Microsoft in the Mirror 265
| Microsoft in the Mirror | |
| author | Karin Carter |
| pages | 246 |
| publisher | Pennington Books |
| rating | 7 |
| reviewer | timothy |
| ISBN | 097252990X |
| summary | Revealing look at Microsoft from its employees, including war stories from the company's early days. |
Microsoft in the Mirror is written for a general audience, though some of the stories it contains are probably going to draw grins or nods only from readers interested in software and programming.
The collection of employee portraits -- first person, no last names -- starts with Carter's account of being hired (as an admin), then promoted over the course of years at the company to Editorial Assistant and eventually into management. Carter joined Microsoft when the company had a few hundred employees and called itself MicroSoft. Working in multiple divisions and levels of employeedom gave her a chance to see more of Microsoft than many employees see of the companies that employ them. (The book continues with a chapter apiece for the others; Carter's account is actually split into two, bookending the 18.)
Mirror is a breezy, personal self-portrait -- maybe too breezy and personal for some tastes; just a few pages into her text, Carter has already been through one boyfriend (her initial draw to Seattle), and a 9-year marriage (maybe I should be surprised that she mentioned it at all), and several job titles. Given the company's growth rate in its early years, perhaps this compression is necessary, but I would have enjoyed finding out more about the early days in detail, a Microsoft equivalent to the way Steven Levy describes an important stretch of computer culture in Hackers.
Though Carter's is a complete and interesting Microsoft experience (complete with sudden, transient wealth), most of the best content in this book comes from the other employees she prompted to share their stories. They speak with their own voices, in a range of prose styles and breadths; they range from chatty to Garrison Keillor-style droll, and though many of the employees' responses overlap (for instance, nearly all of them talk about their Microsoft stock options, either because those options made them rich, or because the shares and options they mishandled still haunt them), each one adds to the picture of Microsoft -- the corporation -- as a complex and demanding employer, and Microsoft -- the workplace -- as one where dress is casual, coworkers are (mostly) respectful and friendly toward each other, and office pranks are mostly good natured and elaborate.
(A few of the programmers profiled had their offices remodeled by
coworkers: Peter's floor was covered with sod, complete with
instructions to water it by activating the room's sprinkler head with a
helpfully supplied lighter, and Stewart arrived for his second day of
work to find his office occupied -- completely -- by an inflated pink
weather balloon.)
Carter (and her respondents) don't try to separate the personal from the
corporate: at a company where perqs like windowed offices for
programmers and well-stocked snack rooms for everyone are tradeoffs for
long days and nothing-is-impossible project schedules, that would be
impossible. This is refreshing at first, but after several chapters I
found some of the stories mixing in my head.
The first chapter I read was written by Yoshi, an ambitious and confident former Adobe employee, who engineered his way into a job at Microsoft when he saw Microsoft's development of TrueType looming ominously on Adobe's future -- and cutting the value of his company stock in half. So he jumped ship.
"I figured that if I took a project at Adobe that was directly relevant to MS, I would have a good chance of landing a job. So I did that, and we subscribed to the Seattle Times Sunday edition to start scoping out places to live."
Unlike some of the profiled employees, Yoshi didn't leap to Microsoft to enjoy intellectual freedom to explore abstract problems, or because the management and dress code was looser than elsewhere. Those things may be nice, but Yoshi did it for the money, including 3,000 shares of MSFT, with no apologies. His story, and tough-guy cynical attitude, also made me think of the contractor fired over a blog posting. He sums up his attitude like this:
"So I am a software mercenary. The old style of work and pensions in extinct. You get compensated if you work hard but it is merely a long contract. I am loyal as long as I am paid for my time and effort. I am a hired gun. I believe there is no dishonor to this view. In fact, I think it is more realistic and closer to how MS thinks of its people."
By contrast, Stewart's stretch at Microsoft
paints a far rosier picture of Microsoft's management as well as
the company in general. Stewart started out as a summer intern,
profiling the Xenix kernel ("hog heaven" for a college student), and
programmed in a string of other jobs throughout Microsoft, including a
mid-career stint on liason duty with IBM in Boca Raton, Florida.
Clashing corporate cultures in the shared office space meant that
"Microsoft employees racked up more security violations per day than an
IBM employee would have in a year because we didn't follow the dress
code and we didn't care about tailgating through the door." Microsoft is
thought of today as the stodgy company in some quarters; 'twasn't always
so, and the rest of Stewart's Boca Raton story makes this even
clearer.
Stewart's Microsoft story is also one of the more
challenging to Microsoft critics; he describes the Microsoft managers
under whom he worked as supportive, hands-off and efficient, and
Microsoft's coders as anything but sloppy or lazy. That "Microsoft
doesn't care about security" is a casualism that many outside Microsoft
have come to accept because of the confluence of Windows security
flaws, simple repetition of the allegation, and (as I see it)
envy. According to Stewart,
"One of the thing I liked at Microsoft was that most of the programmers there, in addition to being very bright, cared about writing quality, robust code. ... People cared about their code being as bug free as possible and were willing to sacrifice their weekends and social lives in order to write the best code they could. It was an attitude I saw throughout my twelve and a half years at Microsoft."
It's not surprising that people within the organization see Microsoft so differently; after all, the employees profiled come from different backgrounds and worked at different jobs within the company. More interesting to me is that in so many ways they agree with each other. Nearly all of them maintain that Microsoft is or was a rewarding place to work, and nearly all of them caution against something that may make recent CS graduates wince -- letting too much money go to your head. People who retired, or could have retired, in their mid-30s, really do have to ponder the problems that come with having too much money. (Mainly, that it can change your relationships to other people in unpleasant ways.)
The other employees profiled include Gerhardt (who arrived in Seattle on one week's notice from Germany, straight out of graduate school) and Ian, University of Waterloo graduate who was pushed to Microsoft in part by a Canadian recession. Work weeks of 120 hours, and sometimes only 80 (he "thought he was on vacation" when that happened) eventually led to chronic fatigue and insurance problems for Ian. In those days, he says, "Microsoft was still small enough that that once you were in, you were really in." Microsoft short circuited his insurance policy's depletion by giving him a job that he could do even while weakened, so he could remain covered by the company health plan while he recovered -- in other words, the sort of thing that a Big Faceless Corporation might not be expected to do.
Anne's is one of the shorter chapters, written with seeming restraint (and relief to be an ex-Microsoft employee) as she describes a work environment with mostly good relations between immediate coworkers and a fair amount of job satisfaction, but acrimony and bitterness between groups doing similar tasks, and "silly politics" surrounding the company's constant reorganizations that led to unnecessary stress.
Reading lightly, it's easy to get the impression that Microsoft hires only smart, competent people. Less-than-stellar managers and co-workers are mentioned in here, but mostly they're summed up with short, dismissive descriptions. I wonder whether this is more out of a good-natured desire to accentuate the positive or an illustration of our litigious society and fear of professional retribution. I would have enjoyed reading much more about what made them so awful, not out of shadenfreude, but out of simple curiosity, and to know how the vaunted Microsoft management machine dealt with them in the long term.
A three-part appendix rounds out the book. There's a short glossary of terms reflecting the book's general audience, defining abbreviations like DEC, HR and IT. A few Microsoft-specific ones are on the list too; can you guess what "calling in rich" means? A three-page timeline traces Microsoft's history from 1975 nearly up to the present day; since this book isn't about the details of Microsoft's history or its interaction with the U.S. federal court system, it's no crime that this timeline ends in 2002 and glosses over legal clashes. I'm most grateful for Carter's third appendix, which is a list of the prompts she sent to elicit the employee responses this book contains.
Since the computer industry in young (in all respects, but in particular the business of selling packaged, ready-to-run software), it's also changing rapidly. That means that even though the stories in Mirror reflect the recent past, they show how fast companies' relative fortunes shift and how quickly reputations change. A book like this -- mostly sympathetic to Microsoft, written by insiders -- doesn't pretend to be objective or to present a complete picture of the company, but it makes thought-provoking background reading if the word "Microsoft" makes you see red.
You can purchase Microsoft in the Mirror from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Par for the course (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps geeks ain't so different after all
Simon
Really, who needs 'em? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been an "I.T. guy" ever since my first job, and frankly, I banked on "PCs and DOS/Windows solutions" as the stuff one needed to keep up with to retain a decent job.
Somewhere along the way (I think roughly around the time Microsoft started pushing Active Directory integrated with Exchange 2000, but that's far from the ONLY factor), I started becoming disillusioned with the whole thing. I had always tinkered with Linux as a curiousity and fun "alternative OS" to use at home - but couldn't spark any interest in it where I worked.
I decided to "rock the boat" a little bit, building Linux-based thin clients PCs out of old, depreciated systems being taken out of service, and asking employees to try using them on a "trial" basis. I had few complaints, and got most of the ones I did have ironed out in short order. (Mostly, people whining about needing support for their scroll wheel mice, stuff like that.)
I think it threatened my co-workers though, who were die-hard "MS only!" people. My boss was "on the fence" about the whole project, basically not wanting to stop me from experimenting - yet uneasy about it disrupting his little "happy family" of I.T. employees.
Next thing I knew, I was let go. By this time, the job market was quickly drying up, and I spent a long time collecting unemployment checks, and trying to find another, similar job to no avail.
I finally found work with Apple Mac systems. Wow, what a difference! Problem is, it's a small mom and pop place that's hanging on by a shoestring. My hours got cut back to part-time recently, because he couldn't make ends meet otherwise. It's really disappointing more folks haven't yet discovered the things Apple has done/is doing with OS X.
But anyway, here in the present, I see the I.T. job market SLOWLY starting to open back up, but when I read the job descriptions, my stomach churns. I don't even want to apply for most of them! It just seems like signing up to administer hundreds (or thosands?) of users on Exchange email while helping develop roll-outs of the latest MS technologies is like signing one's death warrant.
This DRM garbage is just another nail in the coffin, the way I see it. I can just imagine the fun it'll be explaining to the higher-ups why everyone's locked out of hundreds of important documents because Joe Schmoe encrypted them and then got laid off/fired/took a vacation/whatever. It's already insane enough trying to keep up with all these security fixes (and fixes for broken fixes!), stop the floods of email from woms/virii, and all the other MS headaches.
Obviously, there are still plenty of I.T. folks out there happy and willing to take on these jobs, risks and all. But maybe all my experience has made me too jaded? I'm about to throw in the towel. I don't have nearly enough "real world experience" using the OS's I see as superior solutions (Solaris, Linux, BSD, etc.) to get a decent paying job supporting/administering them. I spent too much time in the MS camp for that. I think I can handle the Mac OS X support quite well, but nobody's hiring for that. MS's current offerings give me the creeps....
Re:Really, who needs 'em? (Score:3, Insightful)
It sounds like you just need some confidence. You won't learn Linux without needing to use it and putting it to use. If you think Linux (or Solaris or BSD or whatever you consider a worthy OS) is what you need to know to get a job, then us
Re:Really, who needs 'em? (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO, Linux is not about better code at all, it's about personal sustainability. Sometimes the code is better, sometimes it's worse, but the OSS / Unix way of doing things emphasizes people doing things rather than people buying products. When my job is to fix problems using judgement, skills, and as little cash as possible, I'm going to be happier than if my job is to buy and integrate black box products.
Not a troll, a copy (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:Really, who needs 'em? (Score:2)
Needed. (Score:5, Insightful)
This looks to provide a great picture of the people who make the corporate giant run. I'm not entirely anti-MS...they DO have some friendly, intelligent people working for them.
It's nice to see this side of things. Great looking book, good review.
Damon,
Re:Needed. (Score:3, Informative)
Actually we don't have cubes at Microsoft, just offices. Oh and some of us aren't guys either
Re:Needed. (Score:2)
Kinda reminds me of a quote from some movie I don't recall the title of... 'there's no good guys chasing bad guys... it's just a bunch of... guys!'
Be sure to check out.... (Score:3, Funny)
It's stapled on.
Re:Already read it (Score:2)
Calling in rich (Score:5, Interesting)
Among my favorites are Buzzowrd Bingo and FYIV.
Re:Calling in rich (Score:2)
I know Intel term for "Action Item" (Score:2)
Hmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
This really isn't a revelation.... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is consistent with my long experience with Micrsoft development... some piece of Microsoft's software and tools are really good, others are bad, but never is there any kind of overarching consistency and philosophy. Even parts of Win32 itself aren't consistent with other parts... everything seems to be developed in a fairly isolated environment and crammed together at a higher level into a final product.
My own experience with an ex-Microsoft employee was very telling. I worked with him only briefly, and he was a really sharp guy who had worked on the NT kernel and SQL Server for several years. He had good ideas and a penchant for simplicity that seemed very un-Microsoft-like.
Interestingly, I learned some really interesting things about the Microsoft environment. The first was when I asked why "Internet Connection Sharing" and "RAS" were so buggy and bad. His reply was that the good people were all working on NAT for the server OS's. We repeated this conversation on several topics.
The other thing that was very telling was that MS does not use Source Safe in-house. No wonder... it's awful. Apparently thay have an in-house source control/configuration management solution which works much better... and yet they sell Source Safe.
From what I can tell as an outsider, the real genius of Microsoft is at these lower levels (and places like Microsoft Research) and that genius gets diluted or corrupted at a higher level of trying to integrate all the pieces of the world's largest software monopoly ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h company.
This sounds like an interesting book.
Re:This really isn't a revelation.... (Score:2, Interesting)
When I started, the source code control system I saw was SLM a.k.a. slime, the source library manager. It sucked hugely, doing stuff like locking whole directories for updating one file, leaving hidden files around, basing configuration info on the label you gave a local volume, etc.
AFter Win2000, they switched t
Re:This really isn't a revelation.... (Score:3, Informative)
Source Safe's real failure, in my experience, was that if you ever renamed or moved a file it would often completely lose the history for that file, often to the point of giving you garbage errors when you tried to get old versions.
Re:This really isn't a revelation.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with VSS is:
- Doesn't work well over a WAN, have to purchase a 3rd party product like SourceOffSite. (Which, while pretty darn good, isn't keystroke compatible with VSS... which is annoying).
- Storage system is horrid... hundreds of thousands of little files, with little to no anti-corruption measures (such as storing CRCs of the revision or cross-linking thing
Re:This really isn't a revelation.... (Score:2)
Which dosn't stop the MS marketing department from going on and on about "integration" though...
Re:I've seen that too. (Score:2)
This is why I had to smirk cyncially when the talking heads talked about breaking up Microsoft as a possible punishment. You can't break up something that isn't unified in the first place. (Also you would just replace a monopoly with a duopoly or triopoly and acheive nothing but some inconsequential transparency in how the company works).
.."cared about writing quality, robust code". .. (Score:3, Funny)
Which raises the big, big questions: Why is it that they are writing all this great, quality, robust code, but releasing/selling all these crappy, bloated, consistently insecure products? Are they hiring good programmers and keeping them working on stuff they'll never release just to keep them off the market?
bad security != "sloppy coding" (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think the allegations of bad security of Microsoft are all about sloppy coding, then you haven't been paying attention. You can have the best checking for coding flaws, check the bounds of all input buffers and all that, and still have horrible security. The bad security of Microsoft products comes from decisions that are out of the coders' hands. The basic design decisions are where the flaws start - like choosing to make the running of attachments the default setting in an e-mail client - which is mainly a problem because the macro languages of content viewers like Word and Excel allow people to do things a macro language for an office tool should never be able to do - like open and write files to the disk in a manner outside the document's normal File/Save method. The decision not to sandbox the office tool macros is not a coder's fault. It's a very high level design decision, and one that's fed by marketting - it makes the tool more powerful at the expense of security.
The ugly truth about computer security is that it's a pain in the ass. It gets in the way of making programs be easy and intuitive. Microsoft consistently chooses to place the glitter and showoff factor at a higher priority than security. If something is insecure, but it makes the system seem nifty, they'll put it in.
Re:bad security != "sloppy coding" (Score:5, Informative)
For instance it is often helpful to have one place and only one place where credentials are verified. Likewise, there needs to be one place and only one place where external data is verfied or data is truncated to fit in a buffer. We have seen some evidence that MS still has basic functionlity spread over a much too large area. These issues have nothing to do with external user experience.
Re:bad security != "sloppy coding" (Score:2)
This does make it much harder for some third party to easily replace some section of Windows though.
Re:bad security != "sloppy coding" (Score:2)
"On Our Inability To Make Much", indeed!
Does anyone know what I am talking about? Any ever HEARD of the book called "Structured Programming"??????
Re:bad security != "sloppy coding" (Score:3, Insightful)
They get a software architect (a mid-level techie) to write a software spec, and if it weighs enough and they're burning cash, they approve it.
There's no way to do exhaustive security testing on a word doc with eight dozen TBDs in it.
You're right if you think management was too busy shilling for options to prioritize security considerations in the minds of the architects, but you're wrong if you think they were pr
Re:bad security != "sloppy coding" (Score:2)
Which version of Outlook - *by default design* - runs attachments without user intervention ? All the ones I've used have _at least_ popped up a dialog to confirm the action (with the text inside it getting more and more alarming over the years).
I'm aware some of the earlier versions had *coding bugs* that could be exploited to launch attachments without use
Re:bad security != "sloppy coding" (Score:2)
Re:bad security != "sloppy coding" (Score:2)
This is part of a more general issue of bluring the distinction between "code" and "data". There is also the problem th
Re:bad security != "sloppy coding" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:bad security != "sloppy coding" (Score:2)
Re:bad security != "sloppy coding" (Score:2)
Thing is that "bells and whistles" don't really do much to aid ease of use anyway.
Even to the point of there being Windows "features" which are almost exclusivly used by malware.
Not a monolith? (Score:3, Funny)
-B
Long hours and smart people (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no doubt all these Microsoft people thought they were hotshots, and thought all their coworkers were hotshots, but they define hotshot by long hours, and that only impresses clueless managers and other long hour hotshots.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like nails. Screwdrivers -- who needs 'em?
When the only capability you have is long hours of coding, every problem looks like a long slog of coding. Thinking and designing -- who needs it?
If You Are Curious About MSFT Employee Opinions... (Score:2)
Countless analysts are overpaid (Score:3, Insightful)
Being excellent programmers is not enough (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact is that this does not appear to be enough to make really good software.
Microsoft's software has certain specific issues. First, it is too monolithic: it consists of large vertical packages. There are horizontal layers - like Win32 and
The second problem is that Microsoft make their software too complex. Complexity is fun for technicians and programmers and marketing people, but it's a serious handicap in real life: what succeeds is simplicity, but the kind of simplicity that comes from honest and determined removal of functionality. A good example: I plug a USB mouse into my Win2k system, and see 5 dialog boxes appear before it works. Indeed, I even get to confirm the download of a digitally signed driver. On another system (Linux), I plug it in, the mouse cursor appears, and it works.
Large, over complex pieces of software is a serious problem. Intelligence and hard work are effectively wasted, because they are spent managing the complexity that results, instead of creating real value (namely good abstracted horizontal layers and excellent designs).
The reason for these two issues comes, I believe, from the fact that the company is too large and wealthy, ironically. It can afford to throw unlimited numbers of the best developers at problems. It can afford to feel the pain of writing millions of lines of code when a hundred thousand would be possible.
The best software comes from small, starving teams, who have to scrape the last bit of ingenuity from their brains to turn that million-line problem into a 10k problem.
Software is my business, and this is my opinion based on 20 years of writing the damn stuff. Just my 2c.
Ps. "Code Complete" was the best book on programming ever written. It almost made me send my CV to Microsoft.
Re:Being excellent programmers is not enough (Score:2)
How about this example: I plug my USB Wingman Rumblepad into my WinXP box, and it works. I plug in my EasyDisk 64MB USB KeyDrive and it works. I plug in my USB cordless Logitech optical mouse and it works. I plug in my HP 842C Deskjet printer and i
Re:Being excellent programmers is not enough (Score:2)
Try that and similar stuff with WinXP and you may risk having to go through "Product Activation".
I'd rather click 5 dialog boxes than risk having to call a call centre.
I'd avoid an O/S that refuses to work just because it thinks it is not supposed to. I can understand an O/S that doesn't work because something went wrong and it can't. The two ca
I was not actually comparing Windows and Linux (Score:2)
Perhaps I should have compared WinXP with Win2K as regards the USB driver businesses.
The point remains: Microsoft products tend to be exceedingly complex for the wrong reasons.
Thank you Timothy (Score:2)
Case (Score:3, Funny)
Probably the only thing belonging to MS that was ever case sensistive.
Sounds nice. (Score:3, Insightful)
figure out Microsoft's financial success (Score:2)
Deliver 60%, make up for the remaining 40% with marketing, doublespeak, and lies.
Monoliths (Score:2)
Actually, they are an aggregate of monoliths. Jupiter is doomed.
Yeah, offtopic, but I'm tired today, and it's just friggin' Microsoft, for Cliff's sake.
My experiences of 3 years at Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
2. There's a real "Rosemary's Baby" thing going on: everybody sorta knows they company is increasing the quantity of Evil in the world. We just liked it. I think a lot of companies are like that, but the difference is Microsoft is highly successful at it.
3. It is better to have shitloads of money than almost anything else. Loads of stuff is de rigeur. You cannot underestimate the effect this has on your daily psychology - everyone has an Amex with no limit, unlimited cell minutes, lots of travel.
4. The evil that is produced does not occur at the individual level, somehow, it's just a product of everybody or somebody I didn't meet. I saw Whistler become XP and Server 2003, and I saw NGWS become
To sum up: "Evil" is another word for "money". And it's better to have money than not to have money. And it's more fun to be evil than to be a saint. But the final check is a bitch
Salon Article (Score:3, Informative)
120 hr weeks? (Score:3, Insightful)
Mirror? (Score:2, Funny)
always a mixed bag (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:always a mixed bag (Score:3, Insightful)
Deadlines are the only way anything ever gets finished.
Aim for the stars,
On campus atmosphere (Score:3, Informative)
"Drippy"? (Score:2)
I think I know this guy (Score:5, Insightful)
Anwyays, this was on the Excel team. And that could explain this other part:
From what I remember, at that time Excel and Word were pretty much the "elite" teams within MS. The design teams were extremely well respected and I think could get whatever they wanted in terms of resources they thought they needed to get their jobs done. For example, they were still using a Borland software development platform to develop Excel, at a time when Borland was a bitter enemy to MS overall.So Stewart's description may well be accurate for his experience, but it may not be the typical or even average case.
And of course, since then, I have to wonder if the quality has been maintained. Sure, the actual programmers really gave a damn about quality, and poured their heart and soul into the product, but they still lived a the mercy of -- what were they called -- the "program directors"? These were non-programmers whose job was to hand papers to the developers telling them what features to implement. Doesn't sound like the best long-term prospect for quality, does it? Furthermore, at the time I was there, they were just finishing up the OLE integration -- which my mentor on the Excel team described as "the worst thing that ever happend to Excel"...
Exscrews me? (Score:2)
This is Ground Control to Major Clue.
Wait for my book about idiot managers at M$! (Score:2, Informative)
Gerhardt (Score:2)
Small world... Perhaps I do have to read the book?
MSFT since last quarter results (Score:2)
observe [yahoo.com] how microsoft's stock has significantly diverged from the nasdaq index
since they reported their last quarter results
Re:same price at amazon (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 9x always was a hack job.
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
I never understood why Microsoft continued working on 95's codebase. They should have done with 98 what they did with 2000.
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
Because a) too many people still required levels of legacy support NT-based Windows couldn't give and b) they needed to release a product of some sort at the time.
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
Stable does not equate to useful, in all cases.
NT, as in the NT kernel (Score:2)
Linux won't even boot up on my laptop without apmd crashing, no matter the distro I try.
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
You do not have any choice about what can and can not be supported under Microsoft products.
On the other hand, under open source you can modify the operating system to meet your needs, or, more commonly, find a project that is already undertaking the modification that you want.
This is clearly the difference between choice, and lack thereof. I know what I prefer; you, on the other hand, must prefer paying exhorbitant 'upgrade' (read extortion) costs every few years
Arr! (Score:2)
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, they did.
The problem appears to be in the Microsoft development model. I have seen numerous articles claiming that code written and checked by as few as 2 coders (and maybe not even marked as finalized) reaches production. The individual coders may be very hard-working, dedicated, and whatever else.
If the development model sucks, the final product will suck. It looks like this is a problem at the administrative level, not the programmer level. It appears that the Open Source community has figured this out, and I'd imagine Microsoft will follow suit in the near future if it wants to compete.
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
I'll still never use their software though :)
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
It may be true that 2000 and XP are "miles ahead of 95" but that's not due to their recent emphasis on security and stability -- both operating systems were written before MS made that conversion. The NT-based versions of Windows are more stable and secure than the 9x versions because it's based on VMS, a fundamentally more secure OS model than the DOS-based 9x.
development model (Score:3, Insightful)
From afar it looks like Microsoft has a lack of partitioning of functionality. Everything is embeded in everything else. It is so bad that ( According to Gates under oath at least --Gates would not lie to us would he? ) if you remove the media player you break the OS.
Open source has partioning of functionality forced on them. The code is written by volunteers all over the world. Functionaly has to be cleanly partitioned to make this work.
Re:development model (Score:2)
Don't forget, that under oath you have to answer the question precisely as asked. You don't get the opportunity of asking what exactly they mean by "remove". Does remove mean delete the DLLs and EXE? Or does it mean rewriting large swathes o
Re:development model (Score:2)
lack of partitioning of functionality
Isn't that an artifact of their overall high-level design?
Some of Microsoft's programmers may be the world's brightest, but if their managers praise and reward those who "leverage Windows, Office, .NET, buzzword de jour, etc." in their applications, even if it's not a nice clean partition or the interaction is not needed, then what can you hope for but what we have?
They've succeeded in their objectives.
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2, Interesting)
I've been in many environments - in large, well known companies - where code written and checked by as few as one person reaches production. Having someone else check over code - not to mention actual formal code reviews - seems to still be a minority practice. :-(
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
Apple seems to have done a really good job adopting the Unix development model (keep it simple, stupid) and the open source model for
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
Small groups of developers, small modular components, and applying a simple approach as much a
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
Undoubtedly. All things considered, it was amazing Windows 95 worked as well as it did.
Windows 95 was never really meant to be much more than a stepping-stone to NT, providing legacy support for things NT was simply incapable of. Unfortunately, *way* too many people decided it should be the de facto OS and not NT, so the product life cycle got drawn out to Win98 and then WinMe.
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
(Not that I have any evidence that MS does this.)
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
My boss called it, "A stupid idea, brilliantly executed".
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
That depends entirely on your perspective. If what you had was scads of hardware that only had DOS drivers and/or lots of low-level DOS or Win16 software and you wanted an assured migration path, nothing else was even remotely as good as Windows 95.
Windows 95 was successful because it was good enough for the vast majority
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Contrary to what seems to be popular belief in the unix world, "GUI" and "screen full of xterms" are not equivalent.
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes.
The Linux GUI had a hell of lot more than a "screen full of xterms."
Window managers like FVWM were barely more than a basic menu system to launch applications from and some window management semantics. Decent copy & paste ? Nope. Integrated file management ? Nope. Common dialogs ? Nope. HCI guidelines ? Nope. Graphical configuration tools ? Nope. Drag & drop ? Nope.
The state of Linux "GUIs" (and I use the term loosely) in 1995 wasn't even competitive with Windows *3.0*, let alone Windows 95, OS/2 or MacOS.
The first WM+other stuff for Linux that could rightfully be called "GUIs" were probably KDE and GNOME, and early versions were pretty light-on in terms of functionality (in its defense, many of the deficincies were due to a lack of "KDE compliant" applications). That was ca. 1998.
Hell, I even remember the Windows 95 taskbar and right-click menu as being considered something that was copied from X window managers.
You remember wrong. IIRC FVWM95 was the first WM to try and clone the taskbar. Have a think about why it was called FVWM*95*.
The taskbar was, amazingly enough, a relatively unique idea. It sorta borrowed from NeXT and maybe even MacOS if you squinted right, but it was different enough to deserve being called "new".
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
You remember wrong. IIRC FVWM95 was the first WM to try and clone the taskbar. Have a think about why it was called FVWM*95*.
I believe you remember wrong. I seem to recall CDE (SunOS) using a taskbar years before 95 was released. 95 just released it to the PC masses, and Microsoft was NOT the innovator of the taskbar.
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
CDE doesn't have a taskbar *today* - it certainly didn't have on in 1995. Not to mention the fact that the first version of Solaris with CDE (2.5) was released after Windows 95.
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
Can anyone name one useful feature that Microsoft has invented that wasn't prior art on some other platform?
Uh, Clippy? oh shit.. you said "useful"..
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
No, it had something called the (IIRC) Launchpad, which was _not_ an equivalent to the taskbar - it was solely for launching applications. OS/2 Warp 4 was the first to have a functional equivalent of Win95's taskbar.
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
I disagree. You could buy an official port of CDE for Linux in 1995. CDE was on-par with Windows 3.0. Not surprising, seeing as Microsoft was a member of the CDE consortium and Windows 3.0 used all the standard CDE conventions (eg, alt-F4, ctrl-C, ctrl-V, the window decorations, etc).
If you're only going to include the free WMs and DEs for Linux then you're s
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
Yep, got me there. I didn't consider a product maybe 0.1% of people used.
KDE was 1996 and GNOME was 1997.
Some [kde.org] people [gnu.org] disagree with you.
Or, if you want to start counting from project announcements and beta releases, we should be able to go back to 1993ish for Windows 95.
I first used a taskbar with CDE, well before 1995.
Well,
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
Re:Errr...what?? (Score:2)
That's not what I said. I was making a comment on what was (and remains for a lot of people) the prevailing attitude in the linux/unix community towards "GUIs".
I guess we disagree as to what we consider "fully-functional."
Undoubtedly. You consider "fully functional" to be whatever was common to X WMs in 1995. I consider "fully functional" to be the sort of th
Consider what others would have done to him. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:My God. (Score:2, Insightful)
So Microsoft worked the guy so hard it damaged him, they they reclassified him so his insurance could continue? How nice of them! Of course, that was, more than likely, the cheap way out for Microsoft. After all, working you employees till the are badly damaged does not look good when presented to a jury and/or a judge.
"Work weeks of 120 hours, and sometimes only 80 (he "thought he was on vacation" when that happened) eventually led to chronic fatigue and insuranc
Re:My God. (Score:2)
4 hours of creativity
additional 2 hours of code review
additional 2 hours reading work related stuff (hopefully not slashdot).
The working 14 hours a day on a programming project is unsustainable. Especially if you're working with people who have a life. It can work for small teams of young programmers for a "while". Especially if they are inspired.
Re:My God. (Score:2)
People need to rest. There are very good reasons for sleep and researchers are only starting to find them. There are good reasons for the sabbath/weekend and stuff like that too.
The US people aren't more productive than the western europeans on a per hour basis. They just work more hours. As
Re:The Stock-stare Game (Score:2, Informative)
Where I am now, people do follow the stock, but reality has set in and nobody expects to buy their own island in 5 years and retire to it. Probably the same MS (right, you are there now, surely people can't be following every bump)??
Especially now that stock options are gone, replaced by grants.
Re:The Stock-stare Game (Score:2)
However, when I worked at Sun, every day it was more like "Wow, look how much I was worth yesterday/last month, but because I'm still here today look how much less I'm worth..." (and we weren't always talking about the stock price)
Re: MICROSOFT MICROSOFT MICROSOFT (Score:2)
> What nature? You mean the "make as much money as is possible for their shareholders at all costs" nature? Like every publically traded company on the planet?
It's the "at all costs" part that some of us balk at. There are limits to acceptable behavior, even when money is at stake.
Re: MICROSOFT MICROSOFT MICROSOFT (Score:2)
In most cases when Cisco wins their competitors have no reason to suspect cheating or dubious tactics.
I don't mind losing as much when someone plays their cards better. BUT I do mind if someone cheats at every opportunity, and I mean EVERY opportunity. And worse, keeps getting away with it.
I mean what sort of company astroturfs? OK so the US Gov seems to be doing it too with those "letters from soldiers", but that shows you what kind of Gov the US has (the lack of