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)
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Could it be... terror?
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:why? (Score:4, Funny)
If you are reading this...
Corporate anthropomorphism still sucks.
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.
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It's not, actually. At my last class reunion (for high school, as my University is too large for this sort of thing to work) people were quite interested and excited to learn that I worked for Microsoft, and wanted to learn more about the company and how it worked. They thought it was really cool. Your mileage may vary, of course. I don't try to disguise my affiliation with Microsoft when I'm out in bars or cafes, either. There's no point. Virtually everyone in Seattle has a friend or
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Re:why? (Score:4, Informative)
Now I'm over the major part of the Linux learning curve! The view from up here is much nicer, and I have Microsoft to thank for it.
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.
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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.
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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...
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Because they are losing customers to Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft is friendly to Linux because with SuSE they may be able to win some deals that require Linux - and with close interactions to Linux companies they can tune their FUD campaigns to combat it more effectively.
Also, loyal partners (90% of our sales are on the Microsoft stack) are finding Linux extremely valuable (our prototyping is all done on Linux/Ruby/Rails/Postgresql) - and yes, I've done demos with Microsoft where the server in the sales demo is 100% Linux/Ruby/Rails/Postgresql in a virtual machine. At one point they were even paying us to do the ports of some of our stuff when we said we were having a hard time porting to sql server (some of the extended index types that PostgreSQL has that sql server doesn't).
They see that Linux is important to their customers and partners - and desperately try to understand it.
So why, you may ask, are we such a loyal microsoft partner - we're doing government sales; and their washington sales&marketing (lobbyests?) have been more supportive of us than oracle or IBM have.
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:5, Funny)
"If you are going to kill someone, you should be able to smile at them when you pull the trigger."
Ring any bells?
Novell Headquarters: "Hey! We just got a cool wood horsie from Microsoft! Lets put it in the Board room!"
glass houses (Score:4, Insightful)
How is that any different than the state of Open Source Software?
not trolling either...
Re:glass houses (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably because "Open Source Software" has never pretended to be otherwise?
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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: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.
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-Eric
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I think that part of the nature of the OS model is that often when a project forks the number of developers (and support people, and users, which are likely intersecting groups) increases.
I know this doesn't always happen. Sometimes the fork may kill the entire project.
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Examples of poor performance when direction is lost: Novell, Corel, Sears
Examples of increased success by forking: RedHat, Novell
(Yes, I see the apparent contradiction. Working out what I mean is left to the reader.)
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: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.
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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
Re:glass houses (Score:4, Insightful)
-matthew
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.
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:glass houses (Score:4, Funny)
Unfortunately for you, I'm a spelling pedant (with only one 'n')!
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 infl
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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 mana
What were they thinking? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What were they thinking? (Score:5, Funny)
What I was going to say was:
Newsflash: Pro-Linux reporter invited to visit Microsoft and gives biased report.
Later on in this show: A group of nuns visit Amsterdam and don't enjoy it.
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:Speaking of that (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What were they thinking? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well, you could have... wait for it... RTFA and see that clearly his personal opinions did enter into his review and saved yourself the time it took you to type that first sentence.
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It's called irony. You know, it's like goldy and bronzy, only it's made of iron...
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Your opinion does not matter. (Score:3, Informative)
It seems sometimes that Slashdot readers think that everybody in a company think the same, eat the same, say the same. ... Microsoft is full of real people that probably cares about their job and just want to show it in the best light.
How nice and diverse they are does not matter. The company sues public schools and is at war with free software. No one in a position to change that was mentioned and no changes should be anticipated. This trip was pure propaganda.
You may be under the delusion that M$
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So, when the GP said "I'm not sure what MS thought they were going to get by inviting a "true believe
They only found 10 people? (Score:5, Funny)
I think they could have looked a little harder for people "not friendly" to MS.
Re:They only found 10 people? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:They only found 10 people? (Score:5, Funny)
I can see it right now:
FROM: Press Junket Passport
TO: Anonymous Coward
SUBJ: Formal Press Junket Invite
Dear Mr. Coward,
We have decided you are unfriendly towards Microsoft and we ask that you join Slashdot's Roblimo on a tour of our Redmond campus. You will have limited access to staff but you will get a great feeling for th excitement that is rippling through our campus. Don't think of it like a UN envoy being led around internment camps. Think of it as a freedom tour!
If you see any chairs near broken glass, best to be quiet and keep moving, fast.
If you have any questions, please wait till the end of the tour. You will be signing an NDA and will not be allowed to post this to Slashdot or your personal journal (http://slashdot.org/~anonymous/journal) after completion of the tour.
Please let us know what kind of caffeinated drinks you want during your tour.
Sincerely,
Media Relations Team
Microsoft
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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...
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Then Microsoft should be easy to be split up in a few independant companies?
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Ok, I keep seeing this claim that Microsoft was way behind the Internet curve... and I always wonder, "compared to WHAT?" MacOS at the time didn't even supply TCP/IP with the OS, you had to download a third-party control panel called MacTCP. God knows Linux hardly worked at all in that timeframe. Meanwhile, Windows 95 supported ethernet and modems all built-in and came with a browser.
In w
disconnected fiefdoms (Score:3, Insightful)
Everything you need to know from TFA... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
Moo (Score:4, Funny)
It's true (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't want to do this old cliche, but... (Score:2, Funny)
Three steps (Score:4, Funny)
step 2. Get famous
step 3. Get invited to Redmond for a free weekend and a Zune
step 4. Sell the Zune on ebay
step 5. PROFIT!
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Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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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.
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MVPs (Score:5, Informative)
"There are people who love Microsoft. The company has an active Most Valuable Professional (MVP) program that encourages outside volunteers to help other users."
Now, this doesn't specifically say that MVPs all love Microsoft, but I think that's the conclusion most people would draw from the above statements. As an MVP (C#) I'd just like to say that MVPs don't all love Microsoft. I'm more positive about MS than I used to be, partly as a result of meeting some great and really smart employees, partly due to some good technologies coming out of Redmond (along with not so great ones, certainly) - and no doubt freebies have a certain amount of influence.
However, this doesn't make me a Microsoft shill, and it doesn't mean I dislike non-MS software where appropriate (for instance, I prefer Eclipse to Visual Studio, even though I prefer C# to Java). In the MVP community there's plenty of irritation with certain bits of Microsoft. MVPs are often valued within the community because they're not shills, and won't always say things are rosy. I'm not saying we're completely unbiased - MS treats us very nicely, and we'd have to be inhuman not to be swayed at all by that - but that's a long way from the implication of the quote above. I've certainly never had any pressure put on me to be "nicer" about MS in newsgroup/blog posts.
Just thought I'd try to clarify things a bit.
Video (Score:2)
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.
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: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.
Fiefdoms?! Blame the video games... (Score:4, Funny)
The executive staff is playing too much Age of Empires, and everyone else is playing too much Gears of Wars. Microsoft was a better company when Minesweeper was the only game in town.
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Screw you, Minesweeperite! Solitaire or death!
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.
My two cents on Rob's excellent writeup (Score:2)
The repeated "I can't comment on that, I'm a product marketing guy" it totally weak and speaks volumes about their lack of accountability. I was surprised you didn't push Nick White ("Mr. Cut off the Conversation") to have their "lawyers who make all patent decisions" meet with you guys
Re:My two cents on Rob's excellent writeup (Score:5, Informative)
What some Slashdot readers seem to have missed (possibly because they read only part of the article, if any of it) is that the negative comments about Microsoft's corporate culture came from Microsoft employees. I said clearly that I asked questions of many "unauthorized" people. I didn't quote any of them by name because I was there to write a story, not to get some poor guy fired for being more open with me than he was supposed to be.
I have never believed that all Microsoft employees are evil. Most of the ones I know personally are decent people. I have seen the company do a lot of bizarre things, and it's still threatening Linux users in an unseemly way, but I don't think Nick White or many of the other 70,000 Microsoft employees are behind any of that or even like it. That kind of behavior comes from top management, which *from what Microsoft employees have told me* may change before long. And almost of the Microsoft people I have talked to "informally" considered Ray Ozzie the most likely successor to Steve Ballmer, and told me they thought he'd be a better boss. I have no idea if any of this is true.
We'll see.
Or, to use the traditional cliche, "only time will tell."
- Robin
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:We're listening (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately for Microsoft, Open Source advocates don't care about kickbacks, most of them are in it for the true advancement of technology. If Microsoft is really listening, play nicely! I think the biggest thing Microsoft could do to avoid the harsh criticisms from the open source community is to open up your protocols, work with standard groups to develop open standards so everyone can play nicely together.
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.
So let me get this straight . . . (Score:2)
So all I have to do to get a paid trip to Seattle is to hate MS and write about it? In that case: Hey Bill, Wind0ze suxx0rs, L1nux 1337!
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.
Microsoft is Anti-Everyoneelse (Score:4, Interesting)
closed mind (Score:3, Interesting)
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: (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.
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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 i
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?
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Well, why don't we look at the actual questions?
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And I said something different?
If by "vista disaster" you mean it will very likely be installed in a couple of hundred million computers in the next five years, I guess you have a point. Nothing else because of sheer inertia, Vista will be no different than Windows 95, 2000 or XP were. Let me guess, you predicted the same "disaster" when XP was released, right?
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DiBona's hilarious anecdote refers to people who are in middle management positions at Microsoft. I never once said "coders" would suddenly become managers and change Microsoft. Your opinion is an interesting one, but an opinion nonetheless.
Crap or not (which is again your opinion), it's installed in a few hundred million computers around the world. Barring a nuclear war, s
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I heard it hear on
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