5 ms·

Julia Liuson promoted to President of the MSFT DevDiv, which now includes GitHub

82 points by ghuntley 5y ago

ghuntley 5y ago
That email was sent by Scott Gu of Azure. GitHub now reports to the same person that did this to the .NET community. Is anyone paying attention or just me? http://theverge.com/2021/10/22/22740701/microsoft-dotnet-hot-reload-removal-decision-open-source http://theverge.com/2021/10/22/22740701/microsoft-dotnet-hot... (and https://isdotnetopen.com/ https://isdotnetopen.com/) See also https://twitter.com/geoffreyhuntley/status/1455936480023482377?s=21 https://twitter.com/geoffreyhuntley/status/14559364800234823... Other items under this persons remit: - Visual Studio - .NET - Python - TypeScript - OpenJDK - GitHub (+NPM) - (hint hint) Azure SDKs (hint hint) - (hint hint) Azure PaaS / Azure Serverless (hint hint)
- ksec 5y ago
  Ok, the timing of this and Nat Friedman stepping down from CEO. Coincidence?
  - ghuntley 5y ago
    The capture of open source programming languages via binary blobs [1][2] and hiring influencers + open-source maintainers so “ecosystem works best on azure” (go look at careers page) is “an absolute a coincidence”. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/k0s8qw/vs_code_developers_prevent_running_the_new/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/k0s8qw/vs_code_devel... [2] https://twitter.com/geoffreyhuntley/status/1455966028744122375 https://twitter.com/geoffreyhuntley/status/14559660287441223...
    - geofft 5y ago
      What you call "capture of open source programming languages via binary blobs" is in fact someone trying to run a closed-source application and then being disappointed it doesn't work the way they want. It's a closed-source application. Stop expecting that. Yes we all want everyone to write nothing but free software all the time, and yes we all specifically want pylance to be open source, but saying that the existence of closed-source code is an attack on open source is both silly and wrong. Would you be happier if the entire .NET ecosystem were closed-source?
      - cbkeller 5y ago
        A closed-source application (dare I say, _extension_) that provides some enhancement to some existing open-source software… How is this at all distinguishable from the second step someone would take in an “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy?
        geofft 5y ago
        "Embrace, extend, extinguish" isn't real and has never happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish#Examples_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... is full of examples that failed and not a single one that succeeded. So, no, it's not distinguishable, but that's a good thing, because it means that no extinguishing is going to happen. And it's strictly better than Microsoft spending their time enhancing closed-source software, no? That was my question at the end: they could make .NET closed-source (as it was when Mono was a thing) and write a high-quality, Windows-only type inference engine for that - are you claiming that would have been preferable?
        cbkeller 5y ago
        > "Embrace, extend, extinguish" isn't real and has never happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish#Examples_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... is full of examples that failed and not a single one that succeeded. How on Earth did you reach that conclusion? A trivial look at that list: * Web browsers. -- Worked so well that IE remained the dominant browser for over a decade [1]. Of course, bundling was important here too but without the intentional incompatibilities between IE and Netscape, bundling alone would not have been nearly as effective. * Office documents. -- Despite .docx files being notionally based on an open standard, to this day, Microsoft office will frequently reject as "corrupted" .docx files that have been edited using other implementations of the OOXML standard (in my experience, particularly when tracked changes are enabled or images are involved). In most such cases in my experience, the sentiment from coworkers is "why don't you just install Word" --- so apparently still working as intended. * Instant messaging -- seems to have worked pretty well at the time [2] and remained popular for nearly a decade. And while they later lost marketshare to transformationally different technologies (texting, mobile messaging), the competitors against which they used the strategy remain dead. * Against Java -- Led to major legal action, in which Microsoft was forced to pay Sun >$2B and agree to discontinue the practice in settlements, presumably only because by now people were catching on to the strategy. Failing that, Microsoft just made a separate competing language for cross-platform (AKA "write once run anywhere" :) development and called it.... .NET [3] > And it's strictly better than Microsoft spending their time enhancing closed-source software, no? That was my question at the end: they could make .NET closed-source Presumably it is reasonable to assume that they would like to grow the market share of .NET. While more open code is usually good, I would indeed not consider it "strictly better" if their goal in this work is to capture market share against other languages by leveraging the popularity and community that comes with "Open Source", while leaving them in a position where they can then reassert hegemonic control over their language via exactly the pathway being discussed here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#First_Browser_War_(1995–2001) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#First_Browser_War... [2] https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/ https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/ [3] The tagline on https://dotnet.microsoft.com https://dotnet.microsoft.com is currently "Free. Cross-platform. Open source." The "Open Source" part of course only added somewhat more recently after the closed-source version failed to dethrone Java. Not that I like Java so much or anything, but you get the point.
- flavayoda 5y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at MSFT on Julia's team While the recent hot reload was super disappointing and a larger organization failure, I can't say enough good things about Julia as a leader. She is incredibly developer-focused, smart, and approachable. She is everything I would want to see in a CVP / President, and a fantastic track record of both people and product.
  - cnxs 5y ago
    We frequently hear amazing testimonies in MSFT threads here. Who does she report to? We don't know the grand plan (perhaps neither does she) and that org looks a little too crowded for my taste.
    - Bognar 5y ago
      She reports to Scott Guthrie. Is this supposed to be relevant to something?
      - ghuntley 5y ago
        Relevant: Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and corporate strategy.
  - hitekker 5y ago
    You should comment with your real account, if you have one. Otherwise some folks might interpret this comment to be artificial, damage control.
  - anothermsthrw9 5y ago
    Disclaimer: many years in devdiv I unfortunately have far more mixed feelings. I've found the hot reload fiasco to be representative of a pattern of decisions coming out of Julia's leadership org. This is not the first casualty, although it was the most visible. I did not find her to be approachable either, surface friendly and professional, to be clear, but not approachable; I would however give the strong caveats that this is obviously a subjective opinion likely biased due to professional disagreement. To try and be additionally fair, I do not think these are unique qualities to a specific (V)P, just that I often find leadership at that level to be disconnected and have an agenda that doesn't sit well with me even if I may see the rationale. Most people I would like to see in CVP/President roles are not in (and often do not seek) those positions.
- Bognar 5y ago
  Julia is pretty well regarded by people under her. Additionally, she has some big OSS names reporting directly to her like Miguel de Icaza and Guido van Rossum. Perhaps if she was hellbent on destroying open source then we might hear more about it or see some high profile exits? Have you considered that this could be just a bog standard corporate promotion + re-org and that you're reading too much into things?
  - ghuntley 5y ago
    Previous leak related to decisions made by Julia from engineers in the .NET team at http://pastebin.com/RF6015kv http://pastebin.com/RF6015kv Now, to be clear, the focus should not be on the person. Instead the many corporate strategies in play here. GitHub just got slotted into the person who overlooks Azure SDK development.
    - supthere 5y ago
      > Now, to be clear, the focus should not be on the person. He said after spending several hours drawing focus to the person, including by name in the very previous breath.
    - Bognar 5y ago
      It's incredibly reductive to refer to DevDiv as Azure SDK development. Also, Nat reported directly to ScottGu whose purview is literally all of Azure and then some. Don't you think that's a closer relationship to Azure than someone who "overlooks Azure SDK development"?
      - ghuntley 5y ago
        GitHub CEO reporting to Gu is fundamentally different to the new structure of the GitHub CEO reporting to "The mission of the Microsoft Developer Division is to earn the trust and love of developers across all languages and platforms and make them successful as they build the applications of the future. DevDiv today includes our developer tools and services including Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, NET and C#, TypeScript, and the OpenJDK. Our Azure Developer SDKs, as well as our Azure Application Development PaS and Serverless offerings (including our Azure App Services, Functions, Logic Apps, API Management, Dapr, Redis Cache, Spring Cloud services, etc.) are also part of this organization."
- fwip 5y ago
  https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/pull/22262 https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/pull/22262 - Just as a heads up, the PR to add this functionality back in was merged half an hour ago. Maybe it was an evil scheme to sell more VS licenses, but they've at least backtracked and the functionality has been restored for other clients.
- passerby1 5y ago
  The question is, was the person got promoted _despite or for_ the dotnet go-live removal?
steego 5y ago
I’m not going to pretend I am an OSS champion. I am not. I want to use tools built by people who are paid and supported. I don’t care if it’s commercial or OSS. I want to pay for my lunch. I want my interests and the person making my lunch to have an aligned interest in making me a good lunch. With that, I actually like that Julia focuses on revenue, but I hated the sudden decision to remove dotnet watch. I thought it was a stupid and pointless distraction to a bigger cloud strategy. I’m not saying Microsoft needs to kill Visual Studio, but they should start talking about a DNR at some point in the future. I hope this promotion will make it easier for her to focus on the right revenue streams so she’ll feel less compelled to save legacy revenue streams. She needs to focus on making it easy to make and deploy OSS software. Everything will fall into place and the revenue opportunities will be there. Microsoft has incredible people in their R&D. Cloud based tools will make it a lot easier to take the fruit of their research and bring it to market so much faster. There’s so much opportunity for amazing new products that can and should be billed monthly (or by usage) on my employer’s Azure/GitHub account. Just stop hanging to the old software licensing model. IT organizations loathe software licensing game Microsoft insists on playing, but we will piss money away on cloud services and SaaS solutions.
- oliwarner 5y ago
  > I want to pay for my lunch. I hate this phrase. I'll pay for my lunch but I need to know what I'm actually eating. I want to be allowed to add seasoning, pick out hairs, reheat it at home.
  - PostOnce 5y ago
    We've revoked your salad and it's now $0.63/minute to add it back to your plate, cancel any time.
  - steego 5y ago
    How about we stop mangling metaphors and speak clearly? Paying for software and the licensing terms are independent concepts. We pay for OSS software for the projects where we find it advantages for us to have access to and contribute to the source code. We customize it, we fix bugs but also benefit from bug fixes done by the full-time developers who we pay to support it. We also control how it’s hosted. We also use and license a bunch of other software where we never want access to its source control. We don’t care if it’s closed source and sometimes we prefer that we don’t host it and manage the IT resources.
aaomidi 5y ago
Hahaha She was one of the major reasons I left Microsoft. Good memes.
ahersouza 5y ago
When companies or individuals lack innovation. They just shuffle existing technology. MSTF like all companies should prioritize meaningful innovation over meaningless repackaging

82 points by ghuntley 5y ago

That email was sent by Scott Gu of Azure. GitHub now reports to the same person that did this to the .NET community. Is anyone paying attention or just me? http://theverge.com/2021/10/22/22740701/microsoft-dotnet-hot-reload-removal-decision-open-source http://theverge.com/2021/10/22/22740701/microsoft-dotnet-hot... (and https://isdotnetopen.com/ https://isdotnetopen.com/) See also https://twitter.com/geoffreyhuntley/status/1455936480023482377?s=21 https://twitter.com/geoffreyhuntley/status/14559364800234823... Other items under this persons remit: - Visual Studio - .NET - Python - TypeScript - OpenJDK - GitHub (+NPM) - (hint hint) Azure SDKs (hint hint) - (hint hint) Azure PaaS / Azure Serverless (hint hint)

ksec 5y ago
Ok, the timing of this and Nat Friedman stepping down from CEO. Coincidence?
- ghuntley 5y ago
  The capture of open source programming languages via binary blobs [1][2] and hiring influencers + open-source maintainers so “ecosystem works best on azure” (go look at careers page) is “an absolute a coincidence”. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/k0s8qw/vs_code_developers_prevent_running_the_new/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/k0s8qw/vs_code_devel... [2] https://twitter.com/geoffreyhuntley/status/1455966028744122375 https://twitter.com/geoffreyhuntley/status/14559660287441223...
  - geofft 5y ago
    What you call "capture of open source programming languages via binary blobs" is in fact someone trying to run a closed-source application and then being disappointed it doesn't work the way they want. It's a closed-source application. Stop expecting that. Yes we all want everyone to write nothing but free software all the time, and yes we all specifically want pylance to be open source, but saying that the existence of closed-source code is an attack on open source is both silly and wrong. Would you be happier if the entire .NET ecosystem were closed-source?
    - cbkeller 5y ago
      A closed-source application (dare I say, _extension_) that provides some enhancement to some existing open-source software… How is this at all distinguishable from the second step someone would take in an “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy?
      - geofft 5y ago
        "Embrace, extend, extinguish" isn't real and has never happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish#Examples_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... is full of examples that failed and not a single one that succeeded. So, no, it's not distinguishable, but that's a good thing, because it means that no extinguishing is going to happen. And it's strictly better than Microsoft spending their time enhancing closed-source software, no? That was my question at the end: they could make .NET closed-source (as it was when Mono was a thing) and write a high-quality, Windows-only type inference engine for that - are you claiming that would have been preferable?
        cbkeller 5y ago
        > "Embrace, extend, extinguish" isn't real and has never happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish#Examples_by_Microsoft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... is full of examples that failed and not a single one that succeeded. How on Earth did you reach that conclusion? A trivial look at that list: * Web browsers. -- Worked so well that IE remained the dominant browser for over a decade [1]. Of course, bundling was important here too but without the intentional incompatibilities between IE and Netscape, bundling alone would not have been nearly as effective. * Office documents. -- Despite .docx files being notionally based on an open standard, to this day, Microsoft office will frequently reject as "corrupted" .docx files that have been edited using other implementations of the OOXML standard (in my experience, particularly when tracked changes are enabled or images are involved). In most such cases in my experience, the sentiment from coworkers is "why don't you just install Word" --- so apparently still working as intended. * Instant messaging -- seems to have worked pretty well at the time [2] and remained popular for nearly a decade. And while they later lost marketshare to transformationally different technologies (texting, mobile messaging), the competitors against which they used the strategy remain dead. * Against Java -- Led to major legal action, in which Microsoft was forced to pay Sun >$2B and agree to discontinue the practice in settlements, presumably only because by now people were catching on to the strategy. Failing that, Microsoft just made a separate competing language for cross-platform (AKA "write once run anywhere" :) development and called it.... .NET [3] > And it's strictly better than Microsoft spending their time enhancing closed-source software, no? That was my question at the end: they could make .NET closed-source Presumably it is reasonable to assume that they would like to grow the market share of .NET. While more open code is usually good, I would indeed not consider it "strictly better" if their goal in this work is to capture market share against other languages by leveraging the popularity and community that comes with "Open Source", while leaving them in a position where they can then reassert hegemonic control over their language via exactly the pathway being discussed here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#First_Browser_War_(1995–2001) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#First_Browser_War... [2] https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/ https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/ [3] The tagline on https://dotnet.microsoft.com https://dotnet.microsoft.com is currently "Free. Cross-platform. Open source." The "Open Source" part of course only added somewhat more recently after the closed-source version failed to dethrone Java. Not that I like Java so much or anything, but you get the point.
flavayoda 5y ago
Disclaimer: I work at MSFT on Julia's team While the recent hot reload was super disappointing and a larger organization failure, I can't say enough good things about Julia as a leader. She is incredibly developer-focused, smart, and approachable. She is everything I would want to see in a CVP / President, and a fantastic track record of both people and product.
- cnxs 5y ago
  We frequently hear amazing testimonies in MSFT threads here. Who does she report to? We don't know the grand plan (perhaps neither does she) and that org looks a little too crowded for my taste.
  - Bognar 5y ago
    She reports to Scott Guthrie. Is this supposed to be relevant to something?
    - ghuntley 5y ago
      Relevant: Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and corporate strategy.
- hitekker 5y ago
  You should comment with your real account, if you have one. Otherwise some folks might interpret this comment to be artificial, damage control.
- anothermsthrw9 5y ago
  Disclaimer: many years in devdiv I unfortunately have far more mixed feelings. I've found the hot reload fiasco to be representative of a pattern of decisions coming out of Julia's leadership org. This is not the first casualty, although it was the most visible. I did not find her to be approachable either, surface friendly and professional, to be clear, but not approachable; I would however give the strong caveats that this is obviously a subjective opinion likely biased due to professional disagreement. To try and be additionally fair, I do not think these are unique qualities to a specific (V)P, just that I often find leadership at that level to be disconnected and have an agenda that doesn't sit well with me even if I may see the rationale. Most people I would like to see in CVP/President roles are not in (and often do not seek) those positions.
Bognar 5y ago
Julia is pretty well regarded by people under her. Additionally, she has some big OSS names reporting directly to her like Miguel de Icaza and Guido van Rossum. Perhaps if she was hellbent on destroying open source then we might hear more about it or see some high profile exits? Have you considered that this could be just a bog standard corporate promotion + re-org and that you're reading too much into things?
- ghuntley 5y ago
  Previous leak related to decisions made by Julia from engineers in the .NET team at http://pastebin.com/RF6015kv http://pastebin.com/RF6015kv Now, to be clear, the focus should not be on the person. Instead the many corporate strategies in play here. GitHub just got slotted into the person who overlooks Azure SDK development.
  - supthere 5y ago
    > Now, to be clear, the focus should not be on the person. He said after spending several hours drawing focus to the person, including by name in the very previous breath.
  - Bognar 5y ago
    It's incredibly reductive to refer to DevDiv as Azure SDK development. Also, Nat reported directly to ScottGu whose purview is literally all of Azure and then some. Don't you think that's a closer relationship to Azure than someone who "overlooks Azure SDK development"?
    - ghuntley 5y ago
      GitHub CEO reporting to Gu is fundamentally different to the new structure of the GitHub CEO reporting to "The mission of the Microsoft Developer Division is to earn the trust and love of developers across all languages and platforms and make them successful as they build the applications of the future. DevDiv today includes our developer tools and services including Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, NET and C#, TypeScript, and the OpenJDK. Our Azure Developer SDKs, as well as our Azure Application Development PaS and Serverless offerings (including our Azure App Services, Functions, Logic Apps, API Management, Dapr, Redis Cache, Spring Cloud services, etc.) are also part of this organization."
fwip 5y ago
https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/pull/22262 https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/pull/22262 - Just as a heads up, the PR to add this functionality back in was merged half an hour ago. Maybe it was an evil scheme to sell more VS licenses, but they've at least backtracked and the functionality has been restored for other clients.
passerby1 5y ago
The question is, was the person got promoted _despite or for_ the dotnet go-live removal?

steego 5y ago

I’m not going to pretend I am an OSS champion. I am not. I want to use tools built by people who are paid and supported. I don’t care if it’s commercial or OSS. I want to pay for my lunch. I want my interests and the person making my lunch to have an aligned interest in making me a good lunch. With that, I actually like that Julia focuses on revenue, but I hated the sudden decision to remove dotnet watch. I thought it was a stupid and pointless distraction to a bigger cloud strategy. I’m not saying Microsoft needs to kill Visual Studio, but they should start talking about a DNR at some point in the future. I hope this promotion will make it easier for her to focus on the right revenue streams so she’ll feel less compelled to save legacy revenue streams. She needs to focus on making it easy to make and deploy OSS software. Everything will fall into place and the revenue opportunities will be there. Microsoft has incredible people in their R&D. Cloud based tools will make it a lot easier to take the fruit of their research and bring it to market so much faster. There’s so much opportunity for amazing new products that can and should be billed monthly (or by usage) on my employer’s Azure/GitHub account. Just stop hanging to the old software licensing model. IT organizations loathe software licensing game Microsoft insists on playing, but we will piss money away on cloud services and SaaS solutions.

oliwarner 5y ago
> I want to pay for my lunch. I hate this phrase. I'll pay for my lunch but I need to know what I'm actually eating. I want to be allowed to add seasoning, pick out hairs, reheat it at home.
- PostOnce 5y ago
  We've revoked your salad and it's now $0.63/minute to add it back to your plate, cancel any time.
- steego 5y ago
  How about we stop mangling metaphors and speak clearly? Paying for software and the licensing terms are independent concepts. We pay for OSS software for the projects where we find it advantages for us to have access to and contribute to the source code. We customize it, we fix bugs but also benefit from bug fixes done by the full-time developers who we pay to support it. We also control how it’s hosted. We also use and license a bunch of other software where we never want access to its source control. We don’t care if it’s closed source and sometimes we prefer that we don’t host it and manage the IT resources.

aaomidi 5y ago

Hahaha She was one of the major reasons I left Microsoft. Good memes.

ahersouza 5y ago

When companies or individuals lack innovation. They just shuffle existing technology. MSTF like all companies should prioritize meaningful innovation over meaningless repackaging