Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

18 Years in Software Tools, an Insider's View 102

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the learning-from-history dept.
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"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

18 Years in Software Tools, an Insider's View More

18 Years in Software Tools, an Insider's View

Comments Filter:

  • Wow (Score:5, Funny)

    by bgog ( 564818 ) * on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @05:48AM (#15567606) Journal
    Good talk but man that guy is whiney. He sound's like my four-year-old.
    • This guy's mind runs at hyperdrive. If he is any indication, it's no wonder that MS is #1. Terrific film. Worth watching the whole thing (which stopped before he was done). Not that I especially like MS products, but he gives detailed MS insights into many facets of the software/computer industry. Mac User
    • Good talk but man that guy is whiney. He sound's like my four-year-old.


      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)

        by bgog ( 564818 ) *
        Interesting. I wasn't bashing microsoft at all. In fact I said the talk was 'Good'. I was commenting on how difficult the speaker was to listen to. Also don't you have anything better to do than to rip on my use of an apostraphe in a casual online post. Really, who cares.

  • Unique, huh. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @05:55AM (#15567626)
    Is this "Unique" in terms of "unexpected, enlightening and nuanced" or "Unique" in terms of "The 'Unique' Opinion Held By This Guy As Well As Everyone Else Who Has Been Immersed in Microsoft's Corporate Culture For Two Decades!"?

    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)

      by kjart ( 941720 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @08:01AM (#15567967)

      Is this "Unique" in terms of "unexpected, enlightening and nuanced" or "Unique" in terms of "The 'Unique' Opinion Held By This Guy As Well As Everyone Else Who Has Been Immersed in Microsoft's Corporate Culture For Two Decades!"?

      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.

      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.

      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)

        by drsmithy ( 35869 )
        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.

        Not to mention an engineering decision that "everyone" (GNOME, KDE, OS X) subsequently copied. Doesn't that fit the category of "innovation" ?

        • I didn't realize Gnome and KDE were Operating Systems. But then again, the difference between the GUI and the OS is a minor one, don't you think?
          • I didn't realize Gnome and KDE were Operating Systems.

            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)

        by Tony ( 765 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @11:15AM (#15569454) Journal
        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.

        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.
        • 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.

          From what I've heard, "Netscape" and "the competition" would have been pretty much synonymous back then.

        • 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 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

          • 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...

            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...

          • 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

            • 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).

              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

              • You seem to be ignoring the facts that IE was never sold

                The OS was sold, and IE was tied to the OS. Please read what I said.

                ...and the technical aspect of a shared browser component is a perfectly valid piece of functionality for an OS to include (and has since become commonplace).

                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

                • The OS was sold, and IE was tied to the OS. Please read what I said.

                  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

      • Yup, those engineers are "just following orders". The excuse doesn't fly any more now than it did in the 40s. If you purposely help evil, you are evil.
      • anyone that thinks Microsoft is the result of "just good engineering decisions" is not facing reality.

        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"
      • they made an engineering decision at the time that they thought made sense and ended up causing a big brouhaha.

        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)

      by OnanTheBarbarian ( 245959 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @08:13AM (#15568026)
      Right, because we hear frank talk from people who have been at _any_ tech company for 18 years all the time, this is obviously a non-event (this means that this guy was cutting code when a good proportion of Slashdotters were still crapping in diapers or watching Saturday morning cartoons). Face it, 18 years of actual activity (not just a few good years followed by 15 years of pontification or management or both) is a long time in this business and perhaps you should shut the hell up and at least listen, before shooting off your mouth. Even if the guy is from (shock, horror) Microsoft, and even if only you think that this guy is only useful as an insight into the enemies' camp.

      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.
    • 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.

      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)

    by demongeek ( 977698 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @05:56AM (#15567629)
    I'm not a psychologist, but surely 18 years in a single organization is going to brainwash you to some limited extent. You will either be (a) the corporate lovebug, touting everythign you do as infalliable, or (b) the corporate naysayer, whose sole response to anythign the company puts out is "it isn't read" or "this won't work".

    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)

      by kjart ( 941720 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @06:21AM (#15567683)
      Actually, so far he seems to have a relatively objective perspective. Obviously he likes Microsoft (he does work there) but his perspective on OSS is interesting (somewhat paraphrasing):

      I like open source..I'm a great fan of Stallman's....I think open source has definitely a place in the world and that linux has a place in the world and I hope linux continues to do a great job, and do you know why? Because to the extent that Linux does a great job it forces my guys to do a great job.

      • Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by killjoe ( 766577 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @06:43AM (#15567749)
        All religions have words that mean "not us". It could be heathen, infidel, goyem or whatever.

        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)

          by kjart ( 941720 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @06:57AM (#15567784)
          I find it interesting that he uses the phrase "my guys".

          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.

          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.

          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)

            by zootm ( 850416 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @07:31AM (#15567876)

            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 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.

          • I don't really find this odd at all. If you like your company/friends/coworkers you tend to identify them as "yours".
            I think parent found it odd that he uses the phrase "my guys" as opposed to "we". It does sound somewhat unnatural: the person works 18 years for the company and still does not identify himself as a part of it.
        • 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.

          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

          • OSX is based on FreeBSD. And I am pretty sure that the BSD license allows you to do pretty much whatever you want with the code, which is why OSX is not forced to be open source.

        • Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:5, Funny)

          by Daniel Dvorkin ( 106857 ) * on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @09:28AM (#15568515) Homepage Journal
          My guys. My friends. My paisans. They're very smart guys. Wise, even. You could call them my wiseguys.

          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)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "I'm not a psychologist, but surely 18 years in a single organization is going to brainwash you to some limited extent. You will either be (a) the corporate lovebug, touting everythign you do as infalliable, or (b) the corporate naysayer, whose sole response to anythign the company puts out is "it isn't read" or "this won't work". "

      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
    • surely 18 years in a single organization is going to brainwash you to some limited extent
      I like the way you sneaked in that "limited" so that you couldn't be excused of over-exaggeration...

    • Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RedOregon ( 161027 ) <redoregonNO@SPAMsatx.rr.com> on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @12:07PM (#15569898) Homepage Journal
      Not really. I spent 20 years in the Air Force, and I (and most retirees for that matter) turn into neither. Generally speaking, after that much time you know the organization well enough that you can both call BS on the BS parts, and support the good parts.

    • Re:18 Years? Wow... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      ...surely 18 years in a single organization is going to brainwash you to some limited extent. You will either be (a) the corporate lovebug, touting everythign you do as infalliable, or (b) the corporate naysayer, whose sole response to anythign the company puts out is "it isn't read" or "this won't work".

      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

    • surely 18 years in a single organization is going to brainwash you to some limited extent.

      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).

      • I suspect that depends to a large extent on the nature of the organization in question.

        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.

    • I'm not a psychologist, but surely 18 years in a single organization is going to brainwash you to some limited extent. You will either be (a) the corporate lovebug, touting everythign you do as infalliable, or (b) the corporate naysayer, whose sole response to anythign the company puts out is "it isn't read" or "this won't work". ...or 5 minutes working at the FSF

  • Rico writes the most interesting blog on MSDN (Score:5, Informative)

    by jeswin ( 981808 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @06:05AM (#15567649) Homepage
    For those of you who are new to .Net, Rico Mariani used to be the performance architect in the .Net team. His blog Performance Tidbits [msdn.com], will give you tons of insight into making that .Net application run faster. For the naive, it also tells you when performance matters (which is not all the time). This feed sits right at the top of my subscription list.

  • Wow (Score:4, Funny)

    by $RANDOMLUSER ( 804576 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @06:08AM (#15567661)
    > The talk can also be download from the (University of Waterloo Computer Science Club) csclub's media server

    They could've saved time and simply set fire to their server themselves.

  • Interesting talk (and not just about tools) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kjart ( 941720 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @06:14AM (#15567672)
    Still in the process of watching it, but he has interesting perspective on Windows 95 and it's role as a bridge from 16bit to 32bit programs. 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 did (in his opinion). Whether you agree or disagree, it's an interesting look at Microsoft over (nearly) the past two decades.
    • Looking back from today, Windows 95 looks like a hack, and not in a good way.

      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
      • >Looking back from today, Windows 95 looks like a hack, and not in a good way.
        >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.
    • >> 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 did (in his opinion).

      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.
    • Still in the process of watching it, but he has interesting perspective on Windows 95 and it's role as a bridge from 16bit to 32bit programs.

      ? 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)

    by Betabug ( 58015 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @06:16AM (#15567677) Homepage
    There seems to be no transcript, nothing to read.

    The only option is a couple of media files to download - at least they have options that should work on a variety of platforms.
  • Slashdot gets a mention around the 37 minute mark (paraphrase)

    Slashdot is kinda gratuitously over the top. On the other hand, there is great content there too - great minds go to Slashdot....Really, you could argue about the signal to noise ratio, but it's definitely not zero.

    He must be new here...:)

  • He's a programmer (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The programming is important, everything else is secondary. He isn't against doing things as a community and has embraced a Wiki. His comments about it are quite positive. http://msdnwiki.microsoft.com/en-us/mtpswiki/defau lt.aspx [microsoft.com]

  • UWCSC (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @08:13AM (#15568023)
    I attended Waterloo for a few years back in 96-99, and just as an interesting side note (since I can't seem to access the CSC media server, probably due to the /. effect), while a lot of people were members of the CSC to have access to another UNIX system and the tools they provided, the active CSC members were perhaps the most looked down upon people in the entire Math and Computers building. They epitomized everything negative about being a CS geek: essentially, they were a group of perhaps six guys and one girl, and while they were all incredibly savvy, they required emergency remedial lessons in personal hygiene (people actually avoided the stretch of 3rd floor hallway off which the room was located because the... aroma... was so potent), and even more amusingly, the girl, who was perhaps the antithesis to Natalie Portman (think grotesquely overweight, sporting a healthier quantity of facial hair than one would want in a woman, and entirely lacking any grooming whatsoever) was the entire focus of the males, who appeared to be trying to woo her in some sort of hyperCS ritual which involved much talk of network topologies, UNIX, and computer programming.

    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 :-).
    • ummm. i think you just described /. as well.

    • 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

    • Check out tehladies [tehladies.com] your source for teh ladies (some of them are CSC members even :-)).
    • I currently attend UWaterloo (Mechanical Engineering), and I have to say, UWCSC isn't quite that bad anymore. Many of them keep proper hygiene - or at least rudimentary - and there isn't that unpleasant aroma any more.
  • Seems a bit gratuituos to send us to newsforge that only then sends us to the waterloo site. Are you needing to raise the hits on newsforge?

    Now, the site is hoplessly timed out. Next time, spend the extra minutes mirroring the stinkin' thing.
  • I was hoping to download just the audio so I could listen to it on the way to work today.
    If anyone has just the audio track, please post it.
  • Interesting to me to hear his rant about the fact that customers were more impressed by his 'easy-to-build data tips tool', than they were by his friends 'very-hard-to-build better call stack display tool'.

    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.
  • Why did you bother linking to the article on Newsforge when your summary of it was the entire article? I'm getting sick of all these summaries on Slashdot being nothing more than the first paragraph from the linked article. How hard is it to read the article and write a f#%@*n summary?

    I'm done with my rant, you can go back to whatever you were doing now.

  • He seems to resent users (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DavidinAla ( 639952 ) on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @12:23PM (#15570079)
    I'm not quite finished watching the video, but I think the most interesting thing about watching this guy is the unspoken attitude that he seems to have toward users. The most telling thing is when he expresses irritation that developers cheered a "crap" feature that it took him 10 minutes to write in a developer tool (but which those developers thought was very important) but didn't care much about another feature that was very difficult to write and took a lot of time and effort. He seems almost angry that users of his software don't appreciate how hard something was to do. He seems disdainful of the fact that the users have their own needs and desires for what is most useful to THEM. The attitude seems to be that the users are too stupid to understand what's important and what's not.

    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

  • Reinforces my experience... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by drsmithy ( 35869 ) <drsmithy&gmail,com> on Tuesday June 20, 2006 @07:01PM (#15572932)
    That when you objectively listen to what *real people* from Microsoft are actually saying (and look at what they're doing), rather than apply biased feelings to out of context soundbites and "media analysts" with chips on their shoulders, they're just a bunch of geeks writing the best software they can.

Slashdot Top Deals

I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

Close