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Comment by aaroniba | Hacker News Reader

When I was an intern at Microsoft in 2003, I brought my PowerBook into work. Sometimes coworkers would give me shit, and I would offer to start using a windows laptop once they used MSN Search instead of Google for all their web searches.

At the time, MSN search was so bad that this proposition was ludicrous. In fact, every Office developer I knew used Google with a "site:msdn.microsoft.com" restriction to search their own API docs.

I wonder if Bing is now good enough that employees feel pressure to use it instead of Google.

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Does that mean that msdn.microsoft.com performed acceptably in 2003 when you were on MS's network?

I've always found MSDN's online access to be dreadfully slow. The lack of a proper rich client - dynamically updating index in particular - for MSDN content in VS2010, so far, is disturbing to me - I generally find APIs using the index followed by contextual tree navigation, both of which don't work nearly as well in web apps.

There's no comparison. Search wasn't a big business for anyone then. Microsoft has been in the smartphone business for a while and it's an extremely sore subject.

It really comes down to this: why work at a company whose products you're not excited about? This is part of Google and Apple's success. You were an intern then, so you're fine, but more senior, high-level employees better be using your company products--otherwise, they're doing a shitty job and need to be fired.

"why work at a company whose products you're not excited about?"

Microsoft has a lot of products. It would be unnatural for every employee who worked there to be excited about every single one of those products. I can understand the cognitive dissonance issues of working in a division that produced products that you weren't excited about, but as for the entirety of Microsoft I think that's an unrealistic idea.

The only way to be excited equally about all of Microsoft's products (in preference to all of their competitors) is to have drunken the kool-aid so deeply that you've lost the ability to judge anything fairly. This is a far more dangerous scenario than a company that produces some products that are second run in comparison to some of their rivals. The former is a recipe for a company full of zealots who drive the company into the ground due to their lack of fair judgement, the former is to be expected of any company that has a huge and widely varied product offering spanning multiple industries.

The former (a company full of zealots who drive the company into the ground due to their lack of fair judgement) is a classic case of a late-stage company overtaken by the clueless, who survives simply by inertia.

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