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"I am surprised that no one I met in Windows Azure team heard about Heroku or Rackspace, which are direct competitors. That’s acceptable, not everybody has to k

"I am surprised that no one I met in Windows Azure team heard about Heroku or Rackspace, which are direct competitors. That’s acceptable, not everybody has to know these." WOW! It's one thing to ignore competitors, it's another to not know who they are. I thought (by reputation) that Microsoft was a competitive place. "It’s hard to find a position in corporations matches what you love to do." Seems obvious, but hindsight is 20/20. It was a risk for them to post an article that could be considered critical of the mothership.

philliphaydon 13y ago
I find that statement hard to believe. The Azure Insiders mailing list has multiple threads mentioning other competitors such as Heroku and Rackspace.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  I guess this once again proves that a lot of people simply don't read mailing list emails.
  - mathattack 13y ago
    :-) Everyone's inbox gets flooded. This highlights what people self-select to ignore.
- fragmede 13y ago
  I don't. Microsoft has such a high level of not invented here (NIH) syndrome sometimes that I'd find it easier to believe that engineers on the ground are simply unaware of the competition.
  - philliphaydon 13y ago
    I'm not suggesting they should all know, but I don't believe all are completely oblivious to the outside world.
  - marssaxman 13y ago
    That was certainly my experience in devdiv. People barely seemed to realize that a world outside the Microsoft ecosystem still existed. I have forgotten the details, but there was a meeting once where I suggested we look at some open source project for ideas about solving the problem we were working on... possibly LLVM?... in any case the response was completely blank, like, what possible relevance could that have, why are you wasting your time thinking about some weird open source thing in the first place? It was a really strange attitude to encounter, as someone who had never even used Microsoft tools before going to work there.
    - hamburglar 13y ago
      Matches my experience as well. I was there for nearly a decade, with several years in windows client, and I was always amazed that nobody there ever seemed to learn anything outside of microsoft tech. It's stunning how there are two almost completely separate worlds. Just taking web development as an example, outside microsoft, there's this whole culture of github, ruby, python, node, various open source frameworks, gems/eggs/npm. If you're a web dev outside of microsoft and you are completely ignorant of all this stuff, you're stunted. Whereas inside of microsoft, most people will stare at you blankly if you mention ANY of that stuff. Mind you, none of this says anything about developer competency. There's no shortage of great developers at microsoft. They're just very insular and good at using microsoft tech and that's it. Oh, and these great developers are obviously hamstrung by the fact that microsoft isn't in the business of making great software, but that's a whole other rant.
- mansigandhi 13y ago
  It's not that unbelievable, I've seen it at Oracle too.
  - mathattack 13y ago
    Interesting. I thought that Oracle was hyper-competitive too. Is it because they are now the defacto standard?
shanselman 13y ago
Ya, he's not paying attention. I work for Azure and everyone is very clearly aware of the world and the competition.
- rajanikanthr 13y ago
  scott, hope he is not creating controversy by publicizing his team n stuff..
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- alpb 13y ago
  (Hi there, I'm the author.) Scott, you are a PM manager, you have to hear about it. What I am pointing out is individual contributors (SDEs and SDETs) mostly have never heard of these. Even the senior ones, I am pretty sure.
albertyw 13y ago
My guess is this is because of the separation between engineers and product managers (PMs). Engineers are supposed to focus on development and PMs (and more businessy folks) are supposed to focus on the competition.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
adamconroy 13y ago
An alternative explanation is that what he says is not true.

philliphaydon 13y ago

I find that statement hard to believe. The Azure Insiders mailing list has multiple threads mentioning other competitors such as Heroku and Rackspace.

enraged_camel 13y ago
I guess this once again proves that a lot of people simply don't read mailing list emails.
- mathattack 13y ago
  :-) Everyone's inbox gets flooded. This highlights what people self-select to ignore.
fragmede 13y ago
I don't. Microsoft has such a high level of not invented here (NIH) syndrome sometimes that I'd find it easier to believe that engineers on the ground are simply unaware of the competition.
- philliphaydon 13y ago
  I'm not suggesting they should all know, but I don't believe all are completely oblivious to the outside world.
- marssaxman 13y ago
  That was certainly my experience in devdiv. People barely seemed to realize that a world outside the Microsoft ecosystem still existed. I have forgotten the details, but there was a meeting once where I suggested we look at some open source project for ideas about solving the problem we were working on... possibly LLVM?... in any case the response was completely blank, like, what possible relevance could that have, why are you wasting your time thinking about some weird open source thing in the first place? It was a really strange attitude to encounter, as someone who had never even used Microsoft tools before going to work there.
  - hamburglar 13y ago
    Matches my experience as well. I was there for nearly a decade, with several years in windows client, and I was always amazed that nobody there ever seemed to learn anything outside of microsoft tech. It's stunning how there are two almost completely separate worlds. Just taking web development as an example, outside microsoft, there's this whole culture of github, ruby, python, node, various open source frameworks, gems/eggs/npm. If you're a web dev outside of microsoft and you are completely ignorant of all this stuff, you're stunted. Whereas inside of microsoft, most people will stare at you blankly if you mention ANY of that stuff. Mind you, none of this says anything about developer competency. There's no shortage of great developers at microsoft. They're just very insular and good at using microsoft tech and that's it. Oh, and these great developers are obviously hamstrung by the fact that microsoft isn't in the business of making great software, but that's a whole other rant.
mansigandhi 13y ago
It's not that unbelievable, I've seen it at Oracle too.
- mathattack 13y ago
  Interesting. I thought that Oracle was hyper-competitive too. Is it because they are now the defacto standard?

shanselman 13y ago

Ya, he's not paying attention. I work for Azure and everyone is very clearly aware of the world and the competition.

rajanikanthr 13y ago
scott, hope he is not creating controversy by publicizing his team n stuff..
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
alpb 13y ago
(Hi there, I'm the author.) Scott, you are a PM manager, you have to hear about it. What I am pointing out is individual contributors (SDEs and SDETs) mostly have never heard of these. Even the senior ones, I am pretty sure.

albertyw 13y ago

My guess is this is because of the separation between engineers and product managers (PMs). Engineers are supposed to focus on development and PMs (and more businessy folks) are supposed to focus on the competition.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

adamconroy 13y ago

An alternative explanation is that what he says is not true.