{"id":133,"date":"2004-10-18T11:14:46","date_gmt":"2004-10-18T18:14:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp\/?p=133"},"modified":"2004-10-18T11:14:46","modified_gmt":"2004-10-18T18:14:46","slug":"deep-thoughts-on-microsoft-by-nat-friedman-and-mini-microsoft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/2004\/10\/18\/deep-thoughts-on-microsoft-by-nat-friedman-and-mini-microsoft\/","title":{"rendered":"Deep Thoughts on Microsoft, By Nat Friedman and Mini-Microsoft"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two very interesting takes on the climate at Microsoft that I wanted to flag for the folks not picking up my del.icio.us<\/a> links:<\/p>\n

First, Nat Friedman of Novell (link<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Microsoft’s focus has always been on developers, and when you hear Ballmer and Gates talking about Longhorn, you hear them talking about WinFS, Avalon, and Indigo: terms that mean nothing to software users, but that are endlessly interesting to developers.<\/p>\n

Or at least, Microsoft hopes that they’re interesting topics. But what if they aren’t?<\/p>\n

The web has taught people that low-tech stuff can be really productive. Lots of people are using PHP, Perl and Python in areas you wouldn’t expect. These are real, salt-of-the-earth tools. By contrast Avalon and some of Microsoft’s other recent efforts at programming environment design look like out-of-touch erudite fluff, with a rank odor of cubicleware evident from miles away.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And this one, an older post that I somehow missed (link)<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Scoble post “Zef says Microsoft can’t hire great programmers” ( Zef’s link) brings up one truth I’ve seen since the internet bubble: Microsoft has a really hard time hiring quality people. We go hunting for them in the wilds of East Europe. Why don’t people want to come to work for Microsoft?<\/p>\n

My take: because we’re big, boring, and too entangled in each other’s business. We are now IBM. We spackle in process to make up for the gaps in intellectual progress. Perhaps I have a snazzy new web app idea. There’s no way I could incubate that into something that would ever see the light of phosphor as a Microsoft-brand. I’d have to hook Passport up to it, and then glom some sort of MSN story on-top of it. No, we might say how we need to be quick and agile and deft, but then we end up spending 1000% of our time trying to justify it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two very interesting takes on the climate at Microsoft that I wanted to flag for the folks not picking up my del.icio.us links: First, Nat Friedman of Novell (link): Microsoft’s focus has always been on developers, and when you hear Ballmer and Gates talking about Longhorn, you hear them talking about WinFS, Avalon, and Indigo:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trends-observations"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/sogrady\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}