3 ms·
None of what you wrote is obvious to me. Partly this is because Microsoft is big enough that I find descriptions that treat Microsoft as a monolithic entity un
by kvb 14y ago
None of what you wrote is obvious to me. Partly this is because Microsoft is big enough that I find descriptions that treat Microsoft as a monolithic entity unconvincing. After all, they got Kinect to market quickly. SharePoint seemed to come out of nowhere to dominate its market, too. Thankfully, I've never had to deal with stack ranking, but I find it unlikely that it's the explanation behind Microsoft's various failures.
- bunderbunder 14y agoMicrosoft's got a weird dual personality in that regard. There are plenty of smaller units within Microsoft that manage to do really great things. At the same time, oftentimes when the Mothership decides to try and get involved, what ensues frequently looks more like meddling than coordination. For example, look at how their mobile offering's .NET-based APIs and "WCF lite" GUI toolkit lasted for precisely one generation before someone got the bright idea of yanking it and replacing it with a whole new system based on a gussied-up version of COM. I have a really hard time believing that's an example of coordination. From the outside, it looks a lot more like someone from the Windows division becoming jealous of what folks from the other divisions were accomplishing, and deciding to horn in on that game while simultaneously reasserting the old Win32 technology base at the expense of newer technologies. It's also a spectacular waste of effort, and left a lot of us developers feeling like we just became collateral damage in an internal power struggle.
- olefoo 14y ago> collateral damage in an internal power struggle Why I'm leery of Windows Azure, even though it seems to be doing mostly the right thng.
- bunderbunder 14y agoDitto. Azure looks nice enough, but at this point I can't in good faith recommend to my employer that we become any more exposed to opportunities for the carpet to get yanked out from under us by an executive in Redmond who's forgotten to take his Ritalin.
- taligent 14y agoKinect was acquired and SharePoint is popular but it really did so on the back of existing infrastructure i.e. it was like an upsell. And I am not saying that stack ranking is responsible for all its failures but I fail to see how it encourages co-operation which is so critical for successful companies.
- RDeckard 14y agoKinect was not acquired.