And You're a Microsoft Shareholder Because...?
Hello. Just a quick check-in for Mini-land. As I start writing this, I should be out soaking up the sun biking down some nice trail, but my knee started making those wet twig-snapping noises so here I am, side-lined and typing.
Quarterly financials are due in a week, and I'll probably skip a post on this one. Other places do a pretty good job of tracking the financial results. I am really curious, though, of all the people either holding or accumulating Microsoft stock: why? Why are you a Microsoft MSFT shareholder? What kind of metrics are you using to deciding to buy and/or hold? Sure, we all set alarms on stock when we buy it, but usually that does not include stagnation. Rick Sherlund gets off the Microsoft beat and the next thing you know we're getting bounced around.
This past week, I was driving home, listening to Marketplace on NPR, and some fellow gets on talking about Microsoft: "Lumbering..." he starts off with. "Dinosaur" he adds. Wow, he ripped into us more than I ever have. And what else shows up today? Lumbering Giants, mentioning Microsoft and other Dogs of the Dow.
This, combined with reports of Microsoft's death (SteveB and BillG in the repository: "Sorry, we're what? We can't hear you over all the ruckus of counting these billions raining down on us."), means we've reached a cultural turning point: Who's afraid of the big Microsoftie bad wolf?
No one.
Thank goodness. Pretty soon, the institutional shareholders might actually rub their eyes really well and look over the data, stumble up to the microphone at FAM, tap it, and say, "Hey! What the hell are you Bozos doing with my money?"
Personally, I'm in the middle of extreme diversification and I've scheduled myself out to aggressively sell-off all the MSFT ESPP and stock awards I've left alone for all these years. I guess that's just another little death in my confidence that Microsoft is actually ever going to turn around stock price-wise. I'm holding on to my options, though, hoping to at least fund an extra shot or two in my occasional mocha.
Other goings on...
InsideMS: "hey, was that a shark I just jumped?"
Collision Domain has a new post - "Bunnies!" - discussing the state of LisaB's internal InsideMS blog. Readers of the comments to a recent post will get the title. InsideMS certainly had a lot of potential at the get-go, along with probably a deep desire of Microsofties to use it as a place to engage and help change Microsoft and knowing that they could safely engage in conversation with peers. Then, it seems, it all went kinda wrong. Chops to LisaB for keeping it running as long as it has but hell, I wouldn't have it on my commitments either at this point. You can't keep posting on HR topics forever. I think it could change with more guest posts and with follow-up posts that summarized the major themes in comments so that the comments can at least be acknowledged, if not acted upon ("order up!").
Or maybe any topics originally started by He Who Must Not Be Named are off-limits.
If LisaB were to be interviewed, what are the hard, unanswered questions you'd want posed to her?
Microsoftie in the Field: hey, my goodness, a new post. Keep it up!
Outlook 2007 Performance: so, as Joel Spolsky notes, an update for Outlook 2007 was released to address performance problems. And, by the way, Outlook PM suggests you trim down your PST / OST size so that it doesn't accumulate email and silly stuff like that. Outlook is a temporal organizer, not a repository! Anyway, my performance is a little better but I still have strange freezes with POP, which I don't even know if it's on the Outlook team's radar. I'd be interested in what SQM said was the percent of non-Exchange Outlook users.
But it has me thinking. Thinking about waterfalled monolithic product wave shipping. Can it go on? Can we keep with the every three year product pipeline burst? One issue with Office proper is that it's half client software and half platform, and some large chunk of each wired up to the server solutions. The corner we've painted ourselves into is the platform part, where it was a strategic advantage but now IT departments are wary of upgrading less all their custom platform-based solutions regress because of new features or deprecation.
What to do? Well, avoid making that mistake again. Can Office be saved? Could you write a feature and stabilize it and just ship it, all within three months? A release of Office becomes constantly updated as new features come out, at least ensuring we can stay competitive fresh.
"Oy!" You start screaming about service packs and QFEs and N minus one and crazy sustainability crap like that. Really? Do we really have that limitation? Is it leading us to the path of reward and success?
And do we have the culture and know-how to be on track to just incrementally ship new features as we finish them? I'd be interested in knowing which groups do this really, really well.
Take This Microsoftie Job and Shove-It: Ms. Mary Jo Foley picks up on a f(Microsoftie) = Googler post: Ouch Goodbye Microsoft; Hello, Google. Ooo, that item got deleted from the blog. Silly delete. Never delete your blog entry. Always update and just plain replace the content with a space or a smiley. Less people track it down in the BlogLines cache by looking for feeds with "David Bennet" or such.
Vizzini! You know I have to give a shout-out to Mr. Joe Wilcox for his Princess Bride reference in DoubleClick and Microsoft's Thrift Culture. DoubleClick. Well, I'm glad it wasn't Microsoft paying $3,100,000,000 for it.
(Oh, and Mr. Wilcox: man, you've got some interesting comment action going on in your posts. Whew.)
229 comments:
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ms flikr.... ms del.icio.us.. ms broadcast.com ... ms geocities (ha)
edit... *after merger...
Microsoft Flikr Photo Sharing Technologies for Windows
Microsoft del.icio.us.net
Microsoft Soapbox.broadcast.com.silverlight.windowsmediatechnologies.playsforsure.zune.net
The weirdest thing about the whole "backwards compatability" issue is this:
If MSFT wanted 100% compatibility, simply embed a XP VM in Vista, and use that to launch and run old apps.
There, solved. All done.
Now you could architect a brand new deisgn.
The weirdest thing about the whole "backwards compatability" issue is this:
If MSFT wanted 100% compatibility, simply embed a XP VM in Vista, and use that to launch and run old apps.
There, solved. All done.
Now you could architect a brand new deisgn.
The mostest weirdest thing is that this was proposed back in 2002, but since Longhorn was shipping in 2003 it was discarded because there wasn't enough time to do the development.
Oh, and it was considered "hard". Customers wouldn't understand it and there were worries that it wouldn't be seamless enough.
"If MSFT wanted 100% compatibility, simply embed a XP VM in Vista, and use that to launch and run old apps."
Problem is VMs take lots of memory that most machines don't have enough to run vista+xp+apps all at the same time. Most people also have lots of 2+ years hardware they want to use.
"If MSFT wanted 100% compatibility, simply embed a XP VM in Vista, and use that to launch and run old apps."
Yeah, like nobody ever thought of that:
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/10/05/477317.aspx
Say goodbye to $31.
What kind of blue crack are they smoking where they think a Yahoo merger would be accretive? The culture clash alone would be destructive enough. And it's not like we're this smooth running happy machine anyway. Unless one is a partner of course.
"If MSFT wanted 100% compatibility, simply embed a XP VM in Vista, and use that to launch and run old apps.
There, solved. All done."
Yes. It REALLY is that simple.
*sarcasm alert*
IBM about to layoff 100,000 US employees?
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070504_002027.html
Can Microsoft's SMSMG be very far behind?
off-topic
from http://msn.careerbuilder.com/custom/msn/careeradvice/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=1010&SiteId=cbmsnhp41010&sc_extcmp=JS_1010_home1>1=9965&cbRecursionCnt=1&cbsid=d9fa61d02c6947e8b26912aaf4cb2c7b-231635747-JA-5
an article about 'the five hottest IT careers':
Software Developers
How much can you make? A shortage of skilled software developers means companies are willing to pay top dollar to recruit and retain these professionals. As a result, software developers will see the greatest salary gains of any job classification in 2007. Average starting salaries are expected to rise 5.1 percent, to between $60,250 and $94,750.
Anybody think our in-house pay at the biggest, most profitable software concern in history, which just posted marvelous quarterly numbers and revised up estimates for the next year, will match this across the board?
"Anybody think our in-house pay at the biggest, most profitable software concern in history, which just posted marvelous quarterly numbers and revised up estimates for the next year, will match this across the board?"
Must just be you. I honestly don't know of anybody in the rank and file that isn't getting something at least in that range.
Anybody think our in-house pay...
Dude, I'd have to take a 30% cut using that pay scale, leave me out of it.
You are talking about entry level developer pay scale here, and if you are stuck there very long you have bigger worries.
>"Problem is VMs take lots of memory that most machines don't have enough to run vista+xp+apps all at the same time."
I think you mean Vista doesn't have enough to run itself.
>"Most people also have lots of 2+ years hardware they want to use."
End sentence with "which will fail before next year, especially if it is a notebook and need to be archived into a new machine."
I love it when pms spout opinions as if they were facts surveyed at the local Starbucks and then foist those opinions on product strategy.
Maybe we can figure out a way to Tag all these managers and partners, group them on a Vista display list so they can then be summarily dismissed (fired for those of you in Redmond).
If MSFT wanted 100% compatibility, simply embed a XP VM in Vista, and use that to launch and run old apps.
Bingo. This is exactly what Apple did with OSX back in ~2000 to run OS9 programs. And it worked fine.
Yes, there were some of the problems that Chen and other posters mention, and not some of the others. (You got logged in automatically--duh. And it mounted the host's hard drive automatically--duh.)
The point was that you could run OSX and OSX software and still use your old OS9 programs if you had to. It wasn't a "perfect" experience but people recognized that it was a feature and appreciated it.
Of course, if Microsoft were to do something like this, we'd need to be switching to a radically different and better OS (Linux, anyone?). If the host OS is 90% identical to XP, then there's not much point to writing software specifically for the host.
>> It REALLY is that simple.
Yes, it really is. Mac OS X with Parallels on it has a 100% compatibility with non-DirectX Windows apps. There's even "coherence" mode to show the windows as if they were Mac OS windows, and allow Alt-Tab between Mac OS and Windows. OK, cut&paste is limited (only text can be cut&pasted between OSs), but you get my drift. Next version of Parallels will have limited DirectX support.
I can't believe that Parallels can do this across two extremely different operating systems and we cannot. I can believe that after years of "planning" that could be better spent writing code, the idea was discarded as "unfeasible".
What kind of blue crack are they smoking where they think a Yahoo merger would be accretive?
Possibly something other than a merger is in order. I think you only have to combine the advertising. If Microsoft and Yahoo combine overall "impressions" (total number of eyeballs that view all their ad properties) advertisers will pay more to hit a bigger bucket of users. (I think that's how it works.) Anyway, Microsoft, by and large, doesn't care about advertising. Microsoft makes software and thinks about software. If their backend ad business is combined with Yahoo's in order to bring more ad income to both, then great.
"OK, cut&paste is limited (only text can be cut&pasted between OSs), but you get my drift."
Unfortunately, that inability to integrate negates the point of the whole exercise. Cut and paste is just the tip of the iceberg.
Thankfully, wiser heads than you are quite aware of this.
Must just be you. I honestly don't know of anybody in the rank and file that isn't getting something at least in that range.
It is comparing the current salary after 6 years to the starting salary range and getting the impression that we value inexperienced talent just as much as we do very experienced developers that has me worried.
Hypothetical re-architected versions of Windows appear to be a temperamental subject as far as Mini's comment filtering is concerned; I've tried a few times to talk about this, but he would have none of it.
But the subject has come up again, so I have to ask the same question of those poster here who are smarter than I am about OS construction:
Hypothetically, wouldn't it be possible to do what Apple did with its legacy APIs?
Like this:
1) Amass a comprehensive assessment of all third-party Windows software.
2) Perform a detailed analysis of the software (ranking it by size of installed user base; obsolesence of older versions/file formats; age of the product; funtionality that is mission critical vs. "you can live without it" for each program etc.)
3) Based on the above, derive a comprehensive, definitive list of all Windows APIs.
4) Sort the APIs into groups: the ones that are necessary; the ones that are redundant; the ones that are obsolete; etc. etc.
5) Warn developers in advance that you are going to commit to a certain subset of the above APIs and depreciate the rest.
5) Build a new, clean, modern OS from scratch, reverse engineered from that subset of APIs.
This is exactly what Apple did when they planned their OS 9 / OS X migration roadmap. They extracted a subset of their "Classic" APIs (about 60% IIRC) and told everyone that those were the "Carbon" APIs and that, if you changed your application so that it only used those APIs, you could then "port" the app to OS X.
The result: An OS (call it "Windows Prime" or something like that) that runs (presumably) all Microsoft Applications natively; can run older stuff (with "dangerous" ActiveX controls etc.) with Vista-style warnings, etc. and can run easily-altered versions of third-party applications (installed as double-binaries or whatever) or run original versions with slightly-limited funtionaliy.
You would occasionally (occasionally) see warnings that said, "The program you're running is calling an older, XP-era API that's going to open a port or change the registry or do something else; how do you want to handle it? (FYI, we recommend you use the free upgrade to the Windows Prime version of Outlook which doesn't have this problem and basically works the same.)"
You'd need a CEO and BOD who actually grasp what's going on inside the box, however. That may be the dealbreaker.
"It is comparing the current salary after 6 years to the starting salary range and getting the impression that we value inexperienced talent just as much as we do very experienced developers that has me worried."
The experienced developers I know here exceed that range easily. Again, must just be you.
>> Unfortunately, that inability to integrate
Dude, you're either not very smart, or you're distorting the facts intentionally. You have to realize three things:
1. Architecture of the clipboard is fundamentally different between Windows and Mac OS X. You can't quite paste an OLE doc into a Mac app that doesn't know what it is.
2. Even so, if there was enough demand, this would be implemented at least for images, RTF text, Office docs and the like.
3. Parallels don't have the engineers who created either of the OSs, while we would have engineers intimately familiar with both. You can do ANYTHING in this case.
Time for a new post, Mini. It's May! Let's have some new fodder. :-)
It is comparing the current salary after 6 years to the starting salary range and getting the impression that we value inexperienced talent just as much as we do very experienced developers that has me worried.
This is an issue that has been raised (here and on Lisa's blog) again and again. Nothing new, and nothing is going to be done about it, clearly. The solution is to leave and come back, crazy as that is.
"Dude, you're either not very smart, or you're distorting the facts intentionally. You have to realize three things:
1. Architecture of the clipboard is fundamentally different between Windows and Mac OS X. You can't quite paste an OLE doc into a Mac app that doesn't know what it is.
2. Even so, if there was enough demand, this would be implemented at least for images, RTF text, Office docs and the like.
3. Parallels don't have the engineers who created either of the OSs, while we would have engineers intimately familiar with both. You can do ANYTHING in this case."
You know, I'm trying to get my head around exactly why people are making architectural comparisons between OSX and Windows. Is there something really special about OSX architecturally? In what ways is Windows limited architecturally compared to OSX? Is there something that I can do on OSX that I can't do in XP or Vista due to this architectural superiority that OSX has?
Might sound like a troll, but this topic just seemed to come out of nowhere, so now I'm curious.
Go.
Re: Mac OSX architecture v. Windows - just to be clear: I lighten up on the comment moderating near the end of a post's life, but if you're following up on this sub-thread, do so without brazen, shallow snarks as part of your explanation, or you might as well be typing directly into the Big Bit-Bucket in the Sky.
In what ways is Windows limited architecturally compared to OSX? Is there something that I can do on OSX that I can't do in XP or Vista due to this architectural superiority that OSX has?
Yeah; you can put out a new one every year.
I'm not being snarky! I'm absolutely serious. Vista didn't take five years for an abandoned Longhorn and a patched XP because of bad management: it's because MSFT literally couldn't do what they wanted to do, because of legacy interoperability issues.
Plus, there's the "no security issues" part of Mac OS. There's a myth that OS X has no viruses (NO viruses) because nobody's trying to crack it. Actually, it's because the OS is intrinscally more secure. (This is provable but I don't want to get into it here.)
OS X has no registry; no dynamic link libraries; no way that software can be altered/installed without express user permission (your fingers on a keyboard, and nothing else; can't be faked or gotten around); integrated system-wide search that was added for Tiger (OS X 10.3, two years ago).
OS X has gotten faster with each iteration. Older, slower machines get zippier when you upgrade the OS. There is no creeping need for more speed/RAM/storage. (Those things are nice, but OS X upgrades don't require them and actually relax the need for them. Really! I'm speaking from personal experience. My PCs got slower when I went from Win2k AS to Vista; my Macs got faster when I went from Panther to Tiger.)
So, 1) yearly innovation of new features; 2) vastly superior security; 3) speeds up your machine each time; all because of the modular, modern, non-legacy architecture. Any questions?
>> Go.
I wasn't saying it's superior (even though knowing both I think it is), I was just saying that implementing a VM that works well enough between non-backwards compatible V.next and Win XP wouldn't be as unsurmountable a task as some folks on this board make it out to be. If it's doable between Mac OS X and XP, it sure as heck is doable between XP and Windows.next. Worse yet, we'll have to do it anyway and now it will be much harder because of Vista's graphics requirements and future apps that will use them.
And dude who ruminates about security - STFU, you don't know what you're talking about. They just had their own *.ani exploit. They're only not being pwned because there's just 5% marketshre.
"Dude, you're either not very smart, or you're distorting the facts intentionally."
To point out the obvious:
A) The clipboard is the tip of the iceberg in terms of integration. Apparently this sailed right by you. Consider that in Parallels you have *two* entirely separate machines to manage, along with all the heartburn that entails.
B) Too much integration not only brings back the problems you had before you went with the VM, it multiplies them tenfold.
Pretty embarrassing things you failed to think of for somebody who's going around calling other people not very smart. A little more humility next time, please.
>> The clipboard is the tip of the iceberg
Roll out the entire thing, don't be shy. Tell us why it can't be done, only to be proven wrong with Windows v.next (for which Windows bigwigs have publicly said they'll explore VMs for backwards compat).
>> you have *two* entirely separate machines to manage
It has to be that way on a Mac (I'm intentionally discarding the "Wine" option - it does not, as of right now, work all that well). It doesn't have to on Windows.
Then there's this whole "manage" thing which you mention but don't describe what it is. What do you mean by "manage"? Install updates every now and then? Run two kernels simultaneously? Why is it such an unbearable burden on the user that even mentioning it puts VM solution out of the question?
>> somebody who's going around calling other
>> people not very smart
Hey, you reap as you sow. I wasn't the first one calling the opponent stupid in this particular debate.
Software Developers
How much can you make? A shortage of skilled software developers means companies are willing to pay top dollar to recruit and retain these professionals. As a result, software developers will see the greatest salary gains of any job classification in 2007. Average starting salaries are expected to rise 5.1 percent, to between $60,250 and $94,750.
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