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.
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.