4 ms·

"Some bifurcation" is quite an understatement! Unless you're trying to partition all actions into "good" and "bad", it's more like octofurcation or dodecafurca

"Some bifurcation" is quite an understatement! Unless you're trying to partition all actions into "good" and "bad", it's more like octofurcation or dodecafurcation. Microsoft is not a homogenous monolith...what does it even mean to split something that's already split apart? Here's an old org chart which shows Microsoft trifurcated: https://i.insider.com/4e0b340dcadcbbdd35120000 https://i.insider.com/4e0b340dcadcbbdd35120000 But realistically, each of 5 divisions - Windows, Office, Server & Tools, Online Services, and Entertainment & Devices (the above chart may have been made before the latter two existed) - has a president that's trying to make their division successful, even at the expense of goodwill earned by other divisions. Yes, Server & Tools has been knocking it out of the park for you and I recently with regards to developer enthusiasm, but they're a long ways away from Entertainment & Devices. Each of those divisions actually has another ~25 VPs and hundreds of Directors each trying to climb the ladder faster than the others. To put it bluntly, Windows is jealous of all the post-sale revenue that Entertainment & Devices gets, and all the telemetry that online services gets, and has shoved as much as possible of both into Windows 11.

S_A_P 5y ago
This is a great point- I dramatically oversimplified what is going on. I do wonder how this is discussed internally. Since I started working as a dev back in the late 90s I feel like a lot of the optimism I had from tech improving our lives has largely been erased. Its probably just me getting old and pessimistic though :).
- jraph 5y ago
  > a lot of the optimism I had from tech improving our lives has largely been erased It can do both, and we should strive to both prevent it from degrading our lives, and make it improve them. That's the original purpose of our computers. This should drive us. It drives me. I'd say this is critically important. Please try to do the right things, whoever reads this. Computer scientists are powerful and impactful. Please reflect on how and what you (and whoever pays you) spend your time on, how it impacts society and human beings (and beyond) and make sure your are at ease with what you come up with, whatever the scale of the impact is. Don't lie to yourself. This paragraph should not be painful to read.
pjmlp 5y ago
I must admit Windows just doesn't know what they are supposed to do. UWP, .NET Native and C++/CX just tanked due to their mismanagement, and having burned the few believers with what are now about 5 rewrites since Windows 8 was introduced plus having dropped the .NET Native and C++/CX toolchains. Forget about.WinUI 3.0, it is so messed up that Windows 11 still needs to rely on UWP and WinUI 2.x, despite being "deprecated". Then we have tons of GUI tooling PMs, each selling their own stack, and every couple of months the faces on community calls keep changing. There are surely some big fires happening in. Redmond and they keep carrying water buckets hoping to make it right. Specially since it appears the lack of love between WinDev and DevDiv never went away. The forces that won over Longhorn have managed to completely mess up WinRT and aren't doing any better with the Project Reunion endeavours. Anyone that is bored during the season festivities can browse the GitHub issues for WinUI, AppSDK, cppwinrt and a bunch of other ones connected to them.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  It makes me think of the disaster of the Linux desktop and X Windows. The first thing you notice about Linux is all the different widget sets that clash with each other such as Motif, Lesstif, tk, gtk, qt, fltk, wxWidgets and many more. They all seem to be in a competition to look worse than all of the competitors. They also seem to share the belief that "font metrics don't matter" and be completely indifferent if labels burst out of their space. Microsoft has gone through almost as many widget sets for Windows. Muggles don't notice, but if you are a dev or learn to be observant you might realize that you are using 8 different widget sets in a given day. Microsoft has so often seemed to be 90 or 180 degrees behind phase with the rest of the world: I remember that awful time in the early 00's that theming widget sets was a fad and the program that ran your scanner was in a competition with similar programs to look uglier than the others, such as https://mercy-evs.com/back-orifice-2000-78/ https://mercy-evs.com/back-orifice-2000-78/ Then they came out with WPF which had wonderful support for theming but everybody was burned out from theming and nobody used it. At least in Windows Vista Microsoft made the transition to the GPU first WDDM rendering model. In linux every decade is going to be the decade of Wayland but it will never actually happen, which is sad.
  - 5y ago
mathattack 5y ago
My experience has been their right arm doesn’t talk to the left. Still mostly good people inside. Except for some enterprise sales.
mlazos 5y ago
I currently work at Microsoft, and all I can say is that I actually have so much respect for CEOs lately. It takes a huge amount of foresight and understanding of human nature to move a company this size in the right direction, because you’re trying to incentivize all these divisions to behave the way you intend. As I’ve become more experienced I’ve learned that company culture is way more important than I thought when I first graduated college.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  > the right direction I used to have a great relationship with Microsoft. I gave them money, they gave me software and went away (patches aside). Now they want to monitor me and advertise to me. It's fairly sad. And certainly not what I would call the right direction.
  - 3np 5y ago
    Every now and then when I get silly thoughts about Microsoft as such (as opposed to just very specific divisions) being "on the right direction", I recall that LinkedIn is under MS ownership. It’s not that LinkedIn is bad; it’s a trackfire if dark patterns and has been getting worse since acquisition.
darknavi 5y ago
FYI Gaming is it's own Org from the top now :) I really respect the decisions lately within Gaming but there have been some really disappointing changes in other spaces like Windows.

S_A_P 5y ago

This is a great point- I dramatically oversimplified what is going on. I do wonder how this is discussed internally. Since I started working as a dev back in the late 90s I feel like a lot of the optimism I had from tech improving our lives has largely been erased. Its probably just me getting old and pessimistic though :).

jraph 5y ago
> a lot of the optimism I had from tech improving our lives has largely been erased It can do both, and we should strive to both prevent it from degrading our lives, and make it improve them. That's the original purpose of our computers. This should drive us. It drives me. I'd say this is critically important. Please try to do the right things, whoever reads this. Computer scientists are powerful and impactful. Please reflect on how and what you (and whoever pays you) spend your time on, how it impacts society and human beings (and beyond) and make sure your are at ease with what you come up with, whatever the scale of the impact is. Don't lie to yourself. This paragraph should not be painful to read.

pjmlp 5y ago

I must admit Windows just doesn't know what they are supposed to do. UWP, .NET Native and C++/CX just tanked due to their mismanagement, and having burned the few believers with what are now about 5 rewrites since Windows 8 was introduced plus having dropped the .NET Native and C++/CX toolchains. Forget about.WinUI 3.0, it is so messed up that Windows 11 still needs to rely on UWP and WinUI 2.x, despite being "deprecated". Then we have tons of GUI tooling PMs, each selling their own stack, and every couple of months the faces on community calls keep changing. There are surely some big fires happening in. Redmond and they keep carrying water buckets hoping to make it right. Specially since it appears the lack of love between WinDev and DevDiv never went away. The forces that won over Longhorn have managed to completely mess up WinRT and aren't doing any better with the Project Reunion endeavours. Anyone that is bored during the season festivities can browse the GitHub issues for WinUI, AppSDK, cppwinrt and a bunch of other ones connected to them.

PaulHoule 5y ago
It makes me think of the disaster of the Linux desktop and X Windows. The first thing you notice about Linux is all the different widget sets that clash with each other such as Motif, Lesstif, tk, gtk, qt, fltk, wxWidgets and many more. They all seem to be in a competition to look worse than all of the competitors. They also seem to share the belief that "font metrics don't matter" and be completely indifferent if labels burst out of their space. Microsoft has gone through almost as many widget sets for Windows. Muggles don't notice, but if you are a dev or learn to be observant you might realize that you are using 8 different widget sets in a given day. Microsoft has so often seemed to be 90 or 180 degrees behind phase with the rest of the world: I remember that awful time in the early 00's that theming widget sets was a fad and the program that ran your scanner was in a competition with similar programs to look uglier than the others, such as https://mercy-evs.com/back-orifice-2000-78/ https://mercy-evs.com/back-orifice-2000-78/ Then they came out with WPF which had wonderful support for theming but everybody was burned out from theming and nobody used it. At least in Windows Vista Microsoft made the transition to the GPU first WDDM rendering model. In linux every decade is going to be the decade of Wayland but it will never actually happen, which is sad.
- 5y ago

mathattack 5y ago

My experience has been their right arm doesn’t talk to the left. Still mostly good people inside. Except for some enterprise sales.

mlazos 5y ago

I currently work at Microsoft, and all I can say is that I actually have so much respect for CEOs lately. It takes a huge amount of foresight and understanding of human nature to move a company this size in the right direction, because you’re trying to incentivize all these divisions to behave the way you intend. As I’ve become more experienced I’ve learned that company culture is way more important than I thought when I first graduated college.

HWR_14 5y ago
> the right direction I used to have a great relationship with Microsoft. I gave them money, they gave me software and went away (patches aside). Now they want to monitor me and advertise to me. It's fairly sad. And certainly not what I would call the right direction.
- 3np 5y ago
  Every now and then when I get silly thoughts about Microsoft as such (as opposed to just very specific divisions) being "on the right direction", I recall that LinkedIn is under MS ownership. It’s not that LinkedIn is bad; it’s a trackfire if dark patterns and has been getting worse since acquisition.

darknavi 5y ago

FYI Gaming is it's own Org from the top now :) I really respect the decisions lately within Gaming but there have been some really disappointing changes in other spaces like Windows.