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Comment by dschobel | Hacker News Reader

I find it weird that he's so transparent about "company X pays me now, company X's products are SO much better than anything I've used in the past".

Is this stuff compelling to engineers who care about technical merit rather than who is paying his salary?

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When a girl breaks up with you, you want to be sure she knows that the new one is way, way hotter. And smarter. And frankly has better friends.

It also strange that by his own admission, he's only been using the products a week - hardly enough time to start experiencing all of the little annoyances of a product.

He raves about GMail's threaded conversation view - this actually drives me crazy - it tries to do a lot of clever things, but sometimes you get client e-mails which are then forwarded / discussed internally and then everything gets out of step. The only way to have a non-threaded view is to use their super-cut down version. I much prefer the flexibility with Outlook. Outlook also has the preview pane - unless I'm mistaken, GMail doesn't have this option (if it does, it's not very discoverable) and this is also a major plus, much easier to scan and deal with e-mail quickly.

Personally I prefer the folder based approach of Outlook as well compared to the tags / labels of Gmail.

(And lastly, why use Chrome or Internet Explorer, Firefox with AdBlockPlus all the way...)

Chrome and AdBlock Plus are running nicely at the moment. :)

I hadn't heard about rolling out extensions yet. Do explain.

I think it is a feature of the upcoming 4.0 version.

See this site: http://www.chromeextensions.org/appearance-functioning/adblo...

Yes, i'm also running the Linux version aswell

I just tried it and it doesn't seem to be working completely. For example, adsense ads are completely unblocked.

Chrome isn't rendering mathML yet, AFAIK

All marketers are liars. This includes evangelists which is just another fancy name for marketers without sales quotas.

I think people are being too hard on him because they are pro-Microsoft or pro-Google instead of pro-Me, pro-You, or pro-Don.

If you consider Don as a corporation himself, what makes this so different than if Dell switched to Linux because MS stopped subsidizing Windows, and Dell started extolling the virtues of Linux over Windows? None.

It is only because we are so ingrained into thinking that employees should be the thralls of their companies even after being fired while the company themselves have no qualms about treating their employees as a cost/benefit commodity. This is a double standard.

Notice that "Evangelist" in his job title??? Yeah he's doing his job.

Ok, but the way it's written up, it's not very effective due to the fact that he's being paid by the company whose products he is now so enthusiastically embracing.

I think it would look a little bit more genuine if there were a thing or two he missed, or something he's ditching for a product that doesn't just happen to be a Google product.

The real news item is not "Google employee uses Google products", but that Google is hiring a guy that seems to be well regarded and that MS, for whatever reason, let go, which most commentators seem to indicate was a smart move for Google and a dumb one for MS; but I guess he can't really say that himself without coming across badly.

I think his blog post was very effective. You can tell because there is a huge thread about it right here.

I really enjoyed reading about him sticking it to Microsoft, and it sounds like they made a mistake firing such a guy.

For me more surprising thing was that Don didn't even try Gmail while working for Microsoft.

Good point. How can you argue that Outlook + Exchange is a better alternative to the competition when you don't know what the competition is.

Unfortunately that seemed to be part of the culture -- don't even bother learning about / using competitors products because you "know" yours is better. Many MS programmers have only ever played on the MS stack.

I think he probably did but didn't want to talk about it.

Bingo, you got it Stanley. I tried it several years ago to see what all the buzz was about. It wasn't until I got flooded with over 600 emails in two days that I could see how effective Gmail was at threading, organizing, and search.

At MSFT it is risky to openly use an iPhone. That and the fact the reception is terrible in my area really made it impossible to go with an iPhone. With Android available on Verizon it is a very viable option for me.

Don

Yea, remember when Ballmer personally almost smashed one?

What do you think got him 'downsized'?

Also Google docs is years away from catching up with Office, particularly excel.

Yeah, that actually took a little something away from the article, for me. Glad that he has a job though.

Yeah, it's a happy ending for sure. It seems like everyone who has ever met the guy likes him.

For those of us who don't really know who he is or what he was doing (other than a vague sense of "microsoft and startups") anyone care to comment?

http://dondodge.typepad.com/about.html

It's only natural that you use the software of the company for which you work. When at Microsoft, you use Microsoft products. When at Google, you use Google products. Of course, any tech person with a blog who made a switch from one suite to the other would write about how the change felt and whether it was for the better or the worse. I don't find anything sinister about it.

Plus, his points ring very true. I care about technical merit, not who is paying Don's salary - which means that if Don is right about a Google product being better in some way, I don't care if he's drawing a Google salary at the time he says it.

Though I'm sure he feels bitter now, his post makes me think of the phrase 'don't burn bridges'. You never know what the future will hold.

It made me think of that phrase too, but because he heaps praise and gratitude upon his former employer. I didn't get any bitterness. But I don't know who this guy is. Maybe I'm missing some context.

Developers choose their dev tools and platforms based on technical merit, experience, cost, and a variety of other factors. I don't believe that any "evangelist" including me, could convince a developer to use a technology just because we say nice things about it.

Xobni, a Y Combinator company, is a good example. They chose to build on Microsoft long before I came along. But, once we connected I was able to help them get access to software, technical support, consulting, and lots of PR and exposure to MSFT, the press, VCs, etc.

I am not a "marketing" or PR guy. I help startups and developers get things done, get them help when they ask, etc.

In my post I highlighted some of the things I noticed about the Google alternatives. I don't think I went al the way to say Google is better in every case and those Microsoft products are bad. If I left that impression I am sorry.

There are lots of choices. No one tool or product will be the best in all possible use cases. Work loads and requirements are different, and the choice of tool or platform can vary. My job as an evangelist is to make people aware or what exists, and make it easy for them to get access to the help they need.

Thanks,

Don Dodge

Some comparisons seemed odd to me. Outlook 2010 has conversation view, and MS has office web apps now, as an employee he must have had access to the above.

He has my wishes for the future. Hopefully, he would continue doing great work at Google

As a Microsoft employee, he'd probably never used Gmail/Gdocs very much.

I've been at Google a year now, and I'm still amazed how much more productive Gmail makes me (vs Outlook) -- I'd never used it in a corporate setting.

I thought as a Microsoft employee.. they'd be forbidden from publicly endorsing GMail or Google Docs.

We are, under the name of Microsoft. Under our own name we can say anything we want, for the most part.

Microsoft employees generally get divided into two camps: those who will only ever use an MS product and never consider the competition no matter what, and those who will use whatever product they deem is best for their needs. Considering most MS employees are relatively new to the company, more people tend to fall into the latter. It's generally only the people who have been here for a decade or more that tend to be the former.

All I could wonder is how he never really gave all of the Google apps a try before further making it a they [MS or Google I don't really care] paid me so I am using their stuff and will tell everyone how awesome it is.

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