I always liked that blog post, as I consider google to be on of the most ineffective successful company out there. There are thousands of developpers, standing on giant's shoulders (ie:using opensource technology), but when you look at the actual produced software, it isn't really that much (it isn't bad either, it is just not something to be particularly proud of)
Furthermore, with all that free flowing money, extreme brainly employees, etc, etc, one have to wonder why they need so many acquisitions...

Do you believe that everyone interview for that book didn't exist ? Urban legend too ?

There is another issue with the Pulse Smartpen: the software is a steaming piece of shit. For instance, if anybody draws a huge penis on the first page of your notebook, you'll stare at it until the end of the year, because you can't delete pages.

And that is just one among many many many issues.

Great hardware. Failed software execution.

There is no such thing as an Nobel Prize for Economics.
It is not actually one of the Nobel Prizes, which were established by the will of Alfred Nobel during 1895

It isn't done to give an excuse to disperse. They don't need any. It is done to clearly mark the movements as "unlawful" in the media and in peaceful protesters and to prevent any kind of massive public support.

> I don't think this guy ever worked with any software engineer with any significant amount of experience

He designed Excel Basic, and did quite a lot of work on VBA, so you can't wipe his experience away. Also, I beleive that there are some experienced engineers at FogCreek

Anyway, the guy is an ass, and loves making outrageous statements. I guess it is because he have to rationalize about how could it be that, being as smart as he think he is, he ended-up with a nice looking web application written in the most evil kludge one could envision. Of course, his inner coherence is getting slowly shredded into pieces after that...

I really like when people make insightful comments, while shooting themselves in the foot -- hard.

>As your program goes on, you clean it up, add abstractions where needed. The first version of Word for Windows didn't look ANYTHING like the current version. If you are going to make a new word processor, you go after the old version, not aim at the sky.

Let me copy page 207 of Taming Wild Software Schedule, because this is just too good to be ignored (you can find the text in amazon by doing a "search in content for WinWord"):

The development of Microsoft Word for Windows 1.0 provides an object lesson in the effects of optimistic scheduling practices. Word for Windows, aka "WinWord," spent 5 years in development, consumed 660 man-months of developer effort, and produced a system of 249.000 lines of code (lansiti 1994). The final 5-year schedule was approximately five times as long as originally planned. Table 9-1 on the next page summarizes WinWord's scheduling history.

WinWord had an extremely aggressive schedule. The shortest possible schedule for a project of its size is about 460 days. The longest estimate for WinWord 1.0's schedule was 395 days, which is 65 days shorter than the shortest possible schedule.

Development of WinWord 1.0 contained classic examples of the things that go wrong when a software project is scheduled too aggressively:
â WinWord was beset by unachievable goals. Bill Gates's directive to the team was to "develop the best word processor ever" and to do it as fast as possible, preferably within 12 months. Either of those goals individually would have been challenging. The combination was impossible.

 

No hard feeling, but that was too good to miss. Anyway, it can actually be used to prove your point: they aimed too high. But, being Microsoft, they succeeded anyway. Overall, I am almost ok with your argument. The only dark side, is that sooo many companies now deliver crappy duct tape one-shot software that hardly work, and never update it, because they go under due to pissed customers...

You know, I happen to think that the net is the biggest duct tape of all. Hundred of billions of dollars have been spent building apps on something that wasn't designed for that, and almost each time a new solution came, it was based on a hack that somebody did, that was glorified into some great technology (say ajax, for instance).

That is the old Worse Is Better theory. LISP machines were fantastic, but were replaced by badly designed kludges. Smalltalk environments were amazing, but everybody used less elegantly designed languages/environment instead. The thing that get the job done NOW, with the smallest curve of learning gets the momentum and WINS.

When you see the kind of kludge and complexity that is CSS (for instance) to get a somewhat controllable UI on the web, it is hard not to feel sorry. Now, people are developing apps in javascript, with very poor development environments, getting extremely fragile systems, that run hundred of times slower than a normal desktop application would. And buggy as hell (for instance, getting proper drag and drop behavior in web apps is currently impossible).

I can't avoid thinking that a properly designed web technology would make all those issues moot, but of course, that "perfect" system would never have been able to get momentum. Maybe the great designer is the one that knows how to design a system just badly enough to be successful....

Why lol at internet mention ? I am not saying that MS invented the net, I am sayin that they made a 180 degree turn when the net appeared. This is documented everywhere (FYI, the first edition of billg "visionary" document had no mention of the net in. Second edition had the net into it, and ms mad a u-turn that nobody thought they were able to do).

> "We reversed the order, now it's DOS running in Windows" - okay, there were changes but it took them 15 years to go through the original Windows leftovers

There were changes ? That is all you can say ? You don't know what you are talking about. Period.

I am always amazed that people can be both assertive and utterly wrong. I despise Microsoft, for a variety of reason, but that isn't a reason to be blind at their qualities:

> Microsoft is far to big to change direction.

Internet, WindowsNT, XBox are counter examples. Microsoft is one of the most agile company out there. A lot of dead / moribond companies and a lot of products are there to serve as a warning to others.

> They have never been a technology company

I beg to differ. It is possible to argue that their are not a technology company anymore, but not that they never were

> They could develop new and better OS's at a fraction of their current research costs by simply giving cash to universities to do the work and keeping their hands off the projects

To build an OS that they would get no benefits of ? Wtf? And why does MS would need a new OS ? What is wrong with the current OS model ? They need better apps, they need better subsystems, they need to remove cruft and to clean up stuff, but the core OS is still fine for its uses and can be improved by evolutions.

They just need Microsoft Research for a few things, mainly:
* To prevent people working here from working elsewhere, where they could create and apply disruptive technology.
* To get ideas that may or may not integrated into products (given the origins of the talking paperclip, the latter may be better)
* To have a better time-to-market IF they needed to produce something due to some disruptive tech appearing from competitors

Giving cash to university and keeping their hands off the projects obviously wouldn't make any sense

Snopes says it is true.

I also like the idea of Wells Fargo sending this to customers:

You owe your soul to the company store. Why not owe your home to Wells Fargo? An equity advantage loan can help you spend what would have been your children's inheritance.

There are (unsurprisingly) a couple of ones in France that can be considered as such, as they are applied on the "before taxes" revenue (Hence, you pay a tax on money you never had). Sorry for the links in French...

Of course! That "2-inch fat" as you call it, is precisely designed so women have something to hold when screaming in pleasure (in the missionary position). :-)

That is a change of process from the previous way pictures were staged

Note that I would love to know how that picture have been taken !

I'd love to see that mention on Paris-Match pictures of Sarkozy...

For the uninformed, Paris-Match magazine published an altered picture of Nicolas "cocainomaniac chihuahua" Sarkozy.