4 ms·

Windows 8 is everything wrong with Microsoft Corporation as an organization and how they go about developing product. I blame it on personas. When you have desi

Windows 8 is everything wrong with Microsoft Corporation as an organization and how they go about developing product. I blame it on personas. When you have designers, PMs and devs creating products for imaginary people instead making something they'd be proud to use themselves, you're going to have problems. It's fine to develop products and features based on market research, user studies and metrics, but at the end of the day it should pass the "will I use it at home" test. Otherwise you'll have a company full of people that go home and use iPhones, Macs and Google Chrome. The only group at MS I see right now making products for real people is Azure. They're actually developing features to remove friction and make its customer more productive and happier—even if it means supporting Linux, Git and Ruby.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
Dog fooding is heavily encouraged within Microsoft and heavily practiced (source: Microsoft employee). Whatever you think is wrong or went wrong, its not because none of us used it. The criticism in the article, if I understand it correctly, is that Microsoft is trying to please too many people.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- bambax 13y ago
  I currently work with Microsoft and what you're doing isn't really "dog fooding" as I understand it. Dog fooding should mean that people are making a product that they themselves would want to use, to scratch an itch they actually feel. What Microsoft does is "dog fooding at gunpoint" even if the result is poisoning oneself. Microsofties carry Windows phones around... and hate it. Openly. This isn't good.
  - ekianjo 13y ago
    > Microsofties carry Windows phones around... and hate it Is the management aware that they hate it ? Do they care?
    - throwawaymsft 13y ago
      Many managers are used to a world where customers have no choice but to buy the latest offering. I don't think they've fully awakened to the thought that Microsoft can be left entirely out of a burgeoning market.
    - jinushaun 13y ago
      Everyone at MS knows, but nothing changes--especially not changes to WP to win over their own people. There is no changing the course of the ship once it has sailed. Everyone is too busy working on their tasks for that sprint to step back and look around. And the backlog is so large that there is no way that tiny annoyance of yours will get done before the "priority 1" bugs, even though it might have more meaningful impact to end users. So it's death by a thousand paper cuts.
      - throwawaymsft 13y ago
        That's one of the biggest reasons I left. The majority of people I met seemed career driven, not product quality driven, and were happy to march to orders set a year ago -- however misguided now -- if it meant a checkbox filled on their review.
  - com2kid 13y ago
    > Microsofties carry Windows phones around... and hate it. Openly. This isn't good. Switched from my Android to WP, loving 95% of it, have a few gripes, but far less than on Android. For one thing, my phone no longer leaks memory. My start screen doesn't randomly take 10+ seconds to load up. My dialer doesn't occasionally decide to just screw it and not appear. (I had those same problems across 2 different android handsets, a 2.3 model from Motorola, and a 4.2 model from Samsung) Couple features are annoying. Too many steps to turn off GPS is one, I liked having a quick pull down drawer. But that is a minor nitpick. Compared to swearing at my phone every single day for being a bloody POS like I was doing with Android? WP is a great experience! > What Microsoft does is "dog fooding at gunpoint" even if the result is poisoning oneself. I also disagree with this, my group uses a variety of handsets, WP, iOS and Android.
    - auctiontheory 13y ago
      Switched from my Android to WP If only there were a third mobile OS for you to try, one that's actually well-designed, one that even many Google employees use ...
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - com2kid 13y ago
        > one that's actually well-designed Have you tried Windows Phone? I'm a bit biased, I spent 3 years working on it, but I'll say that of the current crop of mobile OSs out there, it is by far the best designed. From the underlying infrastructure used by the development team (one of the few teams at Microsoft I've ever been on that really believes every daily build should be stable and reliable, and has the test infrastructure to ensure it[0]) to the lovely UI to the outstanding performance requirements the team places on themselves. Back when I was on the WP team, a list of user frustration levels with wait times was widely disseminated. It was something like " 50ms unnoticeable to user, 100ms+, somewhat noticeable pause or skip, 250ms, interface begins to feel slow, 500ms+, user satisfaction begins to drop, 5s+, users become overly irritated" with a lot more detail and gradations of course. The team's internal requirements was that all UI elements in the OS respond in less than 1 second, and even then, you'd better have a damn good excuse as to why what you were doing took a whole second! The UI flies. Animations are smooth and beautiful. Anything that does not please or delight the user does not get into the code base. The bar in Windows Phone is not "do we have this feature", the bar is "does this feature make the user happy?" All of this is of course not spoken as an MS employee. I'm just a lowly dev, albeit one now in charge of a UI dev team, and I can tell you that our product will sure as hell meet the same bar of smooth beautiful performance that Windows Phone does. It is damn well going to be a matter of pride if nothing else, and the entire management chain here is behind me on that! [0] The Windows Phone division has over 4000 people in it, although I am not sure how many of them are devs. Let's say 500 or so devs total (likely an underestimate!) checking in code to what is a huge code base. Now imagine every single day, you can take the code that is committed and, without worry, put it on your phone and expect it to work. Daily's aren't always 100% stable, but they are dog-foodable and usable. One thing I miss about working there is coming in every morning and flashing the latest code to my phone and seeing the incremental progress that the team made on a daily basis. Of course this ignores that many teams work off of branches which are then tested and integrated. The overall engineering effort to keep that platform moving is huge.
- jinushaun 13y ago
  I actually think dog fooding is a net negative because it teaches people to ignore bugs and bad UX. Everyone at MS is encouraged to run the latest half finished version of some software. You assume it will be "fixed later", but never actually follow up. Or worse, you make excuses for bugs and bad design instead of fixing them. Ultimately, this means no accountability because you are not developing products you yourself would use by choice. You use IE because you're supposed to, not because you prefer it over Chrome or Firefox. Trying to please too many people = personas. Anyone who has worked at MS knows what personas are.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    > I actually think dog fooding is a net negative because it teaches people to ignore bugs and bad UX. I've never been asked to dog food anything before RC, so I haven't really felt that. > Trying to please too many people = personas. Anyone who has worked at MS knows what personas are. Something they left out of our MSR training I guess?
- throwawaymsft 13y ago
  I used to work at msft too. You completely missed the point. Dog fooding at ms is eating a substandard product to provide feedback. You grudgingly use it to help the company. See internal drives to get people to use bing. How about making a product you don't need to cajole employees into? Think Google has ads to get people to use google search, or apple forces employees to use iPhones? (Or do they call it caviar-ing?) If dog fooding is the reason employees use your product you should not release it.
  - joosters 13y ago
    Google does run ads to get people to use Google search.
    - throwawaymsft 13y ago
      Inside of google? (That's what I'm referring to with dog fooding, to convince your employees to use a substandard product "for the good of the company"). Google probably has "google search rocks" internal ads. They probably don't have "hey guys could you stop using bing for a bit and try our search engine?".
      - joosters 13y ago
        Sorry, I got sidetracked from the dogfooding main point. I'm pretty sure google don't need ads to cajole their employees into using their search. I was referring to their public ads.
    - georgemcbay 13y ago
      Sometimes ads aren't really to convince people to use a thing, but sort of just to reinforce an existing "brand relationship". See: Almost all of Coca-Cola's advertising, for example.
      - joosters 13y ago
        This does seem true for the google ads. An overriding theme in them does try to make Google appear more friendly and likeable, rather than to grab more user share. Although reinforcing a brand is still a big part of attracting and keeping customers. If Coca-Cola stopped advertising, they'd definitely lose sales.
yuhong 13y ago
The only group at MS I see right now making products for real people is Azure. They're actually developing features to remove friction and make its customer more productive and happier—even if it means supporting Linux, Git and Ruby. I think it is no coincidence this is where Mark Russinovich etc. works in now.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago

Dog fooding is heavily encouraged within Microsoft and heavily practiced (source: Microsoft employee). Whatever you think is wrong or went wrong, its not because none of us used it. The criticism in the article, if I understand it correctly, is that Microsoft is trying to please too many people.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
bambax 13y ago
I currently work with Microsoft and what you're doing isn't really "dog fooding" as I understand it. Dog fooding should mean that people are making a product that they themselves would want to use, to scratch an itch they actually feel. What Microsoft does is "dog fooding at gunpoint" even if the result is poisoning oneself. Microsofties carry Windows phones around... and hate it. Openly. This isn't good.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  > Microsofties carry Windows phones around... and hate it Is the management aware that they hate it ? Do they care?
  - throwawaymsft 13y ago
    Many managers are used to a world where customers have no choice but to buy the latest offering. I don't think they've fully awakened to the thought that Microsoft can be left entirely out of a burgeoning market.
  - jinushaun 13y ago
    Everyone at MS knows, but nothing changes--especially not changes to WP to win over their own people. There is no changing the course of the ship once it has sailed. Everyone is too busy working on their tasks for that sprint to step back and look around. And the backlog is so large that there is no way that tiny annoyance of yours will get done before the "priority 1" bugs, even though it might have more meaningful impact to end users. So it's death by a thousand paper cuts.
    - throwawaymsft 13y ago
      That's one of the biggest reasons I left. The majority of people I met seemed career driven, not product quality driven, and were happy to march to orders set a year ago -- however misguided now -- if it meant a checkbox filled on their review.
- com2kid 13y ago
  > Microsofties carry Windows phones around... and hate it. Openly. This isn't good. Switched from my Android to WP, loving 95% of it, have a few gripes, but far less than on Android. For one thing, my phone no longer leaks memory. My start screen doesn't randomly take 10+ seconds to load up. My dialer doesn't occasionally decide to just screw it and not appear. (I had those same problems across 2 different android handsets, a 2.3 model from Motorola, and a 4.2 model from Samsung) Couple features are annoying. Too many steps to turn off GPS is one, I liked having a quick pull down drawer. But that is a minor nitpick. Compared to swearing at my phone every single day for being a bloody POS like I was doing with Android? WP is a great experience! > What Microsoft does is "dog fooding at gunpoint" even if the result is poisoning oneself. I also disagree with this, my group uses a variety of handsets, WP, iOS and Android.
  - auctiontheory 13y ago
    Switched from my Android to WP If only there were a third mobile OS for you to try, one that's actually well-designed, one that even many Google employees use ...
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - com2kid 13y ago
      > one that's actually well-designed Have you tried Windows Phone? I'm a bit biased, I spent 3 years working on it, but I'll say that of the current crop of mobile OSs out there, it is by far the best designed. From the underlying infrastructure used by the development team (one of the few teams at Microsoft I've ever been on that really believes every daily build should be stable and reliable, and has the test infrastructure to ensure it[0]) to the lovely UI to the outstanding performance requirements the team places on themselves. Back when I was on the WP team, a list of user frustration levels with wait times was widely disseminated. It was something like " 50ms unnoticeable to user, 100ms+, somewhat noticeable pause or skip, 250ms, interface begins to feel slow, 500ms+, user satisfaction begins to drop, 5s+, users become overly irritated" with a lot more detail and gradations of course. The team's internal requirements was that all UI elements in the OS respond in less than 1 second, and even then, you'd better have a damn good excuse as to why what you were doing took a whole second! The UI flies. Animations are smooth and beautiful. Anything that does not please or delight the user does not get into the code base. The bar in Windows Phone is not "do we have this feature", the bar is "does this feature make the user happy?" All of this is of course not spoken as an MS employee. I'm just a lowly dev, albeit one now in charge of a UI dev team, and I can tell you that our product will sure as hell meet the same bar of smooth beautiful performance that Windows Phone does. It is damn well going to be a matter of pride if nothing else, and the entire management chain here is behind me on that! [0] The Windows Phone division has over 4000 people in it, although I am not sure how many of them are devs. Let's say 500 or so devs total (likely an underestimate!) checking in code to what is a huge code base. Now imagine every single day, you can take the code that is committed and, without worry, put it on your phone and expect it to work. Daily's aren't always 100% stable, but they are dog-foodable and usable. One thing I miss about working there is coming in every morning and flashing the latest code to my phone and seeing the incremental progress that the team made on a daily basis. Of course this ignores that many teams work off of branches which are then tested and integrated. The overall engineering effort to keep that platform moving is huge.
jinushaun 13y ago
I actually think dog fooding is a net negative because it teaches people to ignore bugs and bad UX. Everyone at MS is encouraged to run the latest half finished version of some software. You assume it will be "fixed later", but never actually follow up. Or worse, you make excuses for bugs and bad design instead of fixing them. Ultimately, this means no accountability because you are not developing products you yourself would use by choice. You use IE because you're supposed to, not because you prefer it over Chrome or Firefox. Trying to please too many people = personas. Anyone who has worked at MS knows what personas are.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  > I actually think dog fooding is a net negative because it teaches people to ignore bugs and bad UX. I've never been asked to dog food anything before RC, so I haven't really felt that. > Trying to please too many people = personas. Anyone who has worked at MS knows what personas are. Something they left out of our MSR training I guess?
throwawaymsft 13y ago
I used to work at msft too. You completely missed the point. Dog fooding at ms is eating a substandard product to provide feedback. You grudgingly use it to help the company. See internal drives to get people to use bing. How about making a product you don't need to cajole employees into? Think Google has ads to get people to use google search, or apple forces employees to use iPhones? (Or do they call it caviar-ing?) If dog fooding is the reason employees use your product you should not release it.
- joosters 13y ago
  Google does run ads to get people to use Google search.
  - throwawaymsft 13y ago
    Inside of google? (That's what I'm referring to with dog fooding, to convince your employees to use a substandard product "for the good of the company"). Google probably has "google search rocks" internal ads. They probably don't have "hey guys could you stop using bing for a bit and try our search engine?".
    - joosters 13y ago
      Sorry, I got sidetracked from the dogfooding main point. I'm pretty sure google don't need ads to cajole their employees into using their search. I was referring to their public ads.
  - georgemcbay 13y ago
    Sometimes ads aren't really to convince people to use a thing, but sort of just to reinforce an existing "brand relationship". See: Almost all of Coca-Cola's advertising, for example.
    - joosters 13y ago
      This does seem true for the google ads. An overriding theme in them does try to make Google appear more friendly and likeable, rather than to grab more user share. Although reinforcing a brand is still a big part of attracting and keeping customers. If Coca-Cola stopped advertising, they'd definitely lose sales.

yuhong 13y ago

The only group at MS I see right now making products for real people is Azure. They're actually developing features to remove friction and make its customer more productive and happier—even if it means supporting Linux, Git and Ruby. I think it is no coincidence this is where Mark Russinovich etc. works in now.