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.
why? (Score:2, Interesting)
What were they thinking? (Score:3, Interesting)
disconnected fiefdoms (Score:5, Interesting)
I say this with experience: this is what Microsoft has pretty much *always* been, by design. Except for the guy with the lousy haircut, Microsoft intentionally divided into business units that were to behave as independent "companies." Each had their own vision, their own agenda, their own tactics on how to get there. Just trying to get an App's new feature melted into the System side of the house for anyone to use... it was like murder. Nevermind a Systems guy telling the Apps folks why they shouldn't rely on the broken older features like metafiles. And then as the antitrust issues were creeping in, everyone saw this Chinese Wall between the Apps and Systems divisions as a *good* thing. Of course, that meant that they couldn't turn and leverage new trends like modems and ftp and this newfangled http thing, but they figured that once it became ubiquitous, everyone would just naturally buy Microsoft products on inertia alone. We see how that's worked out...
It's true (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:glass houses (Score:3, Interesting)
For another, traditional wisdom (depending on how you define it, I guess) would say that the fact that Windows is entirely developed by one company should lead to greater project cohesion. Which it may have done; some might say this is why Windows has traditionally been easier to use. However, this illustrates why it would be a problem for it to degenerate into disconnected fiefdoms; it could lose an advantage.
Lastly, looking at Ubuntu, I think that open source developers are either beginning to figure out how to be cohesive despite being relatively disconnected people all over the world (they have after all been doing this for a while), or possibly Ubuntu is just paying people to do that part of the job that nobody else wants to.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
The usual "big company" blues (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine you're a programmer somewhere and are now told to hire 3 people to complete your team. What will you hire? Well, as a good programmer and a "honest" person trying to do the best for your company, you will hire the best people your budget can buy.
The reality is very different, though. Especially in a dog-eat-dog company world, where your boss is monitoring your and your team's progress closely. You will never hire people who're better than you, because you could suddenly end up with one of them being your boss because he gets promoted ahead of you. So you will only hire people who are at max as good as you are.
Even if you try to be "honest", you'll get a lot of pressure from the other teams who resort to this tactic because they want to save their job. Your team must not be better than theirs, which would be easy if you're hiring best material. Try it and you'll be the primary target for any company mobbing. You broke the rules.
And why make yourself your life harder than essentially necessary?
MS is also facing another problem a company faces when such changes set in. Meetings and bureaucracy weigh people down and wear them out who want to create and shape, who want to drive things forwards. The 9-5 guys mentioned above don't care, hey, a meeting is more or less time to let your mind wander and keep yourself busy with more important things (like, what color should your new car have?). But people who are there for the reason that they want to create and shape new and exciting things get bored. Also, MS isn't amongst the top payers in the biz anymore.
So the movers and shakers start looking around for new grounds to play on. And companies like Google are more than happy to scoop them up.
The end result, and so far MS is still far from this, is a company that is plagued by bureaucratic, fearful people who do anything to keep their job because they know themselves that they are unfit to fill the position they have, the position they got after the "good" people left and they were bumped up on the ladder. So they wrap everything up in so much red tape that it LOOKS like they're doing something useful, but essentially all that happens is them trying to protect their job.
MS hasn't reached that point yet. But I can see them moving towards it if they don't find a way to get out of it. Momentum will certainly carry MS further for a while, like an oil tanker without its engines running they will keep rolling for a long while. Unfortunately, that momentum also works against them, inside the company. They'll have to restart that engine soon.
Re:"Disconnected fiefdoms" (Score:3, Interesting)
I worked with a guy in his sixties who had a lot of experience in the business world. He told me companies are a lot like people. As children they're nibble, quick, and go through a lot of growing pains, then as they grow older they get hardening of the arteries.
Fiefdoms (Score:2, Interesting)
You could have said the same thing about them in 1997. I've often wondered, but I'm pretty sure it's that way on purpose.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:glass houses (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:disconnected fiefdoms (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:glass houses (Score:5, Interesting)
It is different because F/OSS has never had the single-minded goal that MS did in the 80's and 90's. "A computer on every desktop and in every home" has to be one of the best mission statements of any organization anywhere. It is actionable at all levels, from negotiating ubiquitous OEM deals to ensuring user-friendly features.
The problem facing MS now is that they have achieved their mission and have nothing to replace it with. In a decade we've gone from Win3.1's breakout to XP, which is a stable, fully-featured OS that satisfies the vast majority of needs of the vast majority of users. I run Linux (Slackware, which I've run since 0.96 days) on my servers and one laptop, but XP does everything I want on my business laptop and Windows development machine (some customers want Windows apps--go figure.) It's not like I'm a natural MS customer, it's just that their OS actually serves my needs.
MS is like Alexander the Great after his conquest of the East. Far from weeping that there were no more worlds to conquer, he was purportedly thinking about western conquests when he died. But his great mission in life, the conquest of Persia and it's dependencies, was finished. He had to pause and consider what he was going to do next before going on, whereas before that the mission was clear and all that mattered was its execution. (Note to history pendants: yeah, yeah, yeah.)
What we know about MS is: they are sitting on a mountain of cash, and they have a history of flailing around before figuring out what to do next. I expect we'll see a lot of very expensive flailing on the next few years. It'll be an interesting show that we all should enjoy watching.
Re:Everything you need to know from TFA... (Score:3, Interesting)
Neither side are perfect, here (Score:2, Interesting)
As a minor detour here, I'm going to observe that I've noticed that my karma is slipping. There are a lot of areas where I disagree fairly adamantly with the conventional opinion held around here, and it seems to be the case recently that people are losing tolerance for my lack of adherence to the party line. If that's true, my karma level is probably only going to continue to deteriorate, since I am aware that many of my own perspectives are antagonistic to the ideology of the stereotypical Linux user, and said perspectives are not going to change simply because it turns out that they're unpopular. I feel that it is a deeply sad testament to the Linux community's inability to tolerate dissent. Said inability has always been present, but it seems to have become rather more chronic in recent years.
Going back to the topic of Microsoft, I really feel that what is needed is a generous dose of rational objectivity on both sides. Ballmer genuinely might have issues in the area of sociopathy, but as Roblimo seemed to point out, he is only a single individual, and I would not be surprised to find that it is in fact true that he does not have the level of support within the company that he might like. Ballmer is exceedingly bad for Microsoft; not least because he continues to reinforce the image of the company as a whole as sociopathic and amoral, when in reality, it is genuinely possible that said amorality primarily resides with him alone.
The part of the article that primarily annoyed me was where it was suggested that Microsoft conform to Bruce Perens' expectations. I'm still trying to understand who exactly died and made Perens God. There is a lot about Debian which I find enormously vexatious, both technically and politically...not least of which is the truly rage-inducing apparent tendency on the part of the Debian developers to try to insist that the rest of the planet conform to their will.
That however has actually caused me to realise what it is that has brought about my own fall from grace around here, however...not even so much that I express contrary opinions, but that I do so with such a degree of anger. I won't apologise for that, however...there is a lot about the way the more vocal segment of Linux's userbase thinks which genuinely *does* make me extremely angry. Microsoft wanted a software monopoly...at least a segment of Linux's userbase want an ideological monopoly. That's what I'm resisting...and it's why my karma is falling on this site; because I won't simply shut up and get with the program. It makes me wonder how many other people have been exiled from here for similar reasons.
Can you honestly tell me that the one is more morally desirable than the other?
Microsoft is Anti-Everyoneelse (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Uh.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, why don't we look at the actual questions?
Fair question. Microsoft officials have stated over and over again that they regard Linux and its users as 'cancer' and 'communists'. As recently as a few weeks ago Ballmer declared that Linux was chock full of Microsoft IP, and the Novell deal gave them a way to monetize that "stolen" IP.
Not only is this a good question, but one that demands an answer.
Fair question. He identifies a specific use for the hardware and sofware, and asks if the elevated hardware requirements and associated costs make Vista less price competitive compared to Apple hardware and software. I don't see how you can find anything loaded in this -- it's either an Apple-based video editing system is cheaper or a comparable Vista-based system is.
Again, a fair question especially in light of Ballmer's recent comments on Linux and alleged infringements of Microsoft's alleged IP. It may not be a question that a marketing manager can answer, but it's certainly one he should be prepared for, especially when speaking to a group of Linux users and supporters. The one about software patents is particularly apt given that Microsoft has as much to lose as anyone from loose application of patents.
A fair question. Microsoft has made a pretty nifty little app but designed it deliberately to run only on their operating system and browser. Why lock users of other OSs and browsers out when there's no real technical reason for doing so (not to mention when the product being copied works just as well on Mac and Linux as it does on Windows)?
All fair questions, and all questions that should be answered. They are certainly questions I want answered before I consider purchasing Vista or advising anyone else to.
Re:glass houses (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think the decentralisation factor here is their problem, at all. A decentralised structure has lots of advantages, and it's really the only efficient way to organise any entity of such size.
The problem is the opposite - despite a certain degree of decentralisation in fact, it's still nominally a monolithic company, and the central authorities are imposing a huge overhead, a huge beaureacracy, on top of that. This is a company with MANY layers of managers. They're trying to tie the semi-feudal structure on the ground together with these layers after layers of managers, leading back to the central authority, and to impose a single over-arching rule over all of them.
Microsoft would work much better if they started spinning off operations left and right and quit trying to control what happens on the ground.
closed mind (Score:3, Interesting)