4 ms·

No, but I view MS as a collection of employees desperate to learn what they need for the next job now. Hence, the total apparent lack of desire to do anything

No, but I view MS as a collection of employees desperate to learn what they need for the next job now. Hence, the total apparent lack of desire to do anything new and innovative ("Let's copy AWS! Genius!").

sargun 10y ago
Funny story from my time at Microsoft (this wasn't representative of the entire population, just a few folks). This was circa 2013: We were in a meeting talking about infrastructure and testing. I said that we used EC2 for some of our infrastructure, and we were thinking of moving some of our local dev infra to AWS. Someone in the room asked me what that was. I responded with "Amazon web services" and they countered "you mean the company that sells books and stuff?" -- they had never heard of AWS, nor EC2 This comes from someone who had been with the organization for some time. He was very well respected by a lot of folks. He had more awards in his office than I could count. I still think he's a great guy. The Microsoft monoculture hurt quite a bit.
- logical42 10y ago
  Why wouldn't you use azure instead?
  - lallysingh 10y ago
    If I were to guess, to avoid having to go through the meetings and internal bureaucracy for it. It'd literally be cheaper (after counting in person-hours of time) to just pay for an external vendor.
    - kevinstubbs 10y ago
      There's no extra meetings or internal bureaucracy for using Azure internally. It's painless to get an internal subscription for Azure that can be used by your team.
      - mooreds 10y ago
        Perhaps that was not the case in 2013?
  - sargun 10y ago
    Did you try using Azure to run Linux workloads "at scale" (100+ nodes) in 2013?
- ethbro 10y ago
  Cheap shot, but this is the company that created TFS in 2005(?). Which as near as I can tell is an answer to the question "How do we reimplement SVN in an MS environment?" Which seems like something no one should have been asking for by that time.
  - bunderbunder 10y ago
    TFS goes rather a bit further than just being a version control system. That said, I'm not entirely certain why they decided to implement TFVC (TFS's default - and until recently, only - version control system) instead of just basing it on SVN. Aside from that this was at the height of the period when Microsoft had a compulsive need to sink resources into building their own proprietary clone of every damn thing.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Well, I love those gated check-ins, specially when working in offshoring projects.
  - sargun 10y ago
    Microsoft's dev tools were straight up amazing. As someone who didn't get to take advantage of many of them, I was always envious of engineers using Visual Studio and being able to debug code like it was magic. Although TFS may seem terrible, it works for super large organizations, and big code bases in a way that SVN and Git just didn't.
    - ethbro 10y ago
      I wouldn't say I worked with a super large codebase at the customer who used it, but the only compelling feature seemed to be "it played nice with MS infrastructure." Teams that had issues grasping the fundamentals of VCS in general still had issues. And in return you got the lesser compatibility and greater number of code warts that came with proprietary enterprise software over open source. But I'm curious, what worked specifically for you in TFS that wasn't in the SVN ecosystem? It's probably the client was unaware of a lot of features.
wmccullough 10y ago
I don't think there's a lack of desire, I think there's a lack of ability due to size. I also don't feel it's fair to say that their attitude is "Let's copy AWS! Genius!", Azure has become very mature and a delight to work with.

sargun 10y ago

Funny story from my time at Microsoft (this wasn't representative of the entire population, just a few folks). This was circa 2013: We were in a meeting talking about infrastructure and testing. I said that we used EC2 for some of our infrastructure, and we were thinking of moving some of our local dev infra to AWS. Someone in the room asked me what that was. I responded with "Amazon web services" and they countered "you mean the company that sells books and stuff?" -- they had never heard of AWS, nor EC2 This comes from someone who had been with the organization for some time. He was very well respected by a lot of folks. He had more awards in his office than I could count. I still think he's a great guy. The Microsoft monoculture hurt quite a bit.

logical42 10y ago
Why wouldn't you use azure instead?
- lallysingh 10y ago
  If I were to guess, to avoid having to go through the meetings and internal bureaucracy for it. It'd literally be cheaper (after counting in person-hours of time) to just pay for an external vendor.
  - kevinstubbs 10y ago
    There's no extra meetings or internal bureaucracy for using Azure internally. It's painless to get an internal subscription for Azure that can be used by your team.
    - mooreds 10y ago
      Perhaps that was not the case in 2013?
- sargun 10y ago
  Did you try using Azure to run Linux workloads "at scale" (100+ nodes) in 2013?
ethbro 10y ago
Cheap shot, but this is the company that created TFS in 2005(?). Which as near as I can tell is an answer to the question "How do we reimplement SVN in an MS environment?" Which seems like something no one should have been asking for by that time.
- bunderbunder 10y ago
  TFS goes rather a bit further than just being a version control system. That said, I'm not entirely certain why they decided to implement TFVC (TFS's default - and until recently, only - version control system) instead of just basing it on SVN. Aside from that this was at the height of the period when Microsoft had a compulsive need to sink resources into building their own proprietary clone of every damn thing.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Well, I love those gated check-ins, specially when working in offshoring projects.
- sargun 10y ago
  Microsoft's dev tools were straight up amazing. As someone who didn't get to take advantage of many of them, I was always envious of engineers using Visual Studio and being able to debug code like it was magic. Although TFS may seem terrible, it works for super large organizations, and big code bases in a way that SVN and Git just didn't.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    I wouldn't say I worked with a super large codebase at the customer who used it, but the only compelling feature seemed to be "it played nice with MS infrastructure." Teams that had issues grasping the fundamentals of VCS in general still had issues. And in return you got the lesser compatibility and greater number of code warts that came with proprietary enterprise software over open source. But I'm curious, what worked specifically for you in TFS that wasn't in the SVN ecosystem? It's probably the client was unaware of a lot of features.

wmccullough 10y ago

I don't think there's a lack of desire, I think there's a lack of ability due to size. I also don't feel it's fair to say that their attitude is "Let's copy AWS! Genius!", Azure has become very mature and a delight to work with.