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."
He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows Admin Tools [intelliadmin.com]
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:5, Funny)
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:4, Funny)
And how many trillions of lines of code is Vista?? I say put Aero on top of Windows 95. Now we're rocking simplicity!!
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:3, Funny)
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:3, Insightful)
GE uses Exchange - 250K people (when I was there) (Score:5, Informative)
I have since been involved with a smaller Notes install - Just 12K seats. IT WAS A HORRIBLE PILE OF SHIT.
IT was elated that they pulled off the config (of Notes/Domino), it was (server side) reliable, it ran on Linux, it fit thier needs.
The users were left in the cold with the brutal Notes interface. Tales of its suckage are all true.
I currently use Notes (at a MUCH smaller company) and am constantly amazed of how bad this software really is.
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:3, Informative)
You might have heard about them. 130k+ computer users on Outlook/Exchange. I don't remember email ever being down due to software problems.
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:5, Insightful)
Give me another company that uses it for 60,000 employees and you'd have a point (not saying there is no such company, I have no idea.)"
Here is my experience with a large (I think it was probably in the 60K range or better) company running Exchange/Outlook: Yes, they do it, but they don't do it well.
You have some company information stored on file servers, other information stored in Outlook folders (or maybe the proper terminology is Exchange folders). None of it is indexed in any way so that it can be found without a brute force search. Some of these folders are out of date and pretty much read-only because they don't want to hire a team of gatekeepers to ensure that it is otherwise. Other folders are more up to date by allowing just about anybody to update them, which occasionally leads to them being updated with bad info or being wiped out altogether: "Let's see, was the last backup done recently? Did any important changes happen after that? Oh well, maybe it wasn't that important. Just to be safe, I'll load a copy of everything I might ever want to use onto my company laptop and take it home, leaving it in plain view in the back seat of my car for a few weeks. Ooops, now where did that laptop get to? I wonder if it would be better to report it stolen or just forget about it. Those company inventories aren't very reliable anyway, after all, they keep the results in a public Exchange folder. HAHA!"
The inmates are running the asylum in many corporate DP shops these days, both large and small, and we have Microsoft (first among many) for providing idiotic tools for idiots to use to so efficiently mishandle important data. I don't see anything changing soon, with kids in grade-school now being required to turn their homework in as Powerpoint presentations.
The PC paradigm shift that allows us all to do things with computers at home has infected the thinking of most companies these days, simply because so many new employes of such companies got their computer education using home PCs for both personal and school work/play. They don't know any better, they don't know any different, and if you try and explain it to them you just get a blank stare, or worse, a "knowing" argument, that as long as we "encrypt some stuff" all will be OK.
I predict the inevitable collapse of much of this infrastructure. I'm not Ludite enough to avoid using computers, but I'm going to avoid being at the epicenter of it all by not using Windows and much Windows based software whenever I can avoid it. My exposure to Notes mostly second hand, observing a friend use it where he worked, was that it handles workflow issues a lot better than Exchange. If it works the way it appeared to work, then yes, it would be harder to administer, because it does more. There would be concurrency and validation issues that Exchange handles by ignoring them.
I bet what brings Microsoft to its senses more quickly than a change at the top will be a change in the way home users use their computers. Yes, today grade school kids may be submitting homework in Powerpoint on floppy disks, but tomorrow they may be using a web based tool and not know what a floppy disk is. Those web based tools will have to deal with validation, backup, encryption and a few other things in order to even be viable solutions. In the mean time, local PC oriented programs will not have changed in any fundamental way since the days of DOS.
Whether it takes a disastrous collapse of this bad infrastructure, or just a generational change, back really, to robust centralized server solutions, there will hopefully be a day when people look back at our day of data loss and corruption and laugh and ask themselves: "What WERE they thinking?"
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:3, Informative)
You gave away your market share, no one took it. (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 IMPORTA
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:3, Informative)
This is a different conclusion at some places where billions of dollars change hands on a daily basis.
For instance, Disney uses Exchange/Outlook. And not just Disney Parks, Columbia Pictures, ESPN, ABC, Disney Interactive (Kingdom Hearts I and II), Disney Consumer Products, or... but the entire enormous media/marketing conglomerate that is Disney, Inc. uses Exchange/Outlook. There are rare
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 de
The End for Microsoft? (Score:2)
I wonder how many Microsoft programmers win the Obfuscated C contect [ioccc.org], and how many more will win without entry after this 'simplification' happens.
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 a
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:4, Insightful)
Blotus Notes (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:4, Insightful)
So what you're really saying is that he's not an internal help-desk worker's programmer, because none of your points really demonstrated that he was a bad programmer, just that you didn't enjoy supporting the software from his company.
I think the guy might be a good fit. It's actually refreshing to see them going out and getting some new blood. They have a history of being a very inbred company, after all.
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:3, Insightful)
It really isn't all that complicated, except when you are totally green. After you've had a few under your belt, the process is automatic. It's a bit cumbersome, but not unmanageably so because the routine is exactly the same every single time.
And there's a good reason for the routi
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.
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless, of course, you were describing your experience with pre-1995 Notes.
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:2)
Re:He is not a programmer's programmer (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny, Picasa works very different from any other Windows program and yet newbies catch on to it almost instantly.
Good plan! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Good plan! (Score:4, Funny)
Personally I prefer TSO.
back to DOS. Hmm.... (Score:2)
Well, with the current Windows security we have "back to DDOS". That ought to be something
Re:Good plan! (Score:3)
OldBus wrote and included with a post:
I respec
Re:Good plan! (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh sure, DOS was easy to work with. Do yo
Re:Good plan! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good plan! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure if I buy into the idea that "most applications are textual in nature" but even if I did, I don't see how the CLI interface has anything to do with how well an application can process text.
If Complexity Kills.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then there are probably few survivors at Microsoft. Ozzie has his work cut out. You can brag about Lotus Notes all you want, but that was developed from scratch when you can make the proper design decisions. But with Windows being bloated and out of control, you just can't clean it up and make it more simple... can you? It seems like there putting to much faith in Ozzie... like a silver bullet. Gonna be tough to undo years and years of neglect.
http://psychicfreaks.com/ [psychicfreaks.com]Re:If Complexity Kills.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Heh, which part of Notes looks like it was based on proper design decisions?
-matthew
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.
Re:If Complexity Kills.... (Score:5, Insightful)
* the demand for portable apps will grow (apps like OpenOffice and Firefox look a lot more attractive since they can be phased in slowly)
* the demand for portability programmer skills will grow (programmers who know Vista, VistaNG, Linux, and Mac portability will have the edge)
* the migration effort will be compareable to switching to a non-Microsoft alternative, so why not investigate them, especially if you're starting to use portable apps?
I'm not sure if you were around in the early 1990s, but back then Borland ruled to developer tools world. Microsoft wasn't even close. It wasn't just Turbo Pascal. It was also in the C++ arena with the OWL 1.0 framework that made Win32 programming a lot easier (although it used a proprietary C++ extension to get things done). Borland decided to make their next version of OWL standards compliant. It was a beautiful MVC architecture that was head and shoulders above thin kludgy MFC. However, OWL 2.0 was completely backwards incompatible with OWL 1.0 and the more standards compliant C++ compiler couldn't compile OWL 1.0 programs. At that point, companies revolted. OWL 2.0 was the right idea, but since companies had to migrate anyway, they chose to migrate to the inferior (though more API stable) MFC. VistaNG could face a similar revolt too if it make migratiting to it too painful.
Here's an alternative that's a lot more likely to me.
* Microsoft ships Vista.
* Microsoft starts writing a new high performance core from the ground up or takes the FreeBSD core or the Darwin core (since they can reuse the Mach experience) and adds its new and improved Windows API layer above it (that API might even be completely written in
* Microsoft ports all their apps to the new VistaNG API
* Microsoft writes a WINE-like app that uses their new cleaned up API layer in order to run Vista apps.
The consequence of this are:
* VistaNG apps run fast and programming for VistaNG is a lot nicer than Vista
* Most Vista apps run smoothly on VistaNG (at a slight performance and memory penalty)
* People who want don't care about backwards compatibility will not have to deal with the bloat and cruft, while those who do, can get it.
* At some point in the future, (2 releases after VistaNG), Microsoft can throw out the VistaNG layer or just let the code break over time, like they have with the Win16 API
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ozzie (Score:5, Funny)
"Gonna be tough to undo years and years of neglect."
That's what rehab is for.
Rock on!
Re:If Complexity Kills.... (Score:2)
Re:If Complexity Kills.... (Score:4, Interesting)
And anyway, the chance that you'd have NO such applications is virtually nil.
Re:If Complexity Kills.... (Score:3, Insightful)
It is, but it was written under the assumption that at some future date, the .NET framework could essentially live in its own NT subsystem and would not be dependent upon the Windows subsystem at all. That would leave out all of the horrible Win32 security and compatibility nightmares that make working on Windows such a headache.
I think
Re:If Complexity Kills.... (Score:5, Insightful)
They used to say the same things about Mac OS 9 and Netscape Navigator 4...
Re:If Complexity Kills.... (Score:3, Insightful)
What worked for them with OSX was basically scrapping everything before and starting over. They saved themselves a lot of time by borrowing a lot from unix and nextOS, and reproduced some of the aspects of OS9. A layer of backwards compatibility was sort of hacked over the new OS, but it wasn't integrated into the new, it w
Re:If Complexity Kills.... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they had a small and diminishing market share they risked alienating, in the face of free competitors and a monopoly.
And they still managed.
Re:If Complexity Kills.... (Score:3, Insightful)
And they were right. That's why MacOS X and the new Mozilla were both complete rewrites as far as the core functional components (kernel / rendering engine) are concerned.
Yes, it would be simple. (Score:5, Insightful)
Some difference would be fine because they could just call it 'compatability mode' and people would live with the slight kludgeness. They don't have to allow any new drivers in the images, as they have a fixed target. This would prevent people from moving the image to other machines.
The beauty of this is that VirtualPC is already semi crossplatform.
who'da thunk it? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:who'da thunk it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Clue (was Re:who'da thunk it?) (Score:4, Funny)
focusing on the core is good (Score:2)
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.
Re:From the horse's... uh... well... (Score:5, Funny)
I know where the other 4 are, they are all in Russia sending me spam and running porn sites.
Re:From the horse's... uh... well... (Score:4, Informative)
That doesn't sound like such an insurmountable obstacle to me. Microsoft can just do what they've done for the past 20 years -- wait for the current batch of "Microsoft Way" indoctrinees to burn out around age 30, and replace them with a bunch of workaholic recent grads willing to put in 70 hour weeks for the price of some free sodas and a complimentary mountain bike.
There's enough churn in the company that any issues with rank-and-file employee attitudes within the company can work themselves out within just a few years.
Re:From the horse's... uh... well... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd seriously consider taking that bet.
I submit two simple points for consideration.
I think it's been widely acknowledged that the biggest problem with MS is the sheer scale of what they've tried to do in recent years. There's little experience in the industry of how to develop projects on the scale of Windows or Office effectively, no handbook of how to keep the bug count down and avoid introducing security flaws, performance hits, or whatever other scalability problems in software with dev teams of the size they use.
With that in mind, I find it strangely reassuring that the first comments from the new guy at (almost) the top involved simplifying everything down to reduce the dangers in these areas.
Re:From the horse's... uh... well... (Score:3, Informative)
Not even close. Just off the top of my head I can think of any major
Lotus Notes??? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Lotus Notes??? (Score:2)
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. Mayb
Technologist! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Technologist! (Score:2)
Re:Technologist! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Technologist! (Score:2)
Re:Technologist! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Technologist! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Technologist! (Score:3, Funny)
That's it. The Vogons are on slashdot. Where did I leave my towel?
Re:Technologist! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Technologist! (Score:3, Funny)
No. I'm afraid there's only one calibur that will be enough to deal with the Redmond campus. [wikipedia.org]
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.
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 t
Re:Lotus Notes (Score:5, Funny)
You just described Visual Basic.
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.
Ozzie knows from experience (Score:2)
Re:Ozzie knows from experience (Score:2)
Simpler times (Score:3, Insightful)
FWIW, any time I find it all overwhelming, I reach for my trusty copy of 'Programmers at Work' by Susan Lammers. Many of the great programmers are here along with the stories of how they created much of the basic building blocks we take for granted these days. Almost without exception, their ability to convey ideas in a clear and concise way is inspiring and after reading a few sections, I'm all fired up again and ready to cut code.
Viva La Simplicity!! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Viva La Simplicity!! (Score:2)
Microsoft's Problem (Score:2, Interesting)
New application Microsoft Simplify, coming 2009Q2! (Score:2)
Too little, too late (Score:3, Funny)
By the time Microsoft gets its problems sorted out, Linux will be the de facto standard. Engineering the complexity out of Windows will take years.
Re:Too little, too late (Score:2)
Come on, Mr. Bill, fix Microsoft if you can!
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.
Hopeful (Score:3)
On a lighter note, the only certifications I have are for Lotus Notes, does this mean the will transfer? Can I be an MCSE without the hassle of regurgitating facts on a test without understanding concepts?
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 =
Re:Bill hasn't been a programmer for a number of y (Score:2)
Anecdote on Lotus Note (Score:2)
Anyway, I have never had the direct pleasure of using LN, however a very close colleague had his whole database of contacts and clients in it, shared amongst the other marketing people. Using one of the first versions of LN he was unable to search in it in any reason
Complexity (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows is like a house of cards made from million decks, so many co-dependancies. It's why Vista has taken so long and will continue to cause problems.
The only thing to do is 'rip it up and start again' but they can't do that because of 1) time 2) losing customers by the millions along the way, so they carry on regardless and hope for the best.
Apple was in the same situation with Copland and it almost killed them too. Eventually they bit the bullet, trashed it (re-used some sections and ideas), provided the carbon bridge for transition/migration, and bought in proven code (BSD/Mach) and just worked on the GUI experience. This rescued them with literally months to spare before the big bad complexity monster ate them up. Genius, IMO.
Surely, at this late stage, they're can be no doubt that *nix won the OS wars?
Quote... (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting parallels (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm, is this quote from Microsoft after the development of Windows 2000 concluded, or when in the finishing touches of Vista.
They're confusingly similar [winsupersite.com] anyway:
So... Microsoft learnt from their mistakes in Longhorn? No, wait a minute!
The next OS shouldn't be as monolithic with things breaking in their own products, or even worse, OS, as soon as they apply a patch.
So now you know what you can expect in Vista -- more of the same?
A funny thing in all this, and a constructive suggestion instead of just whining, is a request for Microsoft to offer install-time choices. Sure, there should be a "novice installer mode" like Vista (and XP) currently features where at the very start, one can say "I'm an idiot, install the OS" in prettier wording. But what about advanced users? Shouldn't they be able to exclude stuff they don't need. Maybe then, *gasp* they won't be subject to security exploits in these non-installed components either.
Turning around a tanker... (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if he were a brilliant programmer (which I think he's not), he still has the extreme inertia of the Microsoft entrenched culture to deal with. This isn't the Microsoft that reacted quickly when the Internet sneaked up on them in the 90's, this is a bloated Microsoft that has as its main goal the protection of a deteriorating monopoly. This is a Microsoft that has not seen a successful, profitable new product in many, many, many years.
MS has very little room to change (Score:3, Insightful)
I strongly suspect the Gates decided to bail now while Microsoft is at it's peak. I figure he knows what is going to happen in ten years.
That's exactly right, painful though it is (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can't resist (Score:2)
Now, now, he did work on DOS... admittedly after he purchased it from someone else. And he didn't so much improve it as obfuscate it, to make it look like his own work. But yes, he did program... after a fashion.
I feel so unclean all of a sudden.
Re:Can't resist (Score:2)
-matthew
Re:Programmer's programmer? (Score:2)
Re:Competitor for Outlook? (Score:3, Informative)
Anyway, you're missing the point. Yes, people primarily use Outlook to send and receive email. But if you deploy it together with Exchange, you supposedly have a groupware solution. And indeed, the Outlook/Exchange combination is obviously meant to compete with the Notes/Domino combination.
As for Sharepoint, I think you're a little confused as to exactly what