Microsoft's Not So Happy Family

D.A. Zollinger writes "Reports from Redmond are that Microsoft Employees are not happy with the double delay of Windows and Office being pushed back into 2007. EETimes is reporting that some Microsoft employees are calling for the termination of several top managers Including Brian Valentine, Jim Allchin, and Steve Ballmer for the delay debacle. The report references a blog by Who da'Punk, an anonymous Microsoft employee who asks, where's the accountability for failure? So far the blog entry has generated over 350 comments from Microsoft insiders and outsiders."

Headless chicken

Not a good day to be a fly on the wall in Ballmers office.

"I'm going to fucking kill Microsoft!"
HURL!
THUD!
SPLAT!

Actually though, chopping the head off the chicken might seem like a good idea at the time until you realise its the arsehole that becomes the new leader.

Re:Headless chicken

Not a good day to be a fly on the wall in Ballmers office.

???

Or did you mean, funny day to be a fly on the wall in Ballmers office, but bad day to be a chair?

Re:Headless chicken

Or did you mean, funny day to be a fly on the wall in Ballmers office, but bad day to be a chair?

What do you think the fly is going to get hit with?

Re:Headless chicken

>Or did you mean, funny day to be a fly on the wall in Ballmers office, but bad day to be a chair?
What do you think the fly is going to get hit with?

You see, I've once killed a mosquito with an overhead swing of an axe. I'm a clumsy oaf, but so far my accuracy with axes against insects is 100% (1/1). Now, considering that the smallest throwable thing in an office is a lot wider than an axe's blade, I believe that Ballmer can make it.
His office is pretty big, so he has at least as many tries as he has chairs.

Re:Headless chicken

From what I understand, his office is only twice as big as any of the other employees. It's just two regular offices with the wall torn out.

Now as for who tore the wall out and what sort of chair was used in that process, I haven't the slightest idea.

Re:Headless chicken

If Ballmer could hit his targets, he wouldn't be in this fix.

Re:Headless chicken

Sounds to me like Microsoft is one of the safer places to be, if you're a bug.

If you could get rid of bugs by throwing chairs at them, Ballmer could have shipped Vista years ago.

It's unfortunate

Here's the thing. It's not like setting a schedule is going to magically make something happen. Programs are written by programmers, they aren't willed into existence by Gantt charts, no matter what PMs think.

The only problem here is not that the release was pushed back, it's that someone's Gantt chart wasn't updated with good information. So when the real numbers went in, the "realistic shipdate" suddenly met reality.

Should someone get fired? Yeah. Probably the managers who didn't do their job and keep upper management up to date with correct project status. Anyone else? Yeah. Those managers who took a ship or die attitude and will end up burning their teams out in the next year. And finally those managers who knew reality but continued to live in their fairyland (not the Mac one) where products are developed by sheer management willpower alone.

Lots of blame to go around, but the bottom line is that the product was never going to make its shipdate. The question now is whether the revised date is realistic and how much is Microsoft willing to trim back features in order to meet it if further delays are encountered.

Re:It's unfortunate

From what i understand they tried to rewrite the dungpile of spaghetticode in .Net technologies but failed to get any descent performance and stability, Late into the process they decided to rip the new code out and start over with the old code again. The mistake was that .Net isnt usable for larger projects.

I would love to get some more facts about this, link away =)

Re:It's unfortunate

The only reason I read the comments on this story was to figure out what the heck Microsoft could have been doing all this time. Microsoft has a bad reputation with regard to the quality of their code. But they have a really good reputation for shipping products. I also know some really smart people working at Microsoft - and I'm sure there are lots of others I don't know.

So I'm trying to figure out what all these smart people known for shipping products could have been doing all this time. The only thing that makes sense is a scenario like the one you described. In other words, that the management had some unrealistic requirement that they were unwilling to compromise. Porting mountains of existing code to .NET sounds exactly like one of the few things that could have bogged down so many smart people for so long. Maybe Microsoft finally is too big for their own good and they're collapsing under the weight of all the pointy haired bosses.

They do?!?

Microsoft has a bad reputation with regard to the quality of their code. But they have a really good reputation for shipping products.

This is news to me. Maybe you mean eventually shipping product, but their general reputation is for always being years late and always dropping features to make even the late dates.

Re:It's unfortunate

The only reason I read the comments on this story was to figure out what the heck Microsoft could have been doing all this time.

I think maybe the Windows codebase has simply finally reached a level of complexity that renders it unmanagable by mortal humans. To quote an anonymous poster to the linked blog:

Today's announcement is of course no surprise to anyone inside MS. The only surprise is that it was such a short delay announced.Basically we do not believe Vista will make January 2007 or even March 2007. Anyone with any access knows what a frankenstein's monster NT is on the inside. At some point there is a law of diminishing returns
trying to do anything to it at all, it seems like that limit is being reached today. The release is pushed back because of bugs but fixing those bugs will create more bugs. It is just godawful to be honest.

Assuming that is true, then probably the only way for Microsoft to move forward and still maintain backwards compatibility with old code is to do what Apple did: Ditch the OS, start fresh with a new one, and provide backwards compatibility with existing Windows applications by shipping the "legacy OS" as an included software application that runs in an emulator. Given the prevalence of VMWare-style technology these days, that should be quite doable; of course getting the new OS up to snuff might take a few years.

Re:It's unfortunate

There was a point a few years ago where MS had the choice-- build a modular architecture similar to WinCE & Linux. If one component was delayed, it wouldn't necessarily add to the delay of the core OS or other components.

The other choice was to continue along the monolithic line, which means that the core OS is more likely to be delayed by a delay amongst the smaller components.

Microsoft chose to continue along the monolithic path, because the modular path pushed out the deadline by a year.

Re:It's unfortunate

Actually, for the Vista development one aspect of a build verification has been to strictly monitor the interdependencies of each individual dlls/exe's. They've establishes a 'layering' scheme, where no component in layer X can take a dependency on a component in layer Y, where layer Y>X. The end goal is that one day they want to be able to draw lines between layers and consider these autonomous units that can be managed independently. So if you want to make a UI-less build of Vista (hypothetically), you could cut everything above and including the UI level and not be burned by finding all these command line utilities that assume they are running in a UI based shell.

It's still a monolith system, but it's taking an interesting approach towards modularization.

Re:It's unfortunate

Probably not.

Apple's whole development team has probably turned over completely since then, with most of the head guys coming from former NeXT.

We worship Steve now. Hail Steve!

And really, that's meant to be funny, but it's almost serious. What a job Steve's done, and what a vivid contrast to Ballmer and friends.

Isn't it funny that Steve Ballmer is never Steve? No, if we say Steve without a last name, it's always Jobs.

D

Re:It's unfortunate

Software most certainly falls into the category as well. Any process where an advancement is used to produce further advancements gets an exponential nature.

I'm struggling to think of any advancement (at least in recorded history) that *doesn't* build on prior advancements.

In software it couldn't be more clearer. After you write your first compiler in machine code, writing your next compiler will be much easier as you base it on the previous step.

Right. But that doesn't mean the 6th revision of that compiler will be as quick to develop as the second.

Indeed, based on the history of software development thus far, the chances of it taking anything less than an order of magnitude *more* time to develop are quite small.

When they started the development of Vista, they had already an operating system to build on and a variety of advanced development tools. With that as a starting point it should have been an order of magnitude faster than the previous step.

Your theory sounds nice, but I'm not aware of any mature software projects for which it has actually happened. In pretty much every case, the more developed a codebase is, the *longer* it takes for subsequent versions to appear (assuming the changes are on the same scale).

I think it would have been perfectly reasonable for Vista to have taken on the order of 3 - 4 years to develop (in line with Win2k from NT4). In fact, if you take into account that they basically "started from scratch" again around 2003, that's about how long it *will* have taken. The real reason Vista (NT 6.0) is late is because of the "lost" 2 years of work between XP (NT 5.1) and Windows 2003 (NT 5.2). Arguably, Microsoft should have released an "XP second edition" (NT 5.3) in 2003/4 - but since the obvious differences between it and XP wouldn't have been large, it was probably considered a waste of time.

Basically, the recent NT family tree looks like this (it's rather difficult to do ASCII art on Slashdot, I hope you can understand):

Windows 2000 (NT 5.0)

..............V

............Windows XP (NT 5.1)

.............V..............V

Windows 2003 (NT 5.2).....Longhorn (NT 6.0)

...V.......................V

...V..........(Code discarded)

...V.............V

Windows Vista (NT 6.0)

Basically, XP branched off into Windows 2003 and Vista (then Longhorn). But around the time Windows 2003 was released, they decided that it was a much better codebase to develop Vista from, so the existing Vista codebase was scrapped and the project started afresh from Windows 2003 (more accurately, a lot of the "Vista" development and "Windows 2003" development was the same and, technically, kept).

It's interesting to note FreeBSD had similar problems around their 4.x, 5.x and 6.x codebases. Arguably, the VM fiasco in the early 2.6 kernels was along similar principles, if not scale (but then again, the Linux kernel is a dramatically smaller project than Windows, so in relative scale they might be somewhat comparable).

The point here is that software development is not a field where advancement is anything close to "exponetial". If anything, it's the exact opposite - the more mature a codebase gets, the *slower* releases become. The "software development" curve looks more like a bell, than anything linear or exponential.

Ballmer Replies!

In other news, Steve Ballmer vowed to "fucking kill" all anonymous Microsoft employees.

"I've done it before and I'll do it again," he said. "Anonymity has no place at Microsoft."

Re:Just a figure of speech

The thing that Linux has over Microsoft is a shift in accountability. Microsoft has the attitude that if any six-year-old broken as hell 3rd party product doesn't work on the newest Windows, their customers aren't going to upgrade. And they may be right, at that. But this leads to whole DIVISIONS of programmers writing bits into the operating system that detect if the application in question is Defunct Spreadsheet Product version 0.55 alpha, and hacking the registry to work in the old (and quite broken) way that the program expected when it was written back in 1997. Microsoft holds itself responsible for busted 3rd party applications. No such thing exists in open source, that I'm aware of. If the Linux kernel is behaving incorrectly, and fixing it breaks a 3rd party application, the fix gets made and nobody looks back. It's up to the app developer to make it work with the new system. This means that old applications on Linux aren't guaranteed to "just work" for decades to come, which might slow adoption by some businesses that don't want to worry about such things, but it also means they're not tied to being backwards compatible forever. The cost of that compatibility in Windows is huge, and affects all these things like security, filesystems, etc.

Can you hear that noise in the background?

Yes, that rumbling noise in the background, faint at first, but growing louder with each passing moment... yes, soon enough you can tell that it is a crowd of people... they are chanting... what are they saying.... I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU SO, I TOLD YOU SO

Joking aside, this shouldn't even be news (sorta) its as unexpected as a suicide bomber in the middle east somewhere. Lets see, the EU, Mass., other entire countries dumping MS, Korea, and the response from MS has been FUD and 'smoke and mirrors' for several years now. I think its time for MS to put up or shut up. They have promised to fix all the woes of Internet users for several years now... time they did some of that, or simply hide in their cubes eating humble pie, reading the news about their stock with FF.

No, not a case of Linux fanboi, just observation. I'm rather tired of hearing how MS is going to fix this or that, and all they've fixed is prices in the past. On that issue, I'm rather happy with the way Open Source software is handling these issues, rather more up front about it, and trying to cobble together associations and software to battle the problems instead of promising the panacea of software at the mere cost of one arm and one leg per user.

Re:Can you hear that noise in the background?

Maybe they'll continue to follow in Apple's footsteps and actually produce a decent OS one of these days. I, for one, welcome disruptions like this in stagnant companies. With all of the press releases and developers videos coming out it's starting to feel like developers are actually taking hold of the software and moving it in the direction they want it to go rather than the marketing department controlling everything.

I'll still be a proponent of alternative operating systems because it's just not good to be limited, but I would be very happy to see MS turn out a decent product for once.

Make no mistake

Who da'Punk is in fact the real enemy. He wants to end the bloat at Microsoft and convert it into a lean and mean machine of productivity. Imagine what options open source would have if people in Microsoft where devoted to create great software for the users, instead of pursuing their own petty concerns in the corporate ladder. If Who da'Punk and others like him had their way, Microsoft would be user-centric, but keeping the users always within the Microsoft universe. He's planning a world of happy slaves of Microsoft. Now we are all slaves, but at least not happy. In the unsatisfaction of slaves the seeds of change lay. If everybody was contented, the chances of breaking the Microsoft monopoly would be nil (on the other side, we'd be happier and have great software, but still slaves).

So help him not. Cheer Balmer instead. He's our real ally in this fight.

Re:Now that's just silly

My point is that we are in a situation of monopoly that will always by its own nature restrict the choice of users to the monopoly universe. The only way of breaking that stranglehold is through the cracks in the monopoly. If those cracks are plastered there is no way out. Of course the quality of software is more important than politics, but I believe than the quality of anything in a monopoly culture will never be so good as the quality of that same thing in a culture of free competition. So is a matter of short-ter versus long-term quality, IMHO.

Re:Now that's just silly

There's nothing wrong with a monopoly if it really is the best choice as there's no anti-competitive things going on to make it a trust. (Monopolies can be fine; trusts are bad.) What you're suggesting is that if MS produces the best OS ever it will be bad for the consumer. What? That makes no sense unless your political idology is your number one factor in decision making for what software to use. I have no problem buying software if it's worth the cost of paying for it.

If MS makes such a superior OS -- which I doubt, not because it's MS but because it's too dofficult for anyone to do at all -- either FOSS raises it's bar or it dies. That's not because MS is a monopoly. That would be because FOSS would not be able to survive in the free market.

Look at OpenOffice.org. People compare it to MS Office and they say it's slow and bloated. Compared to MS Office. I'd challenge someone to find any application with more needless bloat than MS Office. For years the number one complaint about the entire Office line was that it was always bloatware. Now OOo comes along and bloat isn't a problem? I'm sorry, that's BS and we all know it. OOo is going nowhere until the codebase is cleaned up. The only reasons it's as popular as it is are because it's FOSS and because it's the only thing besides MS Office. As it stands now you decide if you want to pay for MS Office. If you don't, you get OOo. Not because OOo is better than MS Office (which should be why you choose any piece of software, right?) but simply because it's cheaper. This is like choosing GIMP over Photoshop. If you're a professional, you only do it when you lack the money to afford the real deal (which then suggests you're possibly not as professional as you think).

Now look at Linux. People chose Linux because for what they want to do, the OS is actually better than other OSs. Look at Firefox. People chose that over IE because it's better. Hadly anybody used the old Mozilla Suite for exactly the same reasons that OOo rather sucks. The fact that Linux in particular costs so much less is rather irrlevant to the discussion. Now look at things like LAMP vs Windows/IIS/MS SQL/ASP. Again, choice has little to nothing to do with the lisencing costs. It's what solution you know better, and what you want to do with it.

Re:Now that's just silly

I'd challenge someone to find any application with more needless bloat than MS Office.

Azareus.

in the meantime...

... people will buy Vista anyway because they will see Microsoft ads on TV 4 times a day. Microsoft as a company may be rotten, Vista as a project may have failed, but still.

Re:in the meantime...

People buy Vista because the manufacturer of their new computer decided to pre-install it.
Consumers are not actively making an OS choice. They take what is fed to them.

Microsoft insiders are probably just annoyed...

...that their stock options aren't going to be worth as much. The truth is that Microsoft has very good reasons to delay Vista, only some of which they control. Anyone who has installed the beta can see that it has a long way to go before it reaches release quality. Vista is a fairly big update to the Windows code base, and the fact that it is not stable or speedy enough yet for day-to-day use at this late stage must be a factor in their decision to put it back.
Externally, Vista changes the driver model, and the hardware manufacturers seem to be lagging behind. There is no point releasing an OS if no one can use their graphics cards.
Microsoft has a lot riding on Vista, the first desktop OS release since 2001. They will not have decided to slip lightly.

This just in...

Microsoft is filling some recently vacated positions. The time to send your resume is now.

Only on thing for it

There is one thing that will get Microsoft's employee's moral back up, a Chair-Throwing-Monkey-Dance! I'm sure they'll be able to find someone who can supply.

Re:Interesting to point out...

There will be plenty of people that are tired XP and its constant security problems by now. They will upgrade the day Vista is out, thinking it will be the solution to all their problems. The advertising for Vista will be *very good*. You can bet on that.

Microsoft will make sure that people using XP will not be able to easily communicate with the new applications on Vista. Companies will be scared of having some computers running XP and newer ones running Vista. Companies loving standardising things.

People will upgrade before too long. If not voluntarily, they will be forced to.

The only thing Microsoft need to do to almost guarantee success is to get the thing released soon before Mac + Linux start getting too popular!

People want Windows.

Even MS employees know they can't sell their crap, they have to force it down peoples throats or it won't sell.

Nonsense, people want Windows. If Dell went 100% Linux tomorrow their sales would drop to near zero and people would buy Gateways, Compaqs, etc.

Also, Apple's Mac OS X has been a far better alternative for regular users than Linux for several years now yet nearly everyone sticks with Windows.

I own a Mac, my PC dual boots Windows and Linux, but I realize I am part of a very small minority. Most people don't want Mac OS X or Linux. That is reality, it may change over time but that it the state of things at the moment.

Re:People want Windows.

The day linux takes 15% of the desktop market, you'll see microsoft scrambling to actually turn windows into a good OS.

s/turn/make/
s/into/look like/

Reference: Internet Explorer 7. Their solution was to change up the interface as a priority. The actual rendering of web pages is still far inferior to all other modern browsers.

Repeat after me: With Microsoft, it has never been about making a good product. It has been about making a product that is good enough to generate revenue, even if it is by force.

The funny part about this is Vista (in its original design) might have actually been about making a good product and taking computing to the next level. However, it is apparent that the marketing-centric Microsoft management style is unable to innovate enough to make this happen and as a result, Vista (when released) will bring very little to the table (not that this matters).

Where Future?

So where is computing's future going to come from? All these years we've been giving MS monopoly rent for OS software in the belief that we were paying for an exciting future, and now the company that's been taking our money is going to give us another "ticking time-bomb of unstable code".

After five years and more than a hundred billion dollars revenue from computer users, Microsoft will revamp Vista at the 11th hour to turn it into a little more than a skin on XP, which was little more than a skin on 2K.

Almost all recent innovations in computing have come from organisations with orders of magnitude less revenue than MS. We are simply not getting value for money. This monopoly must be broken so competition and progress can resume. Formats, APIs, and communication protocols MUST be documented and opened to allow competitors a level playing field.

Anything else will just perpetuate the current stagnant, inbred computing environment.

Re:Where Future?

Microsoft makes lots of money selling those boxes. Their business model is tied to those boxes just as much as the big record companies business model is to moving their little bits of plastic. The data bits on the bits of plastic aren't nearly as important to the business plan as moving the bits of plastic.

This whole thing with Vista reads like a chapter on "Error, Distance and Camouflage" as described by Livingston in his book "The new Plague" back in 1985. This is going to get very interesting when it gets to the "End of Project Mismatch Discovery" stage.

Re:Where Future?

I was just paying them for an operating system.

No, you weren't. If you'd bought an operating system, you'd be able to keep it and put it into other computers. You'd be able to customise it to work the way you want to. You'd be able to update the bits that don't work the way you want, when you want. You'd be able look under the hood and learn how it works. It would be YOURS to do with as you saw fit.

What you have is an instance, a snapshot of somebody else's development cycle. It's locked to the hardware, so it'll die when the electronics does, and you'll have to pay for it all over again. They'll grudgingly fix the most dangerous flaws when THEY feel like it, not when you're being hurt by them. It's not your operating system, it's theirs. And don't you ever forget it.

The entire computer industry has been stifled for years. We need competition, and we need it badly.

Monopoly

If Microsoft didn't have a monopoly in the OS market, these management problems probably would have crippled the company and product by now.

On the other hand, if they didn't have a monopoly, perhaps everyone would be focused on competing and improving their OS, and these problems would not come up.

evolutionary systems

So 20+ years of "making money" is not a way to strategically guide the evolution of a large software project. It's a feedback loop that appears to lead to an evolutionary dead end.

Another 5-10 years or so and we'll be able to compare & contrast with OSS- ie. letting developers and user community determine where a product goes...

Don't get me wrong, I give MS lots of credit. I don't think PC's would be where they are today without them. It's gratifying to me though that the "good of the whole" can win over a 10yr lead and billions of dollars in "R&D" & marketing.

Change in founding philosophy

From the article:

  "But even as some on the Mini-Microsoft blog wished for Maria Antoinette-style retribution, other employees defended the decision, if not the people who made it.

"Yes, it's painful. Yes, it's embarrassing," wrote Robert Scoble, a company technical evangelist, on his Scobelizer blog. "But I'd rather have a slipped date than a cruddy product.""

It would have been nice if they had this philosophy a couple of decades ago, rather than trying to transition to a "first in quality rather than first in marketplace" maxim now after all the messes they have institutionalized and all the good, innovative companies that followed the above maxim they have dispatched.

How much process is too much?

One of the comments [blogspot.com] is particularly interesting:

Want to see Vista ship?

Get rid of 90% of the Process that goes between writing the code and getting it checked in.... get rid of the process that has people working at 3AM on Sunday morning NOT to fix bugs, NOT to write features, NOT to make the product more stable, but only to move marbles from one coffee can to another coffee can....

Because that's where all the time is going, and that's why people working on Vista are closing their doors and literally weeping in frustration at their desks.

There's a continuum between "cowboy coders" and process paralysis. Sounds as if Microsoft has moved too far towards one of the extremes.

Re:How much process is too much?

Either that or the person responsible for that comment is one of the cowboy coders, for whom any non-coding time is seen as a waste (ie, testing, retesting, documentation, etc).

Regurgatated from the belly of the beast

I quit Microsoft (Windows division) in late 2005 after working there for many years. This was one of the best decisions of my life. I am posting this anonymously because I don't know where I stand with regard to NDAs, non-soliciting agreements etc... (all the crap they make you sign when you join and remind you of in your exit interview.)

First, I can tell you exactly what the "process" the blog post is referring to -- it's not an issue of cowboy coders vs. reasonable process and management. Ask anyone who has worked on longhorn questions like: "how many VBLs are there anyway?" and "do you think quality gates have improved the codebase or not?" and (if they have anything to do with test) "what do you think of WTT?". Work spent to satisfy this process consumes way too much of the average developer's time and contributes little or nothing to the overall stability of the codebase.

Next, I know several MS engineers who are on the fence about leaving after the longhorn deathmarch fisaco and the FY06 compensation package. All I have to say on this front is, again, leaving was one of the best moves I ever made. Not to drag Microsoft through the mud (though that's what slashdot is all about, right?) but I agree 100% with mini about the axe needing to fall on some very senior people. Senior management at MS is compensated extraordinarily well (GMs, VPs all make well over $500k/year total compensation). There are way too many of these people and not only do they not write code or contribute meaningfully to the product, they make the lives of the rank and file harder with their bullshit process ideas and beurocracy. Here's a crazy recipe for shipping longhorn: fire some of the windows leadership, give the rest of the windows management 0 bonus and use the money you saved to give real out-of-band raises to the best engineers in the company. When you give them the raises say something like: "We fucked up, we paid management way too much and have been neglecting our real #1 resource which is smart engineers". The brightest people I know work at Microsoft but if things don't change I suspect I won't be saying this for long.

Re:Regurgatated from the belly of the beast

They'll never do the out-of-band raises. Microsoft is too corporate and the corporate class system will not tolerate pay and benefits systems that allow "workers" to be paid more than "management." Ever. Even for one FY cycle.

It only works that way at tech companies run by the engineers that started them, and then only temporarily, until either enough management types are brought in from the outside or until the engineers with stock options and influence decide its not any fun anymore and leave. The latter is a real death knell, since those original engineers are the ones to whom the management guys owe *their* jobs to and it's hard for management to push the corporate class system when their are engineers still there who have both the proven track record and the financial resources to call bullshit on them.

But when it does reach that point, it becomes Just Another Corporation where the corporate class system gets re-introduced and the company is ultimately run by its marketing arm like any other corporation, hoping that nobody sees the mediocrity through the bullshit.

I just wonder how long it will take Google to get like that, or if they have discovered some way around it.

Hello?! Accountability? This is WINDOWS!

Let's be honest here...as long as windows maintains it's current market share it does not matter.

If you work in a windows shop, and run into your CIO or IT head cheese ask this simple question "What would have to happen for you to SERIOUSLY consider dumping windows for some other desktop OS platform"

Chances are they will just give you a blank stare. That alone should tell you that ANY delay in the next version of windows will have ZERO effect on Microsoft's market.

Mod parent DOWN!

Have you realized that he CAN'T change the company from inside?

He says it, he LIKES working there, but he needs to point out the problems. If he tries to do something for a change in a draconian environment, he might as well be fired. IMHO you haven't read EVEN ONE of his blog entries. He LOVES Microsoft, and he WANTS to change it.

Do you think you REALLY can change a WHOLE WORK STRUCTURE in a company just by going to your boss and saying "we need to get rid of these problems"? Oh wait, this one's better. "Boss, we need you to get fired".

The real problem is that Ballmer is F**KING BLIND, he WON'T ACCEPT that there are problems in his company. Microsoft is a time bomb. You should be glad that we have Mini-MSFT to alert the shareholders about the precarious condition of the company.

Re:MiniMSFT is a punk coward

Hate to say this, but I expect more from Slashdot moderation than for this article to be considered 'insightful.'

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man [wikipedia.org]

Well, why not?

Look, kicking Ballmer and a few other people just below him upstairs, sideways or out couldn't cause any more turmoil in these critically wounded projects. And the projects that are working fine would no doubt continue fine.

The big problem is that this would be tantamount to an admission of weakness. It would cause a short term dip in the stock price, and more seriously create the impression of a chink in the armor.

Unless... They appointed somebody in Ballmer's place who would immediately wipe away the memory of all that. And boy, do I have a candidate for them. Wait for it... It's...

Jean-Louis Gasee.

Why?

(1) He's soave. He'd be a palate cleansing draught of Perrier to Ballmer's greasy bag of deep fried pork rinds and Gates's Technicolor Pop Rocks persona.

(2) He has the respect of engineers. He's cool. The proof? One word: BeOS. It would help recruiting of talent. The Linux snobs wouldn't have anybody in the MS corner office who was a convenient joke.

(3) He's European. French (duh). I mean, put yourself in the EU's shoes. An American monopoly is throwing it's weight around, and you've seen the frightening videos of its leader's nearly indescribable antics rallying the troops. How could this not evoke the nightmare of torchlit nighttime rallies and different supreme leader's rants?

Of course, his actual track record as a businessman is, uh, mixed. He had trouble getting product out as the head of the Mac development. He missed his opportunity to sell an 80 million dollar company to Apple for 200 million, and ended up selling it to Palm for 11 million . But he could credibly show up for work in jeans, a turtleneck and gold ear stud -- who could put a price on that? Sandwiching him between the board on one hand and carefully senior managers on the other, this could be a major win.

22 months ago in my Slashdot journal

As much as I would be happier to just ignore it, there is something about the increasing Longhorn hysteria that is reminiscent of the depths Apple slid into in the mid-90s.

There were a succession of enticing technology demos promoted as seeds of totally new architectures, more than a couple of which almost survived deployment then in the process of their ultimate abandonment burnt many fans.

But the ask was always too big, just the same as it has always been with every other monolithic attempt at software over engineering.

The one thing we can count on from Microsoft is that they will eventually bring out something which they will tell us is Longhorn. They are too political to contemplate honest abandonment. But all they will ever deliver will be cherry picked features grafted onto their already long suffering underlying architcture.

(continues) [slashdot.org]

The thing that makes this even wierder is that the betas of XP made it actually look like they might have been getting somewhere, but this time around even the betas are apparently off putting.

I'm relying here on reports from otherwise bright people who actually try to use the stuff, as the weekend provided almost the only excuse I've had to curse M$ software to its face in years. Normally I can just stick with the line which has done almost everything I've asked of it since 1984, but now I guess I might have to revert to evangelising with that client before I'm forced to walk away.

Shorter development cycles the answer?

From my own experience the following usually happens.

The development cycle usually consists of sitting in meetings while the architects and project managers hmmm and hah over what features to scope and de-scope for this particular release. This usually achieves nothing, at the very last minute they'll tell us to design something which has a set of features that don't interact well and require others that have been de-scoped. We now have exactly one week to code and module test the thing.

After many late nights the code is finished and the next few weeks are frought with Integration nightmares that the managers failed to take account of in their initial high level design. This isn't usually as bad as it should be as those of us doing the actual coding can often identify issues at the implementation stage and fix them there. When we tell the managers about this it usually offends them.

Integration complete, there is now about 5% of the work left to do in tidying up loose ends and streamlining code. The powers that be deem this to be un-necessary and my name appears on the Gantt chart of another project. Because I didn't get a chance to complete this final 5% of the work I will probably face a Bugzilla email deluge in the next month.

The answer, short development cycles, Extreme programming, unified process etc.>

Design, code, test and integrate in 3 -4 week cycles. Design decisions can't be drawn out and must be made quickly, coding and testing is done in manageable amounts and integration no longer presents a nightmare. Code is good the first time around for the small number of features implemented in that cycle, and far less buggy.

Unfortunately people are too stuck in their ways to change.

Terminate?

some Microsoft employees are calling for the termination of several top managers

Doesn't that qualify as a death threat?

It's very hard to update a mature codebase

Posting anonymously - we're seeing many of these issues at my employer, and I'd rather keep any tracability out of this, as many people are working very hard to find a way through

There have been huge numbers of rather fatuous comments of the "GANTT chart meets reality" type. My feeling is that these must have been written by people who simply have no understanding of the issues involved in updating a huge existing codebase so that it works to a commercial level of quality and retains backward compatibility with most of what is out there.

It's almost unheard of to find a large mature codebase which is particularly clean. What would have started out as a clean architecture gets pulled out of shape with bug fixes, new features, support for new architectures and so on over time. In particular, many fixes are done in a 'quick and dirty' fashion because there's a need to correct a critical security flaw now, so a quick fix is preferred to a considered refactoring of the relevant code.

Now, the GANTT chart bit isn't so bad: PM asks the developers, who (usually, anyway!) know their codebases well, to say how long it will take to develop a particular feature, and what the dependencies will be. Most people actually get this part somewhere about right. They write their code, unit test it and put it into an integration build. Everything seems fine.

Where things start to go wrong is where you introduce the next level of testing: beta testing out with customers. The messy codebase starts to bite you hard, with obscure bugs which turn out to be due to the presence of some fix which is essential to another area. Fixing the fix turns out to have ramifications elsewhere, and the whole thing can slide out of control quickly.

My guess is that this is where Microsoft is with Vista: they have 99.9% of everything working very well,but there's 0.1% which is a mess, but which is essential to having the stability needed to launch. Problem is that getting the 0.1% right is actually a huge effort, with unknown impacts across the whole codebase.

You can't even really blame the managers for letting the codebase get into such a mess. The issue is an accumulation of short-term fixes, none of which is, in and of itself, a problem, but when you have thousands of these hacks, maintenance becmes a nightmare. trouble is that the managers and developers who allowed this to happen were merely responding to direction from on high (e.g. "fixing security issues is now our highest priority - I want to see our response time down as low as possible"), which makes considered refactoring impossible.

Re:It's very hard to update a mature codebase

This is one of the things that's nice about open source (and really freaking annoying at the same time) - you can just decide to forget about backwards compatibility and go ahead and break old stuff. Since the source is open, someone can fix old programs to match the new API.

I'm sure most people here has had some experience with Mozilla deciding to alter some bit of the codebase to make it cleaner and it breaking some extension. It's "OK" because most of the extensions are open source, and it's possible to fix them to match the new API.

Likewise, I'm currently working with an open source project where I work (gonna keep this abstract enough so I don't need to be AC :)), and had to jump to the current nightly builds due to needed functionality. Unfortunately, the new version breaks backwards compatibility with the old stable version. Fortuantely, I have all the source code, so I was able to upgrade my plugin to work with the new APIs.

The source code is also invaluable due to the absolutely cruddy API documentation that comes with the project, but I've had similar problems with closed source products ("I wonder why all the examples use C-style comments in XML? And what they call XQuery appears to be something they made up on their own?"), but at least with the open source project I can work my way through it and directly contact the developers if I need to.

Unfortunately, this only works in the open source world when everything is open source. When Mozilla 1.0 rolled out, they had changed some of the APIs since the Mozilla 0.9.x builds, which broke some closed source plugins. One plugin in particular (the Adobe SVG viewer plugin) was never updated to support the new API. Of course, with native SVG support, that's really irrelevant now, but it was annoying back when it happened.

pressure much?

I think MSFT management is just afraid cuz of all the build up for Vista that if it goes out the door and is borked then they'll seriously loose mindshare.

I'm hoping [as an individual fed up with windows] that Vista is a flop. I'd love to hear about 0-day exploits and the like. Frankly I'm tired of rampant vendor lockin, bloaty OSes and inferior technology.

Like just recently I had to buy a copy of Word for a publishing deal. Cost me $286 CDN. What does that give me? A word processor that only runs in Windows and only edits Word files. The latter bit doesn't sound so bad until you realize the format is not properly documented anywhere and essentially requires me to keep using Windows and Word to work with the files.

Whereas, in the "real world", I can build my own Linux distro [e.g. gentoo] for free, install OpenOffice for free and be editting documents in no time flat. Then I can move those documents to my BSD or Windows machines if I want. Heck, I can even hack the document [ala unzip and sed] if I want to do something not natively supported by OO directly [e.g. substituting all fonts in the document instantly].

So on Vista launch-eve I'll drink a pint in hopes that their initial release is a total flop. :-)

MS employees -- meet reality

I think for many years, many Microsoft employees have assumed that they are walking on water because, after all, how could they not be, given the financial success of the company.

But I think reality is catching up with the company: Microsoft doesn't walk on water technically, they are producing roughly the same kind of software today as other big software vendors (and that's actually an improvement over where they were a few years ago).

Microsoft is turning more and more into the IBM of 20 years ago, and that means that they are getting technically better than they used to be, and financially less successful. Welcome to reality.

Great Comment

This was a very interesting comment on the blog site:

"
The migration to Vista will be a passive one, as someone else previously mentioned; appearing on new computers bought by companies.

The same for home users; a lot of people do not know enough to figure out what hardware upgrades they need ; so again, it will appear on new computers.

Is this what Windows has become? An upgrade no one wants, forced upon them because the new hardware they're buying doesn't support anything less?

Compare this to OS X, where people fall all over themselves trying to get the newest version running on their old hardware because there's actual value in the new features.

So Vista has its guts ripped out, slips, and we wait another 5 years for a potentially insipring version of Windows, meanwhile Apple ships another 3 updates to OS X.

I hope to God Office 12 steps up and kicks some ass. "

revolt

Uh, any chance this has to do with the fact that Microsoft began expensing stock options - http://news.com.com/Microsoft+to+award+stock,+nix+ options/2100-1014_3-1023840.html [com.com]

- or that employees are pissed about the review system or lack of pay increases over the last 3 years - http://www.washtech.org/news/industry/display.php? ID_Content=5041 [washtech.org]?

Until the late 90's, an engineer could work at Microsoft for 10-15 years and retire. That made them a lot more willing to tolerate constant death marches and ridiculously unrealistic product schedules. I suspect the current crop of engineers realized that weren't going to become billionaires anytime soon and weren't willing to make the same sacrifices. This is probably not the last we'll see of this sort of thing from Microsoft.

Upper management is certainly hard at work trying to figure out how to get Indian and Chinese developers working on Vienna.

MS is VERY scared now

I spent 2 hours reading that thread, and the one thing that dropped my jaw was the post claiming that MS has been unable to stave off six 6-digit corporate desktop migrations.

*blink*

The only one I've heard about is IBM: that's 330,000 desktops. It's more than likely one of the six. This sounds to me like the Fortune 500 is getting really tired of the lack of security, empty promises, endless delays, absurd licensing costs... and has gotten wise to the FUD.

They know that if Apple can put OSX 10.5 on shelves in November, that will start the snowball rolling, and the avalanche is coming.

Sure, when Vista does ship (too late), there will be a huge marketing campaign for it. It seems though that they don't even know how to make a compelling pitch to customers, business or retail. Even with a January launch (I'm not holding my breath), the advertising will start in November, and those campaigns will need to be conceptualized in the next few weeks, if that hasn't started already.

MS has a disaster on its hands that no one seems to want, and they don't know how to sell it. Meanwhile, their enemies (aka the rest of the industry) are circling the bloated prey, waiting for MS to collapse under its own weight before they move in for the kill.

A reminder that we all live in our little worlds.

It's interesting to watch the comments as they unfold in the blog entry. Some of them are very frantic. "The company is going down! Abort! Abort! Abandon ship now!!" -- This from a company which has no real competition.

To be honest, I don't see what they're so upset about. It's done when it's done.

Psychology of delay

There is a very interesting aspect of delay, that is working to Microsoft's favor in this case.

In another field, note the most recently finished highway project in your local area. You might (if you were paying attention) remember the years of political turmoil before it started, the endless planning meetings, the politician promises. Then, you saw the signs go up, saying things like "This exit will be closed from Nov 11 2003 to Jun 1 2005" or something, and it seemed like forever. A date that far in the future is just a hell of a long time away.

But, note how you feel about the project today? The inconvenience of waiting are just completely gone. You've got a nice new freeway, and you get from here to there without much problem. In a couple of months it seems like it has always been there. All the hair-pulling and outrage that you felt when the finish date was first posted just seems so trivial now.

Anyway, that's the way it works for me.

Vista will be the same in a lot of ways. Microsoft, for better or for worse (mostly worse) is just as much of a monopoly as the Department of Public Works. They'll finish the goddamn highway on their own schedule, and they'll do an adequate job of it, and people will just live with it. And the very sad thing is, they'll like it.

Thad Beier

EU and Samba are the real reason

I found the following post (on the MS Blog comments) by someone who is probably a MS employee.

----snip-------
Talk around the vending machines in legal is that the delay has nothing to do with coding, slipped schedules or anything else. That's why very few heads will actually roll and most will simply shuffle positions. Actual reasons have to do with no product, NONE, shipping until after the mess with the EU is cleaned up. From what I've heard so far, if there are further major delays with EU that can't be solved by set-asides and scholarships, then expect another major delay beyond what has already been announced. At 25-40% annual compounded growth rates for Linux servers, the last thing that's going to happen is for the EU to be able to do what US-Justice failed to do, which is force disclosure of MS server protocols so competitors can copy MS's IP and gain market share in the market segment on MS's dime. Samba has never been 100% compatible and that's the way its going to stay, come hell or high water. Regardless of how much time/delay it takes, Samba and Vista will never be as interoperable as Samba is with PDC, AD, AS currently. If it takes another 6 month delay, another 9 months, whatever. Eventually EU will capitulate whether Commerce and the WTO has to step in or not. Server space market share has either reached a tipping point, or already passed a tipping point depending on which internal study you read. Whichever study you read/believe, make sure its one of the ones that takes into account free installs of their versions of AS/ES, such as Cent/OS. According to those studies, the server space has already passed the tipping point, that's why we're seeing what's happening with Mass/ODF/XML, and some of the large desktop migrations that have been documented internally. And remember, any large migrations you get a whiff of, you know where to report them, get details and do it. A single 6 digit desktop migration has repercussions far and wide on many other customers and partners (and media), and we are staring at over a dozen of them and have been unsuccessful in turning any of them around so far.

So unless anything settles with the EU in the coming months, expect further delays regardless of what they are blamed on.
--------snip--------------

Microspeak?

From the article:
With the convergence of high-tech media, this holiday season would have been an explosive nodal point to get Vista out for a compounded effect.

This is why MS can't seem to get it done. They have people working there who ACTUALLY talk like this! I mean, seriously, can anyone translate that sentence into English, please?

Why Do They Care?

Microsoft Employees are not happy with the double delay of Windows and Office being pushed back into 2007.

Why do they care about this? Is it their own bonus in jeopardy because the product didn't ship by a certain drop-dead date?

Whether Microsoft continues to sell old Office, or new Office, people are still buying Office. Whether they're selling XP or Vista, they're still selling a Microsoft OS onto the same number of computers.

WHY DO THEY CARE? THEY'RE STILL GETTING PAID THE SAME AS BEFORE!

I Love This Post at the Mini-Microsoft Blog

Why? It has SPECIFIC REASONS FOR THEIR PROBLEMS FROM THE GUY TESTING IT! Read on:

Ok let's take a look back at the great mgmt decisions in one Windows test org: Not an important group; just appcompat. (It's not like anyone really cares about appcompat - who cares if customers' 3rd party apps (and especially MS apps) really don't work that well on this new fustercluck.

In the last 18 months this org:
1) Cut the number of testers (several times) from approx 50 to now much less than a dozen. Of course, many top performers also left MS entirely because of middle mgmt in this org.
2) Hired more PMs
3) Cut the scope of testing (anyone done any real code coverage testing lately?)
4) Cut the number of promotions in the test orgs - nothing like a little 'de-incentivization' to increase 'bad attrition'
5) Dictate that everything can and should be automated. (Ignore that eyeballs catch more in less time...) way to go Darren. Of course, you were probably lied to by your underlings, so it's not entirely your fault. Uhh, yes it is - you made the call.
6) Hire only a small handful of devs to write automation code. Oh, and don't forget to swamp them with added process and have embittered leads review their code...
7) Hire more PMs
8) Outsource all testing to non-accountable and barely trained CSG firms overseas (Ever try to translate/clarify a bug written not by a tester, but by their lead based on notes? )
9) Limit the number of heads the abovementioned overseas firms can use. > Fewer testers, less experienced, with little training, a much (ahem) 'slower' approach to testing.

Results: Client appcompat % hovering at 75%. No, wait, did I say 75? I meant 85. At RTM it will be 95.6, or whatever other arbitrary happy-happy number they came up with like last time. In reality, last go-around, the appcompat % was quite high, despite the PM lies, just not as high as they claimed.

What? You're going to dispute the numbers that some lower functionaries spun up through the labyrinthine PM food chain? At each 'filter' point one gets to improve his own rep by making his ownership area look better. What's a few % points between bureaucrats?

While I'm in rant mode, why exactly IS MCE so bad? Didn't anyone test this puppy before kicking it out the door and having another PM party?
A brand new Dell with full OEM installed load and almost nothing works in the expected 'just plug it in Dad and it works'.
Sure is great he has a son who works at MS. Oh, no he doesn't. His son left.

Vista - I wouldn't buy it with someone else's money. Then again What do I know, I've only been testing the dog for the last 2-3 yrs...

By Anonymous, at 9:51 PM

Re:Shareholders

How exactly are the shareholders going to be pleased?

Axing senior management isn't going to get Vista out the door any faster -- probably a lot slower because whoever comes it to pick up the pieces is going to have a hell of a job. It might make Windows 2021 (or whatever they're calling Vista 1.1) ship quicker but in the short run, it'll be chaos. Shareholders, for the most part, don't care about the long run -- they care about now.

Re:Shareholders

And it might be seen as motivational.

Yeah, right. Motivational as in "all leave is cancelled until morale improves", or "we'll keep firing people until you ship product"

Unless it's all part of the Linux master plan...

Re:Shareholders

Axing senior management isn't going to get Vista out the door any faster -- probably a lot slower

It depends on why the Vista project is in turmoil, doesn't it?

I can think of several situations that, if they held, would be counterexamples.

(1) The Captain Kirk school managers: Ignore enginering's time estimates because you don't want to believe them and have unwavering faith in your personal charisma's power to alter reality. Also known as the "assume we had a can-opener" manager.

(2)The "turn-around" style of mamagement: When a manager comes in and turns a situation around, he's a strong manager. Therefore a manager that turns his company around frequently must be stronger than one who turns the company around once.

(3) The "kill the messenger" style of management: On the theory that "no news is good news", turn every instance in which bad news has to be brought up into a game of "beard the lion". Subtypes include "If everyone keeps tap dancing hard enough, maybe nobody will notice and things will sort themselves out" theorists.

(4) The "I'm manager because I can everybody's job better than they could" manager. Hardly bears description. On the flip side, if you're honest with yourself, you'll admit that as an engineer, deep in your heart of hearts, this is you. The obviously awesom weapons of the engineering paradigm can slay any dragon. Management? Pfft. You just take the pot of potential objectives on one hand, and the pot of resources and capabilities you have on the other, build a set of alternative frameworks connecting them, crunch the numbers and pick the best.

Re: Bad Engineers

(4) The "I'm manager because I can everybody's job better than they could" manager. Hardly bears description. On the flip side, if you're honest with yourself, you'll admit that as an engineer, deep in your heart of hearts, this is you. The obviously awesome weapons of the engineering paradigm can slay any dragon.

Okay, you knew someone was gonna stick up for engineers around here, so here I am. I'm going to pick up on your previous Star Trek analogy too, for maximum geek-factor.

There will of course be engineers like this, just like there are managers that think they are engineers. A good crew however, doesn't work like this.

Geordi LaForge doesn't WANT to be Captain. In fact, aside from some minor rank bumps early in the shows career when he moved from helmsman to Chief Engineer, Geordi showed no signs of wanting to move up at all. He was already EXACTLY where he belonged, in the engine room of the fleet flagship, under a great Captain.

Good engineers don't want to be out fighting Klingons and worrying about Ferengi ripping them off and Romulans stealing their toys. That's what good CAPTAINS are for. Picard gave Geordi engineering problems, and listened to him when Geordi said he design a way to tie the holodeck to the warp core and fix the particle of the week. There were also plenty of times they went to that meeting room, and Geordi sat there with his hands in his lap because it wasn't an engineering problem, and the best he could offer was to carry a tricorder on the away team.

This is like a good engineer wet dream -- all the best toys to play with, with a gung ho first officer and an angry klingon between you and everything else that can get in your way, from Cardassians to Starfleet Brass.

~Rebecca

Re: Bad Engineers

What is a good scenario, but is destroyed when you put money on the equation. On the reality, engeneers get underpaid, management get lots of money. So, many engeneers want to go into management.

That is also a reason to companies should pay the engeneers well.