7 ms·

About 7 years ago I was in a meeting with a former Windows core graphics engineer. My team was attempting to figure out some extremely obtuse workflows with Me

by noen 3y ago

About 7 years ago I was in a meeting with a former Windows core graphics engineer. My team was attempting to figure out some extremely obtuse workflows with MediaFountain and DirectX. We had a meeting with this guy and a couple of the other engineers that wrote the APIs and the implementation underneath. This particular guy literally chuckled as we aired our frustrations and this was his response: “Yeah you won’t figure those APIs out from the documentation. It was on purpose. You have to go buy the book.” Proceeded to explain to me that this was how he, and many other core Windows engineers lined their pockets for years - write complex implementations, do the absolute bare minimum documentation, then take a 6 month sabbatical and publish a reference book that was absolutely required to actually use the API. Apparently many of these guys made 10-20x their salaries on this grift and it didn’t really stop until the mid 2000’s.

fouc 3y ago
That's a rather profitable twist on the classic "job security" strategy.
golergka 3y ago
Why wouldn't Microsoft sue them for this?
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Can they? On what grounds?
  - golergka 3y ago
    That's a direct action against the interest of their employer, and an attempt to enrich themselves at the benefit of Microsoft. They are purposefully writing bad software which drives ME market share and reputation among developers down only to sell some books.
    - Sharlin 3y ago
      Except if MS gets a share of the profits… which it did in many cases, being the publisher. They had no competitors, there weren't any concerns about market share or reputation!
      - incrudible 3y ago
        There may not have been any concerns at the time, but the damage to the reputation is real, albeit difficult to measure. Nevertheless, you can see that Windows only ever seems to lose market share. Windows desktop is shrinking, Windows mobile is dead, Windows embedded is phasing out, and Windows server is only used for the bare necessities. You can argue that Microsoft successfully managed to pivot to cloud, but that is a rather shallow moat.
        Sharlin 3y ago
        Among all other variables affecting the market share of Windows, the effect of the inscrutability of the Win32 API is almost certainly negligible. Especially given that as far as I know, their APIs designed in the past 20 years haven't typically been as horrible.
    - samus 3y ago
      Microsoft had no real competition back then, and in their core business (desktop and office) is still quite uncontested. Alternatives to parts of the Windows, MS Office, and various corporate systems exist, but nobody offers the complete package. Extensions to their platform were never required to be perfect, just good enough that being ubiquitous (thanks to the platform) is enough to sell it. Also, is it really against the interest of their employer to create products that lock in customers and make it harder to migrate away? Creating a market for support and customization, with MS sitting at the source of the knowledge and being able to sell crumbs by printing books and other training materials, and offering training and certification courses?
- mananaysiempre 3y ago
  Microsoft (Press) published a fair number of these books—or at least books that were so much better than the reference docs that the latter could barely be said to explain anything, whatever the intent of the authors. This includes the classics: Petzold, Inside OLE, Essential COM, ...
- dspillett 3y ago
  A couple of immediate thoughts: 1. In many cases the books were published by Microsoft Press, so the company benefitted financially as well. 2. The engineers may have a defences in not being given time to document better initially due to project deadlines beyond their control, and in the work being signed-off at the time. 3. Some of both the above mixed with other reasons.
  - rob74 3y ago
    4. they probably also didn't have the time for better API design, or the API design was done "by committee", and if you add to that the holy cow of "backwards compatibility", it's easy to see how an API might end up overcomplicated... 5. maybe M$ even encouraged these practices because of the perceived advantage for in-house applications vs. third party ones?
- jollyllama 3y ago
  They still had their monopoly, who cares? Besides, forcing people to invest time and to a lesser degree money to learn and get locked into your ecosystem is probably a net gain.
- usefulcat 3y ago
  Good luck proving that case in court, especially if you have to prove intent.
robertlagrant 3y ago
This is the 2000s equivalent of get paid to work on a cool OSS project and then leave and immediately fork and start commercialisation.
garganzol 3y ago
This is not a bad model in my opinion. Actually, it may be even better than the average. At least, you could buy the expertise compared to a total lack of it.
- incrudible 3y ago
  Making an API knowingly and intentionally far more complicated than necessary is not just bad, it is evil. Doing it to enrich yourself personally is akin to embezzlement.
arethuza 3y ago
That reminds me of the lines from movie of the Big Short: "They're not confessing", "They're bragging".
mschaef 3y ago
> he, and many other core Windows engineers lined their pockets for years - write complex implementations, do the absolute bare minimum documentation, then take a 6 month sabbatical and publish a reference book that was absolutely required to actually use the API. If you don't spend enough time on design, it's easy to wind up with an overcomplicated API that lacks documentation. I wonder if the book was just a "convenient side benefit" of Microsoft's general failure to invest in developer UX. (At least at the time.)
- 8chanAnon 3y ago
  >If you don't spend enough time on design, it's easy to wind up with an overcomplicated API that lacks documentation. That sounds about right. Creeping featurism gets ahead of the team's ability to document it all before the product has to be delivered. Hence the need to take some time off and write a book about it. It's not necessarily an evil plan but just the way it works sometimes. Writing documentation is hard. Delivering the documentation on time is even harder.
- ufmace 3y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if the actual progression went like: Senior engineers end up with a moderately complex API for various bureaucratic reasons and don't have time to document it well -> Some junior engineer trying to be helpful writes up instructions as he figures out how to use it -> Junior engineer, still trying to be helpful, can't find anywhere good to put these instructions he wrote, so he gets a book published of it -> Rakes in extra money from said book -> Senior engineers see this and think, whoa, that's a nice scheme, but why should this newbie get all the $$$, let's do it more on purpose! -> Next thing you know, all the APIs are actually more complex and everyone's got a book
lloydatkinson 3y ago
Pretty shocking their managers let them get away with this. At least that’s stopped now.
krylon 3y ago
> “Yeah you won’t figure those APIs out from the documentation. It was on purpose. You have to go buy the book.” I KNEW it!!! In a prior job, I had the unpleasant task of shepherding a SharePoint installation, and was incredibly frustrated at the documentation AND the available literature. I jokingly commented it must be to keep all those SharePoint consultants busy. Now I think that might actually have been the case. Those poor souls...
- whstl 3y ago
  Yep. I also suffered with SharePoint in the late aughts, and eventually consultants were brought in to add some stupid custom feature to out Intranet Wiki that required a month of custom coding. Plenty of other companies doing that as well. Pretty much every ERP company, for example: from big ones like SAP or IBM, to the ones only popular in their home state. I remember a consultant telling me “you don’t get it, the point of our app is that you can build ANYTHING the customer withs it”. Well, so is the point of, say, Python.
  - arethuza 3y ago
    Any "platform" based approach is going to have that weakness - if you are in the domain where an ERP is a good fit then you'd be crazy not to use one, if you're problem isn't actually a good fit then you can end up in a whole world of pain and you'd be better off with a general purpose dev environment. Unfortunately deciding this in advance can be tricky.
    - whstl 3y ago
      Yep, good points. Indeed, during decision-making time, the people signing the checks always think that everything will fit nicely. With customizable ERPs, what I have witnessed all my career were companies refusing to change their (universally hated, bureaucratic, insecure and inefficient) internal processes and having to pay more for customization. The problem in the end is that there is rarely any shift, unless you have major cultural shift and oversight, coming from someone with the intention to save money and custom development time. Inertia always wins.
Jupe 3y ago
I recall, back when Windows 95 was released, a joke going around that went something like this: "Yes, Windows 95 is awesome and popular. So awesome and popular there are ~450 books written about how to use it!"
forinti 3y ago
I'm pretty sure Oracle works this way, but as company policy so that they can sell more support, consultancy, training, certification, etc.
- brettermeier 3y ago
  SAP surely too...
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    No one has ever managed to successfully describe to me what SAP even does.
    - dizhn 3y ago
      It's a bigger Excel.
    - majewsky 3y ago
      That's like asking what Microsoft does. SAP has lots of different products, many from acquisitions, but the core product (what people think of when they say "SAP", although it's actually called S/4 HANA) is an ERP system. The Wikipedia article looks like a decent overview from what I can tell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning Disclosure: I work at SAP, but on internal IT and not on any of the customer-visible products. (I don't know much about how S/4 HANA really works, except that I use it to view my payslip, enter my vacation days and such.)
SergeAx 3y ago
This is why sharing books is universally good.
marricks 3y ago
I wonder that about many of the corporate web frameworks out there too. The guides and evangelist say it's so easy but they have the most dog shit docs out there but hey, plenty of training you can pay for to get certified. It made me think I was an idiot until I talked to a couple other folks (who didn't have a financial reason to say it was easy) and they agreed it was horrible documentation. One reason I love open source: you won't have folks clamoring to use or improve your system if it's too shitty. To reach great levels of incomprehensibility you really need corporate backing.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
> It was on purpose. You have to go buy the book. I don't think I'll ever find a better justification for copyright infringement in my lifetime.
whalesalad 3y ago
It all makes sense.
blueboo 3y ago
have a hard time believing that selling (tens of?) thousands of programming reference books brought in 10-20x salaries or that entire teams would be following a pied piper leading to such a hellaciously complicated design, contrived to induce desperate reference buying?? It’s a funny thought but this is a fantasy
- rjh29 3y ago
  Book part likely true. 6 month sabbatical and 10-20x salary probably not, or maybe just for like one lucky person.
Karellen 3y ago
Well, I hope you inquired as to whether he was born that much of an asshole, or if he had to work his whole life to achieve it, and then refused to address him as anything other than "fucking wanker" for the remainder of the meeting. On behalf of the rest of us.
geoffdunbar 3y ago
I worked at Microsoft from 1996 to 2011. I was a SDE and lead on Windows Media and Media Foundation. This is a cute story, but I never heard of anything like this. There is no way my management would have approved any time off to write a book on a Microsoft product. Sabbatical is possible, but everyone I knew that qualified for a sabbatical was already filthy rich from early 90s stock options, and used that time to sail around the world or something like that. I can't rule out that such a thing did happen at Microsoft in groups that I wasn't part of, but I would be stunned if it was more than a couple of people.

by noen 3y ago

fouc 3y ago

That's a rather profitable twist on the classic "job security" strategy.

golergka 3y ago

Why wouldn't Microsoft sue them for this?

robertlagrant 3y ago
Can they? On what grounds?
- golergka 3y ago
  That's a direct action against the interest of their employer, and an attempt to enrich themselves at the benefit of Microsoft. They are purposefully writing bad software which drives ME market share and reputation among developers down only to sell some books.
  - Sharlin 3y ago
    Except if MS gets a share of the profits… which it did in many cases, being the publisher. They had no competitors, there weren't any concerns about market share or reputation!
    - incrudible 3y ago
      There may not have been any concerns at the time, but the damage to the reputation is real, albeit difficult to measure. Nevertheless, you can see that Windows only ever seems to lose market share. Windows desktop is shrinking, Windows mobile is dead, Windows embedded is phasing out, and Windows server is only used for the bare necessities. You can argue that Microsoft successfully managed to pivot to cloud, but that is a rather shallow moat.
      - Sharlin 3y ago
        Among all other variables affecting the market share of Windows, the effect of the inscrutability of the Win32 API is almost certainly negligible. Especially given that as far as I know, their APIs designed in the past 20 years haven't typically been as horrible.
  - samus 3y ago
    Microsoft had no real competition back then, and in their core business (desktop and office) is still quite uncontested. Alternatives to parts of the Windows, MS Office, and various corporate systems exist, but nobody offers the complete package. Extensions to their platform were never required to be perfect, just good enough that being ubiquitous (thanks to the platform) is enough to sell it. Also, is it really against the interest of their employer to create products that lock in customers and make it harder to migrate away? Creating a market for support and customization, with MS sitting at the source of the knowledge and being able to sell crumbs by printing books and other training materials, and offering training and certification courses?
mananaysiempre 3y ago
Microsoft (Press) published a fair number of these books—or at least books that were so much better than the reference docs that the latter could barely be said to explain anything, whatever the intent of the authors. This includes the classics: Petzold, Inside OLE, Essential COM, ...
dspillett 3y ago
A couple of immediate thoughts: 1. In many cases the books were published by Microsoft Press, so the company benefitted financially as well. 2. The engineers may have a defences in not being given time to document better initially due to project deadlines beyond their control, and in the work being signed-off at the time. 3. Some of both the above mixed with other reasons.
- rob74 3y ago
  4. they probably also didn't have the time for better API design, or the API design was done "by committee", and if you add to that the holy cow of "backwards compatibility", it's easy to see how an API might end up overcomplicated... 5. maybe M$ even encouraged these practices because of the perceived advantage for in-house applications vs. third party ones?
jollyllama 3y ago
They still had their monopoly, who cares? Besides, forcing people to invest time and to a lesser degree money to learn and get locked into your ecosystem is probably a net gain.
usefulcat 3y ago
Good luck proving that case in court, especially if you have to prove intent.

robertlagrant 3y ago

This is the 2000s equivalent of get paid to work on a cool OSS project and then leave and immediately fork and start commercialisation.

garganzol 3y ago

This is not a bad model in my opinion. Actually, it may be even better than the average. At least, you could buy the expertise compared to a total lack of it.

incrudible 3y ago
Making an API knowingly and intentionally far more complicated than necessary is not just bad, it is evil. Doing it to enrich yourself personally is akin to embezzlement.

arethuza 3y ago

That reminds me of the lines from movie of the Big Short: "They're not confessing", "They're bragging".

mschaef 3y ago

> he, and many other core Windows engineers lined their pockets for years - write complex implementations, do the absolute bare minimum documentation, then take a 6 month sabbatical and publish a reference book that was absolutely required to actually use the API. If you don't spend enough time on design, it's easy to wind up with an overcomplicated API that lacks documentation. I wonder if the book was just a "convenient side benefit" of Microsoft's general failure to invest in developer UX. (At least at the time.)

8chanAnon 3y ago
>If you don't spend enough time on design, it's easy to wind up with an overcomplicated API that lacks documentation. That sounds about right. Creeping featurism gets ahead of the team's ability to document it all before the product has to be delivered. Hence the need to take some time off and write a book about it. It's not necessarily an evil plan but just the way it works sometimes. Writing documentation is hard. Delivering the documentation on time is even harder.
ufmace 3y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if the actual progression went like: Senior engineers end up with a moderately complex API for various bureaucratic reasons and don't have time to document it well -> Some junior engineer trying to be helpful writes up instructions as he figures out how to use it -> Junior engineer, still trying to be helpful, can't find anywhere good to put these instructions he wrote, so he gets a book published of it -> Rakes in extra money from said book -> Senior engineers see this and think, whoa, that's a nice scheme, but why should this newbie get all the $$$, let's do it more on purpose! -> Next thing you know, all the APIs are actually more complex and everyone's got a book

lloydatkinson 3y ago

Pretty shocking their managers let them get away with this. At least that’s stopped now.

krylon 3y ago

> “Yeah you won’t figure those APIs out from the documentation. It was on purpose. You have to go buy the book.” I KNEW it!!! In a prior job, I had the unpleasant task of shepherding a SharePoint installation, and was incredibly frustrated at the documentation AND the available literature. I jokingly commented it must be to keep all those SharePoint consultants busy. Now I think that might actually have been the case. Those poor souls...

whstl 3y ago
Yep. I also suffered with SharePoint in the late aughts, and eventually consultants were brought in to add some stupid custom feature to out Intranet Wiki that required a month of custom coding. Plenty of other companies doing that as well. Pretty much every ERP company, for example: from big ones like SAP or IBM, to the ones only popular in their home state. I remember a consultant telling me “you don’t get it, the point of our app is that you can build ANYTHING the customer withs it”. Well, so is the point of, say, Python.
- arethuza 3y ago
  Any "platform" based approach is going to have that weakness - if you are in the domain where an ERP is a good fit then you'd be crazy not to use one, if you're problem isn't actually a good fit then you can end up in a whole world of pain and you'd be better off with a general purpose dev environment. Unfortunately deciding this in advance can be tricky.
  - whstl 3y ago
    Yep, good points. Indeed, during decision-making time, the people signing the checks always think that everything will fit nicely. With customizable ERPs, what I have witnessed all my career were companies refusing to change their (universally hated, bureaucratic, insecure and inefficient) internal processes and having to pay more for customization. The problem in the end is that there is rarely any shift, unless you have major cultural shift and oversight, coming from someone with the intention to save money and custom development time. Inertia always wins.

Jupe 3y ago

I recall, back when Windows 95 was released, a joke going around that went something like this: "Yes, Windows 95 is awesome and popular. So awesome and popular there are ~450 books written about how to use it!"

forinti 3y ago

I'm pretty sure Oracle works this way, but as company policy so that they can sell more support, consultancy, training, certification, etc.

brettermeier 3y ago
SAP surely too...
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  No one has ever managed to successfully describe to me what SAP even does.
  - dizhn 3y ago
    It's a bigger Excel.
  - majewsky 3y ago
    That's like asking what Microsoft does. SAP has lots of different products, many from acquisitions, but the core product (what people think of when they say "SAP", although it's actually called S/4 HANA) is an ERP system. The Wikipedia article looks like a decent overview from what I can tell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning Disclosure: I work at SAP, but on internal IT and not on any of the customer-visible products. (I don't know much about how S/4 HANA really works, except that I use it to view my payslip, enter my vacation days and such.)

SergeAx 3y ago

This is why sharing books is universally good.

marricks 3y ago

I wonder that about many of the corporate web frameworks out there too. The guides and evangelist say it's so easy but they have the most dog shit docs out there but hey, plenty of training you can pay for to get certified. It made me think I was an idiot until I talked to a couple other folks (who didn't have a financial reason to say it was easy) and they agreed it was horrible documentation. One reason I love open source: you won't have folks clamoring to use or improve your system if it's too shitty. To reach great levels of incomprehensibility you really need corporate backing.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

> It was on purpose. You have to go buy the book. I don't think I'll ever find a better justification for copyright infringement in my lifetime.

whalesalad 3y ago

It all makes sense.

blueboo 3y ago

have a hard time believing that selling (tens of?) thousands of programming reference books brought in 10-20x salaries or that entire teams would be following a pied piper leading to such a hellaciously complicated design, contrived to induce desperate reference buying?? It’s a funny thought but this is a fantasy

rjh29 3y ago
Book part likely true. 6 month sabbatical and 10-20x salary probably not, or maybe just for like one lucky person.

Karellen 3y ago

Well, I hope you inquired as to whether he was born that much of an asshole, or if he had to work his whole life to achieve it, and then refused to address him as anything other than "fucking wanker" for the remainder of the meeting. On behalf of the rest of us.

geoffdunbar 3y ago

I worked at Microsoft from 1996 to 2011. I was a SDE and lead on Windows Media and Media Foundation. This is a cute story, but I never heard of anything like this. There is no way my management would have approved any time off to write a book on a Microsoft product. Sabbatical is possible, but everyone I knew that qualified for a sabbatical was already filthy rich from early 90s stock options, and used that time to sail around the world or something like that. I can't rule out that such a thing did happen at Microsoft in groups that I wasn't part of, but I would be stunned if it was more than a couple of people.