6 ms·
Man, this hurt to read. Keivan’s response is the right one. But I wonder if the arrangements and outcome would have been different had AppGet been closed source
by ak39 6y ago
Man, this hurt to read. Keivan’s response is the right one. But I wonder if the arrangements and outcome would have been different had AppGet been closed source.
This is just not cricket from team Microsoft.
- pdonis 6y ago> I wonder if the arrangements and outcome would have been different had AppGet been closed source. All of the Windows apps that MS did this to back in the 1990s were closed source. Didn't help. MS has more than enough horsepower to just reverse engineer whatever they can't get the source code for if they care enough about the features.
- lostmsu 6y agoI don't think so. There have been quite a few larger products, where Microsoft failed spectacularly.
- pdonis 6y ago> There have been quite a few larger products, where Microsoft failed spectacularly. Sure, but not because of failure to reverse engineer someone else's product.
- lostmsu 6y agoRight. That was the point: it is not enough to just understand how something was made. You have to be able to recreate it too. And building a similar system in just a bit different way to avoid potential copyright or patent claims is hard. If the system is complex, it is hard squared.
- pdonis 6y ago> it is not enough to just understand how something was made. You have to be able to recreate it too I meant to include both in "reverse engineering". What I was trying to say was that the large products where MS has failed spectacularly don't seem to me to be products from some other company that they reverse engineered. They seem to me to be products MS thought up itself. MS is better at co-opting ideas invented by others than at inventing its own.
- intern4tional 6y agoThis isn't secret news, but when you interview at MS there is always a secret / hidden interviewer. This is publicly known information from Cracking the Coding interview. This person is called the as appropriate and you only meet them if you pass all the prior interviews. Per his writeup, he did not meet that person, which means that he most likely did not pass the interview. He also for some reason didn't follow up on the results of the interview for 6 months, which is unique as most candidates will reach out. Assuming he actually filled out a job requisition, which he probably did to interview, he also should have gotten status from that requisition, so things are a little fishy. I do not know anything about his case directly, but I would bet that he did not pass the interview and a decision was made to not bring him on as a result. If Microsoft was trolling him to just pick his brain, they would have done more than two small events, and wouldn't have bothered to reach out to tell him they were releasing a product. This response also burns any bridges that he had built with the team. He could have still potentially made something of his product if he had kept that relationship open and used his leverage as an existing package manager owner to influence WinGet. If I was him, I would have at a minimum asked for feedback far earlier than wait for 6 months.
- lame88 6y ago> And then, I didn’t hear anything back from anyone at Microsoft for six months. This does not mean he did not ask during that time.
- intern4tional 6y agoRight, but if he did and hadn't heard back I would have expected him to note that he asked. It's a significant thing to not note.