Rethinking Ray Ozzie
winsupersite.com
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Certain of our competitors' products and their rapid advancement and refinement of new usage scenarios have been quite noteworthy
could have been:
Our competitors are out-innovating us, and we're losing to them. I hate to lose and you should hate being losers too. So this is what we're going to do.
effective leaders deliver products that customers buy. ineffective ones write memos to other "leaders".
I think many would love to have Office available on all platforms.
Personally I would be thrilled to write C# with first class support on Linux (Mono is not close to having this yet).
the components you cite, sharepoint, sql server, are bought by IT departments that went with windows. once you switch to linux you do not have access to those tools, regardless of their greatness. and yeah, most of those tools are bundled in CALs anyhow, Sharepoint without SQL server?
Once I spent time with people they got more friendly and open. Yet if you do get a good conversation going you can expect the managers at the table to hang out of it. The managers always watch their words. Likewise if you talk to a random person in the cafeteria they will toe the party line.
In contrast one is safe to criticize Microsoft products provided they have been dropped or replaced. No love is shown for Windows Mobile or the Kin.
When you do criticize current practices/products in public there was an unwritten rule that one should always reference the competition. No one calls it out in words like "We can do better!", "This is user hostile!", "We're being to greedy by doing X!". Instead it is "We should focus on X because our competitor is going well on Y". Also "competitor" is always left non-specific, just like it is in your quote.
As such considering Ray Ozzie's former high org chart position I must congratulate him on saying as much as he did.
That's not to say that there aren't koolaid drinkers and that it won't ever be politically unwise to directly criticize your colleagues... But it's a diverse place, and, in my experience, cynicism exists in a big way there.
Interns do seem to be treated differently though. Not many criticisms are voiced around them.
Its good to hear not everyone got the same impression as me. On the other hand they may have been observing more private conversations than I am referring to. Still I cannot at all claim more experience than former full timers.
The /bad/ managers never wanted confrontation, were afraid to raise up problems, were autocratic to their reports and nebbishes to their own managers, and never tried to grow their people.
There are managers I regret leaving behind, and managers who I was very happy to see the back of.
It was a shame that they could not leverage him more effectively as I really think he had clear vision about where things were going.
I recall during one of my first internships (at Siemens, not Microsoft) my first task was to go over test results of electric motors being developed. I drafted an email with my results and fired it off to a number of people.
A short while later I was ushered off by one of the senior project managers. "Why'd you write that email?" "Um...?" "You don't call these things PROBLEMS, you call them ISSUES. Do you understand? You call them problems, people are going to think there are problems!"
And that was the moment I decided I wanted nothing to do with traditional engineering and the automative industry... unfortunately I had another 3.99 months to go on that internship at that point. The rest of the internship didn't go any better, and is still a massive source of antipatterns I still draw from today.
Funny note, those "issues" ended up costing the company millions in a product recall. Maybe they should've been called "problems" instead ;)
The neutering of language into corporate-speak is still one of the biggest red flags I look for when interviewing...
Yes, my exact experiences with that company. Only it lasted a lot more time, at different stints. Sigh.
If they are too blunt and direct in suggesting change, their established rivals paint them out as someone who "does not understand or value the organization's history", or "does not get the culture" etc.
The CEO often prefers to sit on the fence, without putting his/her entire weight behind the contrarian. Because s/he does not (or cannot) risk antagonizing the majority of the old guard. In the absence of a CEO's or board's full support, the contrarians start getting stymied in their plans as time goes on. Their words become less sharper, their plans less disruptive and their canvas much less "blue sky". Till comes a time when they prefer to just leave rather than tilt at windmills.
IMHO - Microsoft could have gone too ways. They could have gone full cash-cow, returned even more money to shareholders, and watched the franchise slowly shrink. (The IBM model, who seem to buy more shares back every year) Or they could have gone full-on towards R&D and killing their sacred cow with a better push into the post-PC world. In muddling between the two they did the worse of both worlds: they missed a tech wave, and punished their shareholders.
1) 2005 is four years after Hailstorm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_HailStorm) and already pretty late for a "services focus" to be forward-looking.
2) October 2010 is right about when Windows Phone 7 shipped, and therefore a year after the "reset" of the previous phone effort. At this point, "devices" is obvious to the point of "duh".
3) There's a world of difference between saying "X is important" and "X is important, therefore we should do Y".
> "The PC-centric/server-centric model has accreted simply immense complexity,"
This is presented as an insight. There is so little context given here, so maybe I'm just missing something, but it sounds much more like bullshit to me.
What exactly is less complex about "post-PC" or "post traditional server"? On the client, minding battery life and constantly dealing with connection loss is much more complex than an always-powered, always-connected PC. On the server front, managing VM instances is in many ways more complex than just running a single server, or a smaller set of them. People add these complexities because they give them something in return. But it is adding complexity, let us not deny it.
I never followed Ozzie too deeply, but this style of throwing around programmer jargon to make an all-around "nothing" point seems to be his style. I still remember hearing him say something along the lines of "RSS is the Unix pipe of the web". I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt when I heard that, to stretch my mind somewhat to believe that is actually a thing... But let's face it, the analogy is nonsense.
The API, mainly. Compare the size and cruftiness of the Windows API with the Android or iOS equivalents that a developer programs against.
The only thing MS needs to do is go modern instead of legacy for their new phones, but is that going to happen?
You know, I let it slide when the comment you replied to said it, but I disagree with this one. IMO most people who criticize Win32 just aren't familiar with it. I've heard plenty of people dismiss objc on similar grounds: simple unfamiliarity becomes "this is bad". Once you get over the initial learning curve it's quite easy to be productive with it.
The sheer complexity of modern computing devices and infrastructure, couple with the abundance of broadband Internet access, have resulted in the proliferation of "appliance-like" devices and cloud-based services. After all most of the time consumers want to view photos on their smartphone and not to deal with the file system. In the same vein, IT would rather fire up an EC2 instance than having to manage a physical server in their data center.
In my view, that's the gist of the post-PC/post-server centric world -- what on the surface today are pushed down to the inner layers, hidden away from users.
stats: https://twitter.com/janettu/status/380824535714377728
You really do have to be paranoid to survive, and the memos in the article are an example of that.
I'm actually not trying to argue that this definitely is the case, I'm just saying those profits don't automatically support the case you're making.
But since you ask, IIRC these make such a claim (especially the latter): http://paulgraham.com/microsoft.html http://paulgraham.com/cliffsnotes.html
RIM made money for a while too, but in the end they were doomed. I don't think that is true of MS, because they are just too big and do too many things. But people arguing that everything is OK because of the top line, I don't get.
They are not interested, or they are able to take a disinterested, i.e. impartial, view?
"it's clear now that the erstwhile Chief Software Architect was simply rowing against a tide of internal calcification."
Somehow I picture a lake of milk.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/ray-ozzies-stealthy-startup...
Basically stuff like google docs, dropbox, heroku, etc. were all trying to be made in Microsoft's image under Ozzie and they all sort of ignored him. Now Microsoft is scrambling with SkyDrive, Office 365, Windows 8, Azure, etc.
Microsoft also pushed out J Allard who had vision to compete with iPad. His team was also responsible for Xbox and Zune. Between Xbox you get the blueprint of how to deliver services people love and evolve with over time. With Zune you got the beautiful Metro design that Microsoft finally embraced. The Zune player was pretty much the blueprint for this style and it was outstanding software for a Windows app.
Microsoft 20 years ago was about finding brilliant people and letting them build brilliant businesses under the Microsoft umbrella. At some point around 2000 the name of the game is to make all things Windows and Office and that kind of protectionism pretty much put Microsoft consistently 3-5 years behind in areas that matter like Search, Mobile, Services, Cloud Infrastructure because they couldn't see how that benefitted Windows and Office.