18 Years in Software Tools, an Insider's View 102
calumtdalek writes "Newsforge (Also owned by VA) has an article on a talk given by Rico Mariani, an eighteen-year veteran at Microsoft, in which he speaks to the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club, sharing his unique take on the history of, and controversies surrounding, Microsoft and the industry in general. Particularly illuminating are his responses to advocates of free/open-source software. The talk can also be download from the csclub's media server"
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow (Score:2, Funny)
Man, the foetuses are getting younger these days...
Re:Wow (Score:1)
Re:Wow (Score:1)
It's funny that even the most idiotic microsoft bashing posts get modded up. You don't even know what an apostraphe is for, and you don't know the difference between real criticism and a baby screaming. Please go back to 6th grade where you belong.
Re:Wow (Score:2)
Unique, huh. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's kind of hard to tell. Since this talk is, unhelpfully, only available as an audio download, (1) I can't easily listen to audio where I am right now (2) I can't skim it (3) it's slashdotted. In other words, I have no idea what this talk says. A transcript would have helped a lot.
This said, I can't help but shake the suspicion if I could listen to this talk, we'd come to the altogether shocking and unexpected discovery that veteran Microsoft executives don't actually think that Microsoft is the bad guy! Who woulda thought? You mean Microsoft doesn't internally hold the opinion that they're evil, world-dominating bastards? Wow! And here I always thought that bad things were only done by people who go home at night, polish their monocles, and cackle gleefully at their own evil while murdering cats.
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say it's unique in that's it's a fairly candid hour and twenty minute discussion (used loosely since he does most of the talking) with an (allegedly) bright developer who has worked for Microsoft for the past 18 years.
Yup, that's actually one of his points - people in Microsoft don't think of themselves as evil and don't have "World Domination" on their todo lists - they're too busy doing their jobs. The people responsible for the whole IE debacle (he actually uses this as an example) didn't integrate IE that way because they wanted to destroy the competition - they made an engineering decision at the time that they thought made sense and ended up causing a big brouhaha.
Since then, he says, people have obviously tried to be more careful with stuff like that, but the bottomline is that the people that do the bulk of the work at Microsoft are not bent on World Domination - they are bent on programming.
By the way, I like how you disclaimered yourself saying you didn't watch it at all and then went on to blast it. If it was because he was black, I'd call you a racist; since it's because he works for Microsoft, I'll just call you a Slashdot reader :)
Cheers
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to mention an engineering decision that "everyone" (GNOME, KDE, OS X) subsequently copied. Doesn't that fit the category of "innovation" ?
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:1)
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:2)
I didn't realise that was relevant.
But then again, the difference between the GUI and the OS is a minor one, don't you think?
In the context of this discussion, it's unimportant. We are, after all, talking about user space shared components. How they are packaged and distributed to the end user simply doesn't matter, when you're looking at architecture and design.
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's why internal memos and emails from the top brass (Ballmer and Gates, for instance) bragged to each other about how the IE integration was going to kill Netscape. Not because they wanted to kill the competition, but because they wanted to kill Netscape.
I'm not saying the engineers had anything to do with that. I'm just saying, people at Microsoft tend to do what Gates tells 'em.
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:1)
From what I've heard, "Netscape" and "the competition" would have been pretty much synonymous back then.
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:2)
I wonder what the average anti-Microsoftie would do if emails and memos from the "top brass" of Apple talked about how new features like Quartz, Expose, Spotlight and Boot Camp were going to "kill" Microsoft...
The ideas of IE integration being both en
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:2)
Argh. Must proofread. That should say:
I wonder what the average anti-Microsoftie would do if emails and memos "leaked" from the "top brass" of Apple talking about how new features like Quartz, Expose, Spotlight and Boot Camp were going to "kill" Microsoft...
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:2)
See the way criminal tying works is that you have a monopoly on something that people want (like, say, and OS), and you tie the sale of that thing with something unrelated (like, say, a browser). This is because it generally reduces competition (like, say, killing Netscape).
Or, simply, it would be fine if Apple execs wanted to "kill MS" and they could do a lot of things to try to make that happen (like, say, "tying" their browser to their OS) ... however MS are held to a higher legal std., because they
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:2)
Right. So no product created by a company considered a monopoly can be improved if a competitor already offers that functionality in another product.
You seem to be ignoring the facts that IE was never sold and the technical aspect of a shared browser component is a perfectly valid piece of functionality for an OS
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:2)
The OS was sold, and IE was tied to the OS. Please read what I said.
Name one other OS that does. You can use/remove/change the browser on Linux/Mac OS X. You might be thinking of Konqueror, which comes with KDE, but you can remove KDE and you can remove konqueror and keep the rest of
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:2)
Everything that comes with Windows is "tied to the OS". Yet no-one seems to care about all those other things.
Effectively, you are saying Microsoft cannot add new functionality to Windows. If you cannot see the fundamental flaw in that position, then there's a serious problem.
Name one other OS that does.
OS X, any Linux distribution that includes KDE and/or GNOME. I think BeOS did, although I'm not 100% on its architecture without go
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:1)
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:1)
It's easy to think that when you sit in a corner and paint, "there is no room, only this corner, and it made perfect sense to paint it blue, the blue paint was right here, it has nothing to do with the rest of the room being blue... I'm not sure there even is "the rest of the room"
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:2)
Just as it was an engineering decision by these same folks to include "!seineew era sreenigne epacsteN" as a totally random string of bytes?
World domination is certainly on their minds. They just don't see that as an 'evil' goal. There's a difference.
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're awfully free with your criticism of a talk that you haven't actually listened to. I too prefer transcripts for the same reason, but generally don't feel the need to critique content that I haven't actually heard. I think that it's interesting - but not entirely surprising - that you can get modded "Insightful" on Slashdot now for commentary on a talk that you didn't hear.
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:1)
Where have you been?
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:1)
Re:Unique, huh. (Score:2, Funny)
They would never kill any cats. They would just throw them in a box with some poison.
You can't say that the cats are dead, because they aren't. Trust me. Just doen't open the box.
18 Years? Wow... (Score:5, Insightful)
makes for an interestign thought though -- how would one get objectivity (or a close approximation). Someone outside the organization could never truly understand the internal workings, but someone exposed to the internal workings would always hold a pretty strong bias (one way or the other).
Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it interesting that he uses the phrase "my guys". He doesn't say "us" or microsoft or "commercial software manufacturers" or anything else.
Maybe I am reading too much into it but that phrase really struck me.
What about the other commercial vendors though? Don't they force "your guys" to do a great job? I mean the development efforts of MS have been driven by apple and google more then anything else. Like clockwork windows implements two year old apple technology and adopts the latest apple GUI paradigms. These days it's virtually impossible not to hear an MS executive talk about implementing something google is doing. It seems to me MS is much more focused on chasing apple and google then what OSS is doing.
Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't really find this odd at all. If you like your company/friends/coworkers you tend to identify them as "yours". I wold imagine since he has worked there for 18 years there are probably many people there that would be like family. Anything that is part of so large a chunk is bound to become personal - heck, you'd probably refer to "my wife/husband" instead of Mr/Mrs Doe after a much shorter period.
Yes, that is his point entirely. He wants to have healthy competition because he feels that Microsoft does it's best work when they have serious competitors. The part I paraphrased was specifically about open source software, but he does discuss competition in general and the whole "healthy ecosystem" (and makes fun of himself for using that term) thing being good for business.
Also, just to give them a little benefit of the doubt, I think Vista has been in development for more than two years. So it's conceivable that they aren't "stealing" Apple's ideas, for example, but that Apple just beat them in releasing those features. I'm not saying that it's necessarily the case, but I don't think people should be so quick to condem - good features are good features.
Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that, in more cases that not, you'd be right here. A lot of the features Vista has been lauded for "stealing" from Apple have been obvious advances for a while (prevalence of search over browsing, 3D-accelerated desktop systems, etc. are all fairly predictable). Vista steals very few design ideas from Apple, in any case (search? that was obvious - it's stolen from Google as much as anyone; desktop widgets? available for Windows and Linux as third-party systems well before Dashboard made people think that Apple "invented" them). As much as I like OSX, I hate the fact that Apple are hailed as so "innovative" to the exclusion of other hard-working companies who do work just as good, simply because they market themselves so well. I feel a lot of companies and organisations doing good work (and I'm gonna controversially include Microsoft here) are being a little hard done-by in this regard.
More widely, though, I'm not opposed to "idea theft" in the IT field. There's a reason so many people are opposed to software patents.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:2)
Yes, but the search promotion these days is (I think) largely an influence of the web, so it's not something that would've been so apparent back then. I'm not sure that Windows Indexing Service was really designed to handle the high-performance querying which is necessary to make these systems work, either. But yes, they've had full-text indexing for a while.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:2)
Nice, I didn't know that. Interesting.
MacOS has had full text searching for a long time (Score:2)
the funny thing is, Windows has had a indexed plugin compatible search built in since NT4.0 (1997?) It's called the Windows Indexing Service
Another funny thing is, the Macintosh has had full text searching for just as long. It was called Sherlock [macintouch.com], and it was heavily promoted by Apple back in the day.
Doug Moen
Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:2)
Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:2)
Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:3, Interesting)
Looking at Microsoft's core business, OS and Office, Google has intruded hardly at all and Apple has intruded into the OS business. To some extent, Apple's OS is based on an OSS flavor of BSD (someone feel free to provide a better explanation; I don't know much about OS X). If an OSS BSD wasn't available, would A
Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:1)
Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:5, Funny)
Now, Don Stallman, he's a very smart guy too. And you know, me and my guys, we got respect for him and his guys. Cause you gotta have respect.
18 Years? Wow...Back in the day. (Score:3, Insightful)
God I love the cynical attitude early in the morning.* One (+5:insightful) for calling someone a shill.
*The thing about cynicism and hate is that they both get into your bloodstr
Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:1)
Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:1, Insightful)
First off, that's a ridiculous assumption. I'm sure there are lots of people who fit one or the other of your two descriptions, but to suggest that those are the only two possible outcomes of working for a
Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:2)
I suspect that depends to a large extent on the nature of the organization in question.
Some organizations are homogeneous, and have a single overriding "culture" throughout, while others use a wide variety of platforms and have a correspondingly wide variety of cultures sprinkled throughout the company (some of them *quite* different from others within the company).
Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:2)
I'd have to say it depends on the individual.
If you're prone to drinking the Kool-aid, you're usually not discriminatory about whose you start drinking.
Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:2)
Rico writes the most interesting blog on MSDN (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Rico writes the most interesting blog on MSDN (Score:1)
Re:burn...burn..burn... (Score:2)
Re:burn...burn..burn... [webcam of server] (Score:1)
Wow (Score:4, Funny)
They could've saved time and simply set fire to their server themselves.
Re:Wow (Score:2)
Re:Wow (Score:2)
Re:Wow (Score:1)
Gah! I just said that, didn't I?
Alas, poor Karma, I knew thee well.
Re:Torrent? (Score:1)
Re:Torrent? (Score:1)
So, they would Torrent if they could.
Interesting talk (and not just about tools) (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows 95 was the most Windows (Score:2, Insightful)
But it was a tremendous accomplishment. At the time, Apple was adrift and Windows 3.1 sucked and was looking very old. In that environment, Windows 95 provided a pretty good alternative to Apple: A usable desktop, A 32 bit API, a decent class library, good developer tools, darn good hardware detection, even for the many devices for which it had to be ad hoc.
Or look at it this way: Windows 2000 was a "better" OS, but normal end-user
Re:Windows 95 was the most Windows (Score:2)
>But it was a tremendous accomplishment [cut the part about other suck]
Bah, it was still a hack because it didn't provide a good memory protection.
Re:Interesting talk (and not just about tools) (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe he meant "release" literally, as in the marketing extravaganza and all the hoopla and parties that ensued when Windows 95 was first released. No other product has since been able to match the long lines, desperation, and tremendous hype^H^H^H^Hexpectation of that version.
-dZ.
Re:Interesting talk (and not just about tools) (Score:2)
? Seems to me he was pretty much repeating what everyone (who was actually interested) already knew.
In fact, it might even help to get across to some people what a tremendous achievement Windows 95 actually was.
He also points out that though it wasnt the best OS they knew how to make at the time (points at NT) it was the best release of Windows that Microsoft ever
No transcript, media download (Score:4, Informative)
The only option is a couple of media files to download - at least they have options that should work on a variety of platforms.
Re:No transcript, media download (Score:1)
what's wrong with plain old text?
Comments about Slashdot (Score:2, Funny)
He must be new here...:)
He's a programmer (Score:2, Informative)
Re:He's a programmer (Score:1)
Re:At least he's not running off curing malaria (Score:2)
UWCSC (Score:3, Funny)
I don't know if the author is admitting an active membership in that club (as I still can't seem to be able to access the server), but if so, it's nothing I think I'd be bragging about
Re:UWCSC (Score:1)
Re:UWCSC (Score:1)
Calum T. Dalek is the permanent honourary head of Waterloo's CSC. They needed a name to put on the ACM charter, and given that the composition of the CSC changes every four months (ain't co-op grand?) figured that one would do. He is the voice of the CSC. Mr. Mariani served on the executive of the CSC for a few terms during his undergrad career, so the fine dalek is drawing attention to a distinguished alumnus.
There were a few female members in the CSC when I was at Waterloo ('81-'87). Certainly not man
Re:UWCSC (Score:1)
Re:UWCSC (Score:1)
Why are you pointing to newsforge? (Score:1)
Now, the site is hoplessly timed out. Next time, spend the extra minutes mirroring the stinkin' thing.
All video? (Score:2)
If anyone has just the audio track, please post it.
hard vs good (Score:1)
To him, that was just wierd and crazy.
To me, it makes the point that it's important to think about what the user wants/needs as well as worring about the engineering.
Off topic - WTF is up with Slashdot summaries (Score:1, Offtopic)
I'm done with my rant, you can go back to whatever you were doing now.
He seems to resent users (Score:3, Interesting)
To me, he seems like a perfect example of a really smart person who doesn't understand that software is judged by how much easier it makes the user's life, not by how impressive the work is to his geek friends.
David
Re:He seems to resent users (Score:4, Funny)
So you're saying he moonlights as an OSS developer ?
(Sorry, cheap shot - but I couldn't resist.)
Re:He seems to resent users (Score:2)
David
Re:He seems to resent users (Score:2, Funny)
(Sorry I couldn't resist either
Reinforces my experience... (Score:3, Insightful)