A Press Junket To Redmond 329
christian.einfeldt writes "Our very own Roblimo Miller was invited to an all-expenses-paid tour of the Microsoft campus because he is supposedly 'not friendly' to Microsoft. Writes Roblimo: 'I came away with a sense that Microsoft doesn't currently have a clear sense of what Microsoft should be and where Microsoft should be going... I also think, from what I heard during my visit and what other Microsoft employees and customers have told me at other times, that it has degenerated into a series of disconnected fiefdoms that aren't all moving in the same direction.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
glass houses (Score:4, Insightful)
How is that any different than the state of Open Source Software?
not trolling either...
just what I've always said (Score:0, Insightful)
disconnected fiefdoms (Score:3, Insightful)
How is this different? (Score:2, Insightful)
The same statement can be made to apply to nearly any Fortune 500 company. It's not something unique to Microsoft, but rather a function of size.
Re:glass houses (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably because "Open Source Software" has never pretended to be otherwise?
Re:why? (Score:4, Insightful)
The truly sad thing is that they push WPA, WGA, DRM, Trusted Computing, overly-restrictive licensing, etc., and think that a simple junket and a couple of freebies can make up for treating customers like crap.
Hey, Microsoft:
If you are reading this, try treating your customers like you value them. I am about as a law-abiding citizen that you can find. I do not appreciate all of the restrictions that you place on your products in an effort to keep me honest. Your slogan used to be "Where do you want to go today?" Now, it is "You can't go there. We will tell you where we will let you go." Wise up before it is too late.
Re:glass houses (Score:5, Insightful)
When a monolithic brand (like Microsoft) lacks unified direction, it not only loses a chunck of the marketing advantage of being a well-known brand, it also tends to stagnate (slower innovation) and lose resources.
Re:just what I've always said (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong on all counts:
- Microsoft can be said to be evil as a company, because they play so rough in the marketplace that they have ruined countless companies in their growing process.
- Microsoft doesn't care about quality, they care about money. They will care about quality (and they're moving in that direction these days) when shoddy products stop making just as much money as good ones.
- It is not a case of a company growing too big: Microsoft has been doing a lot for a long time and has been extremely focused so far.
As for Google, IMHO it remains to be seen if this is not simply an enormous balloon full of hot air... At any rate, Google and Microsoft have very different company cultures, so they're not really comparable.
Re:Uh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
What if you went to buy a new car, and tried to ask tough questions about horsepower, reliability, maintenance, but were just told to admire the shiny paint job and leather seats over and over again. Wouldn't you be rightly annoyed and walk out of there with an unfavorable opinion?
Or, maybe you prefer snow jobs?
No Strategy? (Score:1, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:glass houses (Score:5, Insightful)
A programmer at MS on the other hand knows his software or API will be used, whether it's good or not, because it was demanded to exist.
Now, how do you get other devs to use your tools? By creating good interfaces and at least a working documentation. Only if there is nobody creating a competing interface you can resort to "read the effing source". Which is not really an option at MS either.
That's the difference.
Re:What were they thinking? (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget this part ... (Score:5, Insightful)
When one of the top "security" guys at a company doesn't even know the basics of security, how can their products be "more secure"?
It isn't how many patches are released. It is never about how many patches are released.
It is about the severity of the vulnerabilities.
One remote root vulnerability is worth 1,000+ local app crashing vulnerabilities.
Microsoft is now boring (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft is boring. Nobody is really excited by Vista, certainly not IT managers who have to pay for it. Nobody believes Microsoft's security pronouncements for Vista, since they said essentially the same thing about Windows 95, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. There are still many corporate IT installations quite happy with Windows 2000, the last version before Microsoft slaved the desktops to the mothership in Redmond.
Customers don't really want Office N+1, either.
Reminds me of General Motors in the early 1980s, right before the Japanese car makers started eating their lunch on quality.
Re:Everything you need to know from TFA... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:glass houses (Score:4, Insightful)
-matthew
We're listening (Score:3, Insightful)
In regards to Microsoft operating as a cluster of separate companies: I have worked in large companies before, and I believe that MS does better than average at working cohesively toward common goals. This is an incredibly hard thing to achieve in such a large organization and it's something we continually strive to improve.
Having said that, I believe it is important to allow our engineers some freedom to take slightly differernt approaches to the problems that they're working on - this encourages innovation. The down-side of this is that some products may not integrate as smoothly as others in the early stages, but seamless integration will come as the products mature. There are heaps of great examples of this - Messenger, DirectX, PowerPoint, PnP, Xbox, Media Center, IE... all of these technologies innovated in a way that may have seemed orthogonal to our other products, and didn't integrate terribly well in the early stages. As these products have matured, they have become more seamless and work better with other technologies.
Bureaucracy? I have heard this comment before, but, to be honest, I don't see it. Microsoft has much less red tape than other companies I have worked for. That's one of the things I love about working here as an engineer - we just do our job and build cool stuff. It's almost like the rest of the company just exists to make that easier.
I know that most of the people who have read this far are thinking "Holy Cow! Check out the Micro$oft fanboy! The PR department has him trained!". I'm the first to admit that we're not perfect - in fact we're a long way from it. But we're self-critical and we're always trying to improve.
Keep the feeback coming. We're listening.
Re:glass houses (Score:5, Insightful)
How is that any different than the state of Open Source Software?
1. Because OSS was designed to actually function that way, whereas MS has not.
2) Because each individual OSS project doesn't depend on the others for success, whereas MS has intentionally integrated many of its divisions so that they do depend on each other (Windows and Office and IE, for instance).
3) Because MS has a single leadership, and any a leadership without a coherent plan is a bad one. OSS has many leaders for many projects, and they need not each have the same goal.
4) Each individual OSS project may in fact have a strong leader with a clear well thought out plan. The successful ones usually do.
Not too long ago... (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft was a bigger success than Apple. Microsoft still has nearly twice the market capitalization of Google. And yet, it is evident that Microsoft is no longer a "dream company" to work for.
What is the moral of that story?
When a Bad Idea, like favoring content publishers over your own paying customers, becomes ingrained in a company, it is incredibly difficult to excise that mistaken point of view. Bad ideas require smart people to develop intellectual blind spots, otherwise the Bad Idea glares too much. The Bad Idea becomes a kind of passive-aggressive ogre everyone tries to avoid talking about. So nobody does, until the company is in crisis.
The really scary thing is that Microsoft is so big and so profitable, that to mention "crisis" and "Microsoft" in the same breath sounds a little incomprehensible. GM and Ford were destined to have a crisis from the moment they bought labor peace at the expense of future customers. But they didn't really feel it until, 20 years later, their customer were gone and they had to sell their finance divisions to buy a few quarters more time to find a solution. Microsoft could go on into what are now unforeseeable futures without figuring out that DRM and "Trusted" computing are antithetical to personal computing.
Re:glass houses (Score:4, Insightful)
In OSS, there is no management apparatus behind it. If there are, say, two sound libraries, the one that offers most or easiest implementation to the person who has to use it will be used. The person using it decides. And IMO, that's the person that should decide.
Re:The usual "big company" blues (Score:4, Insightful)
2. The problem at MS isn't some big corp mumbo-jumbo where folks don't want to see other people get ahead. It's the stack ranking combined with the requirement that the individual needs to demonstrate their successes. So as an engineer you need to sell what you've personally done to your boss so he can sell it to the the other bosses when your rank is being decided. Which is a shit ass system. Go read mini-msft for a bit.
3. Generally speaking that 9-5er who is consistently working on the crap code that you're too good to write is the guy that pays the bills. The genius who's always spazzing out and showing up at noon because he was up all night checking in broken ass shit, fuck that guy.
Re:Kafkaesque (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Uh.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Reality Check 101.
The Slashdot Geek is not Microsoft's core market.
Your employer likes the idea of Trusted Computing.
To the home user, WPA is Click. Click. Done. He doesn't hate Microsoft. He has never hated Microsoft. He lives in a country where corporate hardball is the true national sport.
DRM is paying $56 for two years of Y! Unlimited through your debit card in a seasonal promotion.
Wise up before it is too late.
Windows 2015? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, they have to do something after Vista. And it's been a long time since I've heard of anything out of that advanced-OS research group they had going, the one that was supposed to totally redesign everything.
Maybe they're thinking that Apple didn't have a bad idea with OS X
Sounds farfetched, but then again if you had told me in 1994 or 1996 that Apple would completely toss out the MacOS kernel and buy somebody else's rather than developing it in house, I would have laughed at you, too.
Even if they never go down that road, the fact that it's been mentioned here means someone at MS must have at least thought about it. If they could find a way to produce a Linux derivative that people could easily migrate to, but not away from, I think they'd jump on it in a second.
Re:why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not exactly, but close enough. (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually WGA is a pain in the ass if he's using a pirated copy of Windows, which isn't atypical; somebody needs their OS reinstalled and because their computer never came with any installation media, they get a friend to help them out, except that the friend uses some hot ISOs they grabbed from #cablemodemwarez or Kazaa. The person may even be entitled to a legit copy of Windows on their computer, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily running one. A lot of the people I heard complaining about WinXP's WGA were in that category (because people who pirated it themselves are probably smart enough to know why it won't validate and don't try).
Also, a lot of people hate Microsoft. Aside from the IRS, Microsoft probably gets cursed at more often than any entity in existence. Every time a computer crashes, chances are somebody is mentally (or verbally) cursing Microsoft. They just don't hate Microsoft enough to want to do anything different. Outside of Microsoft fanboys, I haven't found anyone who's really enthused about Windows (or most other MS products) in general. They're not terribly exciting. But they're good enough. In fact, Microsoft's corporate motto ought to be those two words: "Good enough." When you're on top, that's the only standard that matters -- the standard you have to maintain so that people won't get fed up enough to leave.
Reality Check (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, have you ever worked for an organization this large? I have. Several times, unfortunately. It may not be acceptable, but it is , in fact, the norm. It's very easy to communicate a clear, concise corporate vision to 50 employees; it becomes exponentially more difficult as the number of employees rises. An organization of 50 is limber and agile, able to turn on a dime. 70,000 is a lumbering behemoth barreling forward under its own momentum heedless of the need to change direction.
Yeah, yeah, easy to get around that nit pick. (Score:4, Insightful)
OK, how about, "Hey, all of you:
but neglecting those hundreds paid to astroturf, who's opinion is neither respected or listened to.
The way everyone there danced around "hard" questions, it should be obvious that one or two people are actually making decisions that others must follow or quit. The results of those decisions are equally obvious, a second rate product from a hated company. Those at M$ are going to be the ones who know all of the wrongs better than anyone else. None can miss the summary opinion offered by Rob:
Yeah, it's that bad.
Re:glass houses (Score:3, Insightful)
How is that any different than the state of Open Source Software?
Probably because "Open Source Software" has never pretended to be otherwise?
Or more likely, because "Open Source Software" isn't trying to control how you use it.
Re:just what I've always said (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not so sure about that. It seems to me that they care more about dominating and crushing competition, than about money. For Microsoft, "winning" is not about earning more than the competition, it's about cutting off the oxygen and killing them.
Of course, once the competition is killed, a monopoly is established and profits can be made.
This, of course, makes Microsoft an even more evil company.
Free market and large corporations (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem when it happens to divisions inside the same company is that, unlike for free software projects and small companies, there isn't a objective market to determine who is going to flourish and who is going to wither away. Inside the same organization, it becomes a political game of influence and connections. This is much less efficient than a free market, and is in fact similar to a planned economy (which tends to become inefficient once the initial drive dies out.
This is actually also the sound economic reason why large companies tend to outsource as many tasks as possible. By outsourcing it they can create a market of smaller companies trying to serve their needs, and thus regain some of the lost efficiency.
Re:why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Then your employer is run by idiots. After all, the company doesn't have control over the TPM either! Think of it this way: if it screws up on a home machine, you lose access to your vacation photos. If it screws up on a business machine, it can cripple the whole company. And that goes for WGA too.
What kind of idiot do you have to be to trust your business to a third party? And don't even get me started on governments using Windows...d00d!1! u r soo l33t!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm curious what would you like us to infer from your usage? It's harder to type anyway, unless you're an uber l33t typer too.
"Imagine working for a company that is tolerated, at best, in many social circles. Imagine being a computer science graduate, going to a class reunion, telling people you work for Microsoft, and watching your former classmates slowly back away as if you'd just told them you had a venereal disease." Yeah, it's that bad.
I cannot defend Microsoft's questionable business practices but, as a place to work I doubt it's that bad. As long as I work with good people, management is tolerable, enjoy my job, and my children and wife are taken care of then why does it matter what your old college "buddies" think. I'd tell them, FUCK YOU!! Who goes to those things anyways? Probably full of sad, single people.
And the comment about the Zune...
"Tyler Welch, a Zune marketing guy, seemed to understand that there's a delicate balance between satisfying the movie and music companies enough that they'll sell content for online devices and giving customers the unrestricted use and copying freedoms they demand. And instead of giving some sort of flip or PR-speak canned response, he admitted that he had no ready way to solve the conflict between these competing constituencies and that this is something it's going to take a long time to work out."
Well no shit, I could have told him that. It's quite clear that the ball is in the **AA's court. Another comment:
"I'm sure Vista is wonderful. I'm sure XBox is great, too. A Microsoft person said so."
Zing!! He really stuck it to the man there. What about the other couple million people who have spoken with their wallets?
About the avoiding of questions. This is not an uncommon practice when outsiders are asked to tour a company. Think of it as preemptive damage control. The last thing they need is a rogue marketing guy to start spouting his opinion on random questions, especially ones not related to marketing. It's kind of like asking a White House tour guide how our current lobbying system is ruining our government.
Hypochondriac's epitaph: "I knew it..." (Score:4, Insightful)
My father once told me: "you cannot be neutral between good and evil". Sometimes a report may be called biased when it's just trying to give a neutral description of biased facts. At the risk of pulling a Godwin [wikipedia.org] here, would you expect a report on Nazi Germany to present a description of their efforts on recycling used toothpaste tubes as a counterbalance of their prosecution of Jews?
Roblimo didn't seem to be biased to me, unless he lied about the basic facts in his report. If he actually was required to sign an NDA in order to visit the "Microsoft Home of the Future", if he was given evasive answers to simple questions like those he made about Steve Ballmer's threats against Linux users, or about "working with the Open Document Format (ODF), acceptance of the GNU General Public License (GPL) as a legitimate software license, how DRM built into Vista may anger users", etc, then his report isn't biased at all, it seems more like a neutral report on a strongly distorted situation.
Re:Your opinion does not matter. (Score:3, Insightful)
So, when the GP said "I'm not sure what MS thought they were going to get by inviting a "true believer""
I said maybe that was just some people inside with respect/admiration for guys like slashdot people that wanted them around. If I was working for Microsoft, I sure could have slipped this brilliant idea to some middle manager. Sure they could not avoid the propaganda, but they would come for free, and I could have the opportunity to show them some cool stuff.
Re:just what I've always said (Score:3, Insightful)
Being successful in the marketplace and "ruining" competitors doesn't make one "evil." If I sell better lemonade than the stand down the street and put them out of business through my superior marketing and distribution, that doesn't mean I'm evil. I agree that Microsoft's OEM deals in the 90s were anti-competitive, but that also doesn't make someone evil. Evil is a very subjective, religious term that is grossly misused by Slashdotters.
They do care about quality; their legacy codebase makes it difficult to produce any. Obvious this is something to fault them for, but to claim they only care about money is silly. All companies care about financial returns for their efforts.