I'm not sure how this makes any sense for Microsoft. If they assigned a few engineers to work on this, they could replicate the functionality within few months, especially since they know the internals of Outlook.
And they get more than just code, and people who write code. They get a little street cred back in the hacker community for picking up a YC startup. They get people who have vision, which MSFT appears to be in need of these days. It could be the beginning of a new era for them.
Also, Xobni has had a number of high quality engineers (probably much better than what you'd typically find slaving away in the trenches at MSFT) working on their plugin for a lot more than a few months. I'm guessing the programming cost would be a lot higher than you might think.
Exactly what I was thinking. If it's not the features, not the engineers, it must be the positive buzz they get for it. Probably this is some lame attempt by Microsoft to appear cool and show that they understand the new wave.
Occam's razor?
as far as the actual commentary goes I think Microsoft is doing it because honestly 30-40 million is chump change for them and yeah they could develop it but why bother when you already have it tall done and the structure already setup?
If you want to work at MS you're already lacking in the taste department. And what's the interview process, brainteasers or BSing your way through random estimates like the number of gas stations in the country?
Being good at bluster can make someone seem pretty smart. But the computer doesn't care about that. It filters out what you can really do from what you can fool people into thinking you can do.
Wanting to work a corporation that has big revenues with job security, stability, steady paychecks, interesting projects (yes, there are still interesting projects everything from online, web, to Xbox), big campus treatment, vacation, healthcare benefits, and et al. Yeah, that's just an outright dumb move.
Try to keep up here, Freddo. Try following the context :) Smart is orthogonal to skilled at a particular endeavor.
> Yeah, that's just an outright dumb move.
Funny how you twisted "lacking in the taste department" into "dumb". It's a computer industry truism that MS lacks taste, whereas Apple has good taste.
This is also amusing: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/05.html
The original point was that MS had smart people so a lack of smarts couldn't be the problem. The salient points are 1) smarts don't guarantee programming skill, and 2) smarts don't guarantee taste.
Fair enough. In that sense, then, I wouldn't say that programmers at Microsoft lack taste by definition.
There are things at Microsoft that have demonstrated solid taste: the original NT kernel comes to mind, as do early iterations of Word and Excel (starting back when they were primarily developed for Mac). LINQ. WCF. The DLR. There are also smaller pieces of tools that seem elegant, even when there are issues with the larger design. Active Patterns in F#. Attributes in C#. The ADO.Net CommandBuilder and DataAdapter.
I'm not convinced that it's that everyone at Microsoft is individually defective as much as that their methods of collaboration, like those of most large corporations, usually yield results less effective than good individuals or small teams could have produced with sufficient autonomy.
Which brings this thread from the religious fervour of "what it means to be smart" right back to the subject at hand: Why MSFT would pay M$20+ for Xobni rather than write a kock-off in-house.
Say efficiency and aesthetics are two sides of the same coin. So, if you put them at odds with each other you won't ever reach the epitome of either.
Like I said, they may not be typical, but most of the Microsoft people I've met work on compiler design, static verifiers, and things like that. If where you come from that's considered trivial stuff, feel free to make your own judgements accordingly.
> If you want to work at MS you're already lacking in the taste department.
Really? Last I checked, there are openings on the F# team. Would it really be that horrible to get big-company pay and benefits to have the opportunity to hack on compilers for functional languages?
> And what's the interview process, brainteasers or BSing your way through random estimates like the number of gas stations in the country?
Done away with, last I heard.
Not on the heavy consumer apps, eh?
> Last I checked, there are openings on the F# team.
So you're saying they have positions open that need people with taste to work on them. In other words, they have a shortage of people with taste ;)
> Done away with, last I heard.
What's the process now?
No, the Microsoft people I've met tend to be from the language teams, mostly because I'm working a lot with IronPython and F# in my codebase, so that's the kind of thing I go to conferences about.
And, to be honest, working on language implementations in small teams for Microsoft sounds a lot more appealing than working on Windows or Office in ginormous bureaucratic teams. Then again, being a tiny cog in the AdSense machine doesn't sound appealing to me either.
> What's the process now?
Doesn't sound all that different from a Google interview.
"I've told folks that my MS interview was on par in difficulty as my Ph.D. candidacy oral examination, partly due to the fact that it was much, much longer. (A Ph.D. oral exam is done by 3-5 professors vs. you in a room and they decide whether you continue in your studies or whether they kick you out). Mine started at 10am and ended at 6:30pm or so when I sat down with Scott Guthrie at the end of my loop."
MSFT wants great engineers, and most of the people there probably aren't. Surely some are, but for a very long time now the kinds of people who make great engineers have shifted en masse either to going their own way (startups) or to working at Google, Facebook, or a number of other places.
Seriously though, that seems to be a self talk thing in the hacker community, making me skeptical it's true. Places like Slashdot and the like seem to be echo chambers of ego boosting phrases.
Here's some data. Outlook's last two major releases were in '03 and '06. In those 3 years they added the following visible features:
- todo bar
- better calendar UI
- RSS aggregator
- search
Xobni might be as useful and interesting as all those combined, and the Xobni team can deliver it today. The evidence suggests that Microsoft would take years to deliver something similar.
The guys at Xobni are extremely talented and Microsoft always wants talented engineers.
That's what 4-year vesting is for. Besides, part-time work from an expert is better than full-time work from the hoi polloi.
The reason big companies buy startups is because they can't do what they "could" do.
Also, only people forced to use Vista are using it at this point which boils down to employees of corporations with not-so-wise IT departments - not the prime audience for a startup product IMO.
I do think there is potential for money in the idea of building a layer on top of Windows that makes it more usable. Xobni seems to be doing exactly that starting with email. (I'm sure they are looking beyond email by this point).
if that happens, my evil glee my well burst out of my gut like a baby alien.
You're not; you're supplying new reasoning for me. My point was that big companies can screw up even apparently straightforward projects, so screwing up novel ones would be even more likely.
the number of votes on a comment should become visible only after someone voted already, similarly to online polls. This would prevent people from mindlessly agreeing with popular opinion, and in the same time it would encourage more people to vote, out of curiosity to see the result.
however, microsoft is slated to do the exact same thing with the next version of windows, which will supposedly break binary compatibility with old windows apps. if ms has the guts to follow through on this, it will be a Very Good Thing.
It's not like a few million more or less mean much to Microsoft anyway.
Counter-exhibit 1: Vista.
Apparently the MS development process makes it almost impossible to get anything done within the bureaucracy these days.
Their best results are from their research groups (e.g. Haskell) but those are people paid to work on what they want to work on anyway.
You can't just assign developers randomly to something and get the same results.
In fact, given Outlook's bugs and lack of functionality in these areas you could make a pretty compelling argument that, despite their knowledge of its internals, those are about the last people you'd want to put in charge of making Outlook work. They already got their shot and look what happened!