Up until a few months ago, the term DevOps was simply another buzzword which filled my Twitter feed that evoked a particular idea but wasn’t really concrete to me. Similar to other buzzwords related to software development such as NoSQL and Agile, it is hard to pin down what the definitive definition of the term is just what it wasn’t. If you aren’t familiar with DevOps, a simple definition is that the goal of DevOps is to address this common problem when building online services

The Big Switch

A couple of months ago, my work group took what many would consider a rather extreme step in eliminating this wall between developers and operations. Specifically, Bing Ads transitioned away from the traditional Microsoft engineering model of having software design engineers (aka developers), software design engineers in test (testers) and service operations (ops) and merged all of these roles into a single engineering role. As it states in the Wikipedia entry for DevOps, the adoption of DevOps was driven by the following trends

1. Use of agile and other development processes and methodologies
2. Demand for an increased rate of production releases from application and business unit stakeholders
3. Wide availability of virtualized and cloud infrastructure from internal and external providers
4. Increased usage of data center automation and configuration management tools

All of these trends already applied to our organization before we made the big switch to merge the three engineering disciplines into a DevOps role. We’d already embraced the Agile development model complete with two to four week sprints, daily scrums, burn-down charts, and senior program managers playing the role of the product owner (although we use the term scenario owner). Given our market position as the underdog to Google in search and advertising, our business leaders always wants to ship more features, more quickly while maintaining high product quality. In addition, there’s a ton of peer pressure for all of us at Microsoft to leverage internal tools Windows Azure and Autopilot for as much of our cloud services needs as possible instead of rolling our own data centers and hardware configurations.

Technically our organization was already committed to DevOps practices before we made the transition that eliminated roles. However the what the organization realized is that a bigger change to the culture was needed for us to get the most value out of these practices. The challenge we faced is that the organizational structure of separate roles for developers, testers and operations tends to create these walls where one role feels their responsibility is for a certain part of the development cycle and then tosses the results of their efforts down stream to the next set of folks in the delivery pipeline. Developers tended to think their job was to write code and quality was the role of testers. Testers felt their role was to create test frameworks and find bugs then deployment was the role of the operations team. The operations team tended to think their role was keeping the live site running without the ability to significantly change how the product was built. No matter how open and collaborative the people are on your team, these strictly defined roles create these walls. My favorite analogy for this situation is like comparing two families who are on a diet trying to lose weight and one of them has fruit, veggies and healthy snacks in the pantry while the other has pop tarts, potato chips, chocolate and ice cream in theirs. No matter how much will power the latter family has, they are more likely to “cheat” on their diet than the first family because they have created an environment that makes it harder for them to do the right thing.

Benefits

The benefits of fully embracing DevOps are fairly self-evident so I won’t spend time on discussing the obvious benefits that have been beaten to death elsewhere. I will talk about the benefits I’ve seen in our specific case of merging the 3 previous engineering roles into a single one. The most significant change is the cultural change towards how we view automation of every step related to deployment and monitoring. It turns out that there is a big difference when approaching a problem from the perspective of taking away people’s jobs (i.e. automating what the operations team does) versus making your team more effective (i.e. reducing the amount of time the engineering team spends on operational tasks that can be automated thus giving us more time to work on features that move the business forward). This has probably the biggest surprise, although obvious in hindsight, as well as the biggest benefit.

We’ve also begun to see faster time to resolve issues from build breaks to features failing in production due to fact that the on-call person (we call them Directly Responsible Individuals or DRIs) is now a full member of the engineering team who is expected to be capable of debugging and fixing issues encountered as part of being on-call. This is an improvement from prior models where the operations team were the primary folks on-call and would tend to pull in the development team as a last resort outside of business hours.  

As a program manager (or product manager if you’re a Silicon Valley company), I find it has made my job easier since I have fewer people to talk to because we’ve consolidated engineering managers. No longer having to talk to an development manager separately from the manager of systems engineers separately from a test manager has made communication far more efficient for me.

Challenges

There are a number of risks with any organization taking the steps that we have at Bing Ads. The biggest risk is definitely attrition especially at a company like Microsoft where these well-defined roles have been a part of the culture for decades and are still part & parcel of how the majority of the company does business. A number of people may feel that this is a bait and switch on their career plans with the new job definitions not aligning with how they saw their roles evolving over time. Others may not mind that as much but may simply feel that their skills may not be as valuable in the new world especially as they now need to learn a set of new skills. I’ve had one simple argument when I’ve met people with this mindset. The first is that DevOps is here to stay. The industry trends that have had more and more companies from Facebook and Amazon to Etsy and Netflix blurring the lines between developers, test engineers and operations staff will not go away. Companies aren’t going to want to start shipping less frequently nor will they want to bring back manual deployment processes instead of automating as much as possible. The skills you learn in a DevOps culture will make you more broadly valuable wherever they find their next role whether it is a traditional specialized engineering structure or in a DevOps based organization.

Other places where we’re still figuring things out are best practices around ownership of testing. We currently try to follow a “you build it, you test it, you deploy it” culture as much as possible although allowing any dev to deploy code has turned out to be bit more challenging than we expected since we had to ensure we do not run afoul of the structures we had in place to stay compliant with various regulations. Testing your own code is one of topics where many in the industry have come out against as being generally a bad idea. I remember arguments from my college classes from software engineering professors about the blind spots developers have about their software requiring the need for dedicated teams to do testing. We do have mitigations in place such as test plan reviews and code reviews to ensure there are alternate pairs of eyes looking at the problem space not just the developer who created the functionality. There is also the school of thought that since the person who wrote the code will likely be the person woken up in the middle of the night if it goes haywire at an inopportune moment, there is a sense of self preservation that will cause more diligence to be applied to the problem than was the case in the previous eras of boxed software which is when most of the anti-developer testing arguments were made.

Further Reading

• DevOps on Wikipedia

• What is DevOps? by Damon Edwards

• Release Engineering at Facebook based on a talk by Chuck Rossi

• Ops, DevOps and PaaS (NoOps) at Netflix by Adrian Cockcroft

 

Now Playing: Eminem – Rap God

 

It isn't hard to find criticisms of Microsoft's employee appraisal system. Whether it's almost decade old complaints such as Mini-Microsoft’s Microsoft Stack Ranking is not Good Management or more recent forays into blaming it for the company's "decline" such as Kurt Eichenwald's 2012 Vanity Fair opus Microsoft’s Lost Decade or the follow up The Poisonous Employee-Ranking System That Helps Explain Microsoft’s Decline from Slate, there are many who would lay the practice of ranking employees on a vitality curve as the root cause of any problems facing Microsoft today. Kurt Eichenwald's article persuasively makes that argument in the in excerpt below

Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. The system—also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”—has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor. …

For that reason, executives said, a lot of Microsoft superstars did everything they could to avoid working alongside other top-notch developers, out of fear that they would be hurt in the rankings. And the reviews had real-world consequences: those at the top received bonuses and promotions; those at the bottom usually received no cash or were shown the door. …

“The behavior this engenders, people do everything they can to stay out of the bottom bucket,” one Microsoft engineer said. “People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn’t get ahead of me on the rankings.” Worse, because the reviews came every six months, employees and their supervisors—who were also ranked—focused on their short-term performance, rather than on longer efforts to innovate. …

This reads as a very damning indictment of the Microsoft performance appraisal system. Although I've now been at Microsoft for 12 years and a manager for the last three of them, the purpose of this blog post isn't to defend or expand on the details of performance reviews at Microsoft. The purpose of this blog post is to point out that one often needs multiple data points before coming to sweeping generalizations when discussing something as complex as the success or failure of technology companies.

 

The Four Horsemen: Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple

A few years ago, Eric Schmidt described the "gang of four" companies driving innovation and growth in tech as Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple.  The implication being that these were the four leading companies in the tech industry. For the purpose of this blog post, I’ll take this implication at face value and will consider these 4 companies as leading examples of what other companies should aim to emulate in the technology industry. In fact, I’ll go one further and reference Mobile is eating the world, autumn 2013 edition by Benedict Evans where he cites these four companies as “setting the agenda” whereas when Microsoft is mentioned, it’s only to speak about it’s “growing irrelevance”.

Now that we’ve established that these four companies are worthy of emulation, how exactly do these companies evaluate employee performance anyway?

Unfortunately, I could not find any information either off-the-record from friends or on the Internet about how performance reviews work at Apple. On the other hand, there has been enough written about the other three companies that we can still draw some conclusions about how performance appraisal works at relevant technology companies. 

Let’s start with Facebook. A good overview of Facebook’s performance review system can be found in the answers to the Quora question, What does Facebook's performance review process look like? Below is the answer from Molly Graham who used to work in Facebook HR

Then there is a (roughly) two week period of calibration where managers meet to look at the assessments of everyone on their team and ensure that people are rated correctly relative to their peers. Facebook has seven performance assessments as well as a guideline for what % of employees should be at each level, however it is explicitly not a forced curve, particularly for small teams. The curve exists to ensure that extraordinary performance is rewarded (I believe the distribution is such that only 2% or less of employees are given the highest rating every cycle) and that if hard conversations need to happen, they happen.

Calibration happens at the team level and at the senior management level (Mark, Sheryl, and all of their direct reports look at the numbers for the whole company, lists of the highest performers, lists of the lowest performers, etc). Performance Assessments are final and they are used to determine compensation like raises, bonuses, and additional equity grants. Facebook gives out raises and additional equity once a year but they do promotions and bonuses twice a year. Compensation at Facebook is almost entirely formulaic with multipliers (based on the Performance Assessment) for bonuses, raises, and additional equity grants.

Hmmm, so it looks like Facebook uses a curve but the argument seems to be that it is to ensure that extraordinary performance can be rewarded yet there is a quota on how many extraordinary performers that can exist according to the system.

Let’s see what Amazon does in the area of employee appraisals next. For this topic, I’ll use an excerpt from an article in Business Insider which references a leaked document that has since been pulled and an article by Amazon chronicler, Brad Stone. The Business Insider article is titled Amazon Has A Brutal System For Employees Trying To Get Promoted and is excerpted below

In the second meeting, which takes place in September or October, the leaders talk some more about who's getting a promotion, and talk about who is doing well and who is doing poorly. Amazon's managers group employees into three tiers: The top 20%, who are groomed for promotions, the next 70% who are kept happy, and the bottom 10%, who are either let go, or told to get it together.

This system, which was created by Jeff Bezos, is supposed to cut down on politics and in-fighting. Unfortunately, Stone says it has the opposite effect."Ambitious employees tend to spend months having lunch and coffee with their boss’s peers to ensure a positive outcome once the topic of their proposed promotion is raised in [the meetings]," says Stone.

Stone also notes that promotions are very limited at Amazon, so if you fight for your employee to get a promotion, it means someone else's employee gets snubbed. And anyone in the room can nuke someone else's promotion.

OK, so it seems Amazon also has a curve and it seems more explicit that the bottom 10% are targeted for negative messaging. But it seems there is a new concept we’re being introduced to. A peer review based system for promotion which in theory is in place to reduce cronyism (e.g. working for a boss that’s a friend who then promotes you for simply having a pulse) which in reality turns into politics-driven affair since everyone needs to like you for you to get ahead at the company. Good luck, rocking the boat in such environments.

So far we’re not really seeing much alternative ideas for tech companies that decide Microsoft’s employee appraisal system is one they don’t want to emulate. Let’s see what we can learn from how performance reviews are done at Google to turn the tide. For this I think we’ll look at two perspectives on the Google performance appraisal system. First here is an excerpt from a review on Glassdoor from a Google employee that loves everything about working at the company describing the performance review system.

Promotion and work performances is entirely reliant on peer reviews. In other words, to get ahead at Google and to get a positive performance review, you must get positive reviews from your fellow co-workers. Your manager might love you, but if your co-workers don't like you, you have some work to do. Managers are also required to seek peer review from those they manage. (I have never seen this before in my career.) Senior level employees from other fields are also encouraged to seek peer reviews from people in other departments. For example, engineers need reviews from people other than engineers in order to advance. For this reason, a culture of cooperation is endemic at Google. This is great because the percentage of "cowboys" that seems common at other high tech companies is quite low at Google. It also fosters an awareness of the type of contribution made by people outside your department, since everyone reviews people in other fields, and therefore must learn a bit about what others do outside their sphere.

Peer reviews sound like a great idea. Now we have a performance appraisal technique we can emulate that is different from applying recommended or forced curves as Facebook and Amazon do. Before embracing this whole heartedly, let’s balance our perspective with excerpts from Quora answers to What are the major deficiencies of the performance review process at Google?

Google's original intention in designing the byzantine monstrosity known as "Perf" was noble: to provide multiple avenues toward success. Someone who got mediocre reviews from his manager but excellent peer reviews could move up, or at least laterally. (This prevented the scenario where a manager uses mediocre or even negative reviews in order to prevent transfers, a known problem at Google.) It was an "OR-gate". If you had good managerial reviews or good peer reviews or objectively demonstrable accomplishments, you'd be in good standing and move up.Eventually, it became an AND-gate. To get a promotion or even a transfer, you had to have managerial blessing and good peer reviews and high visibility and the willingness (as Piaw Na alluded) to spend considerable amounts of time and energy marketing yourself. So it became a morale-killing, time-consuming "No Machine" that people spent a considerable amount of time figuring out how to game. The typical corporate manager-as-SPOF dynamic that Perf was invented to extinguish was strengthened by the "objective" soothsaying they call "calibration scores". – Anonymous

The big one is that engineers have to apply for a promotion and put together their own promotion packet. There's no human being who can do that and not end the process thinking, "Oh boy, I did so much work. I really deserve a promotion." Since the process doesn't promote everyone, that creates a number of disgruntled employees. Even if these employees were to eventually get promoted later, they tend to think, "I should have gotten this N quarters/years ago,", not "I'm so glad I got this promotion." The net result is that very few people are pleasantly surprised when they get promoted, while a lot of people get disappointed. – Piaw Na

Although there isn’t forced ranking in place, it does looks like Google one-upped Amazon in making it difficult to climb up their corporate ladder by having a promotion process based on pleasing everyone.

 

In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is King

To summarize, so far it looks like Amazon and Facebook have fairly similar performance review structures as Microsoft much-lambasted system while Google seems to have a performance that seems to trade one set of problems for a different set. As an honorary mention, I’d like to point to the QPR system recently put in place at Yahoo by Marissa Mayer which is also a vitality curve based system.

This then raises the question of why if forced ranking and other similarly disheartening employee appraisal processes are commonplace in the industry that tech blogs makes it seem the practice is limited to Microsoft and then blame it for the challenges the company has faced in recent years? From what I can tell, the reason is twofold. The first is that Microsoft employees stick around at the company for far longer than peers at other companies. From the Geekwire article Amazon, Google employees ranked as ‘least loyal’ which looks at data from PayScale, we learn

Amazon.com tied for second for the least loyal employees with a median tenure of one year, while Google tied for fourth with just 1.1 years of tenure on average. Apple, meanwhile, tied for 36th at two years…Microsoft, however, was all the way down the list tied for 259th with an average tenure of four years.

Most people at companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google either just got there or left before they would have to deal with the frustration of being disappointed by the performance appraisal system over multiple cycles. On the other hand, the average Microsoft employee has been at the company for far longer and when they do leave have had multiple brushes with the performance appraisal system. Just from a raw numbers perspective given average tenure at the company and number of employees, there are a lot more people who you can find that would complain about the performance review system at Microsoft than say at Amazon which has very similar systems in place.

The second reason I believe there are more people willing to talk to the press about the performance review system at Microsoft than at say Google or Amazon, is that it doesn’t fit the narrative to air those complaints. When you see a chart like below, it is easy to look for simple answers to explain the differences in the stock market’s belief in the success of Microsoft versus the “four horsemen”.

On the other hand, it is also hard for employees to complain when the company they work for is winning in new markets and is being praised by the industry press. Glassdoor is full of complains about poor work/life balance at Apple but no one is going to write a damning expose about the company’s employee morale problems as long as the company doesn’t slip in the marketplace. However once a company starts to falter in the marketplace, everything they do is bad and is the cause of their demise according to the pundits. I’ve been amused by the number of articles blaming Blackberry’s dual CEO model for the company’s failures even though that is effectively the Facebook model if you ask anyone who works there and one could argue at one point Google had a triple CEO model with Eric, Larry & Sergey all running the company in their different ways.

 

Everything Sucks

The bottom line is that performance appraisal systems at large companies always suck for the set of reasons covered extremely well by Steven Sinofsky in his blog post Realities of Performance Appraisal. He does a good job of pointing out some of the realities of businesses and human nature that guarantee that these processes will always come across as soul crushingly awful when applied at large enough scale including 

• Performance systems conflate performance and compensation with organizational budgets. No matter how you look at it, one person cannot be evaluated and paid in isolation of budgets. The company as a whole has a budget for how much to pay people (salary, bonus, stock, etc.) No matter what an individual’s compensation is part of a system that ultimately has a budget. The vast majority of mechanical or quantitative effort in the system is not about one person’s performance but about determining how to pay everyone within the budget. While it is desirable to distinguish between professional development and compensation, that will almost certainly get lost once a person sees their compensation or once a manager has to assign a rating. Any suggestion as to how to be more fair, allow for more flexibility, provide more absolute ratings, or otherwise separate performance from compensation must still come up with a way to stick to a budget. The presence of a budget drives the existence of a system. There is always a budget and don’t be fooled by “found money” as that’s just a budget trick.

This is the fundamental conceit of performance appraisal systems. For large companies they are primarily about answering the question of “how do we distribute our promotion and bonus budget?” by drawing a fuzzy line between employee work activities and how much money they actually have to spend (e.g. policy that only 2% of Facebook employees can have extraordinary rewards is a function of budgets not a natural law of distribution of extraordinary employees at Facebook or any other company in the world). Companies can’t just say everyone who does an excellent job gets $1,000 bonus because they may not have $1,000 to spend per employee in the budget.  

And with that you have the answer to the question in the title of this blog post.

Now Playing: The Game – Martians vs Goblins (featuring Tyler the Creator & Lil Wayne)

 

I’ve had about four hours of sleep but can’t seem to go back to sleep. There’s a pain of loss that feels like a death in the family and I hope writing this down helps in some way of dealing with it.

Yesterday it was announced that Steven Sinofsky is leaving Microsoft. As someone who considered Steven to be a role model of executive leadership and a source of my faith in the future of Microsoft this is a big shock. Part of me acknowledges that change is a natural part of life and nothing lasts forever but this is still a difficult incident to digest. Steven was a leader who understood how to leverage the strengths of an organization to build world class products while protecting the organizations from its inherent self defeating nature. As the saying goes a group is its own worst enemy.

When I think about Steven Sinofsky’s leadership style, I’m reminded of Joel Spolsky’s guide to interviewing which has the following succinct description of a great hire

In principle, it’s simple. You’re looking for people who are

1. Smart, and
2. Get things done.

That’s it. That’s all you’re looking for. Memorize that. Recite it to yourself before you go to bed every night. You don’t have enough time to figure out much more in a short interview, so don’t waste time trying to figure out whether the candidate might be pleasant to be stuck in an airport with, or whether they really know ATL and COM programming or if they’re just faking it.

People who are Smart but don’t Get Things Done often have PhDs and work in big companies where nobody listens to them because they are completely impractical. They would rather mull over something academic about a problem rather than ship on time. These kind of people can be identified because they love to point out the theoretical similarity between two widely divergent concepts. For example, they will say, “Spreadsheets are really just a special case of programming language,” and then go off for a week and write a thrilling, brilliant whitepaper about the theoretical computational linguistic attributes of a spreadsheet as a programming language. Smart, but not useful. The other way to identify these people is that they have a tendency to show up at your office, coffee mug in hand, and try to start a long conversation about the relative merits of Java introspection vs. COM type libraries, on the day you are trying to ship a beta.

People who Get Things Done but are not Smart will do stupid things, seemingly without thinking about them, and somebody else will have to come clean up their mess later. This makes them net liabilities to the company because not only do they fail to contribute, but they soak up good people’s time. They are the kind of people who decide to refactor your core algorithms to use the Visitor Pattern, which they just read about the night before, and completely misunderstood, and instead of simple loops adding up items in an array you’ve got an AdderVistior class (yes, it’s spelled wrong) and a VisitationArrangingOfficer singleton and none of your code works any more.

One of the interesting problems that faces a large software company is that it is very easy to become full of smart people that don’t get things done and then institutionalize this behavior by crowning them software architects or some equivalent. Steven’s leadership style encouraged a process and organizational structure, which you can read about in his book One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making, that encourages getting stuff done by limiting the ability of the organization and people within the organization to take up positions where they strayed far from the goals of shipping a valuable product on time and within budget.

There are lots of people who disagreed with his philosophy and approach but it is hard to argue with the results of his efforts. Under him the team that shipped Windows Vista turned around and shipped Windows 7, the big ass table became one of Oprah's favorite things and one that’s close to home is that a mish mash of confusing consumer synchronization products became SkyDrive.

The way things get done in Steven’s organizations is so straightforward it hurts. You spend some time thinking about what you want to build, you write it down so the entire team has a shared vision of what they’re going to build and then you build it. The part where things become contentious is that getting things done (aka shipping) requires discipline. This means not changing your mind unless you have a good reason to after you’ve decided on what to build and knowing when to cut loses if things are coming in late or over budget. A great post about what it is like for an engineer working in a Steven Sinofsky organization that embraces these principles was written by Larry Osterman about Windows 7.

Each of the feature crews I’ve worked on so far has had dramatically different focuses – some of the features I worked on were focused on core audio infrastructure, some were focused almost entirely on UX (user experience) changes, and some features involved much higher level components. Because each of the milestones was separate, I was able to work on a series of dramatically different pieces of the system, something I’ve really never had a chance to do before.

In Windows 7, senior management has been extremely supportive of the various development teams that have had to make the hard decisions to scale back features that were not going to be able to make the quality bar associated with a Windows release – and there absolutely are major features that have gone all the way through planning only to discover that there was too much work associated with the feature to complete it in the time available. In Vista it would have been much harder to convince senior management to abandon features. In Win7 senior management has stood behind the feature teams when they’ve had to make the tough decisions. One of the messages that management has consistently driven home to the teams is “cutting is shipping”, and they’re right. If a feature isn’t coming together, it’s usually far better to decide NOT to deliver a particular feature then to have that feature jeopardize the ability to ship the whole system. In a typical Windows release there are thousands of features and it would be a real shame if one or two of those features ended up delaying the entire system because they really weren’t ready.

The process of building 7 has also been dramatically more transparent – even sitting at the bottom of the stack, I feel that I’ve got a good idea about how decisions are being made. And that increased transparency in turn means that as an individual contributor I’m able to make better decisions about scheduling. This transparency is actually a direct fallout of management’s decision to let the various feature teams make their own decisions – by letting the feature teams deeper inside the planning process, the teams naturally make better decisions.

Of course that transparency works both ways. Not only were teams allowed to see more about what was happening in the planning process, but because management introduced standardized reporting mechanisms across the product, the leads at every level of the hierarchy were able to track progress against plan at a level that we’ve never had before. From an individual developer’s standpoint, the overhead wasn’t too onerous – basically once a week, you were asked to update your progress against plan on each of your work items. That status was then rolled up into a series of spreadsheets and web pages that allowed each manager to track all the teams’ progress against plan. This allowed management to easily and quickly identify which teams were having issues and take appropriate action to ensure that the schedules were met (either by simplifying designs, assigning more developers, or whatever).

Transparency was also a cornerstone of Steven’s leadership style. The level of transparency into the organization’s decision making process via formalized mechanisms as described above as well as his personal decision making process has been unprecedented in my experience at Microsoft. It may not be as transparent as Google’s TGIF but on the other hand, I don’t think there’s anywhere else at Microsoft where visibility into how and why decisions are made was as clear as in the Windows organization.

At the end of the day, I’ll miss Steven and his influence on Microsoft. I’d like to think I became a better manager and leader from my time working spent working in his organization as well as the multiple exchanges we had over the years. Thanks for the memories.

Now Playing: Fall Out Boy - Thnks fr th Mmrs

 

Yesterday I gave a talk about how Metro style apps and websites can take advantage of the fact Single Sign On (SSO) with Windows Live ID in Windows 8, announced the availability of the Live SDK for Windows Developer Preview and Windows Phone and demoed some of the upcoming Windows Metro style apps that are built on the same platform. You can watch the talk embedded below and you can go here to download the video in various formats or download the slides.

Now Playing: V.I.C. - Get Silly

 

I’m currently at the Microsoft BUILD conference where I’m slated to talk about some of the work my team and others at Microsoft have done in making it easy for Metro-style apps to leverage Live services like Windows Live ID, SkyDrive, Hotmail, and Windows Live Messenger. I’ve been pretty busy at work as regular readers of my blog can tell given my last post was in July. The past few months have been exhilaratingly fun and crazy hectic as well. It’s great to finally be able to share some of the work we’ve been doing with the world.

If you’re interested in learning more, I recommend visiting http://dev.live.com which contains links to the Live SDK and talks about a number of key developer concepts that were introduced in the Windows Developer Preview.

If you’re at the conference, I’d recommend attending my talk and some of the other talks listed below

Power your app with Live services
Windows 8 enables users to log into any device with a single Microsoft account and continuously interact with your app on all of their devices. Your customers will expect the ability to bring their documents, photos, videos, and contacts with them as they move between their devices. Come see how you can enable great on-the-go experiences by integrating Live services into your app. You’ll learn how to take advantage of single sign on using a Microsoft account instead of creating your own authentication infrastructure. You’ll also see how to use the SkyDrive service for free cloud-based storage of your customers’ photos, videos, and documents. We’ll dive into the details of the Live SDK and show how to use Visual Studio to easily enable these experiences

The complete developer's guide to the SkyDrive API
More and more users are becoming familiar with the concept of "the Cloud." More than ever, users are storing their data in the Cloud. SkyDrive is one of the world's leading cloud storage and document collaboration services. Learn how you can easily allow your users to read and write documents, photos, and other files from/to their SkyDrive via simple REST APIs

Create experiences that span devices
Your customers will expect your app to deliver a continuous experience even as they switch between apps and move between their devices. Come learn how to ensure your customers never lose their place in your app even when it is moved to the background or accessed on a new device. You will also discover how to enable customers to personalize your app with settings and ensure those settings flow automatically to all of their devices. We will show you how you can enable this continuous, cloud-powered experience with only a few lines of code.

If you missed the BUILD keynote yesterday and want a quick overview of what was released, the 5 minute video below captures the highlights of the keynote

Now Playing: Jay-Z and Kanye West - Who Gon Stop Me? 

 

Earlier this week, Microsoft took the initial wraps off of the next version of Windows (aka "Windows 8"). As someone who loves personal computing and loves the Web, there’s a lot I find exciting about what we just announced. The official announcement Previewing ‘Windows 8 states the following

The demo showed some of the ways we’ve reimagined the interface for a new generation of touch-centric hardware. Fast, fluid and dynamic, the experience has been transformed while keeping the power, flexibility and connectivity of Windows intact.

Here are a few aspects of the new interface we showed today:

• Fast launching of apps from a tile-based Start screen, which replaces the Windows Start menu with a customizable, scalable full-screen view of apps.

• Live tiles with notifications, showing always up-to-date information from your apps.

• Fluid, natural switching between running apps.

• Convenient ability to snap and resize an app to the side of the screen, so you can really multitask using the capabilities of Windows.

• Web-connected and Web-powered apps built using HTML5 and JavaScript that have access to the full power of the PC.

• Fully touch-optimized browsing, with all the power of hardware-accelerated Internet Explorer 10.
…
Today, we also talked a bit about how developers will build apps for the new system. Windows 8 apps use the power of HTML5, tapping into the native capabilities of Windows using standard JavaScript and HTML to deliver new kinds of experiences. These new Windows 8 apps are full-screen and touch-optimized, and they easily integrate with the capabilities of the new Windows user interface. There’s much more to the platform, capabilities and tools than we showed today.
…
The video below introduces a few of the basic elements of the new user interface. Although we have much more to reveal at our developer event, BUILD (Sept. 13 - 16 in Anaheim, Calif.), we’re excited to share our progress with you.

If you’re a web developer this represents an amazing opportunity and one that should fill you with excitement. Of course, you shouldn’t take the words of a Microsoft employee but should also listen to what even people with cynical opinions of Microsoft are saying such as Mike Mace in his article Windows 8: The Beginning of the End of Windows where he writes

So it's far too early to make any judgments on Windows 8, which Microsoft just previewed (link).  There are an incredible number of ways it could go wrong.

But.  I've got to say, this is the first time in years that I've been deeply intrigued by something Microsoft announced.  Not just because it looks cool (it does), but because I think it shows clever business strategy on Microsoft's part.  And I can't even remember the last time I used the phrase "clever business strategy" and Microsoft in the same sentence.
…
What it means to the rest of us
The history of platform transitions is that they are huge opportunities for developers.  They reset the playing field for apps and devices.  Look at the history:  The leaders in DOS applications (Lotus, Word Perfect, etc) were second rate in GUI software.  The leaders in GUI apps (Adobe, Microsoft, etc) were not dominant in the web.  It's actually very rare for a software company that was successful in the old paradigm to transfer that success to the new one.  Similar turnover has happened in hardware transitions (for example, Compaq rode the Intel 386 chip to prominence over IBM in PCs).  And yes, there is a hardware transition as part of Windows 8, since it will now support ARM chips, and you'll want a touchscreen to really take advantage of it.

So if you're running an existing PC hardware or software company, ask yourself how a new competitor could use the platform transition to challenge your current products.  Here's a sobering thought to keep you awake tonight: the odds are that the challengers will win.  The company most at risk from this change is the largest vendor of Windows apps, Microsoft itself.  Microsoft Office must be completely rethought for the new paradigm.  You have about 18 months, guys.  Good luck.

By the way, web companies are also at risk.  Your web apps are designed for a browser-centric, mouse-driven user experience.  What happens to your app when the browser melts into the OS, and the UI is driven by touch?  If you think this change doesn't affect you, I have an old copy of WordStar that you can play with.  Google and Facebook, I am talking to you.

You should read the rest of Mike’s post because it has an interesting perspective. I strongly believe in the core premise of the article that Windows 8 is disruptive. Not only is it disruptive to the software industry as a whole but it will be disruptive even for the way Microsoft does business today. When Steve Ballmer said Windows 8 will be Microsoft's riskiest product bet he wasn’t kidding.

Out of disruption comes opportunity and if you’re a web developer you have a front row seat in taking advantage of this opportunity. Don’t waste it. You should register for the BUILD conference. I’ll be there and with any luck I may even get to give a talk or two. See you there. 

Now Playing: Jay-Z - On To The Next One (featuring Swizz Beats)

 

Software companies love hiring people that like solving hard technical problems. On the surface this seems like a good idea, unfortunately it can lead to situations where you have people building a product where they focus more on the interesting technical challenges they can solve as opposed to whether their product is actually solving problems for their customers.

I started being reminded of this after reading an answer to a question on Quora about the difference between working at Google versus Facebook where Edmond Lau David Braginsky wrote

Culture:
Google is like grad-school. People value working on hard problems, and doing them right. Things are pretty polished, the code is usually solid, and the systems are designed for scale from the very beginning. There are many experts around and review processes set up for systems designs.

Facebook is more like undergrad. Something needs to be done, and people do it. Most of the time they don't read the literature on the subject, or consult experts about the "right way" to do it, they just sit down, write the code, and make things work. Sometimes the way they do it is naive, and a lot of time it may cause bugs or break as it goes into production. And when that happens, they fix their problems, replace bottlenecks with scalable components, and (in most cases) move on to the next thing.

Google tends to value technology. Things are often done because they are technically hard or impressive. On most projects, the engineers make the calls.

Facebook values products and user experience, and designers tend to have a much larger impact. Zuck spends a lot of time looking at product mocks, and is involved pretty deeply with the site's look and feel.

It should be noted that Google deserves credit for succeeding where other large software have mostly failed in putting a bunch of throwing a bunch of Ph.Ds at a problem at actually having them create products that impacts hundreds of millions people as opposed to research papers that impress hundreds of their colleagues. That said, it is easy to see the impact of complexophiles (props to Addy Santo) in recent products like Google Wave.

If you go back and read the Google Wave announcement blog post it is interesting to note the focus on combining features from disparate use cases and the diversity of all of the technical challenges involved at once including

• “Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication”
• “It's an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop”
• “The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the ‘live’ concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services”
• “The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone's Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service”
• “Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services”

The product announcement read more like a technology showcase than an announcement for a product that is actually meant to help people communicate, collaborate or make their lives better in any way. This is an example of a product where smart people spent a lot of time working on hard problems but at the end of the day they didn't see the adoption they would have liked because they they spent more time focusing on technical challenges than ensuring they were building the right product.

It is interesting to think about all the internal discussions and time spent implementing features like character-by-character typing without anyone bothering to ask whether that feature actually makes sense for a product that is billed as a replacement to email. I often write emails where I write a snarky comment then edit it out when I reconsider the wisdom of sending that out to a broad audience. It’s not a feature that anyone wants for people to actually see that authoring process.

---

Some of you may remember that there was a time when I was literally the face of XML at Microsoft (i.e. going to http://www.microsoft.com/xml took you to a page with my face on it ). In those days I spent a lot of time using phrases like the XML<-> objects impedance mismatch to describe the fact that the dominate type system for the dominant protocol for web services at the time (aka SOAP) actually had lots of constructs that you don’t map well to a traditional object oriented programming language like C# or Java. This was caused by the fact that XML had grown to serve conflicting masters. There were people who used it as a basis for document formats such as DocBook and XHTML. Then there were the people who saw it as a replacement to for the binary protocols used in interoperable remote procedure call technologies such as CORBA and Java RMI. The W3C decided to solve this problem by getting a bunch of really smart people in a room and asking them to create some amalgam type system that would solve both sets of completely different requirements. The output of this activity was XML Schema which became the type system for SOAP, WSDL and the WS-* family of technologies. This meant that people who simply wanted a way to define how to serialize a C# object in a way that it could be consumed by a Java method call ended up with a type system that was also meant to be able to describe the structural rules of the HTML in this blog post.

Thousands of man years of effort was spent across companies like Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and BEA to develop toolkits on top of a protocol stack that had this fundamental technical challenge baked into it. Of course, everyone had a different way of trying to address this “XML<->object impedance mismatch which led to interoperability issues in what was meant to be a protocol stack that guaranteed interoperability. Eventually customers started telling their horror stories in actually using these technologies to interoperate such as Nelson Minar’s ETech 2005 Talk - Building a New Web Service at Google and movement around the usage of building web services using Representational State Transfer (REST) was born. In tandem, web developers realized that if your problem is moving programming language objects around, then perhaps a data format that was designed for that is the preferred choice. Today, it is hard to find any recently broadly deployed web service that doesn’t utilize on Javascript Object Notation (JSON) as opposed to SOAP.

---

The moral of both of these stories is that a lot of the time in software it is easy to get lost in the weeds solving hard technical problems that are due to complexity we’ve imposed on ourselves due to some well meaning design decision instead of actually solving customer problems. The trick is being able to detect when you’re in that situation and seeing if altering some of your base assumptions doesn’t lead to a lot of simplification of your problem space then frees you up to actually spend time solving real customer problems and delighting your users. More people need to ask themselves questions like do I really need to use the same type system and data format for business documents AND serialized objects from programming languages?

Now Playing: Travie McCoy - Billionaire (featuring Bruno Mars)

 

A few days ago someone asked how long I've been at Microsoft and I was surprised to hear myself say about 7 years. I hadn't consciously thought about it for a while but my 7th anniversary at the company is coming up in a few weeks. I spent a few days afterwards wondering if I have a seven year itch and thinking about what I want to do next in my career. 

I realized that I couldn't be happier right now. I get to build the core platform that powers the social software experience for half a billion users with a great product team (dev, test, ops) and very supportive management all the way up the chain. This hasn't always been the case. 

I went through my seven year itch period about two years ago. I had always planned for my career at Microsoft to be short since I've never considered myself to be a big company person. Around that time, I looked around at a couple of places both within and outside Microsoft. I had some surprisingly good hiring experiences and some that were surprisingly bad (as bad as this thread makes the Google hiring process seem, trust me it is worse than that) then came away with a surprising conclusion. The best place to build the kind of software I wanted to build was at Microsoft. I started working in online services at Microsoft because I believed Social Software is the Platform of the Future and wanted to build social experiences that influence how millions of people connect with each other. What I realized after my quick look around at other opportunities is that no one has more potential in this space than Microsoft. Today when I read articles about our recent release, it validates my belief that Microsoft will be the company to watch when it comes to bringing "social" to software in a big way. 

~

In my almost seven years in the software industry, I've had a number of friends go through the sense of needing change or career dissatisfaction which leads to the seven year itch. Both at Microsoft and elsewhere. Some of them have ended up dealing with this poorly and eventual became disgruntled and unhappy with their jobs which turns into a vicious cycle.  On the other hand, I know a bunch of people that went from being unhappy or disgruntled about their jobs to becoming happy and productive employees who are more satisfied with their career choices. For the latter class of people, here are the three most successful, proactive steps I've seen them make

1. Change your perspective: Sometimes employees fall into situations where the reality for working on product X or team Y at company Z is different from their expectations. It could be a difference in development philosophy (e.g. the employee likes Agile practices like SCRUM and the product team does not practice them), technology choice (e.g. wanting to use the latest technologies whereas the product team has a legacy product in C++ with millions of customers) or one of many other differences in expectations versus reality.

   The realization that leads to satisfaction in this case is that it isn't necessarily the case that what the organization is doing is wrong (e.g. rewriting an app from scratch just to use the latest technologies is never a good idea), it's just that what the employee would prefer isn't a realistic option for the organization or is just a matter of personal preference (e.g. the goal of the organization is to deliver a product on time and under budget not to use a specific development practice). Of course, these are contrived examples but the key point should be clear. If you're unhappy because your organization doesn't meet your expectations it could be that your expectations are what needs adjusting.

2. Change your organization: As the Mahatma Gandhi quote goes, Be the change you wish to see in the world. Every organization can be changed from within. After all, a lot of the most successful projects at Microsoft and around the software industry came about because a passionate person had a dream and did the leg work to convince enough people to share that dream. Where people often stumble is in underestimating the amount of leg work it takes to convince people to share their dream (and sometimes this leg work may mean writing a lot of code or doing a lot of research). .

   For example, when you go from reading Harvard Business School articles like Microsoft vs. Open Source: Who Will Win? in 2005 to seeing an Open Source at Microsoft portal in 2008, you have to wonder what happens behind the scenes to cause that sort of change. It took the prodding of a number of passionate Open Source ambassadors at Microsoft as well as other influences to get this to happen.

3. Change your job: In some cases, there are irreconcilable differences between an employee and the organization they work for. The employee may have lost faith in the planned direction of the product, the product's management team or the entire company as a whole. In such cases the best thing to do is to part ways amicably before things go south.

   Being on an H-1B visa I'd heard all sorts of horror stories about being the equivalent of an indentured servant when working for an American software company but this has proven to be far from the truth. There is an H-1B transfer process that allows you to switch employers without having to re-apply for a visa or even inform your current employer. If you work at a big company and are paper-work averse, you can stick to switching teams within the company. This is especially true for Microsoft where there are hundreds of very different products (operating systems, databases, Web search engines, video game console hardware, social networking software, IT, web design, billing software, etc) with very different cultures to choose from.

These are the steps that I've seen work for friends and coworkers who've been unhappy in their jobs who've successfully been able to change their circumstances. The people who don't figure out how to execute one of the steps above eventually become embittered and are never a joy to be around.

Now Playing: Estelle (feat. Kanye West) - American Boy

 

Reading depressing layoff related blog posts like George Oates's Not quite what I had in mind and the Valley Wag's Laid-off Yahoos packing heat for Jerry Yang? reminded me that I've been meaning to post about open positions on our team for a while.

The team I work for is responsible for the "social graph", "news feed" and online presence platforms that power various Windows Live experiences. You can see some of our recent efforts in action by downloading Windows Live Essentials (beta) or visiting my profile on Windows Live and browsing around. If you are interested in building world class software that is used by hundreds of millions of people and the following job descriptions interest you then send me your resume 

Software Design Engineer (Developer)

The Windows Live Messenger service is the backbone of one of world’s leading instant messaging services. The service enables hundreds of millions of users to communicate efficiently using text, voice, video and real-time status updates. This high-profile business is growing to accommodate mobile devices, social networking, web applications and other new areas.
We are seeking a developer with a fondness and talent for working on large-scale fault-tolerant distributed systems. The job involves working on the back-end components that maintain user state and route messages and notifications. In addition to improving the systems performance and resiliency, our team will tackle hard new problems such as
- Supporting new ways of addressing users (personas or aliases)
- Extending user state to support offline presence and presence views
- Creating a generic notification service
- implementing effective request throttling and load-balancing across datacenters.

Software Design Engineer/Test (Tester)

Looking for your next big challenge? How about building the next version of the world’s largest IM and social network platform?
We are looking for a great SDET with solid design, problem solving skills and exceptional track record to help build the next version of Windows Live Messenger and Social Network platform. The Messenger network is already one of the largest social networks on the planet, delivering BILLIONS of messages a day for HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of users world-wide.
The SDET role involves working on these next-generation services and proving they can be delivered to the massive scale required, with the quality our users have come to expect. Particular focus areas for this role are scalability, performance and reliability:
Scalability - building software systems to take each piece of hardware to its limits, identifying bottlenecks, removing them and pushing harder; while also, proving the system can grow linearly, as hardware is added. (…think 1,000s of machines).
Performance - ensuring consistently fast response times across the system by smoothly managing peak traffic -- which averages in the 10s of millions of simultaneous online connections.
Reliability - building online services that remain reliable under stress which the operations team is able to easily monitor, troubleshoot, and repair; enabling the aggressive up time requirements we aim for.

Email your resume to dareo@msft.com (replace msft with microsoft) if the above job descriptions sound like they are a good fit for you. If you have any questions about what working here is like, you can send me an email and I'll either follow up via email or my blog to answer any questions of general interest [within reason].

Now Playing: Rascal Flatts - Fast Cars and Freedom

 

Disclaimer: What follows are my personal impressions from using the beta version of Windows Azure. It is not meant to be an official description of the project from Microsoft, you can find that here. 

Earlier this week I scored an invite to try out the beta version of Windows Azure which is a new hosted services (aka cloud computing) platform from Microsoft. Since there's been a ridiculous amount of press about the project I was interested in actually trying it out by developing and deploying some code using this platform and sharing my experiences with others.

What is it?

Before talking about a cloud computing platform, it is useful to agree on definitions of the term cloud computing. Tim O'Reilly has an excellent post entitled Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing where he breaks the technologies typically described as cloud computing into three broad categories

1. Utility Computing: In this approach, a vendor provides access to virtual server instances where each instance runs a traditional server operating system such as Linux or Windows Server. Computation and storage resources are metered and the customer can "scale infinitely" by simply creating new server instances. The most popular example of this approach is Amazon EC2.
2. Platform as a Service: In this approach, a vendor abstracts away the notion of accessing traditional LAMP or WISC stacks from their customers and instead provides an environment for running programs written using a particular platform. In addition, data storage is provided via a custom storage layer and API instead of traditional relational database access. The most popular example of this approach is Google App Engine.
3. Cloud-based end user applications: This typically refers to Web-based applications that have previously been provided as desktop or server based applications. Examples include Google Docs, Salesforce and Hotmail. Technically every Web application falls under this category, however the term often isn't used that inclusively.

With these definitions clearly stated it is easier to talk about what Windows Azure is and is not. Windows Azure is currently #2; a Platform as a Service offering. Although there have been numerous references to Amazon's offerings both by Microsoft and bloggers covering the Azure announcements, Windows Azure is not a utility computing offering [as defined above].

There has definitely been some confusion about this as evidenced by Dave Winer's post Microsoft's cloud strategy? and commentary from other sources.

Getting Started

To try out Azure you need to be running Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista with a bunch of prerequisites you can get from running the Microsoft Web Platform installer. Once you have the various prerequisites installed (SQL Server, IIS 7, .NET Framework 3.5, etc) you should then grab the Windows Azure SDK. Users of Visual Studio will also benefit from grabbing the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio.

After this process, you should be able to fire up Visual Studio and see the option to create a Cloud Service if you go to File->New->Project.

Building Cloud-based Applications with Azure

The diagram below taken from the Windows Azure SDK shows the key participants in a typical Windows Azure service

The work units that make up a Windows Azure hosted service can have one of two roles. A Web role is an application that listens for and responds to Web requests while a Worker role is a background processing task which acts autonomously but cannot be accessed over the Web. A Windows Azure application can have multiple instances of Web and Worker roles that make up the service. For example, if I was developing a Web-based RSS reader I would need a worker role for polling feeds and Web role for displaying the UI that the user interacts with. Both Web and Worker roles are .NET applications that can be developed locally and then deployed on Microsoft's servers when they are ready to go.

Azure applications have access to a storage layer that provides the following three storage services

• Blob Storage: This is used for storing binary data. A user account can have one or more containers which in turn can contain one or more blobs of binary data. Containers cannot be nested so one cannot create hierarchical folder structures. However Azure allows applications to work around this by (i) allowing applications to query containers based on substring matching on prefixes and (ii) delimiters such as '\' and other path characters are valid blob names. So I can create blobs with names like 'mypics\wife.jpg' and 'mypics\son.jpg' in the media container and then query for blobs beginning with 'mypics\' thus simulating a folder hierarchy somewhat. 

• Queue Service: This is a straightforward message queuing service. A user account can have one or more queues from which they can add items to the end of each queue and remove items from the front. Items have a maximum time-to-live of 7 days within the queue. When an item is retrieved from the queue, an associated 'pop receipt' is provided. The item is then hidden from other client applications until some interval (by default 30 seconds) has passed after which the item becomes visible. The item can be deleted from the queue during that interval if the pop receipt from when it was retrieved is provided as part of the DELETE operation.  The queue service is valuable as a way for Web roles to talk to Worker roles and vice versa.

• Table Storage: This exposes a subset of the capabilities of the ADO.NET Data Services Framework (aka Astoria). In general, this is a schema-less table based model similar to Google's BigTable and Amazon's SimpleDB. The data model consists of tables and entities (aka rows). Each entity has a primary key made of two parts {PartitionKey, RowKey}, a last modified timestamp and an arbitrary number of user-defined properties. Properties can be one of several primitive types including integer, strings, doubles, long integers, GUIDs, booleans and binary. Like Astoria, the Table Storage service supports performing LINQ queries on rows but only supports the FROM, WHERE and TAKE operators. Other differences from Astoria are that it doesn't support batch operations nor is it possible to retrieve individual properties from an entity without retrieving the entire entity.

These storage services are accessible to any HTTP client and not just Azure applications. 

Deploying Cloud-based Applications with Azure

The following diagram taken from the Windows Azure SDK shows the development lifecycle of an Windows Azure application

 

The SDK ships with a development fabric which enables you to deploy an Azure an application locally via IIS 7.0 and development storage which uses SQL Server Express as a storage layer which mimics the Windows Azure storage services.

As the diagram shows above, once the application is tested locally it can be deployed entirely or in part on Microsoft's storage and cloud computation services.

The Azure Services Platform: Windows Azure + Microsoft's Family of REST Web Services

In addition to Windows Azure, Microsoft also announced the Azure Services Platform which is a variety of Web APIs and Web Services that can be used in combination with Windows Azure (or by themselves) to build cloud-based applications. Each of these Web services is worthy of its own post (or whitepaper and O'Reilly animal book) but I'll limit myself to one sentence descriptions for now.

• Live Services: A set of REST APIs for consumer-centric data types (e.g. calendar, profile, etc) and scenarios (communication, presence, sync, etc). You can see the set of APIs in the Live Framework poster and keep up with the goings on by following the Live Services blogs.

• Microsoft SQL Services: Relational database in the cloud accessible via REST APIs. You can learn more from the SSDS developer center and keep up with the goings on by following the SQL Server Data Services team blog.

• Microsoft .NET Services: Three fairly different services for now; hosted access control, hosted workflow engine and a service bus in the cloud. Boring enterprise stuff. :) 

• Microsoft Sharepoint Services: I couldn't figure out if anything concrete was announced here or whether stuff was pre-announced (i.e. actual announcement to come at a later date).

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services: Ditto.

From the above list, I find the Live Services piece (access to user data in a uniform way) and the SQL Services (hosted storage) most interesting. I will likely revisit them in more depth at a later date.

The Bottom Line

From my perspective, Windows Azure is easiest viewed as a competitor to Google App Engine. As comparisons go, Azure already brings a number of features to the table that aren't even on the Google App Engine road map. The key important feature is the ability to run background tasks instead of just being limited to writing applications that respond to Web requests. This limitation of App Engine means you can't write any application that does any serious background computation like a search engine, email service, or RSS reader on Google App Engine. So Azure can run an entire class of applications that are simply not possible on Google App Engine.

The second key feature is that by supporting the .NET Framework, developers theoretically get a plethora of languages to choose from including Ruby (IronRuby), Python (IronPython), F#, VB.NET and C#. In practice, the Azure SDK only supports creating cloud applications using C# and VB.NET out of the box. However I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't be able to support development with other .NET enabled languages like IronPython. On the flipside, App Engine only supports Python and the timeline for it supporting other languages [and exactly which other languages] is still To Be Determined.

Finally, App Engine has a number of scalability limitations both from a data storage and a query performance perspective. Azure definitely does better than App Engine on a number of these axes. For example, App Engine has a 1MB limit per file while Azure has a 64MB limit on individual blobs and also allows you to split a blob into blocks of 4MB each. Similarly, I've been watching SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) for a while and I haven't seen or heard complaints about query performance.

Azure makes it possible for me to reuse my existing skills as a .NET developer who is savvy with using RESTful APIs to build cloud based applications without having to worry about scalability concerns (e.g. database sharding, replication strategies, server failover, etc). In addition, it puts pressure on competitors to step up to the plate and deliver. However you look at it, this is a massive WIN for Web developers.

The two small things I'd love to see addressed are first class support for IronPython and some clarity on the difference between SSDS and Windows Azure Storage services. Hopefully we can avoid a LINQ to Entities vs. LINQ to SQL-style situation in the future.

Postscript: Food for Thought

It would be interesting to read [or write] further thoughts on the pros and cons of Platform as a Service offerings when compared to Utility Computing offerings. In a previous discussion on my blog there was some consensus that utility computing approaches are more resistant to vendor lock-in than platform as a service approaches since it is easier to find multiple vendors who are providing virtual servers with LAMP/WISC hosting than it will be to find multiple vendors providing the exact same proprietary cloud APIs as Google, Amazon or Microsoft. However it would be informative to look at the topic from more angles, for instance what is the cost/benefit tradeoff of using SimpleDB/BigTable/SSDS for data access instead of MySQL running on multiple virtual hosts? With my paternity leave ending today, I doubt I'll have time to go over these topics in depth but I'd appreciate reading any such analysis.

Now Playing: The Game - Money

 

Someone at Microsoft forwarded me a link to danah boyd's announcement, I will be joining Microsoft Research in January where she writes

Guess who has a post-dissertation job? [Yes, that implies I'm actually going to finish this *#$@! dissertation.] ::bounce:: In January, I will be joining the newly minted Microsoft Research New England in Boston, MA. w00000t!!!!! I couldn't be more ecstatic.
…
It all began with Dopplr. Linda Stone noticed that I was swinging through Seattle and she called me up and told me that I had to do dinner with her. Linda's plots are always tremendous so of course I said yes. When I arrived, she introduced me to Jennifer Chayes and Christian Borgs, the physicists who were starting the new MSR lab. Jennifer immediately began interrogating me about my research and about social science more broadly. To say Jennifer & I clicked is a bit of an understatement. Like me, Jennifer is loud, crazy, and intense. We got along like peas in a pod and spent the night chattering away. When she told me that I should come work for her, I laughed it off and didn't think much about it. But I couldn't stop thinking about it.

Jennifer and Christian's vision for the lab aligned with my view of research. They believe in interdisciplinary work, believe in the ways that new ideas can come from unexpected collaborations. While I know a lot of social scientists who curl their nose at the idea of a lab full of physicists, mathematicians, and economists, I find that quite appealing. I love the idea of such a diverse group thinking about how the world works from different angles. Plus, meeting the folks at the new lab - Henry Cohn, Yael Kalai, Adam Kalai, and Butler Lampson - only made me more intrigued by it. Everyone was so ridiculously nice and even though we didn't work on the same problems we found funny intersections.

The more that I talked with folks at MSR, the more I fell in love with the possibility of going there. And then I started meeting with execs and realized that what MSR researchers were telling me fit with broader strategy. I met with Rick Rashid, the head of MSR, who explained why he started MSR and how he saw it fit into the company. I met with Ray Ozzie (who I've known and adored for quite some time) and he confirmed the importance of research for the future of Microsoft. Both of them made me feel fully confident that my approach to research would not only be tolerated but welcomed. Plus, there's a broad desire to understand the intersections between computing and all things social which is straight up my alley.

Congratulations to danah, I've always loved her research and I'm glad to see that she will continue contributing to the industry as a part of Microsoft Research. She is one of the few people out there doing real research into how social software is changing the lives of people on the Web and I'm glad Microsoft can be a part of that effort.

Besides her research papers, danah also have some interesting insights into the current goings on in the world of social networking sites like her post Facebook and Techcrunch: the costs of technological determinism and configuring users on Facebook's continued determination to delete user accounts that don't conform to the company's beliefs about how the site should be used. Her post knol: content w/out context, collaboration, capital, or coruscation which points out some of the shortcomings of Google's Knol when compared to Wikipedia is also another great recent post of note.

Good luck with the new job, danah.

Now Playing: Rascal Flatts - My Wish

 

Whenever you read stories about how Web companies like Facebook have 10,000 servers including 1800 database servers or that Google has one million servers, do you ever wonder how the system administrators that manage these services deal with deployment, patching, failure detection and system repair without going crazy? This post is the first in a series of posts that examines some of the technologies that successful Web companies use to manage large Web server farms.

Last year, Michael Isard of Microsoft Research wrote a paper entitled Autopilot: Automatic Data Center Management which describes the technology that Windows Live and Live Search services have used to manage their server farms. The abstract of his paper is as follows

Microsoft is rapidly increasing the number of large-scale web services that it operates. Services such as Windows Live Search and Windows Live Mail operate from data centers that contain tens or hundreds of thousands of computers, and it is essential that these data centers function reliably with minimal human intervention. This paper describes the first version of Autopilot, the automatic data center management infrastructure developed within Microsoft over the last few years. Autopilot is responsible for automating software provisioning and deployment; system monitoring; and carrying out repair actions to deal with faulty software and hardware. A key assumption underlying Autopilot is that the services built on it must be designed to be manageable. We also therefore outline the best practices adopted by applications that run on Autopilot.

The paper provides a high level overview of the system, it's design principles and the requirements for applications/services that can be managed by the system. It gives a lot of insight into what it takes to manage a large server farm while keeping management and personnel costs low.

The purpose of AutoPilot is to automate and simplify the basic tasks that system administrators typically perform in a data center. This includes installation and deployment of software (including operating systems and patches), monitoring the health of the system, taking basic repair actions and marking systems as needing physical repair or replacement.

However applications that will be managed by AutoPilot also have their responsibilities. The primary responsibility of these applications include being extremely fault tolerant (i.e. applications must be able to handle processes being killed without warning) and being capable of running in the case of large outages in the cloud (i.e. up to 50% of the servers being out of service). In addition, these applications need to be easy to install and configure which means that they need to be xcopy deployable. Finally, the application developers are responsible for describing which application specific error detection heuristics AutoPilot should use when monitoring their service.

Typical AutoPilot Architecture

 

The above drawing is taken from the research paper. According to the paper the tasks of the various components is as follows

The Device Manager is the central system-wide authority for configuration and coordination. The Provisioning Service and Deployment Service ensure that each computer is running the correct operating system image and set of application processes. The Watchdog Service and Repair Service cooperate with the application and the Device Manager to detect and recover from software and hardware failures. The Collection Service and Cockpit passively gather information about the running components and make it available in real-time for monitoring the health of the service, as well as recording statistics for off-line analysis. (These monitoring components are ―Autopiloted like any other application, and therefore communicate with the Device Manager and Watchdog Service which provide fault recovery, deployment assistance, etc., but this communication is not shown in the figure for simplicity.)

The typical functioning of the system is described in the following section.

What Does AutoPilot Do?

The set of machine types used by the application (e.g. Web crawler, front end Web server, etc) needs to be defined in a database stored by on the Device Manager. A server's machine type dictates what configuration files and application binaries need to be installed on the server. This list is manually defined by the system administrators for the application. The Device Manager also keeps track of the current state of the cluster including what various machine types are online and their health status.

The Provisioning Service continually scans the network looking for new servers that have come online. When a new member of the server cluster is detected, the Provisioning Service asks the Device Manager what operating system image it should be running and then images the machine with a new operating system before performing burn-in tests. If the tests are successful, the Provisioning Service informs the Device Manager that the server is healthy. In addition to operating system components, some AutoPilot specific services are also installed on the new server. There is a dedicated filesync service that ensures that the correct files are present on the computer and an application manager that ensures that the expected application binaries are running.

Both services determine what the right state of the machine should be by querying the Device Manager. If it is determined that the required application binaries and files are not present on the machine then they are retrieved from the Deployment Service. The Deployment Service is a host to the various application manifests which map to the various application folders, binaries and data files. These manifests are populated from the application's build system which is outside the AutoPilot system.

The Deployment Service also comes into play when a new version of the application is ready to be deployed. During this process a new manifest is loaded into the Deployment Service and the Device Manager informs the various machine types of the availability of the new application bits. Each machine type has a notion of an active manifest which allows application bits for a new version of the application to be deployed as an inactive manifest while the old version of the application is considered to be "active". The new version of the application is rolled out in chunks called "scale units". A scale unit is a group of multiple machine types which can number up to 500 machines. Partitioning the cluster into scale units allows code roll outs to be staged. For example, if you have a cluster of 10,000 machines with scale units of 500 machines, then AutoPilot could be configured keep roll outs to under 5 scale units at a time so that never more than 25% of the cloud is being upgraded at a time.

Besides operating system installation and deployment of application components, AutoPilot is also capable of monitoring the health of the service and taking certain repair actions. The Watchdog Service is responsible for detecting failures in the system. It does so by probing each of the servers in the cluster and testing various properties of the machines and the application(s) running on them based on various predetermined criteria. Each watchdog can report one of three results for a test; OK, Warning or Error. A Warning does not initiate any repair action and simply indicates a non-fatal error has occurred. When a watchdog reports an error back to the Device Manager, the machine is placed in the Failure state and one of the following repair actions is taken; DoNothing, Reboot, ReImage or Replace. The choice of repair action depends on the failure history of the machine. If this is the first error that has been reported on the machine in multiple days or weeks then it is assumed to be a transient error and the appropriate action is DoNothing. If not, the machine is rebooted and if after numerous reboots the system is still detected to be in error by the watchdogs it is re-imaged (a process which includes reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling the operating system as well redeploying application bits). If none of these solve the problem then the machine is marked for replacement and it is picked up by a data center technician during weekly or biweekly sweeps to remove dead servers.

System administrators can also directly monitor the system using data aggregated by the Collection Service which collects information from various performance counters is written to a large-scale distributed file store for offline data mining and to a SQL database where the data can be visualized as graphs and reports in a visualization tool known as the Cockpit. 

Now Playing: Nirvana - Jesus Doesn't Want Me For A Sunbeam

 

Recently I’ve been bumping into more and more people who’ve either left Google to come to Microsoft or got offers from both companies and picked Microsoft over Google. I believe this is part of a larger trend especially since I’ve seen lots of people who left the company for “greener pastures” return in the past year (at least 8 people I know personally have rejoined) . However in this blog post I’ll stick to talking about people who’ve chosen Microsoft over Google.

First of all there’s the post by Sergey Solyanik entitled Back to Microsoft where he primarily gripes about the culture and lack of career development at Google, some key excerpts are

Last week I left Google to go back to Microsoft, where I started this Monday (and so not surprisingly, I was too busy to blog about it)
…
So why did I leave?

There are many things about Google that are not great, and merit improvement. There are plenty of silly politics, underperformance, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, and things that are plain stupid. I will not write about these things here because they are immaterial. I did not leave because of them. No company has achieved the status of the perfect workplace, and no one ever will.

I left because Microsoft turned out to be the right place for me.
…
Google software business is divided between producing the "eye candy" - web properties that are designed to amuse and attract people - and the infrastructure required to support them. Some of the web properties are useful (some extremely useful - search), but most of them primarily help people waste time online (blogger, youtube, orkut, etc)
…
This orientation towards cool, but not necessarilly useful or essential software really affects the way the software engineering is done. Everything is pretty much run by the engineering - PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. While they do exist in theory, there are too few of them to matter.

On one hand, there are beneficial effects - it is easy to ship software quickly…On the other hand, I was using Google software - a lot of it - in the last year, and slick as it is, there's just too much of it that is regularly broken. It seems like every week 10% of all the features are broken in one or the other browser. And it's a different 10% every week - the old bugs are getting fixed, the new ones introduced. This across Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and more
…
The culture part is very important here - you can spend more time fixing bugs, you can introduce processes to improve things, but it is very, very hard to change the culture. And the culture at Google values "coolness" tremendously, and the quality of service not as much. At least in the places where I worked.
…
The second reason I left Google was because I realized that I am not excited by the individual contributor role any more, and I don't want to become a manager at Google.

The Google Manager is a very interesting phenomenon. On one hand, they usually have a LOT of people from different businesses reporting to them, and are perennially very busy.

On the other hand, in my year at Google, I could not figure out what was it they were doing. The better manager that I had collected feedback from my peers and gave it to me. There was no other (observable by me) impact on Google. The worse manager that I had did not do even that, so for me as a manager he was a complete no-op. I asked quite a few other engineers from senior to senior staff levels that had spent far more time at Google than I, and they didn't know either. I am not making this up!

Sergey isn’t the only senior engineer I know who  has contributed significantly to Google projects and then decided Microsoft was a better fit for him. Danny Thorpe who worked on Google Gears is back at Microsoft for his second stint working on developer technologies related to Windows Live.  These aren’t the only folks I’ve seen who’ve decided to make the switch from the big G to the b0rg, these are just the ones who have blogs that I can point at.

Unsurprisingly, the fact that Google isn’t a good place for senior developers is also becoming clearly evident in their interview processes. Take this post from Svetlin Nakov entitled Rejected a Program Manager Position at Microsoft Dublin - My Successful Interview at Microsoft where he concludes

My Experience at Interviews with Microsoft and Google

Few months ago I was interviewed for a software engineer in Google Zurich. If I need to compare Microsoft and Google, I should tell it in short: Google sux! Here are my reasons for this:

1) Google interview were not professional. It was like Olympiad in Informatics. Google asked me only about algorithms and data structures, nothing about software technologies and software engineering. It was obvious that they do not care that I had 12 years software engineering experience. They just ignored this. The only think Google wants to know about their candidates are their algorithms and analytical thinking skills. Nothing about technology, nothing about engineering.

2) Google employ everybody as junior developer, ignoring the existing experience. It is nice to work in Google if it is your first job, really nice, but if you have 12 years of experience with lots of languages, technologies and platforms, at lots of senior positions, you should expect higher position in Google, right?

3) Microsoft have really good interview process. People working in Microsoft are relly very smart and skillful. Their process is far ahead of Google. Their quality of development is far ahead of Google. Their management is ahead of Google and their recruitment is ahead of Google.

Microsoft is Better Place to Work than Google

At my interviews I was asking my interviewers in both Microsoft and Google a lot about the development process, engineering and technologies. I was asking also my colleagues working in these companies. I found for myself that Microsoft is better organized, managed and structured. Microsoft do software development in more professional way than Google. Their engineers are better. Their development process is better. Their products are better. Their technologies are better. Their interviews are better. Google was like a kindergarden - young and not experienced enough people, an office full of fun and entertainment, interviews typical for junior people and lack of traditions in development of high quality software products.

Based on my observations, I have theory that Google’s big problem is that the company hasn’t realized that it isn’t a startup anymore. This disconnect between the company’s status and it’s perception of itself manifests in a number of ways

1. Startups don’t have a career path for their employees. Does anyone at Facebook know what they want to be in five years besides rich? However once riches are no longer guaranteed and the stock isn’t firing on all cylinders (GOOG is underperforming both the NASDAQ and DOW Jones industrial average this year) then you need to have a better career plan for your employees that goes beyond “free lunches and all the foosball you can handle".

2. There is no legacy code at a startup. When your code base is young, it isn’t a big deal to have developers checking in new features after an overnight coding fit powered by caffeine and pizza. For the most part, the code base shouldn’t be large enough or interdependent enough for one change to cause issues. However it is practically a law of software development that the older your code gets the more lines of code it accumulates and the more closely coupled your modules become. This means changing things in one part of the code can have adverse effects in another. 

   As all organizations mature they tend to add PROCESS. These processes exist to insulate the companies from the mistakes that occur after a company gets to a certain size and can no longer trust its employees to always do the right thing. Requiring code reviews, design specifications, black box & whitebox & unit testing, usability studies, threat models, etc are all the kinds of overhead that differentiate a mature software development shop from a “fly by the seat of your pants” startup. However once you’ve been through enough fire drills, some of those processes don’t sound as bad as they once did. This is why senior developers value them while junior developers don’t since the latter haven’t been around the block enough.

3. There is less politics at a startup. In any activity where humans have to come together collaboratively to achieve a goal, there will always be people with different agendas. The more people you add to the mix, the more agendas you have to contend with. Doing things by consensus is OK when you have to get consensus from two or three people who sit in the same hallway as you. It’s a totally different ball game when you need to gain it from lots of people from across a diverse company working on different projects in different regions of the world who have different perspectives on how to solve your problems. At Google, even hiring an undergraduate candidate has to go through several layers of committees which means hiring managers need to possess some political savvy if they want to get their candidates approved.  The founders of Dodgeball quit the Google after their startup was acquired after they realized that they didn’t have the political savvy to get resources allocated to their project.

The fact that Google is having problems retaining employees isn't news, Fortune wrote an article about it just a few months ago. The technology press makes it seem like people are ditching Google for hot startups like FriendFeed and Facebook. However the truth is more nuanced than that. Now that Google is just another big software company, lots of people are comparing it to other big software companies like Microsoft and finding it lacking.

Now Playing: Queen - Under Pressure (feat. David Bowie)

 

In the past year I've spent a lot of time thinking about hiring due to a recent surge in the amount of interviews I've participated in as well as a surge in the number of folks I know who've decided to "try new things". One thing I've noticed is that software companies and teams within large software companies like Microsoft tend to fall into two broad camps when it comes to hiring. There are the teams/companies that seem to attract tons of smart, superstar programmers like a refrigerator door attracts magnets and then there those that use the beachcomber technique of sifting through tons of poorly written resumes hoping to find someone valuable but often ending up with people who seem valuable but actually aren't (aka good at interviewing, lousy at actually getting work done).

Steve Yegge talks about this problem in his post Done, and Gets Things Smart which is excerpted below

The "extended interview" (in any form) is the only solution I've ever seen to the horrible dilemma, How do you hire someone smarter than you? Or even the simpler problem, How do you identify someone who's actually Smart, and Gets Things Done? Interviews alone just don't cut it.
Let me say it more directly, for those of you who haven't taken this personally yet: you can't do what Joel is asking you to do. You're not qualified. The Smart and Gets Things Done approach to interviewing will only get you copies of yourself, and the work of Dunning and Kruger implies that if you hire someone better than you are, then it's entirely accidental.
...
So let's assume you're looking at the vast ocean of programmers, all of whom are self-professed superstars who've gotten lots of "stuff" done, and you want to identify not the superstars, but the super-heroes. How do you do it? Well, Brian Dougherty of Geoworks did it somehow. Jeff Bezos did it somehow. Larry and Sergey did it somehow. I'm willing to bet good money that every successful tech company out there had some freakishly good seed engineers.
...
You can only find Done, and Gets Things Smart people in two ways, and one of them I still don't understand very well. The first way is to get real lucky and have one as a coworker or classmate. You work with them for a few years and come to realize they're just cut from a finer cloth than you and your other unwashed cohorts. You may be friends with some of them, which helps with the recruiting a little, but not necessarily. The important thing is that you recognize them, even if you don't know what makes them tick.
...
I think Identification Approach #2, and this is the one I don't understand very well, is that you "ask around". You know. You manually perform the graph build-and-traversal done by the Facebook "Smartest Friend" plug-in, where you ask everyone to name the best engineer they know, and continue doing that until it converges.

This jibes with my experience watching various software startups and knowing the history of various teams at Microsoft over the past few years. The products that seem to have hired the most phenomenal programmers and have achieved great things often start off with some person trying to hire the smartest person they know or knew from past jobs (Approach #1). Those people in turn try to attract the smartest people they've known and that happens recursively (Approach #2).

I remember a few years ago chatting with a coworker who mentioned that some Harvard-based startup was hiring super smart, young Harvard alumni from Microsoft and a couple of other technology companies at a rapid clip. It seems people were recommended by their friends at the startup and those folks would in turn come back to Microsoft/Google/etc to convince their ex-Harvard chums to come join in the fun. It turns out that startup was Facebook and since then the company has impressed the world with its output. Google used to have a similar approach to hiring until the company grew too big and had to start utilizing the beachcomber technique as well. I've also seen this technique work successfully for a number of teams at Microsoft.

Although this technique sounds unrealistic, it actually isn't as difficult as it once was thanks to the Web and social networking sites. It is now quite easy for people to stay in touch with or reconnect with people they knew from previous jobs or back in their school days. Thus the big barrier to adopting this approach to hiring isn't that employees won't have any recommendations for super-smart people they'd love to work with if given the chance.  The real barrier is that most employers don't know how to court potential employees or even worse don't believe that they have to do so.  Instead they expect people to want to work for them which means they'll get a flood of awful resumes, put a bunch of candidates through the flawed interview process only to eventually get tired of the entire charade and finally hire the first warm body to show up after they reach their breaking point. All of this could be avoided if they simply leverage the social networks of their best employees. Unfortunately, common sense is never as common as you expect it to be.

Now Playing: Soundgarden - Jesus Christ Pose

 

I've spent all of my professional career working at a large multinational company. In this time I've been involved in lots of different cross-team and cross-divisional collaboration efforts. Some times these groups were in the same organization and other times you would have to go up five to ten levels up the org chart before you found a shared manager. Surprisingly, the presence or lack of shared management has never been the key factor that has helped or hindered such collaborative efforts.

Of all the problems I've seen when I've had to depend on other teams for help in getting a task accomplished or vice versa; there have been two insidious that tend to crop up in situations where things go awry. The first is misaligned goals. Just because two groups are working together doesn't mean they have the same motivations or expected end results. Things quickly go awry when one group's primary goals either run counter to the goal(s) of the group they are supposed to be collaborating with. For example, consider a company that requires its technical support to have very low average call time to meet their metrics. Imagine that same company also puts together a task force to improve the customer satisfaction with the technical support experience after lots of complaints from their customers. What are the chances that the task force will be able to effect positive change if the metrics used to reward their tech support staff remain the same? The funny thing is that large companies often end up creating groups that are working at cross purposes yet are supposed to be working together.

What makes misaligned goals so insidious is that the members of the collaborating groups who are working through the project often don't realize that the problem is that their goals are misaligned. A lot of the time people tend to think the problem is the other group is evil, a bunch of jerks or just plain selfish. The truth is often that the so-called jerks are really just thinking You're not my manager, so I'm not going to ask how high when you tell me to jump. Once you find out you've hit this problem then the path to solving it is clear. You either have to (i) make sure all collaborating parties want to reach the same outcome and place have similar priorities or (ii) jettison the collaboration effort.

Another problem that has scuttled many a collaboration effort is when one or more of the parties involved has undisclosed concerns about the risks of collaborating which prevents them from entering into the collaboration wholeheartedly or even worse has them actively working against it. Software development teams experience this when they have to manage dependences on their project or that they have on other projects. There's a good paper on the topic entitled Managing Cognitive and Affective Trust in the Conceptual R&D Organization by Diane H. Sonnenwald which breaks down the problem of distrust in conceptual organizations (aka virtual teams) in the following way

Two Types of Trust and Distrust: Cognitive and Affective
Two types of trust, cognitive and affective, have been identified as important in organizations (McAllister, 1995; Rocco, et al, 2001). Cognitive trust focuses on judgments of competence and reliability. Can a co-worker complete a task? Will the results be of sufficient quality? Will the task be completed on time? These are issues that comprise cognitive trust and distrust. The more strongly one believes the answers to these types of questions are affirmative, the stronger one’s cognitive trust. The more strongly one believes the answers to these types of questions are negative, the stronger one’s cognitive distrust.

Affective trust focuses on interpersonal bonds among individuals and institutions, including perceptions of colleagues’ motivation, intentions, ethics and citizenship. Affective trust typically emerges from repeated interactions among individuals, and experiences of reciprocated interpersonal care and concern (Rosseau, et al, 1998). It is also referred to as emotional trust (Rocco, et al, 2001) and relational trust (Rosseau, et al, 1998). It can be “the grease that turns the wheel” (Sonnenwald, 1996).

The issue of affective distrust is strongly related to lacking shared goals while working together as a team which I've already discussed. Cognitive distrust typically results in one or more parties in the collaboration acting with the assumption that the collaboration is going to fail. Since these distrusting group(s) assume failure will be the end result of the collaboration they will take steps to insulate themselves from this failure. However what makes this problem insidious is that the "untrusted" groups are often not formally confronted about the lack of trust in their efforts and thus risk mitigation is not formally built into the collaboration effort. Eventually this leads to behavior that is counterproductive to the collaboration as teams try to mitigate risks in isolation and eventually there is distrust between all parties in the collaboration. Project failure often soon follows.

The best way to prevent this from happening once you find yourself in this situation is to put everyone's concerns on the table. Once the concerns are on the table, be they concerns about product quality, timelines or any of the other myriad issues that impact collaboration, mitigations can be put in place. As the saying goes sunlight is the best disinfectant, thus I've also seen that when the "distrusted" team becomes fully transparent in their workings and information disclosure it quickly makes matters clear. Because one of two things will happen; it will either (i) reassure their dependents that their fears are unfounded or (ii) confirm their concerns in a timely fashion. Either of which is preferable to the status quo.

Now Playing: Mariah Carey - Cruise Control (featuring Damian Marley)

 

I’ve been writing a personal weblog for almost seven years. It’s weird to go back and read some of the posts in my old kuro5hin diary such as my early postings about interning at Microsoft and see how much my perspectives have changed in some ways and stayed the same in others. Anyway…

Although I’ve found this weblog to be personally fulfilling, the time has come for me to put it aside for the time being. This will be the last post on http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog.

In addition, I’ll be cleaning up my Twitter and Facebook profiles by removing anyone who I haven’t personally met from my list of followers and friends respectively.

I will continue to work on and blog about RSS Bandit. I haven’t yet picked a location for a new blog for the project. However this shouldn’t impact subscribers to my RSS Bandit feed since it is already hosted on Feedburner and a redirect shouldn’t be noticeable.

Thanks for everything.

PS: See also The Year the Blog Died.

Now playing: Boyz II Men - End of the Road

 

From the press release entitled Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 21, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today announced a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors.

Specifically, Microsoft is implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products: (1) ensuring open connections; (2) promoting data portability; (3) enhancing support for industry standards; and (4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.
...
The interoperability principles and actions announced today apply to the following high-volume Microsoft products: Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, and future versions of all these products. Highlights of the specific actions Microsoft is taking to implement its new interoperability principles are described below.

• Ensuring open connections to Microsoft’s high-volume products.
• Documenting how Microsoft supports industry standards and extensions.
• Enhancing Office 2007 to provide greater flexibility of document formats.
• Launching the Open Source Interoperability Initiative.
• Expanding industry outreach and dialogue.

More information can be found on the Microsoft Interoperability page. Nice job, ROzzie and SteveB.

Now playing: Timbaland - Apologize (Feat. One Republic)

 

Mini-Microsoft has a blog post entitled  Microsoft's Yahoo! Acquisition is Bold. And Dumb. which contains the following excerpt

To tell you the truth, if you had pulled me aside when I was in school, holding court in the computer science lab, and whispered in my ear ala The Graduate: "online ads..." I would have laughed my geek butt off.

So Google gets to have the joke on me, but for us to bet the company and build Microsoft's future foundation on ads revenue? WTF? As someone who considers themselves a citizen, not a consumer, I want to create software experiences that make people's lives delightful and better, not that sells them crap they don't need while putting them deeper into debt. I'm going to be in purgatory long enough as is.

I find this sentiment somewhat ironic coming from Mini-Microsoft. Microsoft’s bread and butter comes from selling software that people have to use not software that they want to use. In fact, you can argue that the fundamental problems the company has had in making traction in certain consumer-centric markets is that our culture is still influenced by selling to IT departments and developers (i.e. where features and checklists are important) as opposed to selling to consumers (i.e. where user experience is the most important thing).

Specifically, it is hard for me to imagine that there are more people in the world that think that whatever Microsoft product Mini works on has given them more delight or improved their lives better than Facebook, Flickr, Google, MySpace or Windows Live Messenger which happen to all be ad supported software. Thus it amusing to see him imply that ad-supported software is the antithesis of software that delights and improves peoples quality of life. 

The way I see it, Jerry Yang is right that from the perspective of a user “You Always Have Other Options” when it comes free (ad supported), Web-based software which encourages applications to innovate in the user experience to differentiate themselves. It is no small wonder that we’ve seen more innovations in social applications and user interfaces in the world of free, Web-based applications than we’ve seen in the world of proprietary, commercial software.  Something to think about the next time you decide to crap on ad supported Web apps because you think building commercial software is some sort of noble cause that results in perfect, customer delighting software, Mini.

Now playing: Snoop Doggy Dogg - Downtown Assassins

 

Given that I work in Microsoft's online services group and have friends at Yahoo!, I obviously won't be writing down my thoughts on Microsoft's $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo. However I have been somewhat amused by the kind of ranting I've seen in the comments at Mini-Microsoft. Although the majority of the comments on Mini-Microsoft are critical of the bid, it is clear that the majority of the posters aren't very knowledgeable about Microsoft, it's competitors or the online business in general.

There were comments from people who are so out of it they think Paul Allen is a majority share holder of Microsoft. Or even better that Internet advertising will never impact newspaper, magazine or television advertising. I was also amused by the person that asked if anyone could name 2 or 3 successful acquisitions or technology purchases by Microsoft. I wonder if anyone would say the  Bungie or Visio acquisitions didn't work out for the company. Or that the products that started off as NCSA Mosaic or Sybase SQL have been unsuccessful as Microsoft products.

My question for the armchair quarterbacks that have criticized this move in places like Mini-Microsoft is "If you ran the world's most successful software company, what would you do instead?"

PS: The ostrich strategy of "ignoring the Internet" and milking the Office + Windows cash cows doesn't count as an acceptable answer. Try harder than that.

Now Playing: Birdman - Hundred Million Dollars (feat. Rick Ross, Lil' Wayne & Young Jeezy)

 

From the press release entitled Microsoft Proposes Acquisition of Yahoo! for $31 per Share we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 1, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) today announced that it has made a proposal to the Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) Board of Directors to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion. Microsoft’s proposal would allow the Yahoo! shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the total consideration payable to Yahoo! shareholders consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock. The offer represents a 62 percent premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock on Jan. 31, 2008.

“We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We believe our combination will deliver superior value to our respective shareholders and better choice and innovation to our customers and industry partners.”

“Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own.”

WOW. Just...wow.

There's a conference call with Ray Ozzie, Steve Ballmer, Chris Liddell and Kevin Johnson in about half an hour to discuss this. This is the first time I've considered listening in on one of those.

 

Over a year ago, I commented that sometimes it feels like working at Microsoft is like working in Dinosaur Country. Every time, I hear the phrase “software as a service” or it’s cousin “software plus services” it makes me feel this way. Most of the people uttering this crap don’t realize that this makes them sound as dated as the old codgers who kept on talking about “horseless carriages” when everyone else called them automobiles or just plain cars.

Case in point, this article from the Telegraph entitled Microsoft powers up for change which contains this humdinger of an opening paragrapgh

Chief executive says free software, downloadable online, is on the horizon for consumers. Josephine Moulds reports

Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, yesterday signalled another step towards a dramatic change in the software giant's business model.

In London on a whistle-stop tour, Ballmer was discussing the delivery of software packages over the internet. "We are a software company, and yet in a sense, the very form of our core capability is changing. We need to change our capabilities so that we are not just good at writing bits that you put out on CD and deliver, but rather writing this thing that is a living, breathing, dynamic, organic thing."

What’s next? A press release announcing that pasteurization may not be a fad? A news story conceding that heavier-than-air aircraft may just be the way to go after all? 

*sigh*

Now playing: The Verve - Bitter Sweet Symphony

 

Via Mini-Microsoft I found the article Microsoft Investment Requires Too Much Patience - Barron's which contains the following excerpt

Some of the issues that worry analysts:

1. It was clear from the presentation that many of the growth prospects will take 5-10 years to bear fruit.
2. The company overspends ("nothing would delight analysts more than a nice big round of cost-cutting.")
3. The businesses MSFT says it's entering (e.g. advertising and consumer electronics) are far more cut-throat than its current mix.
4. Microsoft's focus on building internet infrastructure rather than building sites that bring in users is "backward."
5. Bill Gates's plan to pass control of product development to Ray Ozzie "will not be a smooth one."

RE: Item #4, it seems weird for analysts to say Microsoft shouldn’t invest in building internet infrastructure but instead on building websites. What do they think you need to build the websites? It’s not like data centers are free.

Now playing: Kanye West - Stronger (feat. Daft Punk)

 

Charlie Kindel just announced on the Windows Home Server team blog that the final version of the software has been released to manufacturing (RTM). This means that you'll be able to buy a dedicated home server from Fujitsu-Siemens, Gateway, HP, Iomega, Lacie or Medion in the next few months.

I wonder if that means we'll soon be seeing the following ad on TV?

 

Marc Andreessen (whose blog is on fire!) has a rather lengthy but excellent blog post entitled The Pmarca Guide to Big Companies, part 2: Retaining great people which has some good advice on how big companies can retain their best employees. The most interesting aspects of his post were some of the accurate observations he had about obviously bad ideas that big companies implement which are intended to retain their best employees but end up backfiring. I thought these insights were valuable enough that they are worth repeating.

Marc writes

Don't create a new group or organization within your company whose job is "innovation". This takes various forms, but it happens reasonably often when a big company gets into product trouble, and it's hugely damaging.

Here's why:

First, you send the terrible message to the rest of the organization that they're not supposed to innovate.

Second, you send the terrible message to the rest of the organization that you think they're the B team.

That's a one-two punch that will seriously screw things up.

This so true. Every time I've seen some executive or management higher up create an incubation or innovation team within a specific product group, it has lead to demoralization of the people who have been relegated as the "B team" and bad blood between both teams which eventually leads to in-fighting. All of this might be worth it if these efforts are successful but as Clayton Christensen pointed out in his interview in Business Week on the tenth anniversary of "The Innovator's Dilemma"

People come up with lots of new ideas, but nothing happens. They get very disillusioned. Never does an idea pop out of a person's head as a completely fleshed-out business plan. It has to go through a process that will get approved and funded. You're not two weeks into the process until you realize, "gosh, the sales force is not going to sell this thing," and you change the economics. Then two weeks later, marketing says they won't support it because it doesn't fit the brand, so we've got to change the whole concept.

All those forces act to make the idea conform to the company's existing business model, not to the marketplace. And that's the rub. So the senior managers today, thirsty for innovation, stand at the outlet of this pipe, see the dribbling out of me-too innovation after me-too innovation, and they scream up to the back end, "Hey, you guys, get more innovative! We need more and better innovative ideas!" But that's not the problem. The problem is this shaping process that conforms all these innovative ideas to the current business model of the company.

This is something I've seen happen time after time. There are times when incubation/innovation teams produce worthwhile results but they are few and far between especially compared to the number of them that exist. In addition, even in those cases both of Marc's observations were still correct and they led to in-fighting between the teams which damaged the overall health of the product, the people and the organization. 

Marc also wrote

Don't do arbitrary large spot bonuses or restricted stock grants to try to give a small number of people huge financial upside.

An example is the Google Founders' Awards program, which Google has largely stopped, and which didn't work anyway.

It sounds like a great idea at the time, but it causes a severe backlash among both the normal people who don't get it (who feel like they're the B team) and the great people who don't get it (who feel like they've been screwed).

Significantly differentiated financial rewards for your "best employees"  are a seductive idea for executives but they rarely work as planned for several reasons. One reason is based on an observation I first saw in Paul Graham's essay Hiring is Obsolete; big companies don't know how to value the contributions of individual employees. Robert Scoble often used to complain in the comments to his blog that he made less than six figures at Microsoft. I personally think he did more for the company's image than the millions we've spent on high priced public relations and advertising firms. Yet it is incredibly difficult to prove this and even if one could the process wouldn't scale to every single employee. Then there's all the research from various corporations that have used social network analysis to find out that their most valuable employees are rarely the ones that are high up in the org chart (see How Org Charts Lie published by the Harvard Business School). The second reason significantly financially rewarding your "best employees" ends up being problematic is well described in Joel Spolsky's article Incentive Pay Considered Harmful where he points out

Most people think that they do pretty good work (even if they don't). It's just a little trick our minds play on us to keep life bearable. So if everybody thinks they do good work, and the reviews are merely correct (which is not very easy to achieve), then most people will be disappointed by their reviews. 

When you combine the above observation with the act if rewarding does that get good reviews disproportionately from those that just did OK, it can lead to problems. For example, what happens when a company decides that it will give millions of dollars in bonuses to its employees if they "add the most value" to the company? Hey, isn't that what the Google Founder's Awards were supposed to be about...how did that turn out?

The company has continually tinkered with its incentives for people to stay. Early on Page and Brin gave "Founders' Awards" in cash to people who made significant contributions. The handful of employees who pulled off the unusual Dutch auction public offering in August 2004 shared $10 million. The idea was to replicate the windfall rewards of a startup, but it backfired because those who didn't get them felt overlooked. "It ended up pissing way more people off," says one veteran.

Google rarely gives Founders' Awards now, preferring to dole out smaller executive awards, often augmented by in- person visits by Page and Brin. "We are still trying to capture the energy of a startup," says Bock.

Another seductive idea that sounds good on paper which falls apart when you actually add human beings to the equation.

 

Recently an email written by a newly hired Microsoft employee about life as a Google employee made the rounds on popular geek social news and social bookmarking sites such as Slashdot, Reddit, del.icio.us and Digg. The mail was forwarded around and posted to a blog without the permission of its original author. The author of the email (who should not be confused with the idiot who blogs at http://no2google.wordpress.com) has posted a response which puts his email in context in addition to his reaction on seeing his words splattered across the Internet. In his post entitled My Words Geoffrey writes

Today my words got splashed all around the Internet. It’s interesting to see them living a life of their own outside the context they were created in. I enjoyed seeing it on Slashdot, reading the thoughtful responses whether they agreed or disagreed, and laughing out loud at the people who were just there to make noise. It’s fun, in the abstract, to the be the author of the secret thing everyone is gathered around the water cooler talking about.

The responses are my personal impressions, communicated to my Microsoft recruiter in the context of a private 1:1 conversation. A few days after I sent my response to the recruiter, I saw an anonymized version floating around and being discussed inside Microsoft. I hadn’t realized at the time that I wrote it that it would be distributed widely within Microsoft so that was a bit of a shock. To see them distributed all over the Internet was another shock altogether. The biggest shock was when Mary Jo Foley over at ZDNet Blogs sent a message to my personal email account.

Read the rest of his post to see the email he sent to Mary Jo Foley as well as how he feels about having words he thought were being shared in private published to tens of thousands of people without his permission and with no thought to how it would impact him.

 

Disclaimer: This is my opinion. It does not reflect the intentions, strategies, plans or stated goals of my employer

Ever since the last Microsoft reorg where it's Web products were spread out across 3 Vice Presidents I've puzzled about why the company would want to fragment its product direction in such a competitive space instead of having a single person responsible for its online strategy.

Today, I was reading an interview with Chris Jones, the corporate vice president of Windows Live Experience Program Management entitled Windows Live Moves Into Next Phase with Renewed Focus on Software + Services and a lightbulb went off in my head. The relevant bits are excerpted below

PressPass: What else is Microsoft announcing today?

Jones: Today we’re also releasing a couple of exciting new services from Windows Live into managed beta testing: Windows Live Photo Gallery beta and Windows Live Folders beta.

Windows Live Photo Gallery is an upgrade to Windows Vista’s Windows Photo Gallery, offered at no charge, and enables both Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2 customers to share, edit, organize and print photos and digital home videos... We’re also releasing Windows Live Folders into managed beta today, which will provide customers with 500 megabytes of online storage at no charge.
...
We’re excited about these services and we see today’s releases as yet another important step on the path toward the next generation of Windows Live, building on top of the momentum of other interesting beta releases we’ve shared recently such as Windows Live Mail beta, Windows Live Messenger beta and Windows Live Writer beta....soon we’ll begin to offer a single installer which will give customers the option of an all-in-one download for the full Windows Live suite of services instead of the separate installation experience you see today. It’s going to be an exciting area to watch, and there’s a lot more to come.

PressPass: You talk a lot about a “software plus services” strategy. What does that mean and how does it apply to what you’re talking about today?

Jones: It’s become a buzz word of sorts in the industry, but it’s a strategy we truly believe in. The fact that we’re committed to delivering software plus services means we’re focused on building rich experiences on top of your Windows PC; services like those offered through Windows Live.

All the items in red font refer to Windows desktop applications in one way or the other. At this point it now made sense to me why there were three VPs running different bits of Microsoft's online products and why one of them was also the VP that owned Windows. The last reorg seems to have divided Microsoft's major tasks in the online space across the various VPs in the following manner

• Satya Nadella: Running the search + search ads business (i.e. primarily competing with Google search and AdWords)

• Steve Berkowitz: Running the content + display ads business (i.e. primarily competing with Yahoo!'s content and display ad offerings)

• Steven Sinofsky and Chris Jones: Adding value to the Windows platform using online services (i.e. building something similar to iLife + .Mac for Windows users). 

From that perspective, the reorgs make a lot more sense now. The goals and businesses are different enough that having people singularly focused on each of those tasks makes more sense than having one person worry about such disparate [and perhaps conflicting] goals. The interesting question to me is what does it mean for Microsoft's Web-based Windows Live properties like Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Favorites and Windows Live Spaces if Microsoft is going to be emphasizing the Windows in Windows Live? I guess we've already seen announcements some announcements from the mail side like Windows Live Mail and the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector now being free.

Another interesting question is where  Ray Ozzie fits in all this.

 

Via Todd Bishop I found the following spoof of Back to the Future starring Christopher Lloyd (from the actual movie) and Bob Muglia, Microsoft's senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business. The spoof takes pot shots at various failed Microsoft "big visions" like WinFS and Hailstorm in a humorous way. It's good to see our execs being able to make light of our mistakes in this manner. The full video of the keynote is here. Embedded below is the first five minutes of the Back to the Future spoof.

Video: Microsoft Back to the Future Parody

 

If you are a member of the Microsoft developer community, you've probably heard of the recent kerfuffle between Microsoft and the developer of TestDriven.NET that was publicized in his blog post Microsoft vs TestDriven.Net Express. I'm not going to comment directly on the situation especially since lawyers are involved. However I did find the perspective put forth by Leon Bambrick in his post TestDriven.net-Gate: Don't Blame Microsoft, Blame Jason Weber to be quite insightful.

Leon Bambrick wrote

If you have time, you really ought to read the whole thing. I've read as much as I can, and here's my analysis.

Right from the start, before tempers flared, Microsoft's representative, Jason Weber should've done a much better job of convincing Jamie not to release the express sku. Jason did put a lot of effort in, and Microsoft spent a lot of effort on this, but Jason sabotaged his own sides efforts right throughout.

The first clear mistake is that Jason should've never referred to Jamie's work as a "hack". He did this repeatedly -- and it seems to have greatly exacerbated the situation. What did that wording gain Jason (or Microsoft)? It only worked to insult the person he was trying to come to agreement with. Name calling doesn't aid negotiation.

When Jamie finally agreed to remove the express version, he wanted a credible reason to put on his website. Note that Jamie had backed down now, and with good treatment the thing should've been resolved at that point. Here's the wording that Jason recommended:

"After speaking with Jason Weber from Microsoft I realized that by adding features to Visual Studio Express I was in breach of the Visual Studio license agreements and copyrights. I have therefore decided to remove support for the Visual Studio Express SKU's from TestDriven.Net. Jason was very supportive of TestDriven.Net's integration into the other Visual Studio 2005 products and I was invited to join the VSIP program. This would allow me to fly to Redmond each quarter and work closely with the Visual Studio development team on deeper integration."

This wording is offensive on four levels. One Two Three Four. That's a lot of offense!

Firstly -- it acts as an advertisement for Jason Weber. Why? Arrogance maybe? He's lording it over Jamie.

Second -- it supposes that Jason should publicly admit to violations. He need never admit such a thing.

Third -- it includes mention of breach of "copyright". I don't think such an allegation ever came up until that point. So this was a fresh insult.

Fourth -- it stings Jamie's pride, by suggesting that he was bribed into agreement. Ouch

So just when they got close to agreement, Jason effectively kicked Jamie in the nuts, pissed in his face, poked him in the eye, and danced on his grave.

That's not a winning technique in negotiations.

I believe there is a lesson on negotiating tactics that can be extracted from this incident. I really hope this situation reaches an amicable conclusion for the sakes of all parties involved.

 

Matt Warren has an excellent Microsoft history lesson in his blog post entitled The Origin of LINQ to SQL which explores how LINQ to SQL (Microsoft's Object/Relational mapping technology with programming language integration) came to be despite the internal politics at Microsoft which encouraged the entire company to bet on WinFS. I'm excerpting a lot of his blog post because I wouldn't be surprised if he ends up taking it down or redacting it later. He writes

LINQ to SQL, possibly Microsoft’s first OR/M to actually ship in ten years of trying, was never even supposed to exist.It started out as a humble Visual Studio project on my desktop machine way back in the fall of 2003
...
Luckily, it didn’t take me long to get the basics up and running. You see, it wasn’t the first time I’d slapped together an OR/M or modified a language to add query capabilities; having already designed ObjectSpaces and parts of C-Omega so I was certainly up to the task. Fortunately, it gets a lot easier the ‘next’ time you design and build something, especially if it was you that did the designing before and you have the opportunity to start over fresh.
...
Why didn’t I start with WinFS? After all, it was all the rage inside the SQL Server org at the time. Unfortunately, it was the same story as with ObjectSpaces. They were shipping before us. We weren’t on their radar. Their hubris was bigger than ours. Not to mention my belief that WinFS was the biggest fiasco I’d ever bore witness to, but that’s another story.

Yet, part of that story was the impetus to turn LINQ to SQL into an actual product.

WinFS client API even started out as a complete copy of the ObjectSpaces codebase and had all the same limitations. It just had more political clout as it was being lead by a figure at a higher-point in the corporate org chart, and so it was positioned as part of juggernaut that was making a massive internal land grab. We on the outside used to refer to WinFS as the black hole, forever growing, sucking up all available resources, letting nothing escape and in the end producing nothing except possibly a gateway to an alternate reality. Many of our friends and co-workers had already been sucked in, and the weekly reports and horror stories were not for the weak-of-heart. It eventually sucked up ObjectSpaces too and in the process killing it off so that in WinFS v2 it could all be ‘aligned’.

At that point, those of us designing LINQ got a bit worried. There were not too many in the developer division that believed in the mission of WinFS. As a developer tool for the masses, something simple that targeted the lower end was paramount. ObjectSpaces had been it, and now it was gone. There was still some glimmer of possibility that WinFS v2 might eventually get it right and be useful as a general OR /M tool. But all hope of that was shot when WinFS was pulled out of Vista and its entire existence was put in doubt. Had they immediately turned around and brought back ObjectSpaces, that might have worked, but in the intervening months ObjectSpaces had slipped past the point of no return for being part of .Net 2.0, turnover within the SQL org was spiraling out of control, and most of the brain-trust that knew anything about OR/M had already fled.

That’s when we realized we had no choice. If LINQ was to succeed it needed some legs to stand on. The ‘mock’ OR/M I was building was shaping up to be a pretty good contender. We had co-designed it in tandem with LINQ as part of the C# 3.0 design group and it really was a full-fledged implementation; we just never thought it was actually going to be a shipping product. It was simply meant to act as a stand-in for products that now no longer existed. So, for the sake of LINQ and the customer in general, we took up the OR/M torch officially, announcing our intention internally and starting the political nightmare that became my life for the next three years.

This takes me back. I had friends who worked on ObjectSpaces and it was quite heart breaking to see what internal politics can do to passionate folks who once believed that technologies stand based on merit and not who you know at Microsoft. At least this story had a happy ending. Passionate people figured out how to navigate the internal waters at Microsoft and are on track to shipping a really compelling addition to the developer landscape.

Editor's Note: I added the links to ObjectSpaces and C-Omega to the excerpts from Matt's post to provide some context.

 

Via Robert Scoble's blog post entitled Microsoft postpones PDC we learn

Mary Jo Foley (she’s been covering Microsoft for a long time) has the news: Microsoft has postponed the PDC that it had planned for later this year.

The PDC stands for “Professional Developer’s Conference.” It happens only when Microsoft knows it’ll have a major new platform to announce. Usually a new version of Windows or a new Internet strategy.

So, this means a couple of things: no new Windows and no major new Internet strategy this year.
...
Now that Google, Amazon, Apple, are shipping platforms that are more and more interesting to Microsoft’s developer community Microsoft has to play a different game. One where they can’t keep showing off stuff that never ships. The stakes are going up in the Internet game and Microsoft doesn’t seem to have a good answer to what’s coming next.

Interesting analysis from Robert, I agree with him that Microsoft no longer has the luxury of demoing platforms it can't or won't ship given how competent a number of competitors have shown themselves on the platform front. The official Microsoft cancellation notice states

As the PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform, we try to align it to be in front of major platform milestones. By this fall, however, upcoming platform technologies including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server codenamed "Katmai", Visual Studio codenamed "Orcas" and Silverlight will already be in developers’ hands and approaching launch

This makes sense, all the interesting near term future stuff has already been announced at other recent events. In fact, when you think about it, it is kinda weird for Microsoft to have a conference for showing next generation Web platform stuff (i.e. MIX) and another for showing general next generation platform stuff (i.e. PDC). Especially since the Web is the only platform that matters these days.

My assumption is that Microsoft conference planners will figure this out and won't make the mistake of scheduling MIX and PDC a few months from each other next time.
 

From the Microsoft press release entitled Microsoft to Acquire aQuantive, Inc we learn

REDMOND, Wash. — May 18, 2007 — Microsoft Corp. today announced it will acquire aQuantive, Inc., for $66.50 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $6 billion. This deal expands upon the Company’s previously outlined vision to provide the advertising industry with a world class, Internet-wide advertising platform, as well as a set of tools and services that help its constituents generate the highest possible return on their advertising investments.
...
The aQuantive acquisition enables Microsoft to strengthen relationships with advertisers, agencies and publishers by enhancing the Company’s world-class advertising platforms and services beyond its current capabilities to serve MSN. The acquisition also provides Microsoft increased depth in building and supporting next generation advertising solutions and environments such as cross media planning, video-on-demand and IPTV.
...
aQuantive, which has approximately 2600 employees, will continue to operate from its Seattle headquarters as part of Microsoft’s Online Services Business. The combination of Microsoft and aQuantive takes the Company’s advertising platform to the next level in its ability to serve Microsoft’s first party audience assets like MSN, Windows Live, Xbox Live, and Office Live, as well as for third party publishers and applications such as Facebook and Activision game titles.

The first thing I thought when I heard this news is that it is quite telling that Microsoft's biggest acquisition ever is for a Web advertising company. The second is that it seems that Google's overpaying for market share disease ($3.1 billion for DoubleClick and $1.65 billion for YouTube) is contagious. And finally, Microsoft now has offices in downtown Seattle. Oh. Yeah. :)

I worked with some of the Avenue A/Razorfish folks as part of the Social Networking feature in Windows Live Spaces. They seemed like good folks. I'm glad Microsoft has decided to open the pocketbook instead of just rolling over when it comes to buy versus build. Sometimes you really just have to suck it up and buy.

Excerpts from the conference call at TechCrunch.

 

From the InfoWorld Article Hilf: Microsoft won't sue over Linux, for now we learn

Microsoft ignited hostility following its assertion in Fortune magazine on Monday that Linux and other open-source software infringe on 235 of the company's patents.
...
In an exclusive interview, Bill Hilf, general manager of platform strategy and director of Microsoft's work with open-source projects, spoke with IDG News Service on the effects of the declaration on the open-source community.

IDG News Service: The Fortune story has caused a lot of concern over how Microsoft may proceed in regard to its patent claims. Did you know Microsoft officials were going to reveal the number of patents?

Hilf: We did. [But] the Fortune article does not correctly represent our strategy. That's what has people so inflamed. It looks like our strategy changed and we are moving in a new direction, but it hasn't. In the Novell deal, we said we had to figure out a way to solve these IP issues and we needed to figure out a way for better interoperability with open-source products. The Fortune article makes it look like we are going out on this litigation path.

Our strategy from everyone in the company -- from [Steve] Ballmer to Brad Smith to me and everyone in between -- has always been to license and not litigate as it relates to our intellectual property. So we have no plans to litigate. You can never say we'll never do anything in the future, but that's not our strategy. That article spins it on the attack. The only new piece information in that article is that it just put a number on the patents.

Your thoughts?

 

By now most people interested in technology news have heard the story initially reported by the New York Post in the article Bill's Hard Drive which claimed that Microsoft was planning to purchase Yahoo! and the subsequent rebuttal of this news in the Wall Street Journal's article Microsoft, Yahoo Discussed Deal. Since I work at Microsoft I'm not supposed to comment on rumors like this so I'll just point to a couple of opinions.

Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research, wrote in her blog post entitled Why Microsoft + Yahoo! makes sense – and why it won’t work that

But there is one major reason why I don’t think Microsoft executives have the stomach for any sort of brand rationalization -- the continued dual branding of Windows Live and MSN. Each time I have a conversation with Microsoft about Windows Live, I get a different explanation of what it is and how it fits with MSN. If the company can’t event figure out its branding strategy with existing properties, I don’t hold out much faith that they could do so with a premium brand like Yahoo!

Robert Scoble writes in his post No “Microhoo”

I’ll tell ya one thing, though. It sure made for interesting conversation with a Yahoo employee I met tonight. We were starting to draw up where value would be built and where it’d be destroyed. There were a lot of places it would be destroyed and if two guys drinking beer can figure that out in half an hour, I’m sure that caused smarter people than us to put on the brakes. For instance one of Yahoo’s biggest properties is its email service. But that’s one of Microsoft’s biggest properties too (aka Hotmail). Then you look at finance sites. Microsoft is doing pretty well there with Microsoft Money (I met an employee who works there too and he said both Microsoft and Yahoo are way ahead of Google in finance traffic). Then you look at mapping. Again, they are pretty strong competitors there. Search? Who’s search technology would be thrown away? Advertising technology? Both Microsoft and Yahoo are pretty close there. Flickr? Clear value creation in an acquisition cause Microsoft doesn’t have anything like it. Same with Del.icio.us, Upcoming.org, Yahoo Answers, MyBlogLog. Portal? Yahoo is clear winner in brand name, but that’s just cause Microsoft has done an awful job in rebranding everything as “Live.”

As for me, two phrases popped into my head when I heard the rumor; hail mary play and post merger layoffs. I guess word association is mother...

In related news, Mike Arrington reported yesterday that Yahoo To Shut Down Yahoo Photos In Favor Of Flickr. This is a shockingly disruptive move that will definitely piss off users given how different the features and target audience of both sites are. Why would a Web savvy, user-centric company like Yahoo! do something that will so obviously cause bad blood between them and their users? How about all the employees working on Yahoo! Photos who busted their butts to make it one of the Web's most popular photo sites? The answer is simple. Yahoo! has redundant and competing products which they could no longer rationalize.

Now go back and reread Robert Scoble's post linked above then consider what a YHOO-MSFT merger would look like again.  

 

This post was originally meant to be a response to Mini-Microsoft's blog post entitled Mini, a Devil, and Fine Whine where he seems to imply that there is some sort of class struggle going on at Microsoft and also made some calls for radical transparency. However this morning Mini linked to a blog post entitled For want of a shoe, or time for a new rider? on the MSFTextrememakeover blog which is just fire and has distracted me. If you're a Microsoft watcher [or even better a Microsoft exec] you should go ahead and read it, twice even. Key excerpts that lit my fire

Mission

MSFT does not appear to have a clear, honestly customer-focused mission that is understood at all levels. Importantly - and perhaps as a result - employees seemingly aren't in total accord or fully bought into it. If MSFT truly believes in "Your potential. Our passion", then it needs to do more than just pay lip-service to it. It needs to open itself to all that that entails (cross-platform support, not playing lock-in games, etc.) and deliver against it.
...
Culture

I see two concerns here. First, the need to move from a culture of "good enough" to one of "excellence" and "insanely great". I've posted about this before. MSFT has a long-standing approach, ingrained via Gates, of getting something - anything - out to market and then fixing it over time. That worked well for a long time when "free" alternatives weren't prevalent, and when competitors/markets weren't moving as quickly as they are today. Now, it's a lot less successful, and yet MSFT continues to do it and be surprised when it fails.
...
Prioritize/Focus

Stop fighting major wars on multiple fronts simultaneously. It is simply ridiculous for current management to assume that MSFT can fight the biggest and best companies on earth, across a dozen or more battlegrounds, and still hope to prevail. Just take a look at some of the folks MSFT is going up against: SONY (and Nintendo) in gaming, Nokia and many others in mobile, GOOG and YHOO in Search, Everyone from Alcatel to Siemens in IPTV, IBM/Oracle/SAP (and smaller players Salesforce.com. Rightnow, etc.) in ERP and CRM, IBM/Adobe/FOSS in middleware and development, AAPL and most of MSFT's former partners in mobile media, AAPL and GNU/Linux in Operating Systems, and FOSS in personal productivity. Worse, these battles are spreading MSFT too thin, and leaving its core cash cows increasingly vulnerable (would Vista have taken 5 years to develop if management hadn't been distracted with a dozen other battles?).
...
Public Face

I am sick and tired of MSFT executives "trash" talking competitors in public. This is such a fundamental business tenet that it's an embarrassment to have to even list it.

Like I said, the entire post is really good. As for my response to Mini's Mini, a Devil, and Fine Whine post, here it goes. The kind of people who focus on what the top X% of Microsoft are making are probably not the kind of employees you want to keep around anyway so it seems weird to be catering to them. The concerns that the Microsoft employees whose opinions I value have are all eloquently described in MSFTextrememakeover's post excerpted above. The kind of people who get in a tizzy because some VPs got to attend an expensive award ceremony that they didn't are the kind of whiners and losers you can never make happy so why bother? It's not like they can argue that they are underpaid or that their employment benefits suck. Instead I see it as part of the age of entitlement in America where lots of people believe they deserve to be balling out of control and then gets pissed off when they aren't. The best thing you can do with those kind of people is to show them the door. 

 

According to the Infoworld article entitled Microsoft names leaders for search-and-ad unit

Microsoft Wednesday named Satya Nadella to lead the newly formed Search and Ad Platform group, the software giant's effort to optimize the advertising revenue-raising potential of its search business.

Nadella, previously corporate vice president for Microsoft's Business Solutions group, will report to Kevin Johnson, president of the Platform and Services Division, the company said in a statement.

I'm not sure this information is accurate since I haven't seen any sign of it on Microsoft Presspass nor has Satya Nadella's corporate profile been updated. However if it is, it would then create three VPs under Kevin Johnson who are in charge of Microsoft's three Web brands; Windows Live, MSN, and Live Search. The org chart representing all the folks who are in charge of Microsoft's online businesses would then be 

if the Infoworld article is accurate.

The only relevance this has to people who read my blog is that it gives a nice visual of where I fit in the org chart. I'm in Blake Irving's group, working on aspects of the Windows Live Platform that powers services used by the Windows Live Experience group. 

 

It seems just like yesterday when the tech blogosphere was abuzz with news that analyst Michael Gartenberg was leaving Jupiter Research for Microsoft. So you can imagine my surprise to fire up his blog today to find the post And Back to Analyst… where he writes

This is a difficult post to write. But after  much of thought, I have decided not to remain with Microsoft and I am returning to JupiterResearch as of Monday 3/12.

At my core, I am an analyst. It’s what I do and I do it well and after much thought, I realize I’m just not ready to stop doing that job just yet. I believe Jupiter itself is poised for some amazing things in the future and I’ve invested too much in the company to feel good about walking away at this point. Therefore I have decided to return and I am pleased that I have been welcomed back. My thanks to everyone I have worked with at Microsoft.

Wow, that was quick.

 

I'm almost caught up on my blog reading since getting back from vacation and I've spotted a couple of items I'd have blogged responses to if I was around. Since I don't have the time to write full blog posts on each of these items, here are links to the posts and brief outlines on what I thought about them

• Harish Mallipeddi has a blog post entitled Measuring efficiency of tagging with Entropy links to the paper Understanding Navigability of Social Tagging Systems by Ed Chi and Todd Mytkowicz of Xerox Parc which excerpts the key findings from the paper. One result of their research which seems obvious in hindsight and shows one of the issues that social software has to deal with as its community of users grows was

  The way he does that is to measure entropy (yup that same old same old Claude Shannon’s information theory which you learned in one of the CS courses) of entities like documents (D), users (U) and tags (T). His research group crawled the entire del.icio.us archive and then calculated the entropies. Here’s what they found:

  • H(D|T) specifies the social navigation efficiency. How efficient is it for us to specify a set of tags to find a set of specific documents? We found that in del.icio.us that it is getting less and less efficient.

  This makes sense when you think about it. Let's say the first set of users of del.icio.us came from a homogenous software development background and started applying the tag "xml" to mean items about the eXtensible Markup Language. Later on as the community grew, a number of gamers joined the site and they now use the tag "xml" to refer to items about the game X-Men Legends. Now if you are one of the original geek users of the site, the URL http://del.icio.us/tag/xml no longer is just about markup languages but also about video games. To actually find items strictly about the eXtensible Markup Language you may have to add other tags as refinements such as http://del.icio.us/tag/xml+programming.

  What this means is that to the oldest users of the site, the quality of the tagging system will seem to degrade over time even though this is a natural consequence of growth and diversifying its user base. Of course, this is only a problem if a lot of people use del.icio.us to find all items about a topic (i.e. browsing by tags) as opposed to just storing their individual bookmarks or subscribing to the bookmarks of people they know and trust.

• It seems Google announced some sort of Microsoft Office killer last week. You can read Don Dodge's Why Microsoft will not fall into the Innovators Dilemma and Robert Scoble's Microsoft has no innovator’s dillema? for two conflicting opinions on how this affects Microsoft. Personally, I think I've overdosed on the amount of times I've read the words innovator's dilemma in association with this announcement while catching up on email and blogs. What is funny about this situation is that almost everyone I've seen who throws the term around doesn't seem to have read the book. It is quite interesting to see Don Dodge write sentences like

  Microsoft will do everything possible to preserve these businesses while transitioning to the new Live strategy.

  and then follow that up with "No Innovators Dilemma here" without seeing the obvious contradiction in his words. Lots of  doublethink at work it seems.

  A side effect of reading this set of blog posts is that I found Don Dodge's Innovate or Imitate...Fame or Fortune? which praises being a fast follower as being more valuable than being an innovator. I've found that a lot of people at Microsoft point to past and recent successes such as XBox, Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer as proof that being a "fast follower" is the best strategy for Microsoft. There are three key problems with this kind of thinking

  1. It assumes your competitors are incompetent. This may have worked in the old days but with competitors like Google and Apple Inc, it isn't the case anymore.
  2. It requires that you have an ace up your sleeve that significantly one ups the competitors when you ship your knock off (e.g. integrating disparate applications into an Office Suite and pricing it lower than competitors, integrating product into the operating system, integrating a rich and social online experience into what was previously a solitary experience etc).
  3. It ignores the fact that "first mover advantage" is actually true for applications that have network effects which is definitely the case for social software which a lot of software has become today.

• The "diversity in conferences" recurring debate was kicked off again by a blog post by Jason Kottke entitled Gender Diversity at Web Conferences which encouraged the interesting responses from folks like Eric Meyer, Anil Dash and Shelley Powers. They are all good posts with stuff I agree and disagree with in them but I wasn't moved to write until I read the post Why are smart people still stuck on gender and skin-color blinders? by Tantek Çelik where he wrote

  Why is it that gender (and less often race, nay, skin-color, see below) are the only physical characteristics that lots of otherwise smart people appear to chime in support for diversity of?

  E.g. as long as we are trying for greater diversity in superficial physical characteristics (superficial because what do such characteristics have to do with the stated directly relevant criteria of "technical expertise, speaking skills, professional stature, brand appropriateness, and marketability" - though perhaps I can see a tenuous link with "rainbow" marketing), why not ask about other such characteristics?

  Where are all the green-eyed folks?

  Where are all the folks with facial tattoos?

  Where are all the redheads?

  Where are the speakers with non-ear facial piercings?

  Surely such speakers would help with "hipness" marketing.

  I found this post to be disingenious and wondered how anybody could downplay the gender and racial bias in the "Web 2.0" technology conference scene by equating it to a preference for green eyed speakers. So I decided to throw in my $0.02 on this topic...again.

  After the last ETech, I realized I was seeing the same faces and hearing the same things over and over again. More importantly, I noticed that the demographics of the speaker lists for these conferences don't match the software industry as a whole let alone the users who we are supposed to be building the software for.

  There were lots of little bits of ignorance by the speakers and audience which added up in a way that rubbed me wrong. For example, at the 2005  Web 2.0 conference a lot of people were ignorant of Skype except as 'that startup that got a bunch of money from eBay'. Given that there are a significant amount of foreigners in the U.S. software industry who use Skype to keep in touch with folks back home, it was surprising to see so much ignorance about it at a supposedly leading edge technology conference. The same thing goes for how suprised people were by how teenagers used the Web and computers. Additionally, there are just as many women using social software such as photo sharing, instant messaging, social networking, etc as men yet you rarely see their perspectives presented at any of these conferences. 

  When I think of diversity, I expect diversity of perspectives. People's perspectives are often shaped by their background and experiences. When you have a conference about an industry which is filled with people of diverse backgrounds building software for people of diverse backgrounds, it is a disservice to have the conversation and perspectives be homogenous. The software industry isn't just young white males in their mid-20s to mid-30s nor is that the primary demographic of Web users.

  Personally, I've gotten tired of attending conferences where we heard more about technologies and sites that the homogenous demographic of young to middle aged, white, male computer geeks find interesting (e.g. del.icio.us and tagging) and less about what Web users actually use regularly or find interesting (hint: it isn't del.icio.us and it sure as fuck isn't tagging).

 

Mini-Microsoft has a blog post entitled Where's Ray? Where's the Vista Campaign? where he claims that Ray Ozzie has been AWOL when it comes to presenting a vision for Microsoft as it's Chief Software Architect. There is an interesting comment in response to his post from an ex-Microsoftie which is excerpted below

>We need more engagement from Ray and his brigade about what's happening and what kind of coherent vision is coming about.

I'm sorry, but this is NOT what you need. You do NOT need vision from Ray. At this point, what you need from Ray is code!

I have a very long history with Microsoft, and I am no longer a softie. One of the reasons I left is the whole vision/strategy vs. code problem. In the old days, production quality code really mattered a ton. In the new Microsoft, from Forum 2000 onward, code was much less important. What really mattered was laying down a vision and a strategy.

I wrote a longish post in response to this comment then realized no good could come from posting it here. Suffice to say I agree with the sentiment in the comment. Somewhere along the line VISION became more important than SHIPPING CODE at Microsoft. This really became a problem when the gap between our vision (or should I say BillG's vision) and our ability to ship code widened a lot more than we realized leading to unpleasant results (e.g. Longhorn). 

What the company needs now is more focus on shipping code and less focus on vision. Quite frankly, I'd be quite happy to never get another vision memo or speech from Ray as long as I'm sure he's out there making sure we aren't working on any more obviously bad ideas. One of the reasons I'm still at Microsoft [specifically Windows Live] is that I believe that our current leadership believes in shipping code. I've also gotten the same vibe from Ray which is also goodness in my book. Time will tell whether my confidence is warranted or not.

PS: Is it me or are there shades of markl in that comment on Mini's blog?
 

One of the interesting things about Microsoft is that the company is so big that it is quite possible to be working on similar ideas to other groups in the company without significantly exchanging information or cross pollinating ideas. Earlier this week, I was at a cross-divisional information sharing event where I got to see where a lot of products were going with integrating the ideas from social software trends on the Web into their products.

One of the presentations I was most impressed with was the one forthe Knowledge Network for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. This is a product that integrates with enables people at a company to

• Discover who knows what and who knows whom within an organization. Quickly and easily locate people by subject expertise or social relationships with key contacts or companies.
• Simplify creating automated user profiles for each member of the network. Knowledge Network automates the discovery and sharing of undocumented knowledge and relationships for each member in the network. The user-customizable automated profile is secure and requires member approval before it is shared.
• Effectively search and pinpoint individuals. Knowledge Network provides the ability to connect with internal and external contacts, and calculates the shortest social distance between any two people in the network.

The problem of discovering people with subject matter expertise is a big one at a company like Microsoft with over 70,000 employees. How do you track down the best person to send feedback about Windows Live Spaces or ask a question about some of the idiosyncracies of C#? Knowledge Network attempts to address this in two ways. Recently I was on a mail thread where some folks suggested building a database of employees and annotating it with tags that identified certain attributes or skills of these employees such as the products they worked on, technologies they were experts at and so on. People quickly pointed out that asking people to create a profile of themselves on an internal site then tag themselves is a hassle that few would undertake. What many people on the mail thread [including myself] didn't realize is that Knowledge Network is actually targetted at exactly this scenario. To get over the boot strapping problem, the Knowledge Network client application indexes your email inbox and extracts two sets of information from it (a) a graph of your professional relationships based on who you exchange mail with regularly and (b) a set of keywords that describes subject matter your regularly communicate about. This information can then be uploaded to your company intranet's "People Search" feature where people can then search for you by tags keywords and then once they find you can then ask "Show Me How I Am Connected to this Person" which uses information gleaned from the org chart and email chains to figure out how your social networks overlap. This is seriously cool stuff. 

Although I had heard of the Knowledge Network product I haven't been deeply familiar with it which seems really unfortunate given that a lot of the kinds of social networking features I've been thinking about for Windows Live would benefit from the ideas I've seen implemented by the Knowledge Network team and Sharepoint. If only there was a way I can search for and browse people working on "social networking" technologies at Microsoft so I don't miss information like this in future. :)  I wonder if I can subscribe to an RSS feed of "People Search" results so I can keep track of when new people that have been tagged as "social networking" enter the system (i.e. join the company or start working on a new product). I need to investigate or propose this as a feature if it isn't already there. 

By the way, the Knowledge Network folks have a team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/kn which has a lot of informative posts about their product such as What is Knowledge Network and Why Should You Care? and How KN Integrates with SharePoint. Definitely add their blog to your news reader if you are interested in social networking within the enterprise.

 

From Jon Udell's blog post entitled A conversation with Jon Udell about his new job with Microsoft he writes

Q: Your new job is with Microsoft?

A: That's right. My last day at InfoWorld will be Friday Dec 15. On Jan 15, after a month-long sabbatical, I'll become a Microsoft employee. My official title will be Evangelist, and I'll report to Jeff Sandquist. He's the leader of the team that creates Channel 9 and Channel 10, websites that feature blogs, videos, screencasts, and podcasts for Microsoft-oriented developers.

Q: What will your role be?

A: The details aren't nailed down, but in broad terms I've proposed to Microsoft that I continue to function pretty much as I do now. That means blogging, podcasting, and screencasting on topics that I think are interesting and important; it means doing the kinds of lightweight and agile R&D that I've always done; and it means brokering connections among people, software, information, and ideas -- again, as I've always done.

Q: Why are you doing this?

A: I'm often described as a leading-edge alpha geek, and that's fair. I am, and probably always will be, a member of that club. But I'm also increasingly interested in reaching out to the mainstream of society.

For those of us in the club, it's a golden age. With computers and networks and information systems we can invent new things almost as fast as we can think them up. But we're leaving a lot of folks behind. And I'm not just talking about the digital divide that separates the Internet haves from the have-nots. Even among the haves, the ideas and tools and methods that some of us take for granted haven't really put down roots in the mainstream.

I had dinner with Jon a couple of weeks ago when he came up to Microsoft for interviews and I was impressed with the plan he described for the future of his career. I was pretty sure that once anyone interviewing him spent even a few minutes talking to him they'd be convinced they'd found the right person for the job, even though the job was Jon's idea. I was honored that Jon contacted me to talk to me about his plans and have been on pins & needles wondering if the folks at Microsoft would hire him or not.

Congrats to Jeff Sandquist. First Rory, now Jon Udell. You're hiring all the right folks.

 

Auren Hoffman of RapLeaf has a blog post entitled Why big high tech companies are losing the talent war where he writes

In today's hot startup market, it is essentially irrational to join a big company. That means that big companies are only attracting “B” and “C” players or they are attracting irrational A players. And they are losing all those great “A” players they hired in the dog days of 2002 (most of which now have fully vested stock-options).

Essentially, when the economy is good and massive amount of startup activity is happening, the big companies suffer. Just think about it…when you see the Google $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube, does that make you want to work more for a Google or for a potential YouTube? I venture to guess that you’ll want to go out there and work for startups like POSTroller and Blip.tv [Disclosure: Auren is an investor in POSTroller and is on the advisory board of Blip.tv and both companies are looking to recruit “A” players right now]

Now there are some rational “A” players that are still going to large companies. In order to recruit rockstar engineers, companies like Google significantly increase the pay and offer too many perks to list. And some people have their own reasons to join these tech companies. Niall Kennedy, a true “A” player, joined Microsoft last April because he wanted to be at the epicenter of the PC user experience. Like a scientist attracted to a university with great resources, Niall was attracted to Microsoft not to make a personal profit but to build true, long-lasting innovations. Unfortunately Niall left four months later when he realized corporate bureaucracy can stifle innovation.

I disagree with the core premise of this post but it did get me thinking about how to differentiate the typical employee at a big company like Microsoft or IBM from the typical person who joins a startup. After watching a couple of people leave Microsoft for startups, I think I've put my finger on the core difference between the kind of people you see toiling at a startup versus the ones you see as faceless cogs in a giant corporation. There are basically two kinds of people that you'll find a lot of at large software companies like Microsoft and IBM but rarely at startups

1. The Indentured: For example, all those foreign workers on H-1B visas
2. The Risk Averse: For example, the kind of folks with a spouse, kids and/or a mortgage.

After a few years of watching people, these are the actual differences I've seen between startup folks and corporate ladder climbing types. It's not some silly distinction as to whether the person is an "A" player or not.

An interesting consequence of this difference is the culture of the work environment. A place full of people who don't want to rock the boat because they are risk averse or indentured isn't the kind of place that will produce a project as fundamentally risky as YouTube. Even though all the big Web companies had online video offerings from MSN Video to Google Video, it was YouTube that won. How? By doing things that the typically cautious, risk averse folks in big companies like Google and Microsoft didn't consider like allowing user uploaded content and not bothering to have an "approval" process to ensure only appropriate videos showed up. YouTube was clearly a lawsuit magnet of the sort that would never fly at a big company.

That is the difference between startups and big technology companies

 

I don't really have much commentary on this but I thought this was still worth sharing. Earlier, this week Joel Spolsky wrote a blog post entitled Choices = Headaches where he writes

I'm sure there's a whole team of UI designers, programmers, and testers who worked very hard on the OFF button in Windows Vista, but seriously, is this the best you could come up with?

Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items. The two icons, I think, are shortcuts to menu items. I'm guessing the lock icon does the same thing as the lock menu item, but I'm not sure which menu item the on/off icon corresponds to.

This was followed up yesterday by Moishe Lettvin who used to work on the feature at Microsoft and has since gone to Google to work on Orkut. In his post entitled The Windows Shutdown crapfest, Moishe gives his perspective on some of the problems he faced while working on the feature for Longhorn Vista.

My main problem with Joel's post seems to be that his complaint seems to already be addressed by Vista. Isn't that the icon for a power button right there on the screen? So the nine options he complains about are really for advanced users? Regular users should only need to ever click the power button icon or the padlock icon. 

Then again, we shouldn't let the facts get in the way of a good anti-Microsoft rant. :)

 

A few days ago there was an article on the BBC News site entitled Zune problems for MSN customers which stated

But in a move that could alienate some customers, MSN-bought tracks will not be compatible with the new gadget. The move could also spell problems for the makers of MP3 players which are built to work with the MSN store.
...
The problem has arisen because tracks from the MSN Music site are compatible with the specifications of the Plays For Sure initiative. This was intended to re-assure consumers as it guaranteed that music bought from services backing it would work with players that supported it. MSN Music, Napster, AOL Music Now and Urge all backed Plays For Sure as did many players from hardware makers such as Archos, Creative, Dell and Iriver.

In a statement a Microsoft spokesperson said: "Since Zune is a separate offering that is not part of the Plays For Sure ecosystem, Zune content is not supported on Plays For Sure devices." The spokesperson continued: "We will not be performing compatibility testing for non-Zune devices, and we will not make changes to our software to ensure compatibility with non-Zune devices."
...
Microsoft said that its Windows Media Player will recognise Zune content which might make it possible to put the content on a Plays For Sure device. However, it said it would not provide customer support to anyone attempting this.

On a similar note there was an article entitled Trying Out the Zune: IPod It’s Not in the New York Times today which states

Microsoft went with its trusted Windows strategy: If you code it, the hardware makers will come (and pay licensing fees). And sure enough, companies like Dell, Samsung and Creative made the players; companies like Yahoo, Rhapsody, Napster and MTV built the music stores.

But PlaysForSure bombed. All of them put together stole only market-share crumbs from Apple. The interaction among player, software and store was balky and complex — something of a drawback when the system is called PlaysForSure.“Yahoo might change the address of its D.R.M. server, and we can’t control that,” said Scott Erickson, a Zune product manager. (Never mind what a D.R.M. server is; the point is that Microsoft blames its partners for the technical glitches.) Is Microsoft admitting, then, that PlaysForSure was a dud? All Mr. Erickson will say is, “PlaysForSure works for some people, but it’s not as easy as the Zune.”

So now Microsoft is starting over. Never mind all the poor slobs who bought big PlaysForSure music collections. Never mind the PlaysForSure companies who now find themselves competing with their former leader. Their reward for buying into Microsoft’s original vision? A great big “So long, suckas!” It was bad enough when there were two incompatible copy-protection standards: iTunes and PlaysForSure. Now there will be three.

(Although Microsoft is shutting its own PlaysForSure music store next week, it insists that the PlaysForSure program itself will live on.)

Microsoft’s proprietary closed system abandons one potential audience: those who would have chosen an iPod competitor just to show their resentment for Apple’s proprietary closed system. To make matters worse, you can’t use Windows Media Player to load the Zune with music; you have to install a similar but less powerful Windows program just for the Zune. It’s a ridiculous duplication of effort by Microsoft, and a double learning curve for you.

So how is the Zune? It had better be pretty incredible to justify all of this hassle.

As it turns out, the player is excellent.

On days like this, I miss having Robert Scoble roaming the halls in the B0rg cube. It sucks when you let the press tell your story for you.

 

I got an email over the weekend from a friend of mine who's leaving Microsoft. I wasn't surprised to see him leave Microsoft, given that the every project he's worked on at Microsoft has either been cancelled mid-project or end of lifed in that release. After being at Microsoft for five years, I've now begun to see the signs that a project is likely to crash and burn early on. Below is a top five list of signs your software project is in trouble I compiled as part of my 'parting career advice' to my intern.

1. Schedule Chicken: This is typically a sign that the project's schedules are unrealistic. A project with unrealistic schedule is either an indication of poor communication between layers in the product team or even worse, bad management that punishes the messenger when there is bad news (e.g. poor initial estimation of project length). The main problem with schedule chicken is that you can be "date driven" or you can be "quality driven", you can't be both.

2. Scope Creep: Requirements changing as a software project progresses are natural. They can change due to feedback from the customer after they get to try out a prototype, due to changes in the competitive landscape or because the original requirements had hidden conditions which were not discovered until after implementation. When things get bad is when the goals of a project are changed or increased significantly without a corresponding significant change to the expected timeframe for delivery. WinFS merging with Object Spaces is my canonical example of scope creep at Microsoft.

3. Underresourced: You don't bring a knife to a gun fight. So you shouldn't expect that 3 developers and $50,000 will be able to compete with the Googles and Microsofts of the world. Similarly, if you work at a big company and you have a handful of folks working on a product where competitors have large teams or entire companies working on the same problem space, you're probably in over your head.  

4. Second System Syndrome: Once you ship a software application, it instantly becomes legacy code. To a developer this means there is something newer and sexier that can solve the same problem in a more elegant way. Eventually a project is started which is intended to replace the existing product which customers are finding useful. This is often a double whammy. The new project is hamstrung out of the gate by having to meet customer expectations on backwards compatibility, performance and new features in comparison to the old product. This burden is often a crushing weight on the second system which eventually collapses under the strain. In addition, the old project is often abandoned or at best put in "maintenance mode" with only a skeleton crew working on it even though it pays the bills.  

5. No Entrance Strategy: There is a lot of talk in the software industry of exit strategies but a lot of the time software products do not have an entrance strategy. How do you get people to use the application? How do you get the first 100,000 or 1 million users? Sometimes in big companies, there is also the corporate strategy tax to consider when deciding whether a product has an entrance strategy or not. When I was on the XML team at Microsoft, there were folks on the team working on a project they called X#. The project was basically C# with extensions to handle relational and XML data access as operations native to the programming language. I attended an internal presentation about the project and when asked what the deliverable from the project would be, the team members actually showed a Photoshoped image of a Microsoft Visual C# box which read Microsoft Visual X#. Of course, this was at the time Microsoft was taking heat for introducing both C# & Visual Basic.NET at the same time. It was unlikely that Microsoft would ship a third similar language anytime soon. The project was killed, resurrected  and morphed a couple of times. The story eventually ended happily with a lot of the innovations in the language eventually showing up as .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) (aka C# 3.0). That was one instance with a happy ending, a counter example is the new file system for Windows being cancelled a few years after it was announced to be shipping separately from the operating system. A file system that doesn't ship with the operating system doesn't sound like a product with an entrance strategy to me. How about you?

 

Last year, in the comments to a blog post entitled Career Development at Microsoft: The internal interview process, there was the following exchange

# re: Career Development at Microsoft: The internal interview process

Monday, October 24, 2005 11:38 PM by hrbp

I have a question.
For internal candidates, is there a selection meeting including the job owner (manager), supervisors of the internal candiates, a representative from the talent management team, and the HR gen? If not, will the job owner talk with the candidate's current supervisor?
Thanks.

# re: Career Development at Microsoft: The internal interview process

Tuesday, October 25, 2005 4:22 PM by JobsBlog

Hrbp - The hiring manager (job owner) will look at the employee's previous reviews and speak with his/her manager AFTER the employee has notified his/her team of upcoming interviews. The current manager must also grant the employee "permission to interview."

gretchen

The concept of "Permission to Interview" is probably the worst idea that Microsoft's HR group has come up with and this is after considering other questionable practices like The Curve & getting rid of the towel service. What happens when you tell your manager you want permission to leave the team? First of all, your manager has veto power over this decision or at the minimum can delay it for months at a time. Secondly, you're automatically labelled as a "bad" employee which sucks if you don't make it through the interviews on the team you want to transfer to or your opportunity to move is delayed for so long the other team finds someone else. 

I've lost count of the amount of times I've heard someone say that they or someone they know is interviewing with Google or some other external company because they (i) don't want to risk asking for permission to interview or (ii) their management team has placed a temporary ban on permissions to interview. This means that the awesome thing about "permission to interview" is that it encourages people to leave the company once they've decided to leave a team because they are no longer a good fit or have a bad manager.

Why am I writing about this now? See the Mini-Microsoft post Microsoft Internal Transfers Just Got a Whole Lot Easier. Another Dilbert-style HR practice bites the dust. Lisa Brummel is slowly becoming my favorite Microsoft employee.

 

Adam Barr has a blog post entitled Trying to Grok Windows Live where he writes

At the Company Meeting last week, Ray Ozzie stood up and gave a very nice, very inspiring speech about how we have to shift the company to Live (Windows Live, Office Live, etc). He spoke without slides or notes and it's obviously something he cares a lot about and has thought a lot about. I'm entirely convinced that he has a great vision of the future in his mind.

The only problem is, I really don't know what he is talking about.

I'm fully prepared to believe it's because I'm too dense to understand. But when he talks about "betting the company on Windows Live", what does that mean? How does Windows become a service? I understand that there are things we need to do in order to make the Internet a platform; back in 2000 I wrote that I thought that's what .Net was. But I don't see how this involves changing Windows in some fundamental way.

This isn't the first time I've heard someone from Microsoft say they don't understand what Ray Ozzie is talking about when he talks about "Live" software. I feel such a disconnect when I hear this because when I read Ray's "Internet Services Disruption Memo, I was like "Duh" so it is difficult to understand the perspective of people who don't appreciate the power of the Web.

From my perspective, Ray Ozzie's memo and his various speeches have one simple message

1. The Web has fundamentally changed the face of computing.
   
2. The Web is here to stay.
   
3. The world's largest software company has to adapt to this reality
   

A good analogy for understanding what it means for software to embrace the Web is to compare an application like WinAmp 3.0 which plays music on your hard drive or from CD to iTunes 7.0 which plays music on your hard drive or from CD and can be used to purchase music from an online store and can be used to subscribe to podcasts on the Web. One doesn't have to resort to "creating an AJAX version of WinAmp" or whatever other straw man argument usually comes up in this context to turn a desktop MP3 player into "Live" software. iTunes shows that.

What Microsoft needs to do is repeat that lesson across all of its products and think about how they can embrace the Web instead of simply reacting to it or barely acknowledging its existence.

 

Lately I find that the stories I have been writing turn out not to be suitable for publication. It makes me kind of sad, because I've written a few things recently that I think are actually really good, but I haven't published them here, because if I did, there would be people who would never speak to me again. Either people who are too close to the stories to think they're funny, or people who are too far away from them to think they're funny.

I think maybe the problem is that I really didn't write them well enough at all: if I'd done my job, then everyone reading them would understand why they were funny. If it only makes sense to people who think like me, then I haven't done my job, right?

- Jamie Zawinski

A few days ago I wrote a blog post entitled Leaving MSFT in Five Years: Year One which was meant to be a follow up to a blog post I wrote a year ago entitled On Moving On From Microsoft in 5 Years. After writing it, I realized I didn't have the stomach to deal with whatever comments or emails I got about the post whether they were good or bad. Just writing the blog post was cathartic even though I never published it and probably never will.

However this afternoon, I saw a blog post Rebuilding Microsoft in Wired Magazine on the Mini-Microsoft blog which talks about the winds of change at Microsoft. I felt drawn to comment even if my comment is just that I like the changes that have been occuring at Microsoft over the past year and I like having leadership like Ray Ozzie, Steven Sinofsky and Chris Jones running Windows Live.

Have a good weekend. See you at Chuck-E-Cheese's. :)

 

Steve Yegge, who works at Google, has a blog post entitled Good Agile, Bad Agile which has a lot of really interesting bits. The first is his take on the origin of Extreme Programming where he writes

So some of the consultants began to think: "Hey, if these companies insist on acting like infants, then we should treat them like infants!" And so they did. When a company said "we want features A through Z", the consultants would get these big index cards and write "A" on the first one, "B" on the second one, etc., along with time estimates, and then post them on their wall. Then when the customer wanted to add something, the consultant could point at the wall and say: "OK, boy. Which one of these cards do you want to replace, BOY?"

Is it any wonder Chrysler canceled the project?

So the consultants, now having lost their primary customer, were at a bar one day, and one of them (named L. Ron Hubbard) said: "This nickel-a-line-of-code gig is lame. You know where the real money is at? You start your own religion." And that's how both Extreme Programming and Scientology were born.

The link which explains that Chrysler cancelled the project where a lot of the Extreme Programming and Agile Methodology hype started is on Wikipedia so for all I know that clarification may be gone by the time you read this post. Unfortunately in trying to track down the details in more permanent location all I can find is a USENET thread and more wiki entries. That's pretty interesting, that XP and Agile resulted in a failed software project in the original project where it all started.

There is also some stuff about working at Google where he writes

From a high level, Google's process probably does look like chaos to someone from a more traditional software development company. As a newcomer, some of the things that leap out at you include:

- there are managers, sort of, but most of them code at least half-time, making them more like tech leads.

- developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team.

- Google has a philosophy of not ever telling developers what to work on, and they take it pretty seriously.

- developers are strongly encouraged to spend 20% of their time (and I mean their M-F, 8-5 time, not weekends or personal time) working on whatever they want, as long as it's not their main project.

- there aren't very many meetings. I'd say an average developer attends perhaps 3 meetings a week, including their 1:1 with their lead.

- it's quiet. Engineers are quietly focused on their work, as individuals or sometimes in little groups or 2 to 5.

- there aren't Gantt charts or date-task-owner spreadsheets or any other visible project-management artifacts in evidence, not that I've ever seen.

- even during the relatively rare crunch periods, people still go get lunch and dinner, which are (famously) always free and tasty, and they don't work insane hours unless they want to.

For some reason this reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell's The Talent Myth which is excerpted below

This "talent mind-set" is the new orthodoxy of American management. It is the intellectual justification for why such a high premium is placed on degrees from first-tier business schools, and why the compensation packages for top executives have become so lavish. In the modern corporation, the system is considered only as strong as its stars, and, in the past few years, this message has been preached by consultants and management gurus all over the world. None, however, have spread the word quite so ardently as McKinsey, and, of all its clients, one firm took the talent mind-set closest to heart. It was a company where McKinsey conducted twenty separate projects, where McKinsey's billings topped ten million dollars a year, where a McKinsey director regularly attended board meetings, and where the C.E.O. himself was a former McKinsey partner. The company, of course, was Enron.
...
"We had these things called Super Saturdays," one former Enron manager recalls. "I'd interview some of these guys who were fresh out of Harvard, and these kids could blow me out of the water. They knew things I'd never heard of." Once at Enron, the top performers were rewarded inordinately, and promoted without regard for seniority or experience. Enron was a star system. "The only thing that differentiates Enron from our competitors is our people, our talent," Lay, Enron's former chairman and C.E.O., told the McKinsey consultants when they came to the company's headquarters, in Houston.
...
Among the most damning facts about Enron, in the end, was something its managers were proudest of. They had what, in McKinsey terminology, is called an "open market" for hiring. In the open-market system--McKinsey's assault on the very idea of a fixed organization--anyone could apply for any job that he or she wanted, and no manager was allowed to hold anyone back. Poaching was encouraged. When an Enron executive named Kevin Hannon started the company's global broadband unit, he launched what he called Project Quick Hire. A hundred top performers from around the company were invited to the Houston Hyatt to hear Hannon give his pitch. Recruiting booths were set up outside the meeting room. "Hannon had his fifty top performers for the broadband unit by the end of the week," Michaels, Handfield-Jones, and Axelrod write, "and his peers had fifty holes to fill." Nobody, not even the consultants who were paid to think about the Enron culture, seemed worried that those fifty holes might disrupt the functioning of the affected departments, that stability in a firm's existing businesses might be a good thing, that the self-fulfillment of Enron's star employees might possibly be in conflict with the best interests of the firm as a whole.

Interesting juxtaposition, huh? I've talked to people who've come to Microsoft from Google (e.g. Danny Thorpe) and it definitely is as chaotic as it sounds there. For some reason, the description of life at Google by Steve Yegge reminds me a bit of Microsoft where there were two huge money making projects (Office & Windows in the case of Microsoft and AdWords & AdSense in the case of Google) and then a bunch of good to mediocre projects full of smart people dicking around. Over the years I've seen a reduction of the 'smart people dicking around' type projects over here and more focus on shipping code. I suspect that it's just a matter of time before the same thing will happen at Google as investors seek a better return on their investments once they hit their growth limits in the online advertising space.

There's just one more thing that Steve Yegge wrote that I want to comment on, which is

The thing that drives the right behavior at Google, more than anything else, more than all the other things combined, is gratitude. You can't help but want to do your absolute best for Google; you feel like you owe it to them for taking such incredibly good care of you.

I remember interning at Microsoft five years ago and hearing someone say how grateful he was for "the things Microsoft has done for me" and thinking how creepy and cult-like that sounded. A company pays you at worst 'what they think they can get away with' and at best 'what they think you are worth', neither of these should inspire gratitude. Never forget that or else you'll be on the road to heartbreak.

 

From the Bloomberg news article Microsoft Gives Bonuses Totaling Almost $1 Billion (Update3) we learn

Aug. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. paid out performance bonuses totaling almost $1 billion in restricted stock to 900 of its top executives.

One-third of the 37 million shares vest immediately, Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, the world's biggest software company, said in a regulatory filing today. Chairman Bill Gates and Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer were excluded.

The company revamped its compensation plan in 2003 to hold onto key executives because many of the stock options granted previously were worthless. Doing so gave the company a way to reward executives and remain competitive with rival employers such as Google Inc. after the stock fell 56 percent in 2001 and 2002.

It's September which means our yearly bonuses and raises are around the corner. It looks like I need to think up another excuse for why my girlfriend and I can't go furniture shopping at IKEA. :)

 

It's hard for me to believe that it's been five years since I was an intern at Microsoft. It's still fun to go back to read my blog posts about my Microsoft interview, my impressions halfway through the experience and my parting thoughts at the end if the experience. I've started thinking about my internship again because I'm going to be the mentor/manager of an intern in a couple of weeks and I've been taking strolls down memory lane trying to remember the experiences that made my internship worthwhile. 

My favorite experience is the story behind how I got the article Using the ECMA Standards: An Interview with Miguel de Icaza published on MSDN while I was still college and Microsoft had only said negative things about Miguel's Mono project up until that article was published.

It all started with an article on C|Net entitled Open source steps in to duplicate .Net which implied that Microsoft's licensing terms may not be favorable for Open Source implementations of the .NET Framework such as Mono and DotGNU. At the time, I thought it was rather two-faced of Microsoft to claim that the CLI and C# were going to be open ECMA standards but then threaten to prohibit Open Source implementations. So I fired of an ranting mail to the internal discussion list focused on the .NET Framework pointing out this inconsistency in Microsoft's position. At first, I got a bunch of replies smacking me down for daring to question Microsoft's strategy but after a couple of supportive mails from coworkers like Fadi Fakhouri, Omri Gazitt and a couple of others I eventually got routed to the right person. I met with Tony Goodhew who was quoted in the C|Net article and he set me straight. When I found out that this wasn't the case, I mentioned that it would be a great sign of goodwill to the Open Source community if Microsoft showed just how much they were supportive of such projects. Since I'd also gotten to know the author of the Dr. GUI columns on MSDN via another flame war email discussion, I had connections at MSDN and mentioned the idea to them as well. The MSDN folks liked the idea and when I pitched the idea to Miguel De Icaza he did as well. Although it only took a few email exchanges between Miguel and I to get the meat of the interview done, I didn't get the article completely edited and approved by MSDN until after my internship was done.

It was a pretty big deal for me when the article was published especially since Slashdot ran the story multiple times. The fact that I was just some punk intern and I got Microsoft to officially endorse Mono on MSDN was a big deal to me. The entire event made me appreciate Microsoft as a company and was a key factor in my decision to come to work for Microsoft full-time.

Now I'm trying to make sure I create an environment where the intern I'll be mentoring over the next few months can have similar experiences. If you are or have been an intern at Microsoft and don't mind sharing what rocked or sucked about your internship, I'd appreciate your comments.

 

This morning I got an IM from Niall Kennedy letting me know that he was Leaving Microsoft. He begins his blog post about leaving by writing

I am leaving Microsoft to start my own company. My last day at Microsoft is next Friday, August 18. It's uncertain whether Microsoft will continue the feed platform work I started, but it's some good stuff so I hope they do.

As the person who referred Niall to the company and gave him some advice when he was weighing whether to join Windows Live, I am sad to see him leave so soon. I sympathize with his reasons for leaving although some of what he wrote is inaccurate and based on speculation rather than the actual facts of the matter. That said, I found Niall to be quite knowledgeable, smart and passionate, so I expect him to do well in his endeavors.

Good luck, Niall.

 

Don Demsak has a blog post entitled Open Source Projects As A Form Of Community Service which links to a number of blog posts about the death of the NDoc project. He writes

Open source projects have been the talk of the tech blogs recently with the announcement that NDoc 2 is Offcially Dead, along with the mention that the project's sole develop was a victim of an automated mail-bomb attack because the project wasn't getting a .Net 2.0 version out fast enough for their liking.  Kevin has decided to withdraw from the community, and fears for himself and his family.  The .Net blogging community has had a wide range of reactions:

• Phil Haack talks about his ideas behind helping/saving the open source community and laid down a challenge. 
• Eric Wise mentions that he will not work on another FOSS project. 
• Scott Hanselman laments that Microsoft hasn't put together an Ineta like organization to handle giving grants to open source projects, and also shows how easy it is to submit a patch/fix to a project.
• Peter Provost worries that bringing money into the equation may spoil the cool part of community developed software, and that leadership is the key to good open source projects.
• Derek Denny-Brown says that "Microsoft needs to understand that Community is more than just lots of vendors creating commercial components, or MVPs answering questions on newsgroups".

I've been somewhat disappointed by the Microsoft developer division's relationship with Open Source projects based on the .NET Framework and it's attitude towards source code availability in general. Derek Denny-Brown's post entitled Less Rambling Venting about Developing for .Net hit the nail on the head for me. There are a number of issues with the developer community around Visual Studio and the .NET Framework that are raised in Derek's post and the others mentioned above. The first, is what seems like a classic case of Not Invented Here (NIH) in how Microsoft has not only failed to support Open Source projects that fill useful niches in the Visual Studio ecosysem but eventually competes with them (Nant vs. MSBuild, NUnit vs. Visual Studio Team System and now Sandcastle vs. NDoc). My opinion is that this is a consequence of Microsoft's strategy of integrated innovation which encourages Microsoft's product teams to pursue a seamless end-to-end experience where every software application in the business process is a Microsoft product. 

Another issue is Microsoft's seeming ambivalence and sometimes antipathy towards Open Source software. This is related to the fact that the ecosystem around Microsoft's software platforms (i.e. customers, ISVs, etc) is heavily tilted towards commercial software development. Or is that vice versa? Either way, commercial software developers tend to view Open Source as the bane of their existence. This is unfortunate given that practically every major software development platform that the .NET Framework and Visual Studio competes with is either Open Source (e.g. PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby) or at the very least encourages source code availability (e.g. Java). Quite frankly, I personally would love to the .NET Framework class libraries being Open Source or at the very least have the source code available in the same way Sun has done with the JDK. I know that there is the Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure (SSCLI) which I have used on occassion when having issues during RSS Bandit development but it isn't the same.

So we have a world where the developer community around Microsoft's products is primarily interested in building and using commercial software while the company pursues an integration strategy that guarantees that it will compete with projects that add value on its platform. The questions then are whether this is a bad thing and if so, how do we fix it?

 

Like every other company out there, Microsoft likes to encourage employees to refer people they know who might be a good fit to join the company. It seems the HR department sent out a mass mailing last week and guess whose ugly mug was used as part of the campaign?

Front

Back

I assume this was just reusing the stock photo from my page on the Microsoft Careers site as opposed to an exhortation to Microsoft employees to hire more people like me. We only need so many paper pushing PMs. ;)

It's still pretty sweet though.

 

It's been one of those weeks where it feels like I spent more time sitting in meetings or composing meeting notes than actually doing productive work. Wonder what it's like? Read the post Fireside Chat with Khoi Vinh and Jeffrey Veen: “In-house vs. on your own” on the 37 Signals blog which is excerpted below

About the chatters
Khoi Vinh is Design Director at the NY Times and creator of Subtraction.com. Previously, he was a founding partner at Behavior. Jeffrey Veen is Product Director for Measure Map, now owned by Google. Previously, he was a founding partner at Adaptive Path.

Matt and Jason from 37signals moderated.

Matt L.	Khoi, what’s the biggest difference between your typical work day now versus when you were at Behavior? And Jeff, what’s been the biggest change since your shift from Adaptive Path to Google? What do you like better about your new job? What do you miss about your old one?
Jeffrey V.	Meetings!
Khoi V.	Meetings is right.
Jeffrey V.	At a large orgainzation, communication is different than in a small team.
Khoi V.	There are a lot of meetings for me — sometimes that’s about 60% of my week.
Jeffrey V.	Yeah, that sounds like my schedule.

Matt L.	What % of these meetings are necessary/productive?
Jeffrey V.	Hmmm… I’m not sure I could quantify that.
Khoi V.	I’d say about 90% of the meetings I attend are necessary and productive. There are very few time wasters.
	In a way, I’ve come to see meetings as central to the success of the design group I lead. They’re my opportunity to articulate the hows and whys of the design process.
Jeffrey V.	Meetings are a byproduct of scale,
	For example, when we were working on Measure Map, we could come to a conclusion with five people very quickly, and launch something new.
Jeffrey V.	But at Google, there are far more dependencies.

What I miss from my old days on the XML team at Microsoft is that I often would take a day off from meetings and either shut myself in the office to get work done or work from home. Somewhere along the line I lost that habit and now every day I spend most of the day either in meetings or killing time between meetings.

 

Microsoft is the only company I've worked for us a full time employee which means that sometimes I wonder how different my perspective of inter-office interaction is from that of the average software developer with a wider range of experiences. For example, one thing I've noticed about internal mailing lists is that there are always people who seem to assume that they are smarter and more knowledgeable about a product or technology than the people who actually work on the product. You can tell these people by the way they point out obvious features that are missing in the product and berate the team for not having them (e.g. why isn't there podcasting support in Windows Media Player or social bookmarking in Windows Live Favorites or support for RELAX NG in System.Xml, etc). I've seen critics both internal and external to Microsoft raise these questions probably because every one of these questions seems like it points to a bad decision on the part of the product team. However things are never so cut and dried.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a blog entry on Robert Scoble's blog where he mentioned that one of the most surprising things about working at Microsoft was that practically every time he criticized a product team for a decision they made there was a good reason behind it. Just this week, I was reading posts by Joshua Allen and Mini-Microsoft that criticized the disappearance of Microsoft Private Folders 1.0 due to "concerns around manageability, data recovery and encryption". Neither of them considered whether these concerns could be valid as pointed out by a comment in the Mini-Microsoft blog which is excerpted below

So what makes you think, even for a New York Minute, that we haven't already been on the firing line because some "gotta have the shiny thing" senior middle mgmt bozo installed this My Private Folder "cool tool" and immediately forget the password that was "securing" the files for a $250,000 project?

I'm here in Redmond, Mini, working IT for a company with 4000 people internationally, 1000 in the US. Some of our staff has been in MS advertisements - there's no dearth of Kool-Aid here. But you want to blame the IT lords? No.

Blame the users to whom your company gave a loaded gun.

It's always interesting to see the other side of the story. Of course, I'm guilty of such criticism of product teams myself. Just this week, I walked over to Jay Fluegel's office to rant about the fact that MSN Spaces hasn't done much in providing users with cool widgets for their space or fixing the bugs in existing widgets in recent months. He not only agreed with me, he also showed me what they have planned to address my issues (i.e. Windows Live Gadgets) and I was blown away.

On the other hand, just because a product team thinks it has a good reason doesn't always make it one. For example, given the predictable amount of negative press about adCenter not supporting Firefox, Safari or IE 7 I would have made the call to not ship whatever features that depend on AJAX/ActiveX/whatever that depend on IE 6 than tell ~10% of the people on the Web that we don't want their advertising dollars. I have no insight into why they made this decision but I'm sure there is a good reason behind it. ;)

 

The past few days seem to have been quite interesting in the comments section of the the Mini-Microsoft blog. Ex-Microsoft employee, Robert Scoble jumped into some comment threads where some of his former bosses were being criticized (start here) and it quickly devolved into a flame war. In the aftermath of that flame war, Mini posted an entry entitled Bad Mini, Scoble's Exit, and Truthiness - Links which also led to another series of interesting comments from Robert. The most interesting of which seems not to have been posted but is instead referenced in this excerpted comment by Who da'Punk (aka Mini-Microsoft)

Okay, okay, hold on... things are getting heated again. I've got about six posts in the queue, including Mr. Scoble's "Goodbye I won't ever be commenting here again," comment. So, please hold on to your "Grr, Scoble!" comments because he won't be following up, let alone perhaps reading them. You'd be much better served submitting your comments to his blog or writing your own blog entries and linking appropriately.
...
In the meantime, I'm certainly thinking about Scoble's parting strategic comments:

* The Mini-Microsoft blog's impact has come, been done, and is past.

* The blog serves now to harm Microsoft more than help it.

* The blog is, specifically, being used by the anti-Microsoft crowd and competitors to harm Microsoft.

All good points, and some, worth putting up a pivotal post about.

But not today. Go have fun.

I find it hard to disagree with Robert's above points. The Mini-Microsoft blog has served as a place for Microsoft employees to discuss what riles them about the company in an anonymous setting that is free of recrimination. From my perspective, this has been both good and bad. It has been good to have a forum where people can discuss some aspects of the culture that have been taken for granted but were actually harmful such as The Curve without fear of being attacked for questioning the status quo. Although, it would have been better for this discussion to happen internally there are a number of social and technological reasons why this is difficult.

On the flip side, the Mini-Microsoft blog is a forum where disgruntled employees pour out their bile on the fellow employees and the company as a whole. I've seen character assassination, racism, sexism, fear mongering, unfounded allegations of sexual misconduct, information leaking, and more in the comments section of the Mini-Microsoft blog. However you slice it, it reflects badly on Microsoft that the people posting these comments appear to be Microsoft employees. What is even more interesting is when you consider Robert Scoble's allegation below

Anonymous bloggers are never as credible as ones who stick their names on things.

Why does it bother me? Cause Mini is being used by non-Microsoft employees to hurt Microsoft. I've learned that a lot of the posts here that you're reading aren't done by Microsoft employees.

Yet you are taking it on face value that everyone is being straight up with you here. They are not.

I didn't realize this until after I had left Microsoft (it's funny how people tell you stuff when you aren't a Microsoft employee anymore). I'm not willing to expose my source, though. But I believe him.

That competitors would astroturf the Mini-Microsoft blog or use it as a recruiting tool when competing against Microsoft for a candidate doesn't surprise me. The surprise is that both Mini-Microsoft and Robert Scoble seem to be taken aback by this. I guess I'm more cynical than most.

The bottom line is that I agree with Robert that in its current incarnation Mini-Microsoft does more harm to Microsoft than good. If anything, it does point out the need for a better internal forums for frank and open discussion but I definitely think it's time is past.   

 

Quentin Clark has posted a new entry entitled Update to the Update on the WinFS team blog that answers some of the questions that have been raised since his post on Friday about the status of WinFS. He writes

Is WinFS dead?
Yes and No. Yes, we are not going to ship WinFS as a separate, monolithic software component. But the answer is also No - the vision remains alive and we are moving the technology forward. A lot of the technology really was database stuff – and we’re putting that into SQL and ADO. But some of the technology, especially the end user value points, are not ready, and we’re going to continue to work on that in incubation. Some or all of these technologies may be used by other Microsoft products going forward.

Does your plan for WinFS have any impact on Windows Vista?
There is no impact on Windows Vista. We announced back in August 2004 that WinFS would not be in Windows Vista.

Will the "Relational Filesystem" ever be in Windows?
Hey – we are very busy finishing Vista, and just aren’t ready to talk about what comes next. The vision for a richer storage in Windows is very much alive.  With the new tools for searching and organizing information in Windows Vista, we are taking a good step towards that vision.  

Why are parts of WinFS going into SQL Server?
We have a vision around data that guides us we call the "Data Platform Vision". We’ve been talking with customers about this for some time, and we have heard consistent positive feedback. It was clear that the integrated storage and automation features of WinFS will help SQL Server deliver on the "Beyond Relational" and "Continuous Availability and Automation" promises of that vision. We decided to focus resources on delivering these technologies to our customers as part of the Data Platform Vision in the near term.

Why did Microsoft announce this now after talking about WinFS at TechEd so recently?
When we were at TechEd, we had not made the decision. Sure, it was under discussion, but we did not have all the information we needed and we had not made the call yet. We did share the news as soon as we had the final word. We could have waited longer to disclose the information and made the change in plans less of a contrast, but we chose to notify people as soon as we could. This is why we used the blog and didn’t fire-up the big MS PR machinery – that takes time.

I commented internally that the response to Quentin's original blog post shows that there has been a discrepancy between what the WinFS team has been working on and what the developer community believes they were delivering. I got to read a draft of this blog post before it went up and it does a better job of stating what has happened with WinFS and even seems to have incorporated some of my feedback. I hope Charles Miller doesn't think this post is also un-blog-like. :)

 

I was reading Charles Miller's post entitled We Come to Bury WinFS... where he wrote

The first thing to strike me about the blog post announcing the end of WinFS as a Vista feature is how totally un-blog-like it is.

Every comment (bar one) got the point. WinFS is dead. Its carcass is being split between SQL Server and ADO.NET, and the relational filesystem that was going to change the way we use computers is no longer just postponed to be shipped after Vista, it’s gone.

The blog post itself, however, is written entirely in marketing-speak. The engineer talks about how super-excited the team is about this "new direction", how encouraging this news is, and leaves the fate of Vista for a final, particularly obfuscatory paragraph. Nary a word is allowed to suggest that the last nail in the coffin for Vista’s most eagerly anticipated feature might be a huge let-down to those people who have been watching it slip further and further down the schedule since its fanfare announcement as a part of Longhorn three years ago.

Did Microsoft forget everything Scoble was supposed to be teaching them, so quickly?

Every now and then, you’ve got to put out a mea culpa. You’ve promised something that turned into something else, or that you changed your mind about, or that you just can’t deliver. In the mass-media world, you do this by spinning the story as positively as you can. The message will be filtered by intermediaries before it reaches the public, and it’s expected the journalists in the middle will get the point, pulling quotes from the positive spin to offset the otherwise negative message.

I agree 100% with Charles Miller's sentiments about the blog posting on WinFS. This seems to be another example a case where Microsoft overpromised and underdelivered failed to deliver but even worse instead of owning up to this, the blog post spins this as being what customers want. From reading the hundred or so comments and trackbacks to Quentin Clark's post it doesn't seem that there are many people who are excited or encouraged that what once was touted as a pillar of Longhorn is now just another checkbox feature in SQL Server. This makes Microsoft look bad to developers because it means that we are either insulting our developer customers by thinking we can pull the wool over their eyes in such a blatant way or even worse that we are completely out of touch with them. Either way, it sucks and I feel like we should apologise to developers and perhaps even the software industry as a whole. Microsoft did offer a mea culpa to developers for the delay between Internet Explorer versions and I think this is another one of those cases where we should do the same.

I feel like I should probably throw in some last thoughts about WinFS, the technology, especially since in my previous post I claim that this decision should have been made a few years ago. Below is a random collection of my thoughts WinFS which can also be gleaned from my various blog posts on the technology over the last few years

1. There was a divergence of opinion in what the team was building and what the people thought the team was building. A common misconception was that WinFS would somehow make search "better" on the desktop in the same way that desktop search tools like Lookout do. I addressed this misconception further in my post Killing the "WinFS is About Making Search Better" Myth from almost two years ago.

2. The project had the biggest example of scope creep I'd ever seen at Microsoft. When WinFS swallowed ObjectSpaces the team decided that instead of just tackling the hard problem of building an object/relational file system for Windows that they also wanted to tackle the hard problem of  building an enterprise-class object to relational mapping technology with the same product in a single release. It also didn't help that key ObjectSpaces folks like Matt Warren, Dinesh Kulkarni and Luca Bolognese ended up joining the C# team to work on LINQ which meant WinFS inherited all of the problems of ObjectSpaces but not necessarily all the folks who had been working on those problems.
   

3. The chicken and the egg problem. One of the key ideas in the WinFS type system for the Windows desktop was that we'd have common file system level types for high level concepts like people/contacts, email messages or photos instead of just opaque bits on disk with some file format specific metadata. To take advantage of this, existing applications would have to be rewritten or new [backwards incompatible] applications would have to be written targetting WinFS. The primary benefits of making this change [besides the improved programming model] were the network effects if lots of applications used these types (e.g. Outlook stored mail identified by a WinFS contact, RSS Bandit stored RSS feeds from that WinFS contact, AOL Instant Messenger stored IM conversation logs using that contact, etc). Even if you got these network effects you then had to deal with the Windows registry problem (i.e. apps stomping over each others data which is one of the main problems with the Windows registry today).
   

4. I never saw good answers to the questions Jon Udell asked in his blog posts Questions about Longhorn, part 1: WinFS and Questions about Longhorn, part 2: WinFS and semantics. Specifically, the world is betting big on open file formats such as XML including parts of Microsoft (e.g. Microsoft Office) so why would anyone want to build aplications targetting a proprietary Windows-only file system that didn't have a good XML story for getting data out of the platform?

I should probably stop now. Even though all the information above is freely available to anyone who reads blogs and can put two and two together, some may object to the above collection of thoughts.
 

Hugh Macloed has a blog post entitled How microsoft lost their canary where he writes

Micorosoft losing both Bill and Robert in the very same week.

In one week, Microsoft lost the two people who best expressed Microsoft; one on the macro-corporate level, one on the micro-grass-roots level.

What does this really say about Microsoft?

To me it says, "Party Over".

To me it says, Microsoft finally has reached the crossroads indicated in the cartoon above, and have opted to take the non-Cluetrain route. They opted to take that route because they have run out of ideas. They're at a time in their corporate life when they need a big idea. And you what? They. Simply. Don't. Have. One.

Hey, it's their company, it's their money, they can do what they like. There's lots of money still there to made, managing one's own demise. General Motors has been doing it for decades. And Madison Avenue, that's pretty much all they do now.

But Robert was the canary in the coal mine. And Microsoft's just lost their canary.

Last week was definitely an interesting week for Microsoft. I agree with Hugh that Microsoft has lost two people that many consider to symbolize the company. I'm not sure I understand what Hugh means by Microsoft has opted to take the non-Cluetrain route but then again the entire Cluetrain trend is something I've never been too knowledgeable about. I do have some opinions on what the loss of Robert Scoble and Bill Gates means to me as a Microsoft employee.

Robert Scoble did three things for Microsoft, only one of which was really his day job. He

1. He was one of the folks working on Channel 9 which has been an important mechanism for Microsoft to soften its image and open a new avenue for conversation with its customers.
2. His weblog acted was an aggregation of the various interesting bits of news about Microsoft. Half of the content of his blog was basically a blog version of Microsoft PressPass, Microsoft Watch and MSDN Blogs rolled into one.
.
3. He had an online persona as a great guy and a passionate technology geek (i.e. the ideal employee) which often made people think "Microsoft can't be all that bad, if this guy works there"

As far as I'm aware, only the first item in the above list was Robert's day job. The other items were just Robert being Robert. Microsoft can easily find someone to replace Robert in the context of item #1 on the list. It may even be a good thing to have some professional media folks running Channel 9 instead of just amateur media geeks. The other two items on the list are things that it's hard to imagine anyone doing in the same way that Robert did. A blog of product announcements can be replicated and although it might be boring reading, people seem to like them, or at least that's the impression I've gotten based on the popularity of "official" Google blog. I personally don't think Microsoft needs one but there probably is enough interest in it that I wouldn't be surprised if one shows up. The third item on the list is one of those things that has incalculable value. It's hard to quantify the value that Microsoft got from this aspect of Robert's blogging but there definitely was a lot of value obtained. There are thousands of Microsoft employees who blog yet somehow Robert Scoble ended up becoming the symbol of blogging @ Microsoft. Do we need another single "model employee" for bloggers to rally around? I don't know. Being the "company mascot" seems like a heavy burden for any single individual to bear especially for a company like Microsoft. The company has lost some points in marketability without Robert Scoble but there are thousands of company's doing just fine without a highly visible employee blogger.

I never got to meet Bill Gates as a full-time Microsoft employee. I did get to ask him questions at one of yearly intern soirree at his house back in my intern days but I've never been at a BillG review. I think Bill Gates leaving the company will be good for him, good for the world and good for the company. I tend to agree with Hugh that Microsoft hasn't had a "big idea" for a while. It used to be "a computer on every desktop" but now that we've almost gotten there it isn't clear what the company stands for as a whole. It isn't just a software company; we do hardware with XBox and other Microsoft hardware devices, television content with MSNBC and online content on MSN. The company doesn't seem to have one big idea because it doesn't have one set of customers. It's hard to see a consistent vision that holds together all the various pieces that are Microsoft. On the other hand, in some of the places where we have had a consistent technical vision, it has been hard for us to actually implement this vision (e.g. Cairo/WinFS, Netdocs and even Hailstorm) for a variety of reasons. I think Microsoft is about due for introducing new perspectives in the technical direction that the company takes. I've met with Ray Ozzie [who'll be taking over from Bill Gates as chief software architect] a few times times and he definitely seems to have a different view of the software landscape than many of the execs at Microsoft. Fresh perspectives are always a good thing. It'll be sad to see Bill Gates step out of his role as Chief Software Architect since he symbolizes so much of the company but I think he'll the world a lot of good with his foundation and he is leaving the company in good hands.

Losing Robert Scoble and Bill Gates sucks but life will go on. This isn't the harbinger of the death of Microsoft, just a signpost that indicates that one era is ending and another beginning.

 

From the press release entitled Microsoft Announces Plans for July 2008 Transition for Bill Gates

REDMOND, Wash. — June 15, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that effective July 2008 Bill Gates, chairman, will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The company announced a two-year transition process to ensure that there is a smooth and orderly transfer of Gates’ daily responsibilities, and said that after July 2008 Gates would continue to serve as the company’s chairman and an advisor on key development projects.

The company announced that Chief Technical Officer Ray Ozzie will immediately assume the title of chief software architect and begin working side by side with Gates on all technical architecture and product oversight responsibilities, to ensure a smooth transition. Similarly, Chief Technical Officer Craig Mundie will immediately take the new title of chief research and strategy officer and will work closely with Gates to assume his responsibility for the company’s research and incubation efforts; Mundie also will partner with general counsel Brad Smith to guide Microsoft’s intellectual property and technology policy efforts.

Wow. It looks like the internal grapevine was right. That explains all the press Ray has been getting as the savior of Microsoft.

 

Nick Carr has a blog post entitled Have Face Will Travel where he writes

So Microsoft's self-styled human face is now some other company's human face. This must be the first corporate human face transplant ever attempted. Will it take? Or will the new body reject the used puss? And what does it say about this whole human face business when a person proclaims himself to be a company's human face and then, when a better offer comes along, tears himself from the old noggin and stitches himself to the new one? That seems a little untoward to me. If I were in a punny mood, I just might call it a mugging.

A company should probably be a little nervous about letting some blogger set up shop as its human face. The earnings the blogger pulls in through the attention economy may accrue more to his own bottom line than the firm's.

I've been thinking about this a little over the past few days. The problem with having visible employees is that when they inevitably leave there is a potential negative PR hit. I started thinking about this when I read Gretchen Ledgard's post entitled closure about the emotional and career impact of having a highly visible corporate blog. I remember thinking that Microsoft's recruiting department had lost some of its shine when Gretchen and Zoe left. Seeing Robert Scoble combating the negative spin on his leaving Microsoft in his post Correcting the Record about Microsoft made similar thoughts come to mind.

What Nick Carr points out is a valid point, however I question the claim that the credit a company accrues due to visible employees accrues more to the employees than the company. It's definitely true that the employees get something out of it. Robert's clout as the 'human face' of Microsoft has gotten him as the cover story of magazines like The Economist and eventually has made him so famous it's been surprising (at least to me) that he'd want to stay at Microsoft as a mere evangelist when he could be off trading his brand for a better gig. On the other hand, there are thousands of people who've changed their impression of the company based on bloggers like Gretchen and Robert. This has directly impacted the hiring situation for the company [given the number of resumes that came in via Gretchen & Zoe's JobsBlog alone] as well as improved customer satisfaction for a lot of product groups.

At the end of the day, who wants to work at the kind of company that is worried that it's employees will become too popular and may get stolen away? Microsoft isn't that kind of company and that's one of the reasons it is a great place to work. If a company is so worried about employees becoming too visible then it probably has deeper personnel problems than just worrying about losing a few bloggers.

 

Recently one of the developers on my team asked what the difference was between a program manager and a product manager at Microsoft. It seemed to him that the roles were redundant. Before answering I answered, I suggested we look up both job descriptions at the Microsoft Career site. This is what we found

Product Management @ Microsoft: Product Managers help chart the course of those new products and services as they emerge. They work with the development team to determine product functionality, strategize product positioning, and drive the product launch. After introduction, the Product Management team monitors customer and partner response to the products and refines product strategy to ensure the best possible user experience.

Program Management @ Microsoft: Working across multiple groups with marketing and sales personnel on the customer end, program managers translate customer requirements into product features and create functional specifications. On the implementation end, they prioritize and deliver on those features, working closely with key technical resources, such as software development, testing, documentation, localization, tech support, and more.

Product Management tends to be about answering questions such as why a product should be built and what features should be added to existing products. Program Management is more about answering questions such as when features should be delivered and how they should be exposed to customers. Depending on the division at Microsoft program managers may have more or less influence than product managers on answering the questions about what features are built. 

Here are some examples from my day job that highlights the difference between the job roles. Product Management answers questions like what are the most popular MSN Spaces or MSN Messenger features in the U.S., UK & China and who are the top competitors in each market. Similarly, product management may also answer questions like 'what is the financial impact of focusing the next release of MSN Spaces to be more competitive with photo sharing sites like Flickr versus making it more competitive with social networking sites like MySpace. Program managers work on actually designing the software that ends up being built based on input from product management. There are User Experience (UX) PMs who work on the actual user interface design and the workflow of how features should work and then there are platform PMs [like me] who work on what the logical schema for various concepts in the application should be and design the APIs through which various front end & back end systems can interact with the feature(s).

In Windows Live we also have a difference between Product Planner and Product Manager. I actually have no insight into what the difference in job roles is here and wouldn't mind some education of my own.

 

Robert Scoble has posted an entry entitled Correcting the Record about Microsoft where he confirms statements by Dave Winer and Chris Pirillo that he is leaving Microsoft for PodTech.

This seems like a good move for Robert. He's always seemed more at home with his role as an amateur technology journalist than as the unofficial spokesman for Microsoft. Congrats to the PodTech folks for making a great hire and good luck to Robert on his new adventure. He definitely will be missed over here in the B0rg Cube.

 

Guy Kawasaki has a blog post entitled The Top Sixteen Lies of CEOs which has the following item on the list

2. “It’s like a startup around here.” This could mean that the place lacks adult supervision; capital is running out; the product is behind schedule; investors have given up, and employees are paid below market rates. Sure, it could alternatively mean that the company is energized, entrepreneurial, making meaning, and kicking butt, but just be sure to double check.

One thing that amuses me at work is that every once in a while I see some internal team on a recruitment drive and one of the selling points is that "working for us is like working at a startup". The seems pretty amusing on the face of it given that most of the characteristics one associates with working at a startup are negative as Guy suggests. Paul Graham pointed out in his essay How to Make Wealth that the main attraction of working at a startup is that you can get really rich working at it. That makes getting underpaid, overworked and in constant fear of your competitors worth it at the end.

Unless your team can guarantee folks a huge chunk of change if your product is successful then working there is not like working at a startup. There are lots of ways to describe how cool your workplace is without resorting to the flawed comparison to working at a startup.   

Thanks for listening.
 

I've been reading some interesting conspiracy theories about why some recent Microsoft product launches have missed the boat on targetting features of interest to tech geeks.

In his post Microsoft's lack of action will slow Podcasting Growth Todd Cochrane writes

Well it is pretty obvious that Microsoft did not get Podcasting support built into Windows Media Player 11 and all I can say is that they obviously blew it. I have been debating what to say for a few days. My summation is not fit to print, what I really don't understand is how they could have been so stupid.

They had a opportunity with Windows Media Player 11 to get in the game, I can guarantee that their inaction will slow the growth of podcasting in a big way. But it makes sense Podcasting does not make them any money, if I were a betting man I bet MTV had something to say in the process and likely killed any podcasting integration as it would have made the URGE network a lesser value.

In his post How Internet Explorer Stifles Microsoft Devanshu Mehta writes

Microsoft has chosen the growth of IE over every other division in the company for 10 years now. Windows versions from 95 onwards have suffered enough. Now, the company’s IE-centric view of its business is hurting younger divisions of the company that have a chance of becoming a major force as the company looks to take on Google...It all began when MSN announced their AdCenterGoogle AdWords- sells text-based, contextual, per-click advertising for MSN properties on the internet. Curious, I went to sign up for an account...I was more curious in Microsoft’s method, their design and approach as compared to my experience with AdSense. So I went to the MSN adCenter site and clicked to sign up. service which – similar to

Lo and behold:

Microsoft adCenter does not currently support the web browser you are using. Please sign in using Internet Explorer 6+. More about system requirements

Oh great! Another MS web site that does not work with Firefox. So I click on the phrase system requirements to find out what I would need. Would a Mac user like me have any recourse? Or did MS not want my business? It only got worse. The System requirements link did not work either! Not only could they not design a web site for my browser, they couldn’t even manage to create a link to their requirements page that I could click on!

Unlike Devanshu and Todd, I don't think there are sinister conspiracy theories for why two Microsoft products were released and ignored features of interest to the geek demographic. In every product release, you have a limited amount of resources and time in which to apply those resources to your next version. This means that you tend to focus on features that will provide the most bang for the buck and may ignore features that have limited appeal such as supporting a browser which is used by 8% of the market or a media subscription model is only used by 1% of internet users. I don't always agree with the practice of deciding on features based on market penetration statistics but I can understand when product teams make such decisions. I suspect that is more likely the cause of these omissions than some nefarious collusion between MTV and the Windows Media team or some plot to ensure IE's market dominance by having Windows Live services require only that browser.

Disclaimer: The post above is my own personal opinion and does not reflect the opinions, intentions or strategies of my employer or the Microsoft product teams referenced.

 

I took a shower on campus this morning because I got stuck in traffic and didn't have enough time to do my work out. Usually I'd still go to the gym just to take a shower but thanks to the recent changes I could just come into work and use the showers in my building. There were a bunch of folks in the locker room and the conversation dwelled on the return of the towels for most of the time I was there. I couldn't help but remember one of my old blog posts entitled On Cost Cutting: Penny Wise, Pound Foolish where I wrote

Recently I found out that we no longer had office supplies on the floor of the building I work in. Now if you need to grab a pen or get a marker after your last one runs out in the middle of a meeting you need to go upstairs. Folks have given me the impression that this is due to the recent cost cutting drive across the company. At first, I couldn't figure out why disrupting people by making them go to another floor for office supplies would cut costs.

Then it hit me. When faced with having to go to another floor to find office supplies the average geek desk jockey will probably say "forget it" and do without. The immediate saving is less office supplies used. But I suspect this is only phase one of the plan. Most people at MSFT believe that on average 50% - 75% of projects and features an employee works on in his career in the b0rg cube never ship. This is all just wasted cash. The best way to nip this is in the bud by preventing people from being able to write down their ideas or whiteboard different ideas with coworkers thus spreading the meme about new projects or features. The amount of money saved by not investing in new money losing ventures like *** and **** would be immense. It all makes a weird kind of sense now.

Of course, the post is tongue-in-check. However a later post where I pointed out that moving office supplies to 'cut costs' was an example used in The Dilbert Principle in a section entitled Companies That Turn On Themselves was not. It sucks when you realize your day job is ripped from the pages of Dilbert. The towel issue was another example of how company can turn on itself. A comment on TDavid's blog by Eric captures the sentiment of many fellow b0rg drones when he writes

Here’s the point on the towels:

1) Health care costs are a huge - and rising - expense for Microsoft. People who are using the towels are exercising - some of them pretty heavily - and are therefore likely to save MS a significant amount of money.
2) There is a serious parking shortage at MS. Some of the people who use the towels are commuting by bicycle, and therefore aren’t taking up a parking space - which has a specific cost per year that you can figure out.

It’s in Microsoft’s best interest to encourage both of those behaviors, and in fact, they have programs specifically designed to encourage such behaviors. But they made a decision that actively discouraged people from these behaviors, for a very measly cost savings.

It’s not that people felt that they *deserved* free towels. It’s that by taking away the towels, management was demonstrating that they weren’t paying attention, because doing so was so clearly against the programs already in place, and clearly not in the company’s self-interest.

I care whether my company has internal coherence in its decisions, and I think that customers and stockholders should also care.

The towel thing was penny wise yet pound foolish. I'm glad that there are two less Dilbert-esque things about my day job. The perks like better cafeteria food and the like are actually less interesting to me than just getting rid of counterproductive practices like The Curve, playing hide & seek with office supplies or removing complimentary towels from on-campus showers.

PS: While looking for the link above, I found one of my old blog posts entitled Post Mortems, Reorganizations and the Dilbert Principle which makes me realize that my blog used to be a lot better two years ago. :)

PPS: For the various folks in the B0rg cube who talk about how much better things are at places like Google, this thread may be of interest to you. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

 

In his post Missed big HR meeting (MyMicrosoft is now improved) Robert Scoble mentions that he missed yesterday's town hall meeting at work where a bunch of employee benefits/compensation changes were announced. I missed the meeting as well because I took a friend on the Ride the Ducks of Seattle tour. I haven't been to work yet so I haven't read what the changes are but bits and pieces have come out in blog posts and news articles. Todd Bishop excerpts some of the highlights in his blog post Microsoft rethinks employee reviews ... and towels such as

• "To reset our approach, beginning with this review period we are retiring the 2.5-5.0 rating scale and introducing a three point Commitment Rating scale of Exceeded, Achieved and Underperformed. ... There will be no forced distribution (i.e. curve) associated with this commitment rating, which allows managers and employees to have a more candid discussion about performance."
• "We are increasing our investment in our annual review stock award program. This incremental investment is focused on providing meaningful stock awards to our top talent. 'Top talent' refers to employees who are strong performers, achieve results in the right way and are expected to make the greatest future contributions."
• "We're planning to provide on-campus access to a variety of services, including laundry and dry cleaning, grocery delivery from Safeway and opening convenience stores -- all of which are designed to ease the burden given the hectic pace of life. We will expand and upgrade dining services adding great new retail food in select cafes, dinners to go from Wolfgang Puck and other services. We are also arranging discounts on a variety of home services including house keeping, yard care, pet care, auto services and more.

Getting rid of the curve is great news. Having a quota of how many people get good or bad scores during annual reviews has been a recipe for bad morale for as long as I've seen it practiced at Microsoft. Bringing back a bunch of the stupid cost cuts like the towel service [free towels in the on-campus showers for people who bike to work] is just common sense. The amount of money it saved couldn't have counterbalanced the amount of bad will it generated. Better food in the cafeteria is cool, auto services is also interesting since I my car always seems to need washing and I never seem to have time to do it. I gotta say kudos to Lisa Brummel on doing something to make the employees lives better.

I was surprised to see negative comments from people who aren't Microsoft employees such as TDavid's post For employees Microsoft throws in the towels where he writes

In a move which is bound to be seen as placation and a serious case of Googleplex envy — by those who aren’t employees anyway — Microsoft has restored the employee towel service that was axed for “cost cutting measures.”...

Towels a “symbol of poor leadership?” Who da Punk’s real name must be Who da Kidding. If Microsoft plays lemming to anon cowards like this then the decline of their stock is far from over. I’m sure shareholders will be pleased that they restored towel service and put better food on the menu, thus restoring employee morale — until the stock drops even further.

Outsider customers like me have to wonder what’s next in the long list of employee perks for these major corporations? Why stop at the marginally sane perks? How about insane ones like escort services? If only Microsoft and Google were in Nevada, they could cut deals with the local brothels I’m sure. Heck, maybe escorts.live.com could be a promising vertical niche. The search for skin and sin is on.

I don't think the perks are worthy of such vitriol. First of all, a lot of the Googleplex-style perks are designed to keep people at work instead of having them leave early to manage their personal lives (e.g. getting the car washed, getting home early to walk the dog, etc) or leave campus for meals by having better food in the cafeteria. Secondly, it is common knowledge that Microsoft doesn't pay that great. I've heard that our pay scale is in the 65th percentile meaning that for every 10 companies out there, 3 to 4 of them would pay the average Microsoft employee more for doing the same job. In a climate where Google recruiters are spamming every half-decent employee at Microsoft and recruiter cold calls are not unheard off, the company needs to step up its game if it plans to retain its talent in an increasingly competitive software landscape. 

Taking care of your employees is just good business.

 

I'm going on vacation to Las Vegas in the next few days so I'm going to be heads down trying to wrap up some work before I leave. Expect blogging to be light over the next week or so. In the meantime, here are some links I found interesting which folks can chew over while I'm gone

1. MSN: Another Quarter Closer To Irrelevant:  My favorite quote "why any one company wants to have $50 billion in revenue and compete with IBM and Oracle on one end and Google, Time Warner, and Sony on the other is beyond me".

2. New Microsoft browser raises Google's hackles: Microsoft talking about spending billions "Winning the Web", Google talking antitrust because of browser defaults. I guess Bugs Bunny was right...this means war. Pass the popcorn.

3. How it works: FAQ on reviews, promotions, job changes, and surviving re-orgs: If you are a new hire interested in climbing the corporate ladder at Microsoft [or any other big company] you should print out that comment. I am surprised by how many of my peers still haven't figured a bunch of this stuff out.

4. Steve Rider Moving On: Steve Rider, original developer for start.com/live.com, has left to join a startup founded by Hadi Partovi who was the original manager who greenlighted and incubated the start.com project. At this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if Sanaz dipped before the year was up.

5. Google's GData, MySQL, and the Future of on-line Databases: I think GData is hot. I'd like us to use this as a building block for some of the developer platform stuff we are doing for Windows Live. Unfortunately, I'll likely have to contend with NIH. I'll worry about this when I get back from Vegas.

 

I read a number of news stories last week about Microsoft hiring a former exec from Ask.com to run MSN. A number of these news sources and corresponding blog posts got the story wrong in one way or the other

In her news story entitled Former Ask.com president will join Microsoft Kim Peterson of the Seattle Times wrote

Microsoft has hired the former president of search rival Ask.com to run its online business group, overseeing the MSN and Windows Live units and playing a big role in the company's move to the Web.

In the Reuters news story entitled Microsoft hires CEO of Ask.com to head Web unit it states

Software giant Microsoft Corp. said on Friday it hired away Steve Berkowitz, the chief executive of rival Internet company Ask.com, to head Microsoft's own Internet business.

In her blog post entitled CEO of Ask.com moves to Microsoft Charlene Li of Forrester Research wrote

Most importantly, Microsoft is taking a very important step in putting ALL of the hot consumer products under one team. Live.com is at the core of Microsoft's turnaround -- it represents fast development cycles and a totally new approach to addressing the marketplace. At the same time, Microsoft can't turn its back on the advertising juggernaut of MSN.com. In the past year, there's been uncertainty about how MSN.com and Live.com will work together. Having them all come together under Steve will be a first step in addressing the concerns of the MSN.com group while maintaining Live.com's momentum.

Highlighted in red are statements which are at best misleading. I'm not singling out the above news publications and bloggers, almost every article or blog post I read about Steve Berkowitz being hired gave the same misleading impression.

Why are they misleading? That's easy. Let's go back to the Microsoft press release Microsoft Realigns Platforms & Services Division for Greater Growth and Agility which breaks out Microsoft's internet business into the following three pieces

Windows and Windows Live Group
With Sinofsky in charge, the Windows and Windows Live Group will have engineering teams focused on delivering Windows and engineering teams focused on delivering the Windows Live experiences. Sinofsky will work closely with Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie and Blake Irving to support Microsoft’s services strategy across the division and company.

Windows Live Platform Group
Blake Irving will lead the newly formed Windows Live Platform Group, which unites a number of MSN teams that have been building platform services and capabilities for Microsoft’s online offerings. This group provides the back-end infrastructure services, platform capabilities and global operational support for services being created in Windows Live, Office Live, and other Microsoft and third-party applications that use the Live platform. This includes the advertising and monetization platforms that support all Live service offerings.

Online Business Group
The new Online Business Group includes advertising sales, business development and marketing for Live Platforms, Windows Live and MSN — including MSN.com, MSNTV and MSN Internet Access. David Cole, senior vice president, will lead this group until his successor is named before his leave of absence at the end of April.

That's right, three pieces each with it's own corporate vice president. So Charlene Li isn't quite right when she says that MSN.com and Live.com are now aligned under Steve Berkowitz. Instead what's being aligned under him is the business development and marketing for both sites. The platform that powers Live.com should be under Blake Irving while the actual website development is under Steven Sinofsky.

I'm sure that makes as much sense to you as it does to me. However according to the press release, this organizational structure will increase Microsoft's agility in delivering innovation to customers.

I can't wait.

 

It's MS Poll season. This is when at work our employer encourages us to fill out an opinion poll on how we feel our day jobs and the company in general. Besides Mini-Microsoft I've seen a couple of the introspective posts about working in the B0rg cube I expect to see during this season such as Robert Scoble's How Microsoft can shut down Mini-Microsoft and Mike Torres's Playing to "not lose.

I don't really have anything intospective to add to what they've written. I probably won't fill out MS Poll this year since it's always felt to me like a pointless opinion poll. If my management can't tell what I like or dislike about working here then it's a screw up on both our parts which won't be fixed by a hastily filled out opinion poll.

I did find an interesting comment by Leah Pearlman to Mike Torres's post I felt compelled to talk about. She wrote

Re: Innovation. Hmm. I agree and disagree. I agree from the standpoint of a Microsoft employee who wants to work on innovative things.  I agree with you that there’s been too much talk about “how to beat the competition.” Reinventing the wheel because Yahoo! and Google have wheels doesn't get me out of bed in the morning. But! (you knew it was coming) My opinion lately has been that there's too much emphasis put on innovation at Microsoft, and it comes at the expense of fundamentals, intuitiveness, simplicity.  Often times there are great reasons why our competitors have done certain things , and I see people carelessly disregard these things in the name of innovation.

Innovation is one of those words Microsoft has killed. What has begun to irritate me is when people describe what is basically a new feature in their product as an innovation. To start off, by definition, since you work at a big software nothing you work on is innovative. Even Google who used to be raised up as the poster child of innovation in the software industry have been reduced to copying Yahoo! services and liberally sprinkling them with AJAX as they've grown bigger. 

Often when I hear people claiming that the new feature in their Microsoft product is an innovation it just makes them look ignorant. Most of their innovations are either (i) already shipping in products offered by competitors or startups that anyone who reads TechCrunch is aware of or (ii) are also being worked on by some poor slobs at AOL/Google/Yahoo! who also think their feature is extremely innovative. As Jeremy Zawodny pointed out in his post Secrets of Product Development and What Journalists Write

Larger companies rarely can respond that quickly to each other. It almost never happens. Sure, they may talk a good game, but it's just talk. Building things on the scale that Microsoft, Google, AOL, or Yahoo do is a complex process. It takes time.

Journalists like to paint this as a rapidly moving chess game in which we're all waiting for the next move so that we can quickly respond. But the truth is that most product development goes on in parallel. Usually there are people at several companies who all have the same idea, or at least very similar ones. The real race is to see who can build it faster and better than the others.

The culture of bragging about dubious innovations likely springs from the need to distinguish yourself from the pack in a reward culture that takes dog-eat-dog to another level. Either way, do me a favor. Stop calling your new features innovations. They aren't.

Thanks for listening

 

I was saddened when I found out that Gretchen Ledgard was leaving Microsoft. We go back a bit given that her husband and I interned at the same company back in 1999 which is when we first met. Once I found out what she was going to be doing next, I was quite happy to see her take this step.

From the blog post on the JobSyntax blog entitled And so it begins ...

Well, hey there. Gretchen here.  After a long hiatus :), I am back in the blogosphere. Did you miss me?

Let me be the first to officially welcome you to our new home, the JobSyntax Blog.  I’ve got so much to write, but I’ll need to save all the juicy news and advice for future blog entries. So I’ll use this first entry to tell you a little bit about how we got here. It’s been a long, crazy journey.

As long-time readers know, until a few days ago,  I was a Microsoft recruiter.  About 2 ½ years ago, I was hand-picked to join a start-up team within the company’s recruiting organization. Also chosen for that team was Zoe Goldring.  We were tasked with building a community and pipeline of qualified and interested software developers for the company’s openings. (Is this starting to sound like the pilot for a cheesy sitcom yet?) :)

Two years ago, Zoe and I founded the Technical Careers @ Microsoft weblog (JobsBlog) as a way to connect with the developers who were latching onto the blogging phenomenon. Quite honestly, we had no idea what were doing and definitely not what we were getting ourselves into.

Being the public faces for Microsoft’s technical recruiting effort was both extremely exhilarating and challenging at the same time. Personally, I loved that I had such a positive impact on so many applicants. I joined the recruiting industry because I wanted to improve the candidate experience, and each day, I saw tangible results of my efforts. I impacted so many more candidates via our blog than I ever could as regular recruiter
...
Time moved along, and many things changed in our lives – yet we still held onto our promise to each other. Finally, we decided the time was right … Personally, we were both ready for new and different challenges in our careers. Professionally, it seemed that our collective passion for technical recruiting, a positive customer and client experience, and strong jobseeker and employer education coupled with, well, the returned rise of the tech market meant it was time to strike out on our own.  The time was right. The time is now.

So here we are. Welcome to JobSyntax, and we look forward to all the good times ahead.  Let the games begin!

It's great to see Zoe and Gretchen convert their skills and blog cred into their own company. There are a number of folks who toil in the B0rg cube who I've wondered why they don't strike out on their own, Robert Scoble for one. Whenever I decide to hang my hat up at the B0rg cube and go wage slave for someone else, I'll be sure to give the Moongals at JobSyntax a call.

Good luck with your new venture Zoe and Gretchen

 

Eric Gunnerson has a blog post entitled Mom and Apple Pie where he writes

What do following words all have in common:

• Passion
• Innovation
• Synergy
• Agility

They're what I call "Mom and Apple Pie" words, for two reasons.

First, they all have a positive connotation. Who wouldn't want to be more agile, more innovative? Who is going to argue against having a more synergistic approach? Shouldn't everybody have passion?

Combine that with the fact that these words are used in a content-free environment, and you get a nice-sounding platitude that means nothing, but makes it sound like you are for changing things.

You don't think we should have more apple pie? What's wrong with you? Why do you hate your mother?

People who want to make an organization more agile don't say, "We're going to improve agility". They say, "we're going to get rid of <x>, we're going to change <y>, we're going to release every <x> months". People who want to improve synergy say, "Our users are trying to do <x>, and it's way too hard. What do I need to do to help you fix this?"

I have a blog post in my head about the top 3 things I'd like to see from Microsoft executives. One of the three things I'd like to see our execs do addresses one of the words mentioned by Eric Gunnerson; agility.

I am currently part of the Plaforms & Services Division which encompasses both Windows and MSN Windows Live. There've been two reorganizations that have affected this division in the past eight months. Both times, the claim has been that these reorganizations are intended to boost our 'agility'. The first reorg involved adding a new layer of vice presidents between David Cole who ran MSN at the time and Steve Ballmer. This meant that at the time I had four people with the title 'Vice President' between me and our CEO [Brian Arbogast->Blake Irving->David Cole->Kevin Johnson]. How adding more management made us more agile was a mystery to me. Our most recent reorganization involved splitting the teams that build the Windows kernel from the team that builds the Windows user interface and the teams that build the Windows Live services from the teams that build the user interfaces. In practical terms it means that when I work on features like Photo E-Mail and Social Networking, the folks I work with not only don't share the same boss as me but our management chains don't meet until it gets all the way up to Kevin Johnson and Jim Allchin (i.e. 3 vice presidents up the hierarchy later). I don't see how this makes us more agile but maybe I'm just dumb.

At Microsoft, agility has joined innovation and passion as words that now have negative connotations to me. The longer I am at Microsoft, the more words I end up excising from my vocabulary.

I agree with Eric that what I'd like to see is less buzzwords and more concrete talk about how things are being improved for our users. I'm still waiting for the mail from Kevin Johnson which contains an FAQ explaining why adding layers of management and splitting up teams makes us more agile. I hope I'm not waiting in vain.

 

Today I read two contradictory posts about Microsoft employees and passion. The first post I found via Mini-Microsoft. It is entitled Microsoft, Your Slip Is Showing (Passion) and is excerpted below

And this partly explains the passion of the comments you will read on this post at Mini-Microsoft.

Skewering the Microsoft leadership. Calling for heads to roll. Frustration. Disgust. Dark humor. Cynicism. Optimism. Pessimism. Rage. Love. Hate.

Another reason -- big reason -- why the Microsoft commenters are so passionate: They give a damn. Whatever else you may think about their comments, their Give-A-Damn meter is registering in the Green. Sure, it may seem like I've got it ass backwards and they're pegged out in the dreaded Red zone.

I'm sure a few are indeed red-zoning, but what I see mostly are folks who want to to be the best. They want their team to be the best. They are proud people. They are winners. They hate the thought of losing -- in any endeavor... to any person or thing.

The people who work for Microsoft are not only some of the best minds in the computer industry, they give a damn about what they do. That is a good thing.

I could be critical of this post but Rory Blyth beat me to the punch in his [unrelated] yet quite relevant post entitled Ten Minutes of Sincerity - Enthusiasthma where he writes

Enthusiasthma

The contemporary blight of communication, at least at Microsoft, is passion. You can’t walk three feet on the Redmond campus without hearing someone talk about passion. If you interview for a job at Microsoft, you will get drilled about your passion. During the course of your job, you will attend meetings in which people constantly refer to passion. You will receive emails about passion.

Again, like communication, passion is a good thing. It’s good to talk. It’s good to be excited. But, it’s gotten to the point that the passion has become a sort of disease. I call it "Enthusiasthma"
...
This notion of constantly being excited is exhausting. It’s not healthy. It isn’t normal. It’s downright stupid and counter-productive.

People at the company are so terrified now of not appearing to show passion that they’ll give you Oscar-winning speeches about what they had for lunch and why it was so great for customers. If you end a sentence with fewer than three exclamation points, offset by several spaces to isolate the excitement and drive it home, then you clearly aren’t really behind whatever it is that you’re talking about.
...
As long as employees feel pressured to constantly overflow with passion, they’re going to be terrified to speak when it’s time to address what isn’t going so well. I’ve watched projects continue, and not with any great success, fueled mainly by passion. In those cases, yeah, people are being passionate, but they’re putting all this passion into things that aren’t really helping. They’ve been fooled by their own passion.

And this is happening company-wide. It’s like open honesty and skepticism are getting brushed aside for passion. It’s spreading thanks to that other often celebrated social disease, the meme. It’s everywhere. And the word is used so often that it’s losing its meaning.

At Microsoft, one of the other words you’ll hear left and right is “innovation.” I’ve already said what I want to say about this awful word, but regardless of how overused I think the word “innovation” is, I still understand its importance.

So here’s something to think about: As long as people are running around with all this passion, having left their critical thinking and skepticism in the late 90’s, and while they’re driving these sometimes winning/sometimes losing projects with all this passion, they’re handicapping their ability to innovate. Innovation is only good as long as what’s being created is actually useful.

We have this situation, then, where one company ideal, innovation, is getting squashed by another company ideal, which is passion.

The problem is that all of this reeks of extremism and zealotry, which never lead to real success. The way you win with extremism is by fooling yourself into believing that everything you think is right, and then bludgeoning your enemies with your abundant resources until they give. That’s not really winning.

Rory says a lot of what I would have said in criticism of the passion post I found via Mini-Microsoft and does it with a lot less bitterness than I could ever muster. If you ask me, Microsoft could do with a lot less of its so-called passionate employees.

 

John Battelle has a post entitled Please, Give me LiveSoft (Or...Please Split Up Microsoft!) where he writes

Everyone knows that Microsoft has one center of gravity that matters: The Office and Windows revenue line. Everything else pales in comparison. But where does Microsoft get judged, day in and day out? Not on Office, or even Windows. It's search, and innovation across the web generally. And there, it's clear, Microsoft's gravitational mass is getting in the way.
...
Microsoft is a middle aged company struggling to figure out how to dance with the teenagers, and its body simply can't keep up with its intentions, no matter how correct they may be. I'm not claiming "Microsoft doesn't get it" - in fact, I very much think it does. I'm saying that structurally, the company is not capable of executing on what it knows it must do. Major projects like Live, Search, and MSN need to compete in the same market ecosystem as Google, Yahoo, and the startups. As it stands now, they can't.

But that could be addressed. MSFT has already taken the first step, which is to reorganize into three distinct businesses - Platform and Products (Windows and MSN), Business (Software), and Entertainment/Devices (Xbox etc.). But really, what it needs to do is spin out a Google/Yahoo killer. Take Search, Live, and a good chunk of MSR (research) and make it a separately traded division of MSFT. Take the damn thing public. Imagine that IPO!

Let's call this new company LiveSoft.

When I first joined MSN I used to think the same thing, that Microsoft should spin off MSN instead of making us pay the various strategy taxes that comes with being part of the B0rg cube. However over time I've realized that this is never going to happen for two reasons.

The first reason I believe Microsoft would never spin off MSN (or Live or whatever we are calling it this week) is that the writing is on the wall that the era of desktop software is coming to an end. I suspect that the folks driving our technical direction like Ray Ozzie and Bill Gates have already accepted this which is why almost everytime see them giving speeches on our future direction you hear the magic buzzword services.

The second reason I believe Microsoft would never spin of MSN is revenue growth. If you look at all the various businesses Microsoft is in, the one with the highest growth potential is online advertising not video game consoles, mobile phone operating systems or any of our other "emerging businesses". From a dollars and cents perspective, it makes no sense for Microsoft to give up it largest growth business.

It is a nice dream though.

 

The team I work for in MSN Windows Live has open developer and program management positions. Our team is responsible for the underlying infrastructure of services like Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Favorites, MSN Spaces, and MSN Groups. We frequently collaborate with other properties across MSN Windows Live including the Live.com, Windows Live Local, Windows Live Expo, and Windows OneCare Live teams as well as with other product units across Microsoft such as in the case of Office Live. If you are interested in building world class software that is used by hundreds of millions of people and the following job descriptions interest you then send me your resume

Program Management Architect
The Communications Core platform team for Windows Live services is looking for an experienced, enthusiastic and highly technical PM to jump start a brand new service that helps developers adopt our platform at a very rapid pace. You will be responsible for building a platform where developers can easily take advantage of emerging technology from our large scale services (e.g. Messenger, Hotmail, Contacts, Storage services) and empower quick schema and API changes for a rapid TTD (Time to Demo!). Designing, developing, deploying, evangelizing and supporting this so called “Sandbox” environment will require excellent cross-group working skills as you will have to interact extensively with business planning, dev/test, operations, and partner support teams. It will also require a high level of technical depth in order to intimately understand and create clones of the back end services involved as well as extensive web services and API knowledge. We are looking for someone with core technical skills, a services or high scale server background; experience with API development, web services and a passion to win developers from the competition.

Program Manager
If you are an experienced Program Manager with strong technical skills and a strong desire to work in an enthusiastic fast paced environment then this job is for you! The Communications Core Platform team for Windows Live services owns the data store serving hundreds of millions of end users with billions of contacts, files and photos. Our systems handle tens of thousands of transactions per second. Our team owns core MSN and Windows Live platforms, including ABCH (storing Messenger and Hotmail contacts, groups and ACLs) and MSN Storage (storing files, photos and other data types). We are looking for a creative, self-driven, technical Program Manager who is interested in designing and shipping the next generation of back-end components that drive this massively scalable service in the midst of stiff competition from Microsoft's toughest competitors. You will be responsible for defining and writing technical specifications for new features, developing creative solutions for difficult scale and performance problems, driving the capacity management framework, working with teams across the company on critical cross-group projects, working extensively with development and test to drive project schedules and ultimately shipping new versions of the service that provide tremendous value for our customers and partners.

Software Development Engineer
400 million address books. 8 billion contacts. A gazillion relationships! That is the magnitude of data the Windows Live Contacts team hosts today (and it is growing fast!). The service (called the ABCH) doesn't just host contacts and address books but provides a platform for building rich permissions and sharing scenarios (sharing objects to individuals, groups or social networks). Now imagine, if this treasure trove of data were accessible via programmable APIs to all the developers in the world. Imagine the scenarios that it could enable. Imagine the interesting applications that developers around the world would build.

This is what we want to provide as part of the Windows Live vision. We are looking for an experienced software developer who can spearhead our effort in providing APIs (SOAP, DAV, REST) to our contacts and permissions service that can be used by third-party developers and ISVs.

The ideal candidate will have at least five years of demonstrated experience in shipping commercial software. The candidate should be a solid developer with above average design skills. The candidate should have a very keen sense of programmability, security and privacy and be willing to go the extra mile to make sure a users' data isn't compromised.

Email your resume to dareo@msft.com (replace msft with microsoft) if the above job descriptions sound like they are a good fit for you. If you have any questions about what working here is like, you can send me an email and I'll either follow up via email or my blog to answer any questions of general interest [within reason].

 

Dave Winer made the following insightful observation in a recent blog post

Jeremy Zawodny, who works at Yahoo, says that Google is Yahoo 2.0. Very clever, and there's a lot of truth to it, but watch out, that's not a very good place to be. That's how Microsoft came to dominate the PC software industry. By shipping (following the analogy) WordPerfect 2.0 (and WordStar, MacWrite and Multimate) and dBASE 2.0 (by acquiring FoxBase) and Lotus 2.0 (also known as Excel). It's better to produce your own 2.0s, as Microsoft's vanquished competitors would likely tell you.

Microsoft's corporate culture is very much about looking at an established market leader then building a competing product which is (i) integrated with a family of Microsoft products and (ii) fixes some of the weakneses in the competitors offerings. The company even came up with the buzzword Integrated Innovation to describe some of these aspects of its corporate strategy. 

Going further, one could argue that when Microsoft does try to push disruptive new ideas the lack of a competitor to focus on leads to floundering by the product teams involved. Projects such as WinFS, Netdocs and even Hailstorm can be cited as examples of projects that floundered due to the lack of a competitive focus.

New employees to Microsoft are sometimes frustrated by this aspect of Microsoft's culture. For some it's hard to acknowledge that working at Microsoft isn't about building cool, new stuff but about building cooler versions of products offered by our competitors which integrate well with other Microsoft products. This ethos not only brought us Microsoft Office which Dave mentions in his post but also newer examples including XBox (a better Playstation), C# (a better Java) and MSN Spaces (a better TypePad/Blogger/LiveJournal). 

The main reason I'm writing this is so I don't have to keep explaining it to people, I can just give them a link to this blog post next time it comes up.

 

In his blog post Windows DVD Maker Not Managed Code Charles Cook writes

Last week Eric Gunnerson mentioned that he has been working on an application for Vista: Windows DVD Maker. Yesterday he posted a FAQ for the application. The answer to question 4 was disappointing:

4: Is DVD Maker written in managed code?

A: No. Yes, it is ironic that I spent so much time on C# and then spent a ton of time writing something in C++ code. Everybody on the team is a believer in managed code, and we hope we'll be able to use it for future projects.

Given that there is a whole new set of APIs in Vista for writing managed applications - Avalon, WinFX, etc - why has a new self-contained app like this been written in unmanaged C++? Actually writing real applications, instead of just samples, with the new managed APIs would be far more convincing than any amount of hype from Robert Scoble.

I agree with Charles. If Microsoft believed in managed code, we would build applications using the .NET Framework. We do.

In his post Cha-Cha-Changes Dan Fernandez wrote

The Microsoft's not using Managed Code Myth
One of the biggest challenges in my old job was that customers didn't think Microsoft was using managed code. Well, the truth is that we have a good amount of managed code in the three years that the .NET Framework has been released including operating systems, client tools, Web properties, and Intranet applications. For those of you that refuse to believe, here's an estimate of the lines of managed code in Microsoft applications that I got permission to blog about:

• Visual Studio 2005: 7.5 million lines
• SQL Server 2005: 3 million lines
• BizTalk Server: 2 million lines
• Visual Studio Team System: 1.7 million lines
• Windows Presentation Foundation: 900K lines
• Windows Sharepoint Services: 750K lines
• Expression Interactive Designer: 250K lines  
• Sharepoint Portal Server: 200K lines
• Content Management Server: 100K lines

We also use managed code for the online services that power various MSN Windows Live properties from Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Mail to Live.com and Windows Live Expo. I find it surprising that people continue to think that we don't use managed code at Microsoft.

 

The Wall Street Journal has an article entitled The Men Who Came To Dinner, and What They Said About Email which contains the following excerpt

"Email is one of the liveliest niches in tech right now. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all view it as a key to winning new customers and making money off current ones. And so they are innovating with new email programs and services all the time. Since all three companies' email teams are in my neck of the woods, I thought it would be fun to have the heads of each team come over one night for dinner and conversation. The three companies were good sports and agreed, in part because I said I wasn't interested in a shouting match.

As it happened, Google's Paul Buchheit, 29 years old; Kevin Doerr, 39, of Microsoft (no relation to the venture capitalist) and Ethan Diamond, 34, of Yahoo were all on their best behavior. Whatever they may say about their competitors at work, at my table they were gracious and complimentary. Gentle teasing was about as far as they would go.

The evening began with even the Microsoft and Yahoo delegates agreeing that much of the current excitement in the email world can be traced back to last year's debut of Mr. Buchheit's Gmail. The program had a fast user interface with a fresh new look, along with a then-remarkable gigabyte of free storage.

Mr. Buchheit said he started working on Gmail after observing that other email programs were getting worse, not better. Microsoft's Mr. Doerr said that at his company, Gmail was a thunderbolt. "You guys woke us up," he told Mr. Buchheit. Yahoo's Mr. Diamond, then at a startup with its own hot, new email program, said Gmail was the final impetus that Yahoo needed to buy his company.

Mr. Buchheit responded with a victory lap. "We were trying to make the email experience better for our users," he said. "We ended up making it better for yours, too."

The evening wasn't all a Gmail love-in, though. The Microsoft and Yahoo representatives said their many millions of users might not accept some of Gmail's departures from email norms, such as the way the program groups messages into "conversations." The two men also razzed Mr. Buchheit a bit, saying that it had been easy for Google to promise a lot of storage to its users because it carefully controlled how many users Gmail would have by requiring an invitation to get an account."

As someone who has to build services which compete with Google's the last statement in the above excerpt resonates with me. I tend to think that in a number of their products such as GMail, Google Talk and even Google Pack, the folks at Google are practising the lessons learned from articles such as Joel Spolsky's Fire & Motion. In the article Joel Spolsky argues that large companies like Microsoft tend to create technological imperatives that force competitors to respond and keep up thus preventing them from focusing on new features.

Examples of Google practising Fire & Motion are somewhat different from what Joel Spolsky describes in his article but the ideas are similar.  Google tends to create initiatives that are either much more expensive for their competitors than them to provide (e.g. giving users gigabytes of storage space for email but limiting sign ups on the service) or would be detrimental to their market share to compete with (e.g. allowing non-Google clients to access the Google Talk servers). I've had co-workers joke that for every dollar Google spends on some of its efforts, its competitors are forced to spend five to ten dollars. Here is a back of the envelope calculation that illustrates this point.

Email Service	Estimated Number of Users	Inbox Size	Total Storage provided
GMail	5 million	2.5GB	12.5 petabytes
Yahoo! Mail	219 million	1GB	219 petabytes
HotMail	221 million	0.25 GB	55.25 petabytes

Of course, these numbers are off because they are based on estimates. Also I think the Hotmail numbers should be somewhat lower since I haven't confirmed that we've rolled out the 250MB inbox to every market. The point should still be clear though, Google has forced its competitors such as Microsoft and Yahoo! to spend orders of magnitude more money on storage which distracts them from competing with Google in the places where it is strong. More importantly its competitors have to provide from 10 to 20 times the total amount of storage Google is providing just to be competitive. 

This is often the dilemma when competing with Google. On the one hand, you have customers who rightly point out that Google is more generous but on the other the fact is that it costs us a whole lot more to do the things Google does since we have a whole lot more users than they do. The cool things about this is that it forces to be very imaginative about how we are competitive in the market place and challenges are always fun.  

 

Every couple of weeks while I'm at Microsoft I hear co-workers or executives say stuff that makes me wonder whether we are stuck in a time warp. My current pet peeve  is when I hear someone use the term Software as a Service or even worse the abbreviation "SaaS" to describe Web-based. There are people here who are so disconnected from the real world that to them Web-based software is some hot, new thing that deserves it's own magical new buzzword. Seriously, if you go around saying stuff like "Software as a Service" in 2006 then you are fricking dinosaur.

Another example of the kind of dinosaur mentality I'm ranting against is linked from a post on Robert Scoble's blog entitled Flickr’ing an unusual Mix06 meeting. In that post he links to the following image

At some meeting about a new Web conference coming out of Microsoft, one of the insightful ideas on the white board is "The Web is inevitable and her to stay". Is this 1996? That would have been insightful a decade ago, now it just makes us seem over the hill. Competitors like Google and Yahoo! are already thinking about the next level (e.g. making deals with network service providers to increase the quality of the user experience when visiting their sites, making heavy bets on the mobile Web, and bridging the gap between the Web and television in concrete ways) yet here we are finally admitting that maybe wishing that the Web will go away isn't a winning strategy.

Sometimes it feels like I work in dinosaur country.

 

I've seen a number of interesting posts today in response to the news that Microsoft will end support for Internet Explorer for the Mac ths year. The best posts have been from people who used to work on the product.

Jorg Brown has a comment on Slashdot entitled I was on the MacIE 6 team when it got canned... which contains the following excerpt

MacIE had one of the strangest and saddest histories I've seen, of any product.

MacIE 5 was an awesome release, critically aclaimed and everything, with a good development team and a strong testing team, that included daily performance measurement.

And yet, almost immediately after 5.0 was released, the MacIE team was redeployed to work on a set-top DVR box. The notion at the time was that the team would continue to do MacIE work in their spare time, since IE 5 was the leader among Mac browsers and no longer needed a full-time team.

The problem with that notion was that WebTV, the team's new bosses, had no reason to actually schedule any time for real IE work. So later, when that particular set-top box got cancelled, the IE team got redployed for other WebTV work, and since this was now out of MacBU's control, nothing could really be done.

3 or 4 years went by before enough people in the Mac division wanted to resume work on IE, and when it looked like we might actually need the technology, as a base for MSN-for-Mac, the IE 6 team was formed. It got a firm OS X-only foundation, a new even more complient browser base, and then suddenly it became apparent that Apple was doing their own browser, because, well, there were lots of small clues, but the big clues was that Apple had started calling the old Mac IE team offering them jobs.

By that time the Mac division had formally committed to MSN-for-Mac-OSX, so it's not like we were completely going to stop work. But a meeting was held internally, the outcome of which was that it didn't make sense to build our own browser if Apple was going to bundle one, because the marketshare and mindshare of the distant-second-place browser, on the distant-second-place platform, wasn't worth pursuing. A week later we had a meeting with high-up people at Apple, where they told us they were doing a browser. And the week after that, after confirming it with Bill Gates, who was reportedly sad but understanding of the decision, MacIE was officially shut down.

MSN-for-MacOSX went ahead, and was also critically acclaimed, but once released, indications were that the number of users was about the same as the number of developers. After that, MacBU concentrated once again on the next Office release, and MacIE has been well and truly and permanently dead ever since.

Over the whole sad journey, the single most surprising thing I ever discovered was from a small conversation that went:

Me: "Look, if it makes sense to devote dozens of people to WinIE, then surely it makes sense to devote half a dozen to MacIE!"

Higher-up: <confused look> "There aren't dozens of people on WinIE. WinIE had some great people on it! We need those great people on products that make money!"

Me: "Then why on earth did we pursue IE in the first place? Just so that the DOJ would sue us?"

Higher-up: <confused look>

Some day I hope to get a proper answer on our motivation to do WinIE and MacIE in the first place. It seems to be that we were scared of not having control of the HTML standard. And indeed, now that Firefox is gaining traction, Microsoft has added more people to WinIE again.

Jimmy Grewal also has a blog post about this entitled End of an era: Mac Internet Explorer where he writes

This announcement has sparked some debate on Slashdot, which was inevitable. Omar pointed me to a comment to this by our former co-worker Jorg Brown, who now works for Google, which I’ll quote below:
... [see above excerpt]
A lot of what he says is true; but the story is more complex than this and there were many other factors that came into play. Issues which he doesn’t cover…primarily because he wasn’t working on the product much until the last few months of development:

• - Mac IE was the first real browser running on Mac OS X. We had it running on Developer Preview 2 and it shipped on the Public Beta CD-ROM. That was a great engineering achievement but it came at a very high price. Developing for OS X in those early days was a nightmare and we spent so much time struggling with OS bugs and changing APIs that precious time that could have been used to improve the product was wasted just trying to maintain compatibility with each new beta release of OS X.

• - Apple was a pain in the ass sometimes. For a company with such great PR, they really were very unprofessional and treated developers poorly. I know that the OS X transition was tough, but there are so many stories I could tell of stupidity at Apple and policies which made no sense…but I won’t. I’ll just say that Apple had a lot more involvement in the development of Mac IE and it’s eventual end than Jorg gives them credit for. There were times during the last two years of working at Microsoft that I really hated Apple’s management…which was very difficult for me being such a loyal fan of their products and having so many friends who worked there.

• - No clear direction from our management was the last major factor which Jorg touched upon but is important to mention again. Towards the end, we had some major changes in management at the MacBU and the new team was inexperienced both with the products they were managing and how to deal with Apple. They were further handicapped by lack of clear direction by our execs who were too busy worrying about AOL, the DOJ, and our stock price.

The common thread in both perspectives is that management at Microsoft didn't see much value in continuing with IE on the Mac. Jorg doesn't seem to understand why but the reason seems clearer to me.Microsoft is a platform company. We have built the most popular software platforms on the planet; Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. In the 1990s, two technologies/products attempted to take the place of Windows as the world's #1 developer platform. These technologies/products were the Java platform produced by Sun Microsystems and the Netscape Navigator web browser produced by Netscape. Microsoft met both challenges in a variety of ways including making sure that Windows  (a) was the best platform to run Java applications and (b) had the best Web browser on any platform. The goal was simple if Java or the web browser became the platform, then that platform would at the end still be a Windows platform. Of course, some other decisions Microsoft made with regards to competing with Sun and Netscape landed the company in court with billions of dollars in fines and settlements. 

Fast forward to the early 2000s, the browser wars are over and IE is the world's dominant Web browser. In an almost text book example of how monopolies work, Microsoft abandoned innovation in IE in a move that showed that at this point IE was considered a cost center not a revenue generator. It simply doesn't make business sense for Microsoft to invest in a technology that dintermediates it's most popular platform, the Windows operating system. This should sound familiar to you if you've read The Innovators Dilemma.

It's now the mid-2000s and the Web browser landscape has changed. Technologies such as DHTML and IXMLHttpRequest which were invented by Microsoft to make IE the best developer platform on the Web have been adopted by competitors like Google and rival Web browsers like Mozilla. Despite our best efforts, the Windows platform is being routed around and even worse it is by technologies we invented. In this case Microsoft has been hoisted by its own petard. 

These developments have caused renewed interest in IE [at least on Windows] by Microsoft which is why I went from two years of being a Microsoft employee and not believing an IE team existed to reading the IE blog which makes it seem that there is now a veritable army of developers working on IE. The only problem is that I expect that history will repeat itself. What happens when IE reaches feature parity with Mozilla? Will we have to wait until Windows Blackcomb until we see Internet Explorer 8? Given how Microsoft [and specifically the Windows division] works this isn't as crazy an idea as it sounds. 

I can think of two ways to prevent history from repeating itself. The first is that Microsoft officially disbands the IE team after IE 7. The second is that Microsoft transfers the IE team to a product group that actually depends on browser innovative to make money such as MSN Windows Live. We haven't innovated in the browser for almost a decade. IE 5 was the last truly innovative release. Ex-IE team members like Scott Berkun who wrote the classic How to build a better web browser show exactly stagnant the world of Web browser innovation has been this century. Given that Microsoft views IE as a defensive option to make Windows an enticing product, there is less incentive to make it the ultimate browsing experience as products whose bread and butter is the Web browser. Why do you think there are so many Google employees working on Mozilla?

Microsoft should either cede innovation in the Web browser to Mozilla/Google or make IE more than just "icing on the Windows user experience cake"by transfering the product to a team whose bottom line depends on browser innovation. Of course, I doubt that my words will be taken seriously by folks at Microsoft [except as a reason to send my boss or his boss angry mail] but this needs to be said.

 

Don Demsak has a post entitled XSLT 2.0, Microsoft, and the future of System.Xml which has some insightful perspectives on the future of XML in the .NET Framework

Oleg accidentally restarted the XSLT 2.0 on .Net firestorm by trying to startup an informal survey.  Dare chimed in with his view of how to get XSLT 2.0 in .Net.  M. David (the guy behind Saxon.Net which let .Net developers use Saxon on .Net) jumped in with his opinion.
...

One of the things that I’ve struggled with in System.Xml is how hard it is sometimes to extend the core library.  The XML MVPs have done a good job with some things, but other things (like implementing XSLT 2.0 on top of the XSLT 1.0 stuff) are impossible because so much of the library is buried in internal classes.  When building a complex library like System.Xml, there are 2 competing schools of thought:

1. Make the library easy to use and create a very small public facing surface area.
2. Make the library more of a core library with most classes and attributes public, and let others build easy (and very specific) object models on top of it.

The upside of the first methodology is that it is much easier to test, and the library just works out of the box.  The downside is that it very hard to extend the library, so it can only be used in very specific ways.

The upside of the second methodology is that you don’t have to trying to envision all the ways the library should be used.  Over time others will extend it to accomplish things that the original developers never thought of.  The downside is that you have a much larger surface area to test, and you are totally reliant on other projects to make your library useful.  This goes for both projects internal to Microsoft and external projects like the Mvp.Xml lib.

The System.Xml team has tended to use the first methodology, where the ASP.Net team tends to build their core stuff according to the second methodology, and then have a sub-team create another library using the first methodology, so developers have something to use right out of the box (think of System.Web.UI.HtmlControls as the low level API and System.Web.UI.WebControls as the higher level API).  The ASP.Net team builds their API this way because, from the beginning, they have always envisioned 3rd parties extending their library.  At the moment, this is not the case for the System.Xml library.  But the question is, should System.Xml be revamped and become a lower level API, and then rely on 3rd parties (like the Mvp.Xml project) to create more specific and easier to use APIs?  Obviously this is not something to be taken lightly.  It will be more costly to expose more of the internals of System.Xml.  But, if only the lower level API was part of the core .Net framework, it may then be possible to roll out newer, higher level, APIs on a release schedule different then the .Net framework schedule.  This way projects like XSLT 2.0 could be released without having to what for the next version of the framework.

 I’ve always been of the opinion that XSLT 2.0 does not need to be part of the core .Net framework.  Oleg doesn’t believe that the .Net open source community is as passionate as some of the other communities, so he would like to see Microsoft build XSLT 2.0.  I’d rather see the transformation of the System.Xml team into more of an ASP.Net like team.  If .Net is the future of development on the Windows platform, and XML is the future of Microsoft, then the System.Xml team needs to grow beyond its legacy as just an offshoot of the SQL Server team.  The System.Xml team still resides in the SQL Server building.  Back before .Net, the System.Xml was known as the SQL Web Data team, and unfortunately, still carries some of that mentality.  Folks like Joshua Allen and Dare (who are both not on the team anymore) fought to bring the team out from the shadows of SQL Server.  With new XML related groups, like XLinq and Windows Communication Framework, popping up within the company the System.Xml group is at a major crossroads.  They will either grow (in status and budget) and become more like the ASP.Net or they will get absorbed into one of the new groups.

 I’d prefer to see the System.Xml team grow and become full partners with teams like ASP.Net and the CLR team.  I’d like to see the XML based languages become first class programming languages within the Visual Studio IDE.  That means not only using things like XSLT and XML Schema as dynamic languages, but also be able to compile them down to IL and compiled with the other .Net languages.  I want to be able to create projects that contain not only VB or C#, but also XSLT and XML Schema (to name a couple), and have them compile into one executable.  Then developers can use things like XSLT 2.0, or the next in vogue XML based language, and take advantage of that language’s unique benefits, without having to choose between a compiled procedural language (like C# or VB) and dynamic functional languages like XSLT.  Linq is starting to bring in more of the functional programming style to the average procedural programmer, so I can start to see the rise public awareness of functional programming.  It is only a matter of time before the average programmer feels as comfortable with functional programming as they do with procedural programming, so we need to look towards including these languages within the Visual Studio IDE (which then leads into my discussion about evolving Visual Studio into more of an IDE Framework, and extended with add-ins.)

There is a lot of stuff which I agree with in Don's post which is why I forwarded it to some of the folks on the XML team. I'll be having lunch over there today to talk about some of the topics it raised

Don does gloss over something when it comes to the decision between whether Microsoft should implement a technology like XSLT 2.0 or whether we should just make it easy for third parties to do so. The truth is that Microsoft now has a large number of products which utilize XML-related technologies. For example, implementing something like XSLT 2.0 isn't just about providing a new version of the System.Xml.Xsl.XslCompiledTransform Class in the .NET Framework. It's also about deciding whether to update the XSLT engine used by Internet Explorer to support XSLT 2.0 (which is an entirely different code base), it's about adding support to the XSLT debugger in Visual Studio to support XSLT 2.0, and maybe even updating the Biztalk Mapper. Users of Microsoft products expect a cohesive and comprehensive experience. In many cases, only Microsoft can provide that experience (e.g. supporting XSLT 2.0 across our entire breadth of technologies and products that use XSLT). It was a really tough balance deciding what we should make extensible and what was too expensive to make extensible since we'd probably be the only ones who could take proper advantage of it when I was on the XML team. I'm glad to see that some of our MVPs understand how delicate of a balancing act shipping platform technologies can be.

 

Given the very negative beef that offshoring has in the U.S. technology industry I've found it interesting how favorable Microsoft employees are towards the practice. From reading the blogs of various Microsoft employees, it seems a number of different products now have part of their development team in Asia. Below are excerpts from a few of blog posts that highlight this trend.

In his post Some Kahuna Stuff, Omar Shahine of Hotmail Windows Live Mail writes

Finally, Aditya announced that he will be moving to Shanghai, to work in our MSN Shanghai Tech Center. We actually have a small team of really smart developers and testers over in Shanghai that are working on various aspects of Kahuna. For those of you that have Kahuna accounts, they are responsible for getting the MSN Calendar into the M3 release of Kahuna which is a project I worked on in my "spare time" while also working on Kahuna M3. I'll be going over to Shanghai in a few weeks to hang with them.

Aditya (who is one of the folks I manage) is one of the co-creaters of FireAnt, the technology that we built Kahuna on. While he'll be missed around the hallways of our campus, he'll be continuing to do some great stuff over in China. It's an amazing opportunity, and I'm really excited about growing and building a strong product development team there.

In his post Travel and Books Chris Anderson of Avalon Windows Presentation Foundation writes

Just got back from China. I spent last week visiting the Microsoft office in Beijing. The Avalon team is partnering with a group in China to produce some of the control and features in Avalon. It was great to get to meet all the folks over there. So, over the past 3 weeks I've spent 1 in LA, 1 in Seattle, and 1 in Beijing.

In the post IE Development in China, Christopher Vaughan of the Internet Explorer team writes

Tony Chor, Rob Franco, and myself are in Beijing today as we make our way to Kuala Lumpur for the Hack-In-The-Box conference. We have a great team over here in what we call the ATC (Advanced Technology Center). In the past 6 months they’ve gone from just starting to adding serious value to IE 7. The folks over here have already contributed to IE 7 by re-writing the select control which Chris Wilson alluded to in his post from the PDC. Other improvements that we’ll see come out of the ATC for IE include improving our bi-directional font support, font linking and fallback improvements, and increased accessibility support. Watch for more blog posts in the future from our teammates here in China covering the kinds of things they’re working on.

I think it's really cool that Microsoft employees are comfortable with the fact that it is a global company. I've seen some of the emotion and rhetoric around offshoring and U.S. companies get ugly which is unfortunate. Of course, Microsoft has a rather diverse and international work force which probably helps a lot.

 

In his post Dinner with Dan'l Lewin of Microsoft Dan Bricklin writes

I was invited to a little dinner tonight, along with John Landry and some others, with the visiting Dan'l Lewin of Microsoft...Earlier in the dinner we all introduced ourselves and Dan'l answered some questions about Live...Basically, he sounded like he couldn't say much and/or didn't know the answers and that we'll find out more in the spring (and is probably pretty happy the recording didn't come out...). He didn't seem keen on the idea of OWA-like (Outlook Web Access) versions of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel. Some of us let him know that's what we expected him to say but were surprised because it's what people want. (I had already told him some about wikiCalc.)

I can understand the Office guys aren't keen on building Web-based versions of their flagship apps but they are going to have get over it. They will eventually have to do it. The only question is whether they will lead, follow or get the hell out of the way.

 

Due to Windows Live, a bunch of us at MSN (the Windows Live division?) have been inundiated with lots of internal marketing and presentations around branding. One thing that this has convinced me of is that we (Microsoft) are totally inept when it comes to branding. The fact that till today nobody can quite answer What is .NET? (a managed runtime? server software? web services? all of the above?) is a testament to our generally cluelessness in this area. I sincerely hope the same thing doesn't happen with "Live" but only time will tell.

On a related note, for some reason I've had a couple of idle lunchtime conversations with different people on what they think about XBox. Somewhat surprisingly to me, many employees at Microsoft are quick to deride MSN for being a "money losing division" even though we are now profitable but yet in the same breath have nothing but praise for XBox which is billions of dollars in the red. When I've probed for reasons for this disconnect, the answer has been usually one of either (i) it was a "big bet" to get Microsoft in the living room or (ii) it adds something cool to the Microsoft brand. The latter is what I find interesting. Since people started mentioning this I've started paying attention to mentions of Microsoft in XBox ads and websites. 

What I've noticed is that there is little mention of Microsoft when it comes to XBox. If you visit http://www.xbox.com/en-US/, you have to scroll down before you see a mention of Microsoft and even then it's in the small print. TV spots for XBox 360 such as Jump In and Water Balloons don't mention Microsoft at all. Why not? My pet theory is that the guys behind XBox know the truth. XBox is cool. Microsoft is not. Thus mentioning Microsoft in XBox ads would actually taint their brand. Of course, if I'm right there goes the theory of a bunch of my coworkers about XBox boosting the "cool factor" of the Microsoft brand.

 

A comment to my post Some Thoughts on the Mini-Microsoft blog struck me as so good that it was worth sharing. So I'm reposting it here so others get to see it

The Lessons of Longhorn
I’ve worked at MS for many, many years in the product groups. I love the company, and have prospered with it. I’m not some disgruntled flunky. I manage a big group, and am committed to doing everything I can to make my group a great place to be and build really compelling products that lots of customers will want to buy. We were and still are a great company in many ways. But we could be even greater.

The Longhorn saga highlights some stark lessons about why employees are pissed off and frustrated with the very top handful of execs. We are all held to very high standards. We write annual commitments, and work very hard to achieve them. If we don’t achieve them, we know we will not be rewarded. We want to do great work, make great products, and be rewarded for it, personally and financially. We don’t shirk from this challenge, we are up to it! But, we expect these rules to apply to everyone, evenly and openly. All the way to the top.

Longhorn will be a good product when it ships, but it will ship two years later than it should have. That extra two years represents what, maybe 8,000 man years of work? At a fully burdened cost of say $150k/head/year that’s $1.2Billion in direct costs of our resources flushed down the toilet. But far worse than those direct costs are the lost opportunity costs of not having the product in market two years earlier and getting started on Vnext.

Who is to blame for this debacle? First BillG himself, for pushing the Windows group to take on huge, extremely difficult technical projects that destabilize all the core parts of the OS, and hold shipping hostage. Even worse, in some cases these efforts seem to be little more than ‘pet’ ideas of Bill’s, with little clear customer value, at least to my understanding. Second, the very top handful of execs in the Windows group are to blame, for placating Bill and not applying the most basic good judgment on engineering and project management. From my perspective, it was clear to nearly every engineer in every product group at MS that Longhorn was badly screwed up, for far too long. But no one at the top would admit it or come to grips with it for far too long. For top product execs as MS, there is a long history of a culture that Bill is right, do what he says, always stay in his good graces no matter what. If you do that, you will likely make a huge fortune. If you don’t, your career at MS is over. I understand the pressure on execs to behave that way and always say ‘Yes’ to Bill. But that’s not the leadership we need. We are not helping anyone with this game, neither customers nor ourselves.

All of us know that if we screwed up like this, we would likely be forced out of our groups, with our reputations as product people shot, and for good reason. But when Bill and Jim et al screw up, nothing happens.

I really want Bill to be man enough to stand up and say, “I made a big mistake. This is what we’ve learned, and this is how we are going to do even better.” Bill is a tremendous thinker, but he is human too, and sometimes can make mistakes. We can’t have a culture that holds he is semi-divine. We need leaders who really lead, pragmatically and effectively, who hold themselves openly to the same standards that we are all held to. That is how we can become an even better company and reach more of our still great potential.

longtimer

 

Mini-Microsoft has a blog post on middle management at Middle Managers, Bureaucracy, and No Birds at Microsoft where he offers pointers to some counter arguments to his regular bashing of bureaucracy and middle management at Microsoft. The various linked posts and some of the comments do a good job of presenting an alternate perspective to the various complaints people make against bureaucracy and middle management.

Derek Denny-Brown, a friend of mine who just left Microsoft, has a blog post entitled The curse of Middle management where he writes

I had a long discussion with a friend of mine about Longhorn aka Windows Vista. He had just caught up with news and some of the recent interviews with Jim Allchin. He knew I had some involvement with the OS divisions, and was just generally curious for my perspective 2 weeks out of the company.

In my view, a lot of the problems at Microsoft stem from bad middle management. Microsoft has built up a whole ecology of managers, who are at least as concerned with their career as they are with making good decisions. I've interacted more than I like to admit. The effect is that upper management doesn't hear a clear story about what is really going on. I think the phrase I used was that they 'massage the message'. Combine that with long release cycles and lack of accountability falls out as an inevitability.

One of the reasons I left is because I just don't see any way out of that mess. I am humbled by MiniMicrosoft and his determination to be part of the solution.

I tend to agree with Derek about lack of accountability being a problem here. One thing I've noticed about bad middle managers is that (i) it is almost impossible to get them out of their positions and (ii) all it takes is one or two to seriously derail a project. I've personally been surprised at how many bad middle managers just keep on ticking at Microsoft. It seems it is a lot easier to see individual contributors or even VPs pushed out for incompetence than middle management (Dev Managers, General Managers, Product Unit Managers, Group Program Managers, etc).

It is also surprising how much damage, a well-placed yet broken middle management cog can be in the smooth functioning of the corprorate machine. I've lost count of the amount of times I've asked some member of a team that creates a much reviled project why they product sucked so much and the response would be "our test/dev/general manager didn't see fixing those problems as a high priority". As Derek states, it is even worse when you get the ones that present a false impression to upper management about how things are going. 

Michael Brundage also covered some of this in his essay on Working at Microsoft which is excerpted below

Company Leadership

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer get most of the press, but it's an open secret that all of the division heads (and their staff, and their staff) are top-notch. I'm (happily) oblivious to how that circle operates, so I can only judge them on their results.

Given that Microsoft's been convicted of monopolistic practices, it may shock you when I say that Microsoft's upper management strikes me as very ethical. They talk about ethical behavior all the time, and as far as I've seen, lead by example. Maybe I'm being naive, but I find Microsoft's upper management to be very trustworthy. They're also thinking very far ahead, and doing a good job getting the information they need to make solid decisions.

Microsoft's leaders are also very generous, and frequently encourage the rest of us to make charitable donations (both money and time) a priority. Giving is a large part of Microsoft's corporate culture.

It's refreshing to work at a company where you can trust that the upper echelon is smart, hardworking, and making right decisions. I don't have to worry that my general manager or vice-president will drive our division (or company) into the ground through incompetence or greed. Microsoft's no Enron or WorldCom.

Managers

In contrast, most of the middle management should be tossed.

Did I mention I've had six or seven managers in five years? I've only changed jobs twice the others were "churn" caused by reorganizations or managers otherwise being reassigned. In fact, in the month between when I was hired and when I started, the person who was going to be my manager (we'd already had several phone/email conversations) changed! It's seven if you count that, six if you don't.

None of these managers were as good as my best manager at NASA. Of the six-seven managers I've had, I'd relish working for (or with) only two of them again. Two were so awful that if they were hired into my current organization (even on another team), I'd quit on the spot. The other two-three were "nngh" -- no significant impact on my life one way or another. I'd love to think this is some kind of fluke, that I've just been unlucky, but many other Microsoft employees have shared similar experiences with me.

I think part of the problem is that Microsoft doesn't generally hire software developers for their people- or leadership-skills, but all dev leads were developers first. Part of the problem is also that (unlike some companies that promote incompetence) good leads are usually promoted into higher positions quickly, so the companies best managers rise to the top. Consequently, the lower ranks are filled with managers who either have no interest in advancing up the management chain (which is fine) or else are below-average in their management skills (which is not).

But it's more complex than this. At Microsoft, many managers still contribute as individuals (e.g., writing code) and are then judged on that performance (which is mostly objective) as much or more than they're judged on their leadership performance (which is mostly subjective). Because individual developers have so much freedom and responsibility, it's easy and typical to give individuals all the credit or blame for their performance, without regard to the manager's impact. Conversely, managers' performance often does not translate into tangible effects for their teams (other than the joy or misery of working for them). For example, I can still get a great review score even if my manager is terrible. I think these factors contribute to management skills being undervalued.

Microsoft also suffers from a phenomenon that I've seen at other companies. I describe this as the "personality cult," wherein one mid-level manager accumulates a handful of loyal "fans" and moves with them from project to project. Typically the manager gets hired into a new group, and (once established) starts bringing in the rest of his/her fanclub. Once one of these "cults" is entrenched, everyone else can either give up from frustration and transfer to another team, or else wait for the cult to eventually leave (and hope the team survives and isn't immediately invaded by another cult). I've seen as many as three cults operating simultaneously side-by-side within a single product group. Rarely, a sizeable revolt happens and the team kicks the cult out. Sometimes, the cult disintegrates (usually taking the team with it). Usually, the cult just moves on to the Next Big Thing, losing or gaining a few members at each transfer.

I think these "cults" are a direct result of Microsoft's review system, in which a mid-level manager has significant control over all the review scores within a 100+ person group (so it's in your best interest to get on his/her good side), and conversely needs only a fraction of that group's total support to succeed as a manager (so it's in his/her best interest to cultivate a loyal fanclub to provide that support). The cult gives the manager the appearance of broad support, and makes the few people who speak out against him/her look like sour grapes unrepresentative of a larger majority. After a string of successes, the manager is nearly invincible.

Fortunately, these managers are unlikely to move further up the ranks, due to the inherent deficiences in their characters (which are usually visible to upper management and enough to prevent their advancement, but not so severe as to warrant firing them).

These "personality cults" always negatively impact the group eventually (while they're there and/or when they leave), but counterintuitively sometimes these personality cults have a large positive initial effect. Many successful Microsoft products have come into existence only through the actions of such personality cults. Some of these products even survived after the personality cult left for the Next Big Thing.

I totally agree with Michael's analysis. Like Derek, I'm unsure as to how one would go about reversing this trend. However I definitely think the way we assess accountability of folks in [middle and executive] management needs an overhaul.

 

I've been reading the Mini-Microsoft blog for a couple of months now and recently considered unsubscribing. The main reason I haven't is that the recent story in Business Week about the blog has attracted a lot of readers which makes the comment threads interesting in a Slashdot kinda way. Since I couldn't locate an email address for the blog's author on the front page of the blog, I'll just post my comments here on why the blog jumped the shark for me.

1. Complaints about Symptoms instead of the Root Problems: A lot of the things complained about by the author of the Mini-Microsoft blog are symptoms of a single problem. About six years ago, Motley Fool ran an article entitled The 12 Simple Secrets of Microsoft Management which listed a number of characteristics of the company which made it successfull. The fourth item on the list is Require Failure and it states

   In contrast, at Microsoft, failure is expected, and even required because risking failure is the only way to push the envelope. As a result, Microsofties relentlessly pursue success without fear of failure. And if they fail, they understand that the key is to fail quickly and not waste time.

   One of the unfortunate things about a culture that turns a blind eye to failure is that this eventually there is no difference between requiring failure and a lack of accountability. A lot of the things Mini complains about point to an environment where  a lack of accountability runs rampant. I'd rather see him ring the bell about these issues [which he does every once in a while] as opposed to meaningless distractions like complaining about vague ship dates or asking for mass firings because the company is "too large".

2. Microsoft is Lots of Little Companies: One thing that isn't clear from Mini's posts is that a number of the complaints he raises are organization specific. The culture in the Office group is different from that at MSN, the issues facing the people working in the Windows group are different from those facing the folks working on XBox. Mini's blog not only isn't representative but it doesn't seem like he pays much detail to what is happening outside of his group. For example, it is quite telling that he didn't know that the ship date for Visual Studio 2005 was announced a while ago. Given how many people within the company work on and are impacted by the shipping of Whidbey & Yukon, it seems clear that Mini doesn't pay much attention to what is going on outside of his group.

3. Stack Ranking: This point is a probably a repeat of my first one. First of all when it comes to performance reviews, I tend to agree with Joel Spolsky that Incentive Pay Considered Harmful. Joel wrote

   And herein lies the rub. Most people think that they do pretty good work (even if they don't). It's just a little trick our minds play on us to keep life bearable. So if everybody thinks they do good work, and the reviews are merely correct (which is not very easy to achieve), then most people will be disappointed by their reviews. The cost of this in morale is hard to understate. On teams where performance reviews are done honestly, they tend to result in a week or so of depressed morale, moping, and some resignations. They tend to drive wedges between team members, often because the poorly-rated are jealous of the highly-rated, in a process that DeMarco and Lister call teamicide: the inadvertent destruction of jelled teams.

   In general, systems where you try to competitively rank people and reward them based on their rankings suck. A lot. When you combine this with the current rewards associated with positive rankings at Microsoft, then you have a system that doubly sucks. I think Mini gets this but he keeps talking about alternative performance review systems even though there is lots of evidence that incentive pay systems simply do not work.

Those are the top three reasons that I find myself losing interest in keeping up with the Mini-Microsoft blog. However I'll probably keep reading because the comments now have me gawking at them regularly, sometimes even more than I do at Slashdot.

 

A few days ago I mentioned in my post, Microsoft's Innovation Pipeline, that I suspect that a lot of folks at Microsoft will be looking to try something new after working on large software projects that in some cases have taken 3 to 5 years to ship. I personally have had conversations with half a dozen people over the last month or so who are either looking for something new or have found it.

In his post, Something New, Derek Denny-Brown writes

What kept me at Microsoft, and what I will miss the most, is the people. I worked with such diverse collection of wonderful people... mostly. Not that you can't get that elsewhere, but the 'individual contributors' (as they are called at MS) are really one of Microsoft's assets. I felt like a I was leaving my family. I have worked with some of these people for my entire time at Microsoft. That is a long, and intense, time to build a friendship.

I've had almost everyone I know ask me "why I are you leaving?" Some factors: Whidbey is basically done, as is Yukon. Microsoft definitely is more bureaucratic that it used to be, as well. Mostly though, it was just time to move on. I was presented with an opportunity that fit my interests. (And no, I'm not going to Google... too big. I decided long ago, that if I was going to leave, I wanted it to be for a small company, something less than 100 people.)

Derek is a good friend and I'll hate to see him leave. At least he's staying in Seattle so we'll still get to hang out every couple of weekends. I didn't try really hard to pitch him on coming to MSN but after a second friend [who hasn't posted to his blog about leaving yet] told me he was leaving the company I've switched tactics. All my friends are getting the pitch now. :)

 

From the press release Microsoft Realigns for Next Wave of Innovation and Growth

REDMOND, Wash. — Sept. 20, 2005 — In order to drive greater agility in the execution of its software and services strategy, Microsoft Corp. today announced a realignment of the company into three newly formed divisions, each of which will be led by its own president.  The Microsoft Platform Products & Services Division will be led by Kevin Johnson and Jim Allchin as co-presidents; Jeff Raikes has been named president of the Microsoft Business Division; and Robbie Bach has been named as president of Microsoft Entertainment & Devices Division. In addition, the company said Ray Ozzie will expand his role as chief technical officer by assuming responsibility for helping drive its software-based services strategy and execution across all three divisions.

The company also announced that Allchin plans to retire at the end of calendar year 2006 following the commercial availability of Windows Vista™, the next-generation Microsoft^® Windows^® operating system....

Microsoft Platform Products & Services Division

Johnson will succeed Allchin, taking ownership of the Microsoft Platform Products & Services Division, which comprises Windows Client, Server and Tools, and MSN^®. To ensure a smooth transition, Johnson and Allchin will serve as co-presidents until Allchin’s retirement next year. The new division’s mission is to enable exciting user experiences and drive customer value through continued innovation in the software platform and software services delivered over the Internet.

"We are focused on creating exciting user experiences and enabling developers to build great applications with the combination of software and software-based services," Ballmer said. "Our MSN organization has great expertise in innovating quickly and delivering software-based services at scale. The platform groups have great expertise in creating a software platform and user experience that touches millions of people. By combining these areas of expertise, we will deliver greater value to our customers. David Cole, senior vice president, will continue to lead MSN, reporting to Johnson.

It seems I was wrong about how long it would take MSN to become more like Windows. The fun thing about Microsoft is that just when you think you have the org chart figured out, we have a reorg.  :)

 

In a recent interview with Business Week, Microsoft's CEO stated

We certainly have the best pipeline of new innovation [over the next 12 months] we've ever had in our history.

I was thinking about that line on my drive back from work yesterday and I think he has a point. Over the next year or so Microsoft is going to ship Windows Vista, Office 12, IE 7, Visual Studio 2005, BizTalk Server 2006, SQL Server 2005, .NET Framework v2.0, Windows Communications Foundation (Indigo), Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon), Xbox 360 as well as the next iterations of various offerings from the MSN division including Hotmail, MSN Spaces, MSN Messenger, MSN Virtual Earth, Start.com, etc. That's a lot of stuff and is probably more stuff than has ever shipped in a 12 - 18 month time period in the company's history.

I suspect that one of the interesting consequences of this will be a significant diffusion of talent across the company and perhaps across the industry. A lot of people have been working on a big pieces of software for several years and will be looking for something new. The most restless have already started moving around (e.g. I went from the XML team to MSN, Joshua went from the XML team to Internet Explorer via the Passport team, and Michael went from the XML team to XBox). I've started having more conversations with folks interested in a change and I expect this will only increase over the next 12 months. Definitely interesting times ahead.

On an unrelated note, I have updated the track of the week from my high school days on my space. Just click on the play button on the Windows Media player module to hear this week's track.

 

BusinessWeek has a cover story titled Troubling Exits at Microsoft which contains some excerpts from my blog. The relevant excerpt is

While Microsoft's internal reformers don't directly criticize Gates, they're frustrated with the sluggish pace of product development. As the company's chief software architect, Gates bears that responsibility. He's the author of a strategy called "integrated innovation." The idea is to get Microsoft's vast product groups to work closely together to take advantage of the Windows and Office monopolies and bolster them at the same time. But with so much more effort placed on cross-group collaboration, workers spend an immense amount of time in meetings making sure products are in sync. It "translates to more dependencies among shipping products, less control of one's product destiny, and longer ship cycles," writes Dare Obasanjo, a program manager in Microsoft's MSN division, on his blog.

To shake Microsoft out of its malaise, radical surgery may be in order.

Wow. Almost every month I am reminded that the stuff I write here can and is read by journalists. At the very least Jon Udell and Steve Gillmor seem to be somewhat regular readers given the number of times I've been quoted by them. This does make it hard for my blog to be as 'personal' as I want it to be.

This is the second time this year my blog has been quoted in a major business paper. The first was the mention in the Wall Street Journal over a back and forth blog discussion between myself, Adam Bosworth and Krzysztof Kowalczyk about Google's contributions to Open Source. Since then Google has launched efforts like the Summer of Code contest and the Google Code website as ways to contribute back to the Open Source movement which has benefitted them so much.

I hope we'll see as much positive change within Microsoft in the future. It seems that we are already trying to move in the right direction with the recent stories about Microsoft's plans to overhaul its development strategy.

 

A number of people at work have asked me why in a previous post I stated that I have concluded that MSFT isn't the kind of place I see myself working at in 5 years. The main reason for this is that I don't think the Microsoft culture and the direction from its executive leadership lends itself to building great consumer-centric software.

A good example of this is taking a look at Windows from the consumer perspective. The decisions that Microsoft has made over the past couple of years from abandoning feature work in Internet Explorer until Firefox became popular to a lot of the original intentions around the 3 pillars of Longhorn (Avalon, WinFS & Indigo) are the actions of a company that is more interested in protecting its market share than one that is trying to improve the lives of its customers by building great software.  Of course, it's not only customers that get the short end of the stick. Employees also have the consequences of this kind of thinking to deal with as well. The primary way this manifests itself is integrated innovation, a buzzword that translates to more dependencies among shipping products, less control of one's product destiny and longer ship cycles. A lot of the frustration you see in the comments in places like the Mini-Microsoft blog are a direct consequence of this focus by our executive leadership.

For now, MSN doesn't suffer from the same kind of culture that I have described but I can see signs that this is just temporary while we face off against competitors like Google [and Yahoo! to a lesser extent]. Since I don't see any reason why the corporate culture will change since the members of our executive leadership who are pushing this kind of thinking are well entrenched, it's just a matter of time before we start thinking that way at MSN as well. 

I give it 5 years, tops. In the meantime, I get to work with really cool people building really cool software that is changing people's lives. I can't ask for much more than that.

 

The Mini-Microsoft blog has an entry entitled 6% raise? I want to work for Dilbert's company! where he writes

Holy whatsa, Alice got a 6% raise ? I'd seriously consider hanging out in the bushes near Google-Kirkland with my aluminum bat to totally Tonya-Hardin-up some delicate competitive fingers just to get a 6% raise.

If you're a lead, you can bring up the manager review tool and check-in on how your reports are doing within The Model. Maybe some bits and pieces will move around, but the review model is pretty much done now and set to go into effect the 1st of September, with the mid-September paycheck showing any benefits.

One thing I've noticed kvetching with other managers is that once again, pay raises are minimal. I'm talking 2%-ish for a 3.5 review. That's barely keeping up with cost-of-living / inflation for doing more than is expected up of you. And of course, 3.0s, for the most part, get nothing. That's right: you're losing buying power for making a 3.0 - doing what's expected of you.

The poor quality of yearly raises was one of the reasons I decided to leave the XML team last year. I realized that no matter how hard I worked, I wouldn't be significantly financially compensated for going above and beyond what I was required to do. Given that I'm an "above and beyond" kinda guy I saw two choices; I could be underpaid or I could be underpaid and work on stuff I was passionate about. So I moved to MSN.

After doing some thinking during my vacation I concluded that MSFT isn't the kind of place I can see myself working at in 5 years. One of the repurcussions of this conclusion is that I'm going to start working on getting an MBA so I can broaden my options whenever I decide that the time has come for me to leave the B0rg cube. Of course, the nagging from my folks about when I'm going to grow up (get married, finish my education, etc) helped in coming to this decision.

Bah! Going back to school is going to suck.

 

In his post entitled Google News and RSS Dave Winer writes

It's the same reason I'm not giddy withdelight that Microsoft decided to call their support of RSS "web feeds"

Considering that the support for XML syndication technologies in IE 7 includes both flavors of RSS (1.0 & 0.91/2.0) and Atom, I personally don't think it is a good idea to call the feature 'RSS'.

Then there's the fact that RSS does sound a bit geeky, after all most people call them web pages and web sites not HTML documents and domains.

Internet Explorer is used by hundreds of millions of regular folks not just geeks. The IE team is simply trying to make the feature approachable to end users.

 

Shelley Powers posted a comment to a recent post of mine about her experience interviewing for a Microsoft position. She wrote

Tod, if I sound angry, I am. Bill Gates went in front of Congress and said we should have unlimited H1Bs, because Microsoft just can't find 'good' people in this country.

I interviewed with Microsoft. As soon as I started talking with the guy, I knew he wasn't interested. Within the first five minutes. I've been around long enough to know when someone isn't interested.

Microsoft doesn't hire 50 year old men, must less 50 year old women.

As for interviewing, yes I have interviewed people. And hired them. I've never once had a bad hire. You can tell when you talk to people, their enthusiasm, how they respond to what you say, if they're a good fit. Do they have to have all of the tech background? Not a bit. Oh, I wanted certain things: interest and background with a specific programming language, experience with relational databases, and so on. But as for the nits, most of us can do something called 'learn'. I looked for motivation, interest, fit with the team, experience, but more importantly interest in the job.

I can understand Shelley's frustration around not being made an offer for a position she feels qualified to handle. Last year, when I decided to leave the XML team I interviewed with a bunch of teams at Microsoft including the newly formed RSS team within the Internet Explorer group. The job would have involved community evangelization around the Longhorn/IE RSS efforts and working on platform APIs for RSS. Given my work on RSS Bandit and the fact that the job I was leaving was designing the core XML APIs in the .NET Framework I thought I was a shoo-in for the job. I wasn't. I didn't get an offer because I wasn't "passionate" or "experienced" enough according to the feedback I got when I inquired as to why I didn't get the job.

I could have decided to give up because "Microsoft doesn't hire black men" or "Microsoft doesn't hire people in their 20s for high visibility positions" but didn't. Instead I kept interviewing and ended up at MSN working on social software. Personally I think I'm happier at MSN than I would have been on the RSS team, I've gotten to broaden my technical horizons and work with a more diverse set of individuals on a prettier campus. Also I still get to work on RSS stuff both in my personal time and with different teams at Microsoft in an advisor role.

It's easy to give in to despair. Don't.

 

During my morning blog reading I stumbled on three blog postings about Microsoft and recruiting which paint an interesting picture.

1. From Shelley Powers's When We Are Needed

   This essay was inspired in no part by a discussion that occurred at Dori Smiths weblog, when she made the statement about women not being able to find work (linked earlier). In her comments, Robert Scoble said:

   Hmmm, at the same time you say the jobs are disappearing I was just talking with a key manager over on MSN Search and he says he is having trouble finding qualified developers in the United States. I also have had the same feedback from the developer division, the IE group, and quite a few others. And if you think this is a Microsoft thing, you should check with HR people at Google, Yahoo, Cisco, and other Silicon Valley companies. They are all having trouble finding great developers.

   I was angry and blasted Scobles comment, anger inspired in no small part by the implication that corporations such as Microsoft are just begging for people, when most of us know (and as I discussed earlier), this isnt true. Here is a fact, technology unemployment in this country exceeds overall unemployment. And women in technology have an unemployment rate higher than the men.

2. From Joel Spolsky on June 15, 2005

   Recruiting

   To Gretchen : recruiting successfully isn't only up to recruiters. The best recruiting department in the world can't make people want to work at a company that's moribund, that can't figure out how to ship a compelling upgrade to their flagship OS , or update their flagship database server more than once every five years, that has added tens of thousands of technical workers who aren't adding any dollars to the bottom line, and that constantly annoys twenty year veterans by playing Furniture Police games over what office furniture they are and aren't allowed to have. Summer interns at Fog Creek have better chairs, monitors, and computers than the most senior Microsoft programmers.

   Recruiting has to be done at the Bill and Steve level, not at the Gretchen level. No matter how good a recruiter you are, you can't compensate for working at a company that people don't want to work for; you can't compensate for being the target of eight years of fear and loathing from the slashdot community, which very closely overlaps the people you're trying to recruit, and you can't compensate for the fact that a company with a market cap of $272 billion just ain't going to see their stock price go up . MSFT can grow by an entire Google every year and still see less than 7% growth in earnings. You can be the best recruiter in the world and the talent landscape is not going to look very inviting if the executives at your company have spent the last years focusing on cutting benefits , cutting off oxygen supplies, and cutting features from Longhorn .

3. From Steven Sinofsky's Welcome to TechTalk!

   I wanted to start this blog to share information and views about how Microsoft recruits and hires college graduates, and what a career at Microsoft is like, at least from one perspective. I invite questions, points, and counter-points. Im excited to use this forum to have a discussion about college hiring at Microsoft. The name TechTalk comes from the series of seminars we do during the summer for interns at Microsoft--one of the most fun times of the year for me is to get to present to this group and learn from them how they feel about the work we're doing and the future of Microsoft.

   By way of introduction, my name is Steven Sinofsky and I am a senior vice president at Microsoft in the Office group. You can read my "official" bio on http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/ssinofsky . Ive worked on Microsoft Office since Office 4.2d (the last 16 bit release). Ive been a program manager and a software design engineer, in addition to a general manager.

Despite what Shelley thinks I know for a fact that we have a hard time filling positions at work. Whether this is because of a lack of qualified candidates in the US or because the Slashdot crowd hates Microsoft [as Joel puts it] is something I dont know. I do know our product teams spends a lot of time talking to folks who sound good on paper but dont do so hot when we talk to them. As for whether H1B visas are a good thing or not, well I'm here on an H1B visa so I guess I'm biased. :)

It is good to see high level execs like Sinofsky getting directly involved in recruiting efforts. One of the things that is missing in the hundreds of Microsoft blogs is a sense of why the Microsoft internships are so cool. Looking back at my blog posts from when I was an intern four years ago it is fun to see how I became infected by the B0rg. Having someone like Sinofsky take part in showing off why it is so cool to be an intern at Microsoft is goodness. Microsoft's best hires are usually folks who started off as interns.

The Office guys definitely rock.

 

 

From the Microsoft-Watch article Google Pinches Another Microsoft Exec 

Google continues to hire away top Microsoft talent. But this time, Microsoft is fighting back. On Tuesday, Google announced plans to open a product research-and-development center in China, and said it was appointing former Microsoft vice president Kai-Fu Lee to head the operation. On Wednesday, Microsoft announced it was filing a lawsuit against Lee and Google, claiming breach of both employee confidentiality and non-compete agreement.
...
Other mid-level Microsoft executives have joined Google over the past couple of years, as well. And Google opened a product-development office in Kirkland, Wash., late last year. Some industry watchers speculated that Google did so in order to attract more hires from Microsoft, which is headquartered in nearby Redmond, Wash.

It's the mid-level product and program managers whom Microsoft and other tech companies should guard most jealously, said Directions on Microsoft analyst Michael Cherry.

"While a lot of people make a big thing about the executives and senior vice presidents that leave, these people rarely ship software," Cherry said. "I think it is a bigger issue when the group program managers and program managers with ten plus years of experience silently leave. No one mourns their departure, but these are the people that take the grandiose architectures and wild-eyed visions and actually make them into products that people can use—and do so in a timely manner.

"The loss of these silent but hard working employees who keep the teams working together may have a bigger effect on the schedules of products like Yukon and Longhorn, and have a bigger long term impact on the company than any of the growing number of VPs and visionary architects," Cherry added.

From the Seattle PI article Ex-Microsoft exec sued over Google job

Microsoft also accused Google of "intentionally assisting Lee."

"Accepting such a position with a direct Microsoft competitor like Google violates the narrow noncompetition promise Lee made when he was hired as an executive," Microsoft said in its lawsuit. "Google is fully aware of Lee's promises to Microsoft, but has chosen to ignore them, and has encouraged Lee to violate them."
...
Tom Burt, a lawyer for Microsoft, said Lee announced Monday that he was leaving for the Google job and had given no indication that he planned to honor an agreement not to work for a direct competitor for one year.

"To the contrary, they're saying, 'In your face,'" Burt told The Associated Press.

Google shot back with a statement saying: "We have reviewed Microsoft's claims and they are completely without merit. Google is focused on building the best place in the world for great innovators to work. We're thrilled to have Dr. Lee on board at Google. We will defend vigorously against these meritless claims."

Um, OK...

 

 

 

Just when you think we've missed the boat on software development trends on the Web, Microsoft surprises folks. First it was announcing that we will be baking RSS support into the next version of Windows. Now we've announced that we will be shipping a toolkit for building AJAX-style Web applications. In his post about the Atlas Project, Scott Guthrie writes

All of the pieces of AJAX – DHTML, JScript, and XMLHTTP – have been available in Internet Explorer for some time, and Outlook Web Access has used these techniques to deliver a great browser experience since 1998. In ASP.NET 2.0, we have also made it easier to write AJAX-style applications for any browser using asynchronous callbacks, and we use them in several of our built-in controls.

 

Recently, however, the technologies used by AJAX have become broadly available in all browsers, and use of this model for rich web applications has really taken flight. There are a number of high-profile new AJAX-style websites out there today, including a number by Google, as well as sites like A9 and Flickr. Microsoft will also have more sites that use this technology out there soon – check out Start.com and the MSN Virtual Earth project for examples.

 

The popularity of AJAX shows the growing demand for richer user experiences over the web. However, developing and debugging AJAX-style web applications is a very difficult task today. To write a rich web UI, you have to know a great deal of DHTML and JavaScript, and have a strong understanding of all the differences and design details of various browsers. There are very few tools to help your design or build these applications easily. Finally, debugging and testing these applications can be very tricky.

...

For this work, we’ve been working on a new project on our team, codenamed “Atlas”. Our goal is to produce a developer preview release on top of ASP.NET 2.0 for the PDC this September, and then have a website where we can keep updating the core bits, publishing samples, and building an active community around it.

 

Here are some of the pieces of Atlas that we are going to be delivering over time:

 

 

Atlas Client Script Framework

 

The Atlas Client Script Framework is an extensible, object-oriented 100% JavaScript client framework that allows you to easily build AJAX-style browser applications with rich UI and connectivity to web services. With Atlas, you can write web applications that use a lot of DHTML, Javascript, and XMLHTTP, without having to be an expert in any of these technologies.

 

The Atlas Client Script Framework will work on all modern browsers, and with any web server. It also won’t require any client installation at all – to use it, you can simply include references to the right script files in your page.

 

The Atlas Client Script Framework will include the following components:

• An extensible core framework that adds features to JavaScript such as lifetime management, inheritance, multicast event handlers, and interfaces
• A base class library for common features such as rich string manipulation, timers, and running tasks
• A UI framework for attaching dynamic behaviors to HTML in a cross-browser way
• A network stack to simplify server connectivity and access to web services
• A set of controls for rich UI, such as auto-complete textboxes, popup panels, animation, and drag and drop
• A browser compatibility layer to address scripting behavior differences between browsers.

This is excellent news which I know a lot of our UX developers at MSN will be glad to hear. Already Scott Isaacs who's been a key part of the AJAX development we've been doing at MSN has posted his opinions about Atlas in his blog entry entitled My personal thoughts on an AJAX (DHTML) framework..... His post highlights some of the history of AJAX as well as the issues a toolkit like Atlas could solve.

First RSS, now AJAX. All that's left is to see some announcement that we will be shipping a REST toolkit to make this a trifecta of utmost excellence. More nagging I must do...

 

I was chatting with Mike Vernal a few weeks ago about the various outcomes we've seen from writing a Bill Gates Thinkweek paper. We came up with the following taxonomy

1. Increased Visibility for the Author: These are usually the papers of the form "Here's a Cool Idea from [my buddies and] me". The most common result for a ThinkWeek paper is for the author to get a virtual pat on the back from BillG and to get their name noticed by their management especially since some product groups have an internal review of these papers before sending them up the stack to the big man himself. 

2. Increased Visibilty for a Product Group: These are usually the papers of the form "Here's a Cool Idea from [my product group]". Sometimes a product group wants to lay out its vision for their product or technology space to the big guy outside of the usual executive review + PowerPoint format and a ThinkWeek paper is good way to do that. A great example is the MapPoint team which submitted the "Virtual Earth" paper recently.

3. The Fire Drill: These are usually of the form "Here's a Cool Opportunity that Microsoft is missing". The best example of this is the "Internet Tidal Wave" memo that Bill Gates sent in response to J Allard's thinkweek paper a decade ago. Many people who send in a ThinkWeek paper are expecting this reaction and in fact I've seen a few that actually have "send Internet Tidal wave-style memo" as one of the recommendations in their paper. Of course, the chances of such reactions to the average ThinkWeek paper are the same as getting a record deal from sending Dr. Dre a copy of your demo tape.

4. Spreading a Meme: Sometimes the ideas in a paper are so powerul it seems that they take a life of their own as they spread from person to person. It is hard to point to any direct action being taken as a result of them but their influence is felt by many. This is my favorite outcome from a ThinkWeek paper.

A recent ThinkWeek paper entitled "10 Crazy Ideas to Shake Up Microsoft" is exactly the last kind of paper mentioned above. The MiniMicrosoft blog mentioned this paper a while ago in a post entitled Think Week, the WSJ, and those Ten Crazy Ideas. According to Mini the 10 Ideas were

1. Schedule Unscheduled Time into Performance Reviews
2. "Break Up" the Company
3. Encourage Loose but Prominent Couplings
4. Exile and Empower Incubation Projects
5. Offer Super-exponential Rewards
6. Offer Different Risk-Reward Compensation Profiles
7. Cut Back on Bureaucracy
8. Review Cost Cutting
9. Reduce Headcount on Large Dev Projects
10. Eliminate Exec Reviews

Why I like the list [and why I assume it's been so popular at work] is that it succintly summarizes the major problems facing folks trying to get stuff done at Microsoft today AND proposes solutions. I suspect these problems exist in every large corporation and are not limited to Microsoft or even software companies.

If you work at Microsoft and you haven't read the paper, you really should. If you work at a medium sized to large corporation and you are a decision maker you should staple that list to a bulletin board in your office and ruminate on its points. 

 

 

Todd Bishop is a reporter on the Seattle Post Intelligencer who has a blog where he posts stories about Microsoft that didn't make it into the paper. In a recent post entitled, Microsoft eyes podcasts he writes

During the revival of the Gillmor Gang audio program over the weekend, podcasting pioneer Adam Curry said he had been trying for some time to persuade Microsoft and Apple to pay attention to the trend and build podcatching features inside Windows Media Player or the iTunes software. He said things changed when Steve Jobs demonstrated the new iTunes podcatching feature last week at the Wall Street Journal's "D: All Things Digital" conference. On the Gillmor Gang, Curry explained what happened next:

"It was like 15 minutes after it showed up in the Wall Street Journal when Microsoft called, saying, 'Hey, how do we get in this?' I don't know a lot about Microsoft. I do see they're a lot hungrier company than they used to be. But every single time you talk to them about anything that's new, or in this case iPodder functionality inside Windows Media Player, the almost standard answer is, 'Yeah we're going to have a lot of that in Longhorn.' That to me means there is this huge steamboat that is very difficult to steer left or right, and it's just harder to get stuff done at Microsoft."

That's just a snippet of an interesting discussion of the topic. You can download the full program via the Gillmor Gang link above.

I had lunch with someone from main campus yesterday and it seems that Adam Curry's perception is also being felt by the folks who work on the product teams. To repeat myself, I hope it doesn't take the stock hitting $10 before some action is taken.

 

I was supposed to post this a month and a half ago but somehow never got around to it. Jon Pincus who organized the session put up his notes on the 20% time session at CFP 2005. It was a pretty interesting discussion, some of which is excerpted below

Some examples that started as 20% projects at Google include GMail, Google Suggests , Firefox prefetching, and various technology pieces that are used throughout Google's code base. At Microsoft, many of the Windows Power Toys had a similar genesis, and attendees thought that Apple's iPod may have had similar origins in a "part-time, on-the-side" project.

One question that came up repeatedly (in various forms) is "how does the company know that people aren't just goofing off?" The short-term answer comes down to trust (that is, the assumption is that most employees will do their best to use this time in ways that give value to the company); in the longer term, contributions from 20% time projects are considered as part of reviews, and so if you've wasted the time, it will come out at that point. [It was pointed out that trust in general reduces "transaction costs", and so can increase efficiency -- so that even if (say) 10% of employees are accomplishing absolutely nothing with this time, it still could be a big win not to have any monitoring overhead which would slow down the other 90%.]

Another question that came up a couple of times was how to manage the impact on schedules -- does this mean that all dates wind up 20% further out than they would otherwise? I don't think there was an explicit answer to this in the meeting, but several people pointed out that a large chunk of many engineers' days at a lot of companies goes to various kinds of not-specifically-product-related tasks (e.g., reading Slashdot); if that "breakage" is diverted into time on a 20% project, then the actual hit is much smaller.

Most of the discussion was devoted to discussing the reasons that this approach appears to work well at Google.

I personally think that creating a framework that encourages developers at a company to work on side projects is very rewarding for both the employees and the company. I don't know how I'd have dealt with some of the issues I had with being a cog in a [relatively] slowly moving corporate wheel if I didn't have RSS Bandit to work on in my previous job.  Now that it is a mature project that has seen hundreds of thousands of downloads since it started, I often end up talking to product teams working with RSS at Microsoft in an adviser role. I got something out of it and Microsoft got something out of it.

One of the questions that kept coming up during the session was how one measured 20% time and made sure employees weren't goofing off. The answer was that it isn't really about taking a day off every week, its more about factoring in the time that the person will spend on their side project into their work schedule. After all, no one has 20% of their time free just before shipping and then there are times when weeks go by with not a lot of work to do. 20% time is more about allowing developer employees to reclaim some of that slack in ways that may or may not benefit the company but would make them more satisfied with their day jobs.

Joe Beda mentioned that the fact that Google was a web application built around web services enabled people to quickly write interesting applications utilizing the data and processing power of their back end. Now that I work on the back end of various services at MSN I can see his point. It would be very interesting to see the kind of applications built if we encouraged people to go wild with the APIs behind applications like MSN Search, MSN Spaces, MSN Messenger, Hotmail, MSN Groups, Start.com, MyMSN and see what they could build in their spare time.  In fact, I've already seen one cool hack built on top of MSN Virtual Earth by some internal folks and it isn't even out yet. This is one of those things I'll definitely be evangelizing at work. Wish me luck. :)

 

From Bob Wyman's post Microsoft to support Atom!

Robert Scoble, a Microsoft employee/insider very familiar with Microsoft's plans for syndication, declares in comments on his blog " we are supporting Atom in any aggregator we produce ." Microsoft's example in supporting Atom should be followed by all other aggregator developers in the future and Microsoft should be commended for supporting the adoption of openly defined standards for syndication.

Given that virtually every aggregator in use today and virtually every blog hosting and syndication platform (expect MSN Spaces) already supports both RSS and Atom, it is clear that the heyday for the historical RSS format has passed. RSS is a historical format, Atom represents the future. We don't need two formats -- or twenty... We should consolidate on that format which incorporates the most learning and experience with the syndication problem. That format is Atom V1.0.

I'm surprised that Bob Wyman is crowing at such a non-issue. Supporting both versions of Atom (Atom 0.3 and Atom 1.0) is a must for any information aggregator that wants to be taken seriously. This is all covered in my post from a year and a half ago (damn, has this debate been going on for that long?) entitled Mr. Safe's Guide to the RSS vs. ATOM debate where I wrote

The Safe Syndication Consumer's Perspective
If you plan to consume feeds from a wide variety of sources then one should endeavor to support as many syndication formats as possible. The more formats a feed consumer supports the more content is available for its users.

Based on their current popularity, degree of support and ease of implementation one should consider supporting the major syndication formats in the following order of priority

1. RSS 0.91/RSS 2.0
2. RSS 1.0
3. Atom

RSS 0.91 support is the simplest to implement and most widely supported by websites while Atom is the most difficult to implement being the most complex and will be least supported by websites in the coming years.

The Safe Syndication Producer's Perspective
...
The average user of a news aggregator will not be able to tell the difference between an Atom or RSS feed from their aggregator if it supports both. However users of aggregators that don't support Atom will not be able to subscribe to feeds in that format. In a few years, the differences between RSS and Atom will most likely be the same as those that are different between RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.91/RSS 2.0; only of interest to a handful of XML syndication geeks. Even then the simplest and safest bet would still be to use RSS as a syndication format. This is the same as the fact that even though the W3C has published XHTML 1.0 & XHTML 1.1 and is working on XHTML 2.0, the safest bet to get the widest reach with the least problems is to publish a website in HTML 3.2 or HTML 4.01.

So far this thinking has aligned with the thinking around RSS I have seen at MSN, so it is extremely unlikely that MSN Spaces will do something as disruptive as switching its RSS feeds to Atom feeds or as confusing to end users as providing multiple feeds in different formats.

 

MSDN just published my article, Fun with IXMLHttpRequest and RSS. The article attempts to illuminate two growing trends; using DHTML & IXMLHttpRequest to build dynamic web applications and the building of interesting applications layered on top of RSS.

In my recent post Ideas for my next Extreme XML column on MSDN, I asked what people would like to see me write about next. Although this topic came second, I felt that it highlighted some interesting disruptive trends that warranted writing about sooner rather than later.

Coincidentally, I checked my favorite RSS reader this morning and find out that our CEO decided to downplay the importance of RSS this morning in favor of XML Web Services in a Q&A on the RSS weblog. I find it interesting that his core argument against RSS is that it is not as complex as XML Web Service technologies. On the flip side, we have Mark Lucovsky who in his post Don Box and Hailstorm argues that the simple technologies and techniques of RSS may succeed in building an ecosystem of applications built on open data access where his attempt with Hailstorm at Microsoft failed. Combining this with the thinking in Adam Bosworth's Web of Data, it seems clear that key people at Google are beginning to understand the power of REST in combination with the flexible nature of RSS.

This all seems like classic Innovator's Dilemma stuff. Thankfully, in this case even though there are lots of people who want us [Microsoft] to bury our heads in the sand when it comes to recognizing these emerging trends, there are also annoying people like me at work who keep preaching this stuff to anybody who is willing to listen.

Will RSS change the world? That's a silly question, it already has.

 

Chris Anderson has been learning Python via Jim Hugunin's excellent IronPython and came to the conclusion that Microsoft has been missing the boat in programming language trends. In his post The Hobbyist and the Script  he writes

Scripting is great for glue code - the same thing that VB1 and 2 used to be great at. VB3 started to get into the serious app development with rich data integration, and VB4 brought us into the 32-bit era, and in a way back to glue code. VB4's embracing ActiveX controls gave VB developers an entirely new place to play. I remember working on an application using a beta of VB5 and writing my "hard core code" in MFC ActiveX controls. After a while I started writing more and more of the code in VB, because it worked and wasn't the bottle neck in anyway for the application.

I think that scripting and many dynamic languages are in the same camp. They are great for small applications and writing glue code. Look at Google Maps, the real processing is on the server, and the client side AJAX is just the glue between the user, the browser, and the backend server. I would argue that something more beefy like Outlook Web Access (a Microsoft AJAX application, writen before AJAX was the name) demonstrates more of the limitations of writing the majority of your client interface in script.

Regardless of the limitations, our singular focus on strongly typed compiled languages has blinded us to the amazing productivity and approachability of dynamic scripting langauges like Python and Ruby. I'm super excited that we are changing this. Hiring Jim Hugunin is a great start. I hope we continue this, and really look to add a strong dynamic language and scripting story to our developer portfolio.

I've actually been quite upset by how many programming language camps Microsoft has neglected in its blind pursuit of competition with Java and the JVM. Besides the scripting language camps, there are significant customer camps we have neglected as well. We have neglected Visual Basic developers, we gave them a poor replacement in Visual Basic.NET which the market has rejected which can be gleaned by posts such as Chris Sells's pointing out that publishers don't want to VB.NET books and the Classic VB petition. We have neglected DHTML developers who have been building web sites and web applications against Internet Explorer, we don't even have a Javascript IDE let alone a story for people trying to build complex AJAX/DHTML applications like GMail or Google Maps.

The main problem is that Microsoft is good at competing but not good at caring for customers. The focus of the developer division at Microsoft is the .NET Framework and related technologies which is primarily a competitor to Java/JVM and related technologies. However when it comes to areas where there isn't a strong, single competitor that can be focused on (e.g. RAD development, scripting languages, web application development) we tend to flounder and stagnate. Eventually I'm sure customer pressure will get us of our butts, it's just unfortunate that we have to be forced to do these things instead of doing them right the first time around.

On a similar note, thank God for Firefox.

 

James Snell posted IBM's blogging guidelines today in his post Blogging@IBM. Some have heralded this as another triumph for corporate blogging, I'm, not so sure this is the case. The particular sticking points for me are the following

2. Blogs, wikis and other forms of online discourse are individual interactions, not corporate communications. IBMers are personally responsible for their posts. Be mindful that what you write will be public for a long time -- protect your privacy.

3. Identify yourself -- name and, when relevant, role at IBM -- when you blog about IBM or IBM-related matters. And write in the first person. You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of IBM.

Basically IBM states in these two bullet points that blogging isn't a way for IBM as a corporate entity to engage in conversation with its customers, partners and competitors. Instead its a way for regular people to talk about their lives including their work. What IBM seems to have done is give its employees permission to state that they work for IBM, and recommended that its employees post a disclaimer. For people like Sam Ruby of IBM, this is actually a step back since he now has to post a disclaimer on his personal weblog.

As I mentioned in a comment on Sam Ruby's blog I guess I must be tainted by Microsoft where product teams use blogs to announce features (e.g. the IE team) or engage in conversations with customers about product pricing (e.g. a conversation and its results). Simply giving your employees permission to mention their employer in their personal blogs doesn't a corporate blogging initiative make. In addition, the position that one has to give employees permission to state where they work if communicating in public is also rather startling.

Why I like blogging as a Microsoft employee is that it allows me to have conversations with our customers, partners and competitors. It isn't just me spouting off about my likes and dislikes, it is a way to communicate to our customers and partners. I've lost count of the amount of times I've referred people to posts like What Blog Posting APIs are supported by MSN Spaces? or Why You Won't See XSLT 2.0 or XPath 2.0 in the Next Version of the .NET Framework. Posts like these led to interesting conversations both internally and externally to Microsoft and informed our decision making processes. Additionally, our customers also appreciated the fact that we are up front with them about our plans and kept them in the loop.

I think communications via "official channels" and "company spokesmen" pales in comparison to the various conversations I've mentioned above. IBM has taken the first step towards accepting corporate blogging. Hopefully, they'll eventually go all the way.

 

A little while ago I noticed a post by Oleg Tkachenko entitled Microsoft licensed Mvp.Xml library where he wrote

On behalf of the Mvp.Xml project team our one and the only lawyer - XML MVP Daniel Cazzulino aka kzu has signed a license for Microsoft to use and distribute the Mvp.Xml library. That effectively means Microsoft can (and actually wants to) use and distribute XInclude.NET and the rest Mvp.Xml goodies in their products. Wow, I'm glad XML MVPs could come up with something so valuable than Microsoft decided to license it.

Mvp.Xml project is developed by Microsoft MVPs in XML technologies and XML Web Services worldwide. It is aimed at supplementing .NET framework functionality available through the System.Xml namespace and related namespaces such as System.Web.Services. Mvp.Xml library version 1.0 released at January 2005 includes Common, XInclude.NET and XPointer.NET modules.

As a matter of interest - Mvp.Xml is an open-source project hosted at SourceForge.

Since Oleg wrote this I've seen other Microsoft XML MVPs mention the event including Don Demsak and Daniel Cazzulino. I think this is very cool and something I feel somewhat proud of since I helped get the XML MVP program started.

A few years ago, as part of my duties as the program manager responsible for putting together a community outreach plan for the XML team I decided that we needed an MVP category for XML. I remember the first time I brought it up with the folks who run the Microsoft MVP program and they thought it was such a weird idea since there were already categories for languages like C# and VB but XML was just a config file format and didn't need enough significant expertise. I was persistent and pointed out that a developer could be a guru at XSLT, XPath, XSD, DOM, etc without necessarily being a C# or VB expert. Eventually they buckled and an MVP category for XML was created.  Besides getting the XML Developer Center on MSDN launched, getting the XML MVP program started was probably my most significant achievement as part of my community outreach duties while on the XML team at Microsoft.

Now it is quite cool to see this community of developers contributing so much value to the .NET XML community that Microsoft has decided to license their technologies.

I definitely want to build a similar developer community around the stuff we are doing at MSN once we start shipping our APIs. I can't wait to get our next release out the door so I can start talking about stuff in more detail.

 

The recent flap about the anti-discrimination bill and Microsoft got a couple of us talking at dinner about how progressive Microsoft's benefits package was compared to the rest of the software industry. One of the the things that came up is also mentioned in the Music for America blog which points out

Microsoft has a stellar record as pioneering same-sex partner rights, and they haven't reneged on this stance internally. Microsoft continues to offer same-sex partner domestic benefits – benefits which are exemplary, especially for health insurance coverage.

Being that Microsoft is the only company I've worked for as a full time employee I do take a bunch of the benefits we get for granted. Although I often end up surprised to hear that other companies in the software industry fall far short of what Microsoft offers.

For example in his post, uh oh, what happened to my bank account? Mark Jen wrote

next, let's look at the health care benefit provided. arguably, this is the biggest benefit companies pay out for their employees. google definitely has a program that is on par with other companies in the industry; but since when does a company like google settle for being on par? microsoft's health care benefits shame google's relatively meager offering. for those of you who don't know, microsoft pays 100% of employees' premiums for a world-class PPO. everything you can possibly imagine is covered. the program has no co-pays on anything (including prescription drugs); you can self-refer to any doctor in the blue cross blue shield network, which pretty much means any licensed professional; and you can even get up to 24 hour-long massage sessions per year.

I also saw similer sentiments in a recent post by Jim Stroud entitled Life with Bill... where he wrote

To all concerned, I am now on the Microsoft payroll effective immediately. Google was a groovy gig, but Bill gave me an offer I could not refuse. (Ask me about the benefits. WOW!) I am SO happy and can truly see myself here for the long haul.

I guess it's a sign I'm getting older that I actually care about things like benefits packages. It's likely that companies like Google tailor their compensation package to what the young, single geek fresh out of college is interested in while as the average age at Microsoft has gone up its compensation package has targeted the older, married geek instead.

Interesting...

 

From the Text of Steve Ballmer E-Mail to U.S. Microsoft Employees Regarding Public Policy Engagement

Date: May 6, 2005

To: All U.S. Microsoft Employees

Subject: Microsoft’s principles for public policy engagement

During the past two weeks I’ve heard from many of you with a wide range of views on the recent anti-discrimination bill in Washington State, and the larger issue of what is the appropriate role of a public corporation in public policy discussions. This input has reminded me again of what makes our company unique and why I care about it so much.

One point really stood out in all the e-mails you sent me. Regardless of where people came down on the issues, everyone expressed strong support for the company’s commitment to diversity. To me, that’s so critical. Our success depends on having a workforce that is as diverse as our customers – and on working together in a way that taps all of that diversity.

I don’t want to rehash the events that resulted in Microsoft taking a neutral position on the anti-discrimination bill in Washington State. There was a lot of confusion and miscommunication, and we are taking steps to improve our processes going forward.

To me, this situation underscores the importance of having clearly-defined principles on which we base our actions. It all boils down to trust. Even when people disagree with something that we do, they need to have confidence that we based our action on thoughtful principles, because that is how we run our business.

I said in my April 22 e-mail that we were wrestling with the question of how and when the company should engage on issues that go beyond the software industry. After thinking about this for the past two weeks, I want to share my decision with you and lay out the principles that will guide us going forward.

First and foremost, we will continue to focus our public policy activities on issues that most directly affect our business, such as Internet safety, intellectual property rights, free trade, digital inclusion and a healthy business climate.

After looking at the question from all sides, I’ve concluded that diversity in the workplace is such an important issue for our business that it should be included in our legislative agenda. Since our beginning nearly 30 years ago, Microsoft has had a strong business interest in recruiting and retaining the best and brightest and most diverse workforce possible. I’m proud of Microsoft’s commitment to non-discrimination in our internal policies and benefits, but our policies can’t cover the range of housing, education, financial and similar services that our people and their partners and families need. Therefore, it’s appropriate for the company to support legislation that will promote and protect diversity in the workplace.

Accordingly, Microsoft will continue to join other leading companies in supporting federal legislation that would prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation -- adding sexual orientation to the existing law that already covers race, sex, national origin, religion, age and disability. Given the importance of diversity to our business, it is appropriate for the company to endorse legislation that prohibits employment discrimination on all of these grounds. Obviously, the Washington State legislative session has concluded for this year, but if legislation similar to HB 1515 is introduced in future sessions, we will support it.

I also want to be clear about some limits to this approach. Many other countries have different political traditions for public advocacy by corporations, and I’m not prepared to involve the company in debates outside the US in such circumstances. And, based on the principles I’ve just outlined, the company should not and will not take a position on most other public policy issues, either in the US or internationally.

I respect that there will be different viewpoints. But as CEO, I am doing what I believe is right for our company as a whole.

This situation has also made me stop and think about how well we are living our values. I’m deeply encouraged by how many employees have sent me passionate e-mails about the broad respect for diversity they experience every day at Microsoft. I also heard from some employees who underscored the importance of feeling that their personal values or religious beliefs are respected by others. I’m adamant that we must do an even better job of pursuing diversity and mutual respect within Microsoft. I expect everyone at this company -- particularly managers -- to take a hard look at their personal commitment to diversity, and redouble that commitment.

The questions raised by these issues are important. At the same time, we have a lot of other important work to do. Over the next 18 months we’ll release a broader, more advanced and more exciting set of products than at any time in the company’s history. Let’s all recommit to the job ahead, using our diversity as a strength to work together creatively and with respect for each other.

Thanks.

Steve

Wow. They listened to us. I guess when a couple thousand employees let you know how they feel about decisions the company is making, it's smart to take their opinions into consideration.

Microsoft definitely does not suck as an employer.

 

The Microsoft Careers website has a section entitled Meet Our People where various profiles of employees of various divisions at Microsoft are highlighted. For whatever reason, I was one of the people picked this year and you can go there find my employee profile here.

The process was quite lightweight. I spoke to an interviewer on the phone for several minutes and then she sent me a transcript of key parts of our conversation which I got to edit or veto. After that there was the photo shoot and a couple of weeks later, voila.

Reading the profile, there is some stuff that stands out to me. I've already been here 3 years so I'm no longer a new guy yet I still don't feel like part of the B0rg. There is also the point about management being interested in your career and you as a person.

• A while ago Mike Torres and I had a presentation for Brian Arbogast which was my first presentation for anyone with Vice President in their job title. While setting up my laptop, Brian chatted with Mike about a post he'd read in Mike's blog about wanting to upgrade his home sound system. Brian also mentioned that he'd remembered seeing my name come up in a lengthy internal email thread where I was in a debate with Vic Gundotra and didn't back down, he commended me for sticking to my guns. That was cool.

• After a recent all-hands meeting I disagreed with parts of the presentations made by David Cole and Steve Liffick, so I sent them some critical feedback. They not only received it well but after exchanging some mail, Steve suggested we meet in person to discuss things further. When I eventually met with Steve, he readily accepted my  feedback so we spent a most of the time talking about Social Software as the Platform of the Future. That was fun.  

• Our dev manager, Farookh Mohammed is just as interested as I am in making sure we have something akin to an MSN Developer Network when we start shipping our APIs for accessing MSN Spaces and we'll be working together to evangelize some ideas around this topic to upper management.

• My boss's boss knows I'm fairly good at communicating my ideas in writing and that I'm passionate about social software so he's been encouraging me to produce a whitepaper that can be shared with various folks around work. 

• My boss, Mike Pacholec, has told me I need to attend more conferences and has suggested that I should plan to attend at least one more conference before the end of the year.  

At the end of the profile it states that I have my dream job which is true. I get to work on software that I like using and which directly affects millions of users. All of this in a ship cycle that is measured in months instead of years. What's not to love?

 

The current issue of Seattle's favorite free weekly newspaper has an article entitled Microsoft Caves on Gay Rights which describes recent happenings in local politics about how Microsoft apparent withdrawal of support for a state bill that would prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians may have been key in preventing the law from passing.

I've tried to write down my feelings about the issue several times over the past few days but words have escaped me. In the meantime you should read some posts from others at Microsoft who've done a better job a capturing their disappointment with our employer than I seem able.

1. Robert Scoble: Steve Ballmer's memo posted, my reply
2. Cyrus Najmabadi: Gay Rights (part 2)
3. Adam Barr: Microsoft and the Anti-Discrimination Bill

I also strongly disagree with Vic Gundotra's post in his response Responding to Scoble. Corporations should not be amoral entities that only exist to generate money. They employee members of a community, they exist as part of community and their actions affect both local and global communities. Sometimes the greatest sins are acts of omission instead of commission.

I hope this feeling of disappointment will soon pass.

 

Lenn Pryor who until quite recently was the Director of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft has left the company for greener pastures. If you don't know of Lenn you should read the notes on Lenn Pryor from Robert Scoble's book blog. Lenn was the guy who came up with Channel 9 and was instrumental in Microsoft hiring Robert Scoble. Particularly interesting is the following description from Robert Scoble's book blog about Lenn's day job

Much of Pryor's job is to serve as a bridge between Scoble and other company elements, such as PR where he has worked to help each to see the other's value and respect each other's turf.

So one might wonder why a guy who was probably been most responsible for the increased corporate transparency at Microsoft would want to leave the company. The answer is in his blog post Goodbye Microsoft, Hello Skype where he writes

I have a lot to say about both companies right now. Microsoft lost me for many reasons, Skype gained me for many reasons. I will let you draw your own conclusions rather than disparage my Microsoft colleagues or over hype my new colleagues and company. I don't believe in writing diatribes and manifestos when moving on from a job so I will spare you the soapboxing. Microsoft has its challenges, we all know what they are, they are more than apparent these days. Skype has its opportunties we all know what they are, who wouldn't like to see the communication and collaboration technologies in their lives get much much smarter and cheaper?

I decided to swap problem sets from one that I am not passionate about any more to one that I AM deeply passionate about. I just couldn't go on being an evangelist for a gospel that I don't believe I can sing. I am returning to focus on what I enjoy most, building amazing things that make people happy, change lives, and make money. In this case Skype was a better place for me to do this and one that shares my core values and beliefs in how the future of both software and business will unfold.

I know lots of people at Microsoft who have voiced the same sentiments that Lenn has. Some like the Mini-Microsoft blogger are anonymous voices in the wilderness begging for change, some like Mark Lucovsky [and Lenn Pryor] leave for other companies that they feel can still make a difference while others have tried to find somewhere at Microsoft that isn't overwhelmed by the current malaise that has smothered main campus. I'd count myself in the latter camp.

At least once a week I want to post a blog entry about how much my job rocks. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to do this that doesn't paint a negative picture of other parts of the company. Our VPs get it and are very open to communication, the product teams have a vision of what they want to build and they want to build it as quickly as possible, and we literally have millions of happy users who are excited about our products. In the places where we are lagging, we have lots of efforts under way to reverse the trend.

I didn't get that feeling when I worked on main campus nor do I see it the few times a month I have to go down there to meet with various folks. However unlike the Mini-Microsoft blogger I don't think Microsoft is Better Off Without Ballmer but I do think something should be done about the company's current funk and it definitely should involve some executive heads rolling.

I hope it doesn't take the stock hitting $10 before some action is taken.

 

Evan Williams recently met with Jim Allchin and wrote about in his blog post Dinner with Jim Allchin. Evan writes

One of Jim's repeated statements was that he wanted to bring "this stuff" to the masses. I asked for clarification because, in a lot of Microsoft's talk, they speak of RSS and blogging as the same thing. He agreed they weren't the same thing, and it seemed to be RSS he was talking about implementing in a variety of ways throughout Windows (e.g., built-in readers, automatic feed generation from a variety of lists...). While Microsoft does have a blogging tool, that's MSN—not Jim's department.

We discussed, briefly, how cool it would be if Windows had, say, the Atom API built in—and then that, it already would had the Atom API been built on WebDAV. Hmmm...I've heard that before.

It seemed pretty clear to me that it is not in Allchin's edict to create web services that bridge the gap between the desktop and the web—which, to me, seems like the future of computing (not to mention, the real potential power play against Google, et al). His job is to create another Windows. They will make more plumbing for others to plug in such services—and I assume it will be within MSN's edicts to do so. But they didn't do much (nor has anyone else) to take advantage even of the stuff that's in XP (such as Save to Web via WebDAV), to Allchin's dismay, it seemed.

I have seen a lot of interest across Microsoft for bringing RSS to the masses and all of us working on MSN Spaces definitely do want to bring blogging to everyone. There are definitely  cool things coming up in the next year or two.

As to whether MSN takes advantage of the various WebDAV related features of Windows XP? I suggest taking a look at the article on Publishing Web Site Content with Windows XP specifically at the section entitled Publishing to Remote Locations Using WebDAV. Not only do we support the WebDAV functionality in Windows XP in our properties such as MSN Groups but since there are so many Windows XP users out there, we don't dare change it without risking causing a negative user experience for a lot of people.

Guess who has to deal with the WebDAV legacy as part of his day job? :)

 

I recently read Joe Beda's post on Google 20% Time and it actually left me with a lot of questions as well as a better understanding of why there is a steady flow of ex-B0rg to Google's Kirkland office. I found some of his points interesting, specifically

Switching teams at Google is a very fluid process.  An engineer can be 40% on one project, 40% on something completely different and 20% on his or her own thing.  That mix can be adjusted as project requirements change.  Switching groups should also not have an affect on your annual review score because of arbitrary team politics.   Joining a new group is more about find a good mutual fit then going through HR and a formal interview loop.  When there is an important project that needs to be staffed the groups and execs will evangelize that need and someone who is interested is bound to step up.  If it is critical to the business and no one is stepping up (I don't know if this has occurred or not) then I imagine it would go come down to a personal appeal by the management team
...
There is a big difference between pet projects being permitted and being encouraged. At Google it is actively encouraged for engineers to do a 20% project. This isn't a matter of doing something in your spare time, but more of actively making time for it. Heck, I don't have a good 20% project yet and I need one. If I don't come up with something I'm sure it could negatively impact my review.

He also mentions the openness of the Google intranet which I find less interesting because I expect that as the company grows it will have to start dealing with the kind of leaks that Apple and Microsoft has. Given the company's history of tightly controlling its message (the extremely boring press release style posts on the Google blog, the firing of Mark Jen, etc) I expect that once leak sites in the style of Neowin and Microsoft-Watch spring up around Google's actions, there will be tighter control over access to internal content.

The first set of questions I have are around his comments on switching teams. At Microsoft it is common knowledge that switching teams in the middle of the annual review cycle is guaranteed to screw up your score. Due to stack ranking managers are obligated to give some people low scores and it is always easy to tell the new guy "Everyone's been here for a year you were only here for a few months so you didn't contribute as much". My first manager at Microsoft was actually pretty good about this which I'm thankful for. This is the main reason I left the XML team without waiting for the release [or even the second beta] of version 2.0 of the .NET Framework which I spent about two years working on. Once I had decided I was going to leave it made the most sense to do so at the beginning of the next review cycle independent of where we were in the ship cycle of the product. The first question swirling through my mind about Joe's post is how does Google allow people to fluidly move between teams yet not get screwed during annual reviews?

The other thing I find interesting are his comments on 20% projects. I was recently part of a leadership training class where we were supposed to come up with a presentation as a team and the topic we chose was launching a 20% project at Microsoft. One of the things we got hung up on was deciding what exactly constituted a valid 20% project. If the company mandates strongly encourages me to have a 'pet' project then what guidelines is the project expected to follow? If my pet project isn't software related, such as a woodworking project, can it be considered a valid use of my 20% time? What if my pet project benefits a competitor such as Mark Pilgrim's Butler which ads links to competing services to Google pages?

I personally haven't needed a formal 20% program while at Microsoft. I've written lots of articles and worked on RSS Bandit while still being able to deliver on my day job. Having flex time and reasonable autonomy from management is all I've needed.

My suspicion is that 20% pet projects are a cheap way for Google to do new product development and prototyping in a light weight manner as opposed to being a way to encourage people to spend time working on their hobbies. This is a 'code first' approach to launching new products. Developers actually write cool apps and then someone decides whether there is a market or business model for it or not. This is in contrast to the 'VP first' or 'talk first' approach of new product development at places like Microsoft where new projects need to be pitched to a wide array of middle and upper management folks to get the green light unless the person creating the project is in upper management. At the end of the day with either approach one has to pitch the product to some management person to actually ship it but at least with Google's "code first" approach there already is a working app not just a dollar and a dream.

 

Every once in a while I check out the forums on Channel 9 to see what the conversations are happening between Microsoft and its customers. Today I found a post entitled MSNFOUND is so sad... which is in reference to the MSN.:FOUND website. The comments on the site on the Chanel 9 forums seems to be universally negative. Looking a little further, I notice that checking the Bloglines citations for http://www.msnfound.com also results in numerous blog postings about the site whose feedback is primarily negative.

The reasons for this are unsurprising. They were listed in Robert Scoble's blog posting where he lambasted the creators of the site and asked for them to be fired. I agree with most of what Robert wrote in his post. I'd only add one thing, please don't hold this against us. We aren't as stupid as our marketing people make us look.

 

For the second time in two months I was contacted by a reporter about my blog. Howard Wen has written an article in InternetWeek entitled Blogging About Work is Risky Business on some of the concerns around blogging and the workplace. I referred him to our PR folks for answers to most of his questions but did have some words to say about what guidelines I use when deciding what to post. From the article

For the employee blogger, finding out what one's company policy is toward blogging would be the first step. If the company doesn't have one, or has one that is not exactly clear about the matter of blogging, it may be best to practice a little paranoia.

"I've had my blog postings appear in such publications as the Wall Street Journal," Microsoft employee Dare Obasanjo says. "So the exhortation to treat blog posts as if they could appear on the cover of a national newspaper is something I keep in mind whenever I write my blog."

Obasanjo keeps two blogs, one on the Microsoft developer network and another on a personal server for non-work-related topics.

I also sent him a link to some of Robert Scoble's blogging guidelines but I guess they didn't make it past editing. My original quote was longer and began with the principle that one should treat one's blog postings as if they were going to appear on the cover of a national newspaper. You never know which one of your posts some reporter or A-list blogger is going to decide to bring to prominence by quoting or linking to it so one should never put anything on their public weblog they wouldn't be comfortable with being read by their friends, family, coworkers as well as thousands of total strangers.

Speaking of reporters, I recently noticed that my blog post on Google Toolbar's AutoLink feature was referenced in the eWeek article Google's Tool Bar Links Stir Debate. Like I said, you never know if or when one of your posts could end up as fodder for a news stories so always think before you post.

 

As a user of Microsoft products and an employee of the company, I am of two minds about its entrance into the anti-spyware and anti-virus arenas. I agree with the sentiments Michael Gartenburg of Jupiter Research shared in his post Microsoft and Security - Demand if they do and demand if they don't

It's tough to be Microsoft. On one hand, folks insist that security, spyware and virus are issues that they must own. On the other hand, when they do own it and respond, they get dinged for it. Microsoft's decision to get into the business and make these tools available should be lauded. Security is a tough issue that I've written about before and users need to also take on a share of the responsibility of keeping their systems safe. The fact is, even with good solutions on the market, not enough users are protecting their systems and if Microsoft entering the game can help change that, it's a good thing.

Given that spyware is quite likely the most significant problem facing users of Windows I believe that Microsoft has a responsibility to its customers to do something about it. Others may disagree. For example, Robert X. Cringely attacks Microsoft for its recent announcements about getting in the anti-spyware market in his post Killing Us With Kindness: At Microsoft, Even Good Deeds Are Predatory. He writes

How can giving away software tools be bad? Look at how Microsoft is doing it. Their anti-virus and anti-spyware products are aimed solely at users of Windows XP SP2. This has very different effects on both the user base and the software industry. For users, it says that anyone still running Windows 98, ME, or 2000 has two alternatives -- to upgrade to XP/SP2 or to rely on non-Microsoft anti-virus and anti-spyware products. Choosing to upgrade is a 100+ million-unit windfall for Microsoft. That's at least $10 billion in additional revenue of which $9 billion is profit -- all of it coming in the next 12 months.That $10 billion, by the way, comes from you and me, and comes solely because of Microsoft's decision to offer "free" software.

Of course, you can decide not to upgrade to XP/SP2 and rely instead on third-party products to protect your system. But Microsoft has set the de facto price point for such products at zero, zilch, nada. By doing this, they have transferred their entire support obligation for these old products to companies like Symantec and Network Associates without transferring to those companies any revenue stream to make it worth their trouble. Maybe Peter Norton will say, "Screw this, I'm not going to support all these millions of people for nothing." Well, that's Symantec (not Microsoft) apparently forcing users into the same upgrade from which Microsoft (not Symantec) gains all the revenue.
...
Look how this decision transforms Microsoft. By choosing to no longer support a long list of products (is that even legal?), hundreds and perhaps thousands of developers will be switching to new duties. If this were any other company, I would predict layoffs, but a key strategy for Microsoft is hiring the best people simply to keep them from working elsewhere, so I don't think layoffs are likely. What IS likely is an exodus of voluntary departures. What's also likely is that those hundreds or thousands of reassigned developers will be moved to some other doomsday product -- something else for us to eagerly anticipate or fear.

Cringely seems to be confusing supporting old versions of Windows with providing applications that run on current versions of Windows. Windows 98, Windows 98 SE and Windows Millenium are old versions of Windows whose support life cycle was supposed to end about a year ago but was extended by Microsoft. At the current time, Microsoft will continue to provide critical security updates for these operating systems but new applications won't be targetting them but instead will target the current version of Windows for the desktop which is Windows XP.

Microsoft's anti-spyware and anti-virus applications are not an operating system upgrade but instead new applications targetting the current versions of Windows. Even if they were, Windows 98, Windows SE and Windows Millenium are past the stage in their support life cycle where they'd be eligible for such upgrades anyway. Given that Robert X. Cringely is quite familiar with the ways of the software industry I'm surprised that he expects a vendor of shrinkwrapped software to be providing new features to seven year old versions of their software when current versions exist. This practice is extremely uncommon in the software industry. I personally have never heard of such an instance by any company.

 

While playing Magic:The Gathering with Michael Brundage and a bunch of former co-workers last week he informed me that he had updated his Working At Microsoft essay given some comments and feedback he had seen. Some excerpts from the additions to his essay are included below

Unreality

As a parent, I've come to understand that there's a wide gray area between overprotecting your children and creating a nuturing environment in which they can develop. I think Microsoft struggles with a similar problem with its employees. Microsoft provides its employees with a nuturing environment in which they can be most productive. But like children, these employees also need to be grounded in reality and exposed to ideas that can be disruptive or even disturbing. Otherwise a sheltered monoculture can develop that's unhealthy for everyone involved.

It's hard for people who don't work at Microsoft's main campus to understand just how unreal the experience of working there can become. Some employees forget that most of the world doesn't have broadband wireless networking, high-end consumer electronics, luxury vehicles, and enough money that they don't need to live on a budget. Some employees spend so much time using Microsoft products, that they forget about the competition and/or lose touch with typical customers' needs

...

Microsoft's Not Evil

The reality is that Microsoft is made up of mostly honest, earnest, hardworking people. People with families. People with hardships. People with ordinary and extraordinary lives. People who make wise and foolish decisions. Some employees are bad apples, and some leaders make poor decisions (which their employees may or may not support). Both usually meet with failure. All the Microsoft employees I know are internally driven to "succeed," where success sometimes means outselling the competition but always means doing your personal best and improving people's lives with your work.

Although groups don't have intentions, it's true that group policies reward some kinds of behavior over others. So perhaps "Microsoft is evil" is shorthand for "Microsoft's policies are evil."

The thing is, I haven't seen any evidence of that on the inside and I'm usually very critical of these things. For as long as I've worked at Microsoft, ethics have been a real part of employee performance reviews. It's not just talk, but the way work goes each day. Most product designs revolve around addressing specific customer needs. No one ever says "Hey, let's go ruin company P" or other things that could be construed as "evil." Instead, it's "customers Q and R are having trouble with this, and I have an idea how we could fix it..." and other positive, constructive statements.

If anything, Microsoft seems to have the opposite problem, in which employees sometimes design or cut a feature or product without fully appreciating the huge impact their decision can have outside the company. When the media goes wild with knee-jerk reactions for or against something Microsoft did, often the employees responsible for the decision are caught off-guard by the disproportionate public attention.

I came to similar conclusions about Microsoft employees a year or two ago. The main problem with Microsoft employees is not that they are out to 'cut of the air supply' of their competitors. Instead it is that they often make decisions without awareness of the impact their decisions will have on the software industry as a whole. I have often been surprised to realize that some program manager for some new feature or component in some Microsoft product has failed to realize that the entrance of Microsoft in that space could potentially put partners or competitors out of business. This isn't to say that the execs don't realize that Microsoft entering markets usually decimates competition but that a lot of the rank and file guys implementing these decisions or coming up with some of these ideas often don't realize the impact of their actions.

One of the reasons I like working at MSN is that we aren't under any illusions about these issues. We aren't "adding a new feature to Visual Studio to make developers more productive" or "adding some new functionality to Windows to make it more useful for end users" which also happens to have been a thriving ISV market until we decided to enter it. Instead we are directly competing with folks like Yahoo, Google or AOL for a particular market. This situation definitely sits a lot better with me.

 

I got an email from Shelly Farnham announcing a Social Computing Symposium, sponsored by Microsoft Research which will be held at Redmond Town Center on April 25-26. Below is an excerpt from the announcement

In the spring of 2004 a small two-day Social Computing Symposium, sponsored by Microsoft Research, brought together researchers, builders of social software systems, and influential commentators on the social technology scene...A second symposium at Microsoft Research is planned for April 25th-26th, 2005...

If you are interested in attending the symposium, please send a brief, 300-500 word position paper. The symposium is limited to 75 people, and participants will be selected on the basis of submitted position papers.

Position papers should not be narrowly focused on either academic study or industry practice. Rather, submissions should do one or more of the following: address theoretical and methodological issues in the design and development of social computing technologies; reflect on concrete experiences with mobile and online settings; offer glimpses of novel systems; discuss current and evolving practices; offer views as to where research is needed.

We are particularly interested in position papers that explore any of the following areas. However, given the symposium’s focus on new innovation in social technologies, we are open to other topics as well.

a) The digitization of identity and social networks.

b) Proliferation and use of social metadata.

c) Mobile, ubiquitous social technologies changing the way we socialize.

d) Micropublishing of personal content (e.g. blogs), and the democratization of information exchange and knowledge development.

e) Social software on the global scale: the impact of cross-cultural differences in experiences of identity and community.

Please send your symposium applications to scspaper@microsoft.com by February 28th.

I would like to attend which means I have to cough up a position paper. I have 3 ideas for position papers; (i) Harnessing Latent Social Networks: Building a Better Blogroll with XFN and FOAF, (ii) Blurring the Edges of Online Communication Forms by Integrating Email, Blogging and Instant Messaging or (iii) Can Folksonomies Scale to Meet the Challenges of the Global Web?

So far I've shared this ideas with one person and he thought the first idea was the best. I assume some of the readers of my blog will be at this symposium. What would you guys like to get a presentation or panel discussion on?

 

The team I work for at MSN has open developer and test positions. Our team is responsible for the underlying infrastructure of services like MSN Messenger, MSN Spaces, MSN Groups and some of Hotmail. We frequentlu collaborate with other properties across MSN such as MyMSN and MSN Search as well as with other product units across Microsoft such as in the case of Outlook Live. If you are interested in building world class software that is used by hundreds of millions of people and the following job descriptions interest you then send me your resume

Software Design Engineer (Developer)

The team builds key platforms that facilitate storing and sharing photo albums, files, blogs, calendars, buddy lists, favorites, etc. We are looking for a strong software developer with good problem solving skills and at least 2-3 years of experience with C++ or other programming languages. Experience in relational databases especially data modeling, schema design, developing stored procedures and programming against the databases is required. Candidates with good SQL knowledge and performance tuning databases will be preferred.

Software Design Engineer/Test (Tester)

The MSN Communication and Platform Services team is looking for a passionate and experienced SDET candidate with a strong programming, design, and server background to help us test next generation internet sharing and communication scenarios at MSN. You will be responsible for designing and creating the test automation and tools for the MSN Contacts service, which stores over 9 billion live MSN Hotmail and MSN Messenger contacts for over 400 million users. You should be able to demonstrate thorough understanding of testing methodologies and processes. Requirements for this position include strong skills in C++ or C#, design, problem solving, troubleshooting, proven experience with test case generation techniques or model based testing methodologies. communication (written & verbal). and a strong passion for quality. Your position will include key tasks such as writing test plans and test cases, working with PM and Development to provide them with integration and architecture feedback, working across teams with major partners such as Hotmail, Office, and Windows, and driving quality and performance related issues to resolution.

Email your resume to dareo@msft.com (replace msft with microsoft) if the above job descriptions sound like they are a good fit for you. If you have any questions about what working here is like, you can send me an email and I'll either follow up via email or my blog to answer any questions of general interest [within reason].

 

When I used to work on the XML team at Microsoft, there were a number of people who I interacted with who were so smart I used to feel like I learned something new everytime I walked into their office. These folks include

• Michael Brundage - social software geek before it was a hip buzzword, XML query engine expert and now working on the next generation of XBox

• Joshua Allen - semantic web and RDF enthusiast, if not for him I'd dismiss the semantic web as a pipe dream evangelized by a bunch of theoreticians who wouldn't know real code if it jumped them in the parking lot and defecated on their shoes, now works at MSN but not on anything related to what I work on

• Erik Meijer - programing language god and leading mind behind X# Xen Cω , he is a co-inventor on all my patent applications most of which started off with me coming into his office to geek out about something I was going to blog about

• Derek Denny-Brown - XML expert from back when Tim Bray and co. were still trying to figure out what to name it, one heckuva cool cat

Anyway that was a bit of digression before posting the link mentioned in the title of the post. Michael Brundage has an essay entitled Working at Microsoft  where he provides some of his opinions on the good, the bad, and the in-between of working at Microsoft. One key insight is that Microsoft tends to have good upper management and poor middle management. This insight strikes very close to home but I know better than to give examples of the latter in a public blog post. Rest assured it is very true and the effects on the company have cost it millions, if not billions of dollars.

 

I've read Robert Scoble's Dear Bill Gates: can we create an interesting music player? post and the ensuing flood of negative  feedback with some interest. The core ideas of the post are fairly naive but do an interesting job of exposing the prejudices and internal biases of both Robert Scoble and many of his readers who responded. The core ideas of Roberts post were

1. Microsoft should get in the music player business or pressure some OEMs to listen to their design suggestions.

2. Get big name celebrities to endorse it

3. Try and ship it in time for next year's back to school season

4. create a marketting blitz around it

5. blog about it

The ideas in itself except for the part about blogging aren't really original and are the kind of things that would come up in any 30 minute brainstorming session about what one would do if they wanted to compete with Apple's iPod. I'm also quite skeptical that blogging about a hardware product will make me any more likely to buy it over an existing market leader. There is no blog by the Apple iPod team or the TiVo team yet I love both products and wouldn't consider alternatives even though there are Microsoft employees who blog who constantly evangelize competing products.

The rest of the ideas are either impractical (even if Microsoft wanted it couldn't get in the music player business in less than six months and OEMs aren't under Microsoft's control when it comes to their product design) or common sense (getting celebrity endorsements).

What I find interesting is the intensity of the reaction to this post.

One reaction which is obvious in hindsight is the assumption in this post that Microsoft shouldn't abide the fact that Apple is dominating a market it isn't directly engaged in. This is such a natural way of thinking of for Microsoft people ("we should be number 1 in every software/hardware/technology related market") that it is often surprising for non-Microserfs when they first encounter the mentality.

Then there are those who thinks Scoble dissed the Windows Media team by (a) touting such obvious ideas as too revolutionary for them to have come up with and (b) implying that they are failing. I think these people are being a tad bit sensitive. However I also think it was unwise of Robert to be so dismissive of the efforts of the folks working in this area at Microsoft. Given that his day job involves getting product teams to open up to him on Channel 9, he isn't going to get much of cooperation from them if he keeps knocking their efforts. Another reason is that you never know who you'll end up working with. I remember once writing that MSN Messenger was one of the software applications I cannot stand only to get a rebuke from Scoble to make the post more constructive which I did. A year and a half later, and I'm on the team that owns the server for MSN Messenger. I have lots of little stories like this just from my experiences in the past three years at Microsoft. I definitely weigh my thoughts more carefully before posting anything negative about products or technologies in the software industry in general.

For a while I've been frustrated by my experience as an XBox owner. I can't get games like Transformers Armada and DragonBall Z: Budokai at all while games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas won't show up until 6 months after they've been out on Playstaton 2. However I've never thought of posting an open letter to Bill Gates on my blog with a proposal to use celebrity endorsements, partnerships with game publishers and blogging to counter the dominance of Playstation 2 in the console market.

Sometimes I wonder if that is a virtue or a vice. ;)

 

Paul Vick has an excellent post about white elephant projects at Microsoft entitled Black hole projects  where he writes

I left Office just about the time that Netdocs really started going, but I do know a few people who invested quite a few years of their lives into it. I can't say that I know much more than Steve about it, but it did get me thinking about other "black hole projects" at Microsoft. There was one I was very close to earlier in my career that I managed not to get myself sucked into and several others that I just watched from afar. None I can really talk about since they never saw the light of day, but it did get me thinking about the peculiar traits of a black hole project. They seem to be:

• They must have absurdly grandiose goals. Something like "fundamentally reimagine the way that people work with computers." Nobody, including the people who originate the goals, has a clear idea what the goals actually mean.
• They must involve throwing out some large existing codebase and rewriting everything from scratch, "the right way, this time."
• They must have completely unrealistic deadlines. Usually this is because they believe that they can rewrite the original codebase in much, much less time than it took to write that codebase in the first place.
• They must have completely unrealistic beliefs about compatibility. Usually this takes the form of believing you can rewrite a huge codebase and preserve all of the little quirks and such without a massive amount of extra effort.
• They are always "six months" from from major deadline that never seems to arrive. Or, if it does arrive, another milestone is added on to the end of the project to compensate.
• They must consume huge amounts of resources, sucking the lifeblood out of one or more established products that make significant amounts of money or have significant marketshare.
• They must take over any group that does anything that relates to their absurdly broad goals, especially if that group is small, focused, has modest goals and actually has a hope of shipping in a reasonable timeframe.
• They must be prominently featured as demos at several company meetings, to the point where people groan "Oh, god, not another demo of this thing. When is it ever going to ship?"
• They usually are prominently talked up by BillG publicly years before shipping/dying a quiet death.
• They usually involve "componetizing" some monolithic application or system. This means that not only are you rewriting a huge amount of code, you're also splitting it up across one or more teams that have to all seamlessly work together.
• As a result of the previous point, they also usually involve absolutely massive integration problems as different teams try madly to get their components working with each other.
• They usually involve rewriting the application or system on top of brand-new technology that has not been proven at a large scale yet. As such, they get to flush out all the scalability problems with the new technology.
• They are usually led by one or more Captain Ahabs, madly pursuing the white whale with absolute conviction, while the deckhands stand around saying "Gee, that whale looks awfully big. I'm not sure we can really take him down."
• Finally, 90% of the time, they must fail and die a flaming death, possibly taking down or damaging other products with it. If they do ship, they must have taken at least 4-5 years to ship and be at least 2 years overdue.

I'm kind of frightened at how easy it was to come up with this list - it all just kind of poured out. Looking back over 12.5 years at Microsoft, I'm also kind of frightened at how many projects this describes. Including some projects that are ongoing at the moment.

Someone who works with me at MSN mentioned that there was a time the Netdocs team was larger than the entire Microsoft Office product unit combined. Scary. As Paul mentions, the sad thing is that there are projects like this that continue to exist at Microsoft even though everybody sees the signs and already knows how the story ends. In fact, you don't even have to work at Microsoft to be able to tell what some of these projects are.

Sad.

 

Since I left the XML team at Microsoft they've gone on an impressive hiring spree. Two people who I'd have loved to work with who have joined up after I left are

David Remy: former Director of Product Engineering at Bea Systems, he was responsible for security, web services, and XML for Bea's Weblogic Workshop product line.

Mike Champion: formerly a research and development specialist at Software AG. He was on the W3C's Document Object Model (DOM) Working Group for over three years and was the co-chair of the Web Services Architecture Working Group.

I have to see how quickly I can nag both of them to start blogging. David used to be in charge of the folks who produced XML Beans so I suspect he has all sorts of interesting perspectives on XML programming models. Mike and I have been exchanging mail on XML-DEV for years and now that we can have some of these conversations in person, I work across campus. Irony indeed. :)

 

Yesterday I literally stopped being the face of XML at Microsoft. From now on if you go to http://www.microsoft.com/xml or http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml you won't see my work blog or my picture welcoming you to the XML Developer Center at MSDN. It's a particularly bittersweet experience. I fought with MSDN for about a year and a half to get that site launched and for a while I felt that it was my baby. The new owner of the site, Irwin, is a great guy and I'm sure he'll do excellent things with it.

Speaking of transitions, I'm still trying to fit in at MSN. It's interesting going from being extremely knowledgeable about all the technologies I'm responsible for to returning blank stares when asked about some aspect of a spec I now own. Hopefully I'll have some downtime at next week's XML 2004 conference to bone up on the various specs about our backend infrastructure so I don't seem so clueless at the next feature costing meeting. :)

So far the new job's been awesome. Great people and the features I'm working on are killer. Best of all I not only get to deliver features for MSN Spaces but also Hotmail, MSN Messenger and even MyMSN. Of course, this means I attend lots and lots of cross-team meetings. Yay, fun...

 

Yesterday I found out that a shortage of styrofoam cups in the kitchen that we experienced in our building was actually occuring all over the Redmond campus. Some of us joked last night that this was the latest in the string of penny wise, pound foolish cost cuttings in the same vein as only having office supplies on one floor of the building.

This morning I realized that moving all of a particular resource to one floor to "cut costs" was actually an example used in The Dilbert Principle in a section entitled Companies That Turn On Themselves.

I wonder what other Dilbert-esque cost cutting moves folks out there have experienced? Post your favorites in the comments to this post.

 

Friday was my last day on the XML team at Microsoft. On Monday I start work as a Program Manager on MSN Communication Services Platform team. This team is responsible for the server side implementation of several aspects of MSN including MSN Messenger, some of Hotmail and MSN Groups.

My immediate responsibilities will involve working on the back end of MSN Spaces which is a hosted blogging service in the same vein as Blogger, LiveJournal and TypePad. The site is currently in beta for the Japanese audience.

This means I'll no longer be responsible for the XML Developer Center on MSDN which now will be managed by Irwin Dolobowsky. My work-related blog will shortly no longer appear on that page. However I will continue to write the Extreme XML column on a bi-monthly basis. Arpan Desai is the contact person for the aspects of the XML programming model in the .NET Framework I was responsible for, specifically the System.Xml.XPath namespace, System.Xml.Schema namespace and the System.Xml.XmlNode hierarchy.

If you are curious as to why I decided to make this move, some of the thinking behind my decision can be gleaned from my weblog post Social Software is the Platform of the Future. 

Update: This move does not change my status as the project lead on RSS Bandit.

 

A couple of people at work use the term strategy tax when referring to compromises or similar decisions a product team makes that are less than optimal because they have to satisfy the corporate strategy. More and more, I see this term coming up with regards to what Microsoft has termed "integrated innovation". If you are unfamiliar with this term a good description of it can be found in the Microsoft press release 'Integrated Innovation' Provides Partners with Roadmap to Success  where its states

The pursuit of Integrated Innovaton pertains both to product and process. Integrated innovation is manifested in the Microsoft platform but it extends beyond the technology stack. It's Microsoft's approach to building software: simultaneously innovating in product design and development and tightly integrating products, each one with all the others.

Before pointing out the obvious cons of such an approach its benefits should be highlighted. Many would argue that the reason Microsoft Office became the multi-billion dollar business it is today is because it applied to doctrine of integrated innovation. Microsoft took what used to be considered disparate applications (word processing, presentation software, spreadsheets, etc) and turned them into a cohesive productivity suite that worked seamlessly together. The fact that one can design a chart in Excel then cut and paste it into Word with no problems was a big deal when it was first implemented and it still is today. As the saying goes, a lot of effort went into making this look effortless. This combined with the fact that you could purchase these tools in a single box made it the killer application for businesses all over the world.

With that out of the way, let's discuss the cons of this approach. Many students of software engineering will tell you that the goal of any systems architect is to increase cohesion and reduce the coupling in the software architecture. The problems with tight coupling (or tight integration) are well known. As mentioned in Object Oriented Software Engineering Knowledge Base, tight coupling causes a system to be hard to understand and change because changes in one place will require changes somewhere else. Requiring changes to be made in more than one place is problematic since it is time-consuming to find the different places that need changing, and it is likely that errors will be made. 

Those are developer-centric reasons for why tight integration is disadvantegeous but what do these mean in practical terms? The first thing it means is projects take longer. This is basically the Mythical Man Month effect. If you have two teams of 10 people working on separate projects that will take six months to complete and tell them to combine their efforts, it will take them more time to complete their joint tasks not less. As implied above this also means a bug in one component is a bug in all the components, a security flaw in one component is a security flaw in all the components and a slip in one component's schedule is a slip in the schedule for all the components. Finally, it makes the systems more complex to manage and understand which means it makes them harder to maintain.

In today's world where the majority of Microsoft's software is competing with the products of the Open Source community whose mantra of "Release early, release often" and increased threats from malicious hackers make security a primary concern the doctrine of integrated innovation seems almost anachronistic.

The effects of integrated innovation on product schedules shouldn't be underestimated. Although Microsoft Office is an example of integrated innovation when considering its constituent parts it also is an example of eschewing this practice when taken as a whole. The Office team releases a cohesive product with minimal dependencies on external products. The Office team has also consistently released software every 2 to 3 years over the past decade; Office 95, Office 97, Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003. Certain other products at Microsoft which are at the forefront of integrated innovation do not seem to have such consistent release cycles. These products are paying the strategy tax.

The main reason for writing this blog entry is so that next time someone asks me what I mean by "strategy tax" I can just give them a link to this entry instead of repeating myself.

 

We are in the process of locking down System.Xml for Beta 2 of the .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. In the past few months we have received customer feedback about our feature set previewed in the Whidbey Alpha & Whidbey Beta 1 and this has guided our decision making process as to where to focus our energies to ensure a comprehensive feature set.

Below is the list of changes to System.Xml and subsidiary namespaces that have occurred between Beta 1 and Beta 2 of the .NET Framework 2.0 release.

ADDITIONS

XmlSchemaValidator

The XmlSchemaValidator class provides a push model API for W3C XML Schema validation. The primary scenario for using the XmlSchemaValidator is for validating an XML infoset in-place without having to serialize it as an XML document then reparse the document using a validating XML reader.

CHANGES

XmlReader

• Added overloads to the static Create() method that take XmlParserContext
• ReadValueAsXXX() methods renamed to ReadContentAsXXX(). Also reduced the number of ReadContentAsXXX() methods relative to the number of ReadValueAsXXX() methods in Whidbey beta 1.
• Added ReadElementContentAsXXX() methods which are specific to obtaining the value of element nodes
• Added methods for reading large streams of text or binary data embedded in an XML document in a streaming fashion

public virtual bool CanReadValueChunk { get; }

public virtual int ReadValueChunk (byte[] buffer, int startIndex, int count);

public virtual bool CanReadBinaryContent { get; }

public virtual int ReadContentAsBase64 (byte[] buffer, int startIndex, int count);

public virtual int ReadContentAsBinHex (byte[] buffer, int startIndex, int count);

public virtual int ReadElementContentAsBase64(byte[] buffer, int startIndex, int count);

public virtual int ReadElementContentAsBinHex(byte[] buffer, int startIndex, int count);

• Added ReadToFollowing(string localname, string namespaceURI) which moves to the next occurrence of the named element in document order.

XmlReaderSettings

• Added XmlSchemaValidationFlags enumeration to replace the following flags; IgnoreInlineSchema, IgnoreSchemaLocation, IgnoreValidationWarnings and IgnoreIdentityConstraints
• Added existing ValidationType enumeration to replace to replace the following flags; DtdValidate and XsdValidate

XmlWriter

• Reduced number of WriteValue() methods
• Removed overloads of WriteStartElement and WriteStartAttribute that took an IXmlSchemaInfo parameter

XPathDocument

• Reverted the XPathDocument to what it was in version 1.1 of the .NET Framework. It is no longer editable and no longer implements the IChangeTracking, IXmlSerializable, IXPathChangeNavigable, IXPathEditable and IRevertibleChangeTracking interfaces. The rationale for this decision is at More Information on the XPathDocument/XmlDocument Change in Whidbey beta 2

XPathNavigator and XPathEditableNavigator

• The XPathEditableNavigator has been merged into the XPathNavigator, making it an editable XML cursor model API.
• The XPathNavigator is the preferred API for exposing data as XML. This has been incorporated into the design guidelines for using XML in the .NET Framework

XmlDocument

• The XPathNavigator returned by the CreateNavigator() method now allows one to edit the XmlDocument through the cursor model API.
• The XmlDocument now supports XML schema validation of the entire subtree or partial validation of nodes in the document using the Validate() method
• The following property added to XmlDocument

public XmlSchemaSet Schemas { get; set; }

• The following property added to XmlNode

public virtual IXmlSchemaInfo SchemaInfo { get; }

XsltCommand

• The XslTransform class was obsoleted in Whidbey Beta 1 and replaced by the System.Xml.Query.XsltCommand class.  In Beta 2, we decided to revamp the XsltCommand API in order to make migration from XslTransform simpler.  This effort also resulted in the renaming of the XsltCommand class to  System.Xml.Xsl.XslCompiledTransform.
• XslCompiledTransform compiles XSLT to MSIL for significantly improved performance at the cost of increased (yet still small) compile times.
• Supports the MSXML XSLT extension functions such as format-date, format-time etc.

Inference

• This class has been renamed to XmlSchemaInference

XPathExpression -

• Added static Compile() method enables one to compile an input string containing an XPath query into an XPathExpression object

REMOVALS

XmlArgumentList

To reduce the cost of churn caused by the obsoletion of XslTransform this class has been removed. In its place the XsltArgumentList from v1.1 can be used

XQueryCommand

Microsoft has decided not to ship a client side XQuery implementation in .NET Framework 2.0 as our customers expect us to ship an implementation that meets the following criteria:

• Compliant with the W3C standards
• Functionally addresses key scenarios

As a core platform component in Windows, they also expect us to ship a product that meets the high bar of not breaking their applications when future updates are released.  After talking to key customers and partners, we have determined it is important that we cross this high bar before shipping a full implementation of XQuery in the platform. 

The best estimates tell us that ETA for XQuery to become a W3C recommendation is end of 2005 which does not fit with the .NET Framework 2.0 product release cycle.

In the meantime, we are shipping a well-defined small subset of XQuery in SQL Server 2005 to query information stored natively as XML data type.  This will enable new customer scenarios in SQL Server for storing and retrieving semi-structured data.

In the NET Framework 2.0 RTM timeframe, we recommend that our customers continue to use XSLT and XPath on the client side to solve their key client side filtering and transformation scenarios.  With this in mind, we have made significant improvements to our client side story including:

• Performance improvements - making the .NET Framework XSLT processor the best performing processor.
• Functional improvements - improving the usability and feature set of the existing .NET Framework processor

Note: As a result of not shipping XQuery, XML Views using mapping and XQuery to query SQL Server 2005 and the XmlAdapter to perform updates that were originally previewed in the PDC Alpha release of .NET V2.0 have also been removed. These were removed in the Beta 1 release.