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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

Midori, as cool as it was, was Microsoft's "no output division" (see https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/DEC/dec.b... for context). It existed so that very senior engineers wouldn't go elsewhere and cause trouble for Microsoft. It had fullfilled its purpose in that regard. I strongly suspect that some of Google's more ambitious endeavors serve the same purpose.

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Based on knowing and being firsthand friends with several Midori devs, I’m going to assert that this is simply not true. The majority of them were just reassigned when the project was cancelled.

Many of the innovations from Midori were included in other projects. The project may have “failed” but it was far from a failure.

> Midori, as cool as it was, was Microsoft's "no output division"

Considering you have absolutely no proof of that it seems rather disrespectful to act like that's a fact rather than your supposition.

It always cracks me up when people demand "proof" of something like this. I mean, I know some of the people from there from way back, and the project was eventually canceled, so there literally was "no output". And they had pretty much complete carte blanche on everything and could bikeshed over the most inane and inconsequential things for months on end. It was a fun "job" while it lasted, though.

Now I'm starting to wonder if you even read the "No Output" letter and understand its implication? You essentially called a bunch of Microsoft employees productivity drains on the rest of the company.

The fact that you think a cancelled project means it is the same as DEC's "No Output" team likely means you don't understand what the "No Output" team even was at DEC or the implication for the people within it.

You absolutely do need to present proof of what you're saying, because it is a serious charge for both Microsoft and those employees alike.

Surely there was output.

Async/await, TPL, Span<>, blittable structs, safe stackalloc, .NET Native, and a couple of other minor features come from M# (System C#) usage.

I don't think is is actually true since they actually did run some production services at MS like the speech service which did voice recognition for windows phones.

Were they placed there because of negative productivity (as implied from the DEC memo), or so they wouldn't become someone else's competitive advantage? (even at the cost of not letting their unvested shares return to the pool when they left)

I hadn't seen that memory before. Turn out there's some previous discussion re: "No Output Division": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10587124

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