Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's an interesting beast. Things that "should" matter to them, like Windows, somehow reach the point of almost falling apart (see Windows Me or Vista). Then, groups that are practically losing money build great things like the Xbox 360 and Kinect. Some products that stumble end up dead, like the Zune, while others are dragged back up to par (see IE9 and Windows 7). This current mess could mean anything from "WP7 is doomed, sell your stock" to "the Eye of Sauron just hasn't shone on that product group yet". We'll see. Personally, I'm thinking WP7 will pull a Vista or two and then become a cool phone OS, but the competition isn't standing still either.

When Apple was launching the iPhone, they pulled engineers from their flagship Mac OS X to work on new phone software. They seemed to think it was pretty important to launch with a strong product and have all the details right; to them, even delaying a product from another part of their business was an acceptable risk. When was the last time Microsoft did anything like that? Instead of slapping together product groups to shove their way into every has-been market, they could stand to divert some developers, developers, developers to products that need a polished launch, such as WP7.

This pretty much jibes with the conventional wisdom that Microsoft is a company with deep political entanglements. If something is important, it stands to reason there would be a lot of paralyzing infighting, whereas teams on the periphery could actually do some good work.

That's the thing I never understood about Microsoft. When they really focus, and spend more time on producing a product versus marketing a product, the seem to do some great things (SEE: Windows 2000/NT).

It seems like MS could really use from some user centric project managers or something to really get them on the course to consistent delivery, because that's what's lacking.

Vista was a bust, 7 was a phenom by MS standards. The 360 did OK, the Kinect was brilliant. By the logic that is the Windows development cycle, Windows 8 is going to be an abysmal failure. I'm an OS X user now, but I'll still say how great Win7 is, and the only thing I wish to see come from the company is some form in consistency with their products and marketing. These "To the cloud" commercials NEED to stop.

Without making a judgment one way or the other in regards to the people at Microsoft I'd make one point about what you said. The problem with looking at Microsoft through the lens of Windows NT to Windows 7 is that Microsoft consists of completely different people in those two eras. The people who spearheaded windows in the time of Windows NT and Windows 2000 were worth tens of millions of dollars by the time Vista went out to door. So most had long moved on to personal ventures.

You have a very valid point, however I'm not per se making the argument of a dichotomy between Windows NT and Windows 7. I am however saying that Microsoft CAN, when they narrow down build some great products. And it seems like every time, as soon as they do, they trip up on their own two feet and fall face first on the very next one.

Windows ME was a result of MS moving their top talent to the NT group. ME should have never been released, but Win2K wasn't ready to be the consumer OS.

When you don't have the company riding on you, you can take bigger risks. It will be interesting to see what Windows 8 ends up becoming. Vista was largely a failure because they were overly ambitious, despite common belief. I fear that this failure will prevent Windows from being ambitious again. I hope they learned that they failed for very specific reasons -- not just ambition in of itself.

For the record that's not really true. By the time Windows ME came out windows development had been split into two pieces. There was the Shell group that was consolidated under Brad Silverberg. And then there was the core operating system group that was under Jim Allchin. So Windows ME actually was the work of the shell group being grafted onto what was still Windows 98. So the reason it sucks so much was because it really wasn't designed by anyone. Microsoft realized they needed a consumer OS so they put together the pieces they had as quickly as possible. Boxed them up and shoved them out the door.

I think what we're saying maybe consistent with each other. Let me point to one of the records at the time:

http://www.winsupersite.com/article/reviews/the-road-to-gold...

A couple of key quotes:

"Previously, the Consumer Windows team had been lumped under Jim Allchin's Windows team, which was furiously working to complete Windows 2000, the company's enterprise OS product. But when it became obvious that a consumer version of Windows 2000 was out of the question, the stagnating Consumer Windows team finally got its wish: To create a final release in the Windows 9x product line"

and

"Just a year earlier, at the 1998 version of WinHEC, Bill Gates had announced that Windows 98 would be the end of the line."

There wasn't supposed to be a Win ME, and there shouldn't have been. Win 2000 was supposed to be the merge point of consumer and enterprise, but wasn't ready.

Maybe it was Silverberg that led the consumer team to create WinME, I don't know. What I do know is that most of the talent was working on the NT side by that point (not to say that the ME folks were hacks, but they weren't the strongest OS team MS had).

Whenever anyone talks about the problems that beset Microsoft it seems almost a universal consensus that it's political infighting/poor management.

An honest question, though: is some of it the tools and/or engineers?

I've never worked in a big software company so for all I know management can have these kind of devastating effects (for this long a period of time). I suppose I just have a hard time believing that everything that goes wrong is the fault of management (Vista, Zune, WP7 at this point) while everything that goes right is brilliant engineering (2000/NT, 360, Kinect).

> When was the last time Microsoft did anything like that?

As recently as last year. They claimed to have 30,000 engineers working on cloud services, which is not what I would consider a has-been market.

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