco executives. A senior engineer at Bell Labs named David Isenberg decided to take a closer look at the two approaches and had an epiphany - all the economics were in favor of the open, decentralized IP approach, where service innovation occurred at the endpoints via the free market mechanism, rather than the monolithic architecture and business model where the monopolist providers controlled the rollout and pricing of new features (sound familiar?). His paper The Rise of the Stupid Network is a considered a classic, and he now blogs as an independent consultant. Once you read his "stupid network" paper, his position on net neutrality will not be a surprise.
an anonymous mini-PodTech blog launches?
2. Geeks won't be impressed because it's so VB
3. Microsofties will explain how your language is "deprecated" unless it's VB.NET. Trust me, it's bad to be deprecated on.
4. Enterprise programmers will explain how C# (or Java) is better than VB.NET, has more constructs, etc.
5. (An elaboration of point #2.) To a programmer, "dim employees() as integer" just looks goofy.
6. You and your company will be a one-man profit center for Microsoft (their tools are priced so that they don't come cheap when you need to do real work). Here it's not so much big bad Microsoft that's a problem, but I hate being someone else's one-man profit center.
7. If it's Visual Basic 6, try to get a hold of Ted Pattison's (out of print) book on how to use Visual Basic with DCOM. It's a great book, but my takeaway was that it's easier and wiser just to say no. (I suspect this may have been Pattison's POV too).
Meanwhile they'll still be selling desktop software of course, but this area will start to decline in profitability. Windows and Office are their cash cows and the software-as-service stuff is their new direction which will eat cash for a number of years.
As far as Cringely's suggestion that MS offers a lean and mean, high performance, secure version of Windows, fully compatible with XP applications and peripherals, that could be sold for $49 without major loss of revenue and internal disruption, well, would that it were that easy. That's Cringely's advantage of being a blogger.
"He walked him, Millar's going to first base, and in comes Dave Roberts to run for Millar as Bill Mueller steps in the batter's box. The Yankees are just three outs away from a trip to the World Series and a sweep of the Red Sox. Roberts definitely has Rivera's attention, he's drawing a lot of looks from the mound. There's a throw over, runner back. Another throw over, runner back. Here's the pitch.
Roberts is taking off...."