Gates' Replacement says Microsoft Must Simplify 405
Javaman59 writes "This article in The Australian newspaper describes the background and the agenda of Ray Ozzie, Bill Gates'
replacement as chief architect at Microsoft. The creator of Lotus Notes, he's
a high-calibre technologist.
From the article: 'Ray's a programmer's programmer .. He's much closer to an uber-engineer, whereas Bill hasn't been a programmer for a number of years.'
Ozzie is also driving Microsoft to simplify its software: 'Complexity kills .. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.' He's not the only brilliant programmer in the world, but he does have Microsoft's resources behind him."
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:5, Interesting)
Back on topic, it's common knowledge among the Notes community that Ozzie was responsible for the Notes engine and backend, not the interface (that was Lotus standards, and later IBM's) -- given that I think he deserves a lot more credit than you give him.
From the horse's... uh... well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Mr Gates himself was once moved to declare Mr Ozzie "one of the top five programmers in the universe" and revealed that he and Mr Ballmer had wanted for more than a decade to persuade him to join Microsoft. To the outside world, Mr Ozzie's programming prowess is known mainly through Lotus Notes, the e-mail and collaboration software that he masterminded, which was acquired by IBM in 1995.
And we know that if BG says it, it must be true!
There's no doubt that Ozzie has some programming credit and no one will argue (I'm going out on a limb here) that Lotus Notes was genius back in the day, pre-Internet-as-we-know it. But despite his desire to streamline programs, reduce the bloat, and re-establish some respectability, he's not going to get very far. First, he'll have to lock horns with Ballmer and dodge chairs. Then he'll find that Microsoft has become so mired in its own muck that spurring the current crop of programmers who've been indoctrinated in the "Microsoft Way" will prove nigh impossible. He will also have to live in the shadow of BG, who despite the announcement, isn't really going anywhere, and will be haunting the halls of Redmond like some anti-Obi Wan.
I give him 18 months before he resigns in frustration.
Lotus Notes (Score:5, Interesting)
If anything, its the poster child of why you *shouldn't* make it too easy for people to develop solutions...and why a solution that does everything does none of it *really* well.
Huge Mess For Whoever Takes Over (Score:5, Interesting)
2) Stock in slow decline for over five years
3) Revenue growth continuing to slow
4) open document format movement continues to spread across the computing world
5) Office software has reached a saturation point for features
6) Linux continues to step by step become the de facto choice for computing companies to base their hardware on
7) Attempts to create new revenue streams have been failures like the Xbox/Xbox 360 marketplace disasters
8) Can't attract/keep good employees now that the stock is no longer going up
9) Can't keep current employees happy - it doesn't matter how you treat an employee if their options are going up dramatically in value every day and that hasn't been the case at MS for many years
10) Years of poor engineering choices are making progress nearly impossible for their OS
Taking over a company that is in its decline is no fun.
Microsoft's Problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft has at least 2 really big problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone needs their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.
The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights [geocities.com]. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.
The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.
Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.
So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.
So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?
Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the C-Prize:
S = size of uncompressed code-base
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed code-base
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize [mprize.org]:
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring the code. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.
They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.
Alas alack (Score:5, Interesting)
The popular perception is that they excel at marketing rather than technology, but the reverse is true. They have top-notch geeks and project management, and then above that, suddenly, there's a layer of utter leaden idiocy that -- well, the chair thing. The chair thing.
It seems so obvious, from outside, that there's a layer of deadwood generic-mulitinational-parasite-management people gradually crushing the company and that they need to put someone up there whose focus is on delivering actual value to actual people. And I think a little bit of that awareness has reached MS itself (I mean the MS boardroom -- it's an accepted fact most other places). And so they decided to appoint Ozzie, because he's handled a real product that involved real software.
It's weird how being a tiny bit right, actually makes the decision so much more glaringly wrong. Of course, I've worked with Notes in some detail (anybody else remember the thing where if the server is too fast, the timestamp on everything starts gradually moving forward, becaues the timestamp is used as a unique ID? It was on thedailywtf.com a while ago) and so to me it's extra specially glaringly wrong.
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:2, Interesting)
Not to mention he was a much younger, and dare I say "wreckless" programmer back then. Experience is now on his side. That has to count for something.
No doubt this challenge (simplyfying Microsoft) may be beyond even him, but give him his due credit.
Like tossing out the heavy stuff when ... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:If Complexity Kills.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to be ridiculously, totally, farcically speculous, but here's a scenario for you:
Vista ships at $$$, with extreme requirements. Adoption is very low, due to all the problems that have been rehashed here at slashdot over the past months. However, Vista is fully backwards-compatible (or as near as possible).
MS releases another OS that looks like Vista but is not backwards compatible (though probably compatible with Vista). Price (at least cost of use) is an order of magnitude (ok, an order of magnitude in binary) lower than Vista.
Users who need interoperability with older Windows versions pay for Vista (these'll be primarily businesses). Everyone else can buy the non-backwards-compatible version.
Of course, Vista would have had to have been built with this in mind. And of course, this would break so much currently-deployed software that it would kill MS in the short run. But, it would help explain MS's interest in ODF.
Finally, this would have to have been in development for years now, and there hasn't been a peep from Redmond (officially or not), so it's pretty much a garbage theory. But, in the long run, the only way MS can get rid of the bloat is to get rid of backwards compatibility.
Bill hasn't been a programmer for a number of year (Score:2, Interesting)
Was he ever really an engineer? He is clearly a business/marketing guy.
The reason he/Microsoft was so successful is that he was the first person to fully utilise the "if you can't buy then steal" approach to software development.
I don't think he has ever really had an original design concept let alone created any product from scratch himself. ALL of Microsoft's products can be traced back to some other company. e.g. Windows = Xerox, Office Suite = Lotus, IE = Netscape, MSDOS = QDOS/86-DOS, C# = Java etc. etc.
Re:Lotus Notes (Score:2, Interesting)
And even that can be effectively prevented with a few deft strokes of the admin client. The big problem is ignorance. Witness, for example, the number of people who are still poorly informed enough to think that Notes is an email client. Sure, Notes sucks if you deploy it in an environment where nobody knows what to do with it and resents the imposition enough that they refuse to learn about it, but I've seen too many well-tuned, stable Notes environments to blame all or even most the problems on the software.
50 Million Lines of Code... (Score:2, Interesting)
( http://techrepublic.com.com/5254-6257-0.html?foru
Re:If Complexity Kills.... (Score:4, Interesting)
And anyway, the chance that you'd have NO such applications is virtually nil.
You gave away your market share, no one took it. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Lotus Notes??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Just about any e-mail package that actually DELIVERS the e-mail. Not in a few hours, a few days, or a few weeks, but actually when you send it. Some of my co-workers are still stuck with it and every once in a while, I receive an e-mail someone sent weeks ago. Notes just kinda "forgot" about the e-mail and suddenly, digging around or something, it comes across it and says, "Oh yeah! I forgot about this one. Maybe I ought to send this out, huh?"
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:3, Interesting)
Software should be as simple as it needs to be, but no simpler.
The core functionality of Notes is not complex at all -- given what it does, which is to provide a industrial strength collaboration platform with military/intelligence grade security features. It's pretty extraordinary, given that it dates from the mid 80s. Building an architecture for a commercial product that survives twenty years in the face of multiple generations of technology and fierce competition from microsoft counts as pretty damned brilliant in my book.
The problem is that the product's market position has been very poorly managed, especially in response to the Internet and MS Exchange. The user interface had always been plagued by badly designed dialogs -- they were designed by programmers and it showed. However this conmplexity was localized, and could have been fixed (why it wasn't I don't know). The workspace user interface worked for users. It was dowdy and a bit ugly, but it was functional and users never had any difficulty adapting to it in my experience.
Administration was "complex" because it required admins to learn about directories and things like cryptographic certificates and signatures. Furthermore, you had to learn about granting and revoking trust to signatures and other concepts. These days, all the stuff about setting up mail transport is unnecessary since TCP/IP is practically always something you can assume, but the complexities of managing (and delegating management of) identies are inherent in the problem of running a large scale directory.
Re:Good plan! (Score:1, Interesting)
Simplification in these terms mean that most daily tasks expected to be solved with a computer won't need rocket scientists for their completion. A very average person should be able to do them. That's the point vs most other OS flavours agains windows/mac. I should be able to do power tasks focusing on the TASK details and not on the TOOL details (a PC in this case).
So, graphical interfaces are a step forward; but it's not the holy grail. I believe an overhaul of today's GUI strategies is long overdue; us humans communicate through sound, eye contact and body posture, rather than click and pointing, and typing. I expect a PC to be able to do this in a near future. That is a step forward against complexity.
Re:If Complexity Kills.... (Score:2, Interesting)
In honesty, I think that putting a guy that wrote his main piece of software totally from scratch in the driving seat of Microsoft is a good plan: hopefully, it means that the next version of Windows will be more elegantly written, and will not be so over-the-top on hardware compatibility, or requirements, for that matter.
We shall just have to wait and see. If it does work out, then I think that the anti-Microsoft bitching from
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:From the horse's... uh... well... (Score:1, Interesting)
Or the manual they use at NASA to build spaceships?
The two things above are just as complicated as windows, if not more.
Granted they have had a few "bugs," but orders less than microsoft.
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:1, Interesting)
Most financial companies (the huge ones) that have to do reporting for Sarbanes-Oxley prefer using Exchange because it is so easy to plug into other apps (CRM, CMS, databases, etc.)
An interesting side note - in the GE GAL, she, or any user, can pull up the email list for and company under the GE umbrella, including Universal/NBC. Anyone on any NBC show has a GE email address. Jay Leno, Conan, etc. My hands were quickly slapped away from her laptop as I tried emailing Jennifer Aniston a few years ago.
Not-so-good Lotus Notes Design (Score:2, Interesting)
It doesn't bode well for Microsoft to have this guy as their main "architect" if his Lotus Notes is any indication of his design prowess.
Re:If Complexity Kills.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Others really should learn from that lesson of how to handle retiring archaic architecture that they don't want to drag along.
Only Now... (Score:1, Interesting)
'Complexity kills
apparently, bill gates didn't have the mental ability to figure this out or listen to people who obviously told him this.
this is bizarre, but it is msft so it is probably only for marketing purposes and it msft expects folks to not put it in context to reach logical conclusions.
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:3, Interesting)
Ultimately, there's no excuse for either a bad UI OR a bad back end. I'm not going to state that everyone should use Outlook and ignore it's obvious deficencies. Needless to say, either Microsoft should be motivated to make improvements, or someone should make something with a UI good enough to be usable, and a back end that is stable, scalable and fairly easy to operate.
However, I would take Outlook's deficencies over Lotus Notes' deficencies at almost any time even if I had to administer Outlook. I'm here to support the end users, not to shaft them to make my life somewhat easier. And of course, I'd be helping myself too, because I wouldn't have to use Notes either.
If I'm ever going to consider this guy a super-developer, I'm going to do it in spite of Notes, rather than because of it. Or perhaps I'll just hope he did all his development, far, far away from that craptastic user experience.
At last! (Score:2, Interesting)
> kills
> difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges,
> and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.'
At last somebody at Micro$oft whose understanding of software approaches that of the Unix way - Keep it simple.
If he really does manage to symplify Micro$oft's software then I think that company will pull through the OSS challenge.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You gave away your market share, no one took it (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, and when "the Exchange server" serving >100K clients gets taken down for maintenance or disrupted due to unknown reasons, mail gets queued and thousands of people can't get their work done for hours on end. There is a reason why people call it "the Exchange server", and that reason is what Microsoft needs to fix ASAP. The marketing managers have justification too: it allows them to put another set of IMPORTANT bullet points on their PowerPoint slides (i.e.: "You can set up an Exchange cluster that will failover when one dies, allowing mail to continue to be delivered, and calendars to continue to be browsed and updated").
Seriously, Microsoft. Clustering and failover in Exchange. DO IT NOW.