6 ms·

Since this blog is a bit dated, here are some things that have changed in the last 10 years from the perspective of someone who works here now. First some backg

by jjcm 11y ago

Since this blog is a bit dated, here are some things that have changed in the last 10 years from the perspective of someone who works here now. First some background to fill in the time between when he wrote this and now: When Vista dropped, public opinion of Microsoft started to go out the door. That was right around the same time that Apple released its first iphone (2007), and with a failed OS and a hugely successful device release by Apple, Microsoft fell by the wayside. Public opinion tanked a bit, and it seemed like the only "positive" energy was Steve Ballmer. Whether or not you can call his energy "positive" is debatable, but he was certainly energetic. Few employees actually liked Ballmer though, so when Satya came on it was a breath of fresh air. Satya came in at an absolutely perfect time - hololens and windows 10 were just about to be announced, meaning he'd get immense credit despite only being here for a short period. With a new CEO, Hololens, and Win10 on the horizon, public opinion (and our stock price) of MS has started to go up. The corporate culture in the last year has changed drastically, and support for open source internally has shot up (which as someone with a linux/unix background has really made me happy). Four or Five years ago, if you'd asked me what tech company I worked for, my answer would have probably been, "Microsoft, I know, it's a bummer. I'm trying to move to google". Now though people actually think MS is cool again. The stuff we're working on is exciting and the corporate culture is starting to get healthy.

vidoc 11y ago
Was stack ranking already common practice when this article was written (2004) and is it actually over now (2015) ?
- RyJones 11y ago
  stack ranking had been going on for many review cycles at this point and I heard last night that it's gone for good (wink wink, nudge nudge) because they still have to allocate bonuses and stock.
tdicola 11y ago
Err, that's kinda greatly simplifying things. I'd say the last 10 years can be described as: - ~2005 to ~2009 was the Ray Ozzie era. Ozzie took over the role of Chief Software Architect from Bill Gates in 2006 and the company, internally and externally, was focused on very ambitious projects. Software 'architects' were common on every team and usually doing something the 'right' way trumped shipping quickly and iterating. There were lots of interesting ideas and cool tech, but turning that stuff into viable products and businesses proved to be difficult. - ~2009 to 2013 was the Steven Sinofsky era. Sinofsky took over as the head of the Windows division after Vista and helped recover with the Windows 7 release. His influence quickly spread and most of the company adopted his management structure (very strict separation of concerns between development, test, and product management). The role of software architect quickly disappeared (and Ray Ozzie left the company, leaving the CSA position to disappear entirely) and although research was still important it was definitely not the top priority. There was much less focus on building platforms, ideas, or other intangible things vs. shipping to customers in controlled and predictable ways. Post 2013 and Steve Ballmer stepping down I don't really know much since I left around that time.
- smacktoward 11y ago
  > 2009 to 2013 was the Steven Sinofsky era... There was much less focus on building platforms, ideas, or other intangible things vs. shipping to customers in controlled and predictable ways. For certain definitions of "controlled and predictable," yes. For others not so much. Sinofsky's tenure was also the era of the great push to turn Windows 8 into the one Windows to rule all devices, which resulted in it being the controversial, poorly-received product it has been. "Controlled and predictable" would have involved rolling out changes like moving to Modern/Metro/Windows-Style/etc. UI, removing the Start button, booting to the Start screen instead of the desktop, etc. slowly and incrementally, but Sinofsky bet instead on rolling them all out at once in a single "big bang" release. That was a big, risky bet that completely failed to pay off, and that MS has been retreating from step by step ever since his departure.
  - dpark 11y ago
    From my perspective, "controlled and predictable" with Sinofsky was about managing the release cycle, hitting the dates. e.g. We said we're shipping in May, so we're shipping in May. That means careful planning and aggressive feature cuts if necessary. The goal was on time with high quality, where quality is measured in metrics like crash rate and bug count, not public opinion surveys. Incremental releases and minimizing controversial changes might make releases more "controlled" in different ways, but those weren't the target. [Edited for clarity]
    - serge2k 11y ago
      That sounds wonderful to me right now.
- goalieca 11y ago
  Sometimes I find "architects" curious folks. XAML was developed during the ray ozzie era right? That certainly has a "right way" with "Model-view-view-model" levels of abstraction insanity. Perhaps simpler is better.
  - 11y ago
ddeklotz 11y ago
I just recently left my job at Microsoft, about 7 months ago. That said, I have nothing but mostly great things to say about my time there (2010-2014). By the time I got there, there was already the sense that even though we had huge market share on traditional desktop operating systems, that we were still far and away the underdog in many other respects that probably mattered more. Working on the dethroned Windows OS was an exciting and compelling thing. How do you stay relevant in a market that is rapidly changing without just outright copying the competition and while still giving it its own unique perspective? That's a really hard problem, and a really fun one to work on. Even though I know we didn't get it all right in 8/8.1, the excitement was all there and it was a really great ride. Ask yourself if you would rather work for a big software leader that is resting on its laurels or for a company that knows it has some ground to cover if it wants to stay relevant, and then you'll know if you prefer the old Microsoft or the new one.
InclinedPlane 11y ago
I love the way MS has smartened up in regards to open source and embracing developers in the modern era. However, I think they still have some very fundamental problems in terms of corporate culture. For a very, very long time the reviews system incentivized short-term, easily measurable work over more substantive work, with a fairly obvious impact on the products delivered by MS.
superiortoyou 11y ago
>Four or Five years ago, if you'd asked me what tech company I worked for, my answer would have probably been, "Microsoft, I know, it's a bummer. I'm trying to move to google". Now though people actually think MS is cool again. The stuff we're working on is exciting and the corporate culture is starting to get healthy. It's embarrassing how fickle the technology industry is... so much reliance on hype and trend-hopping.
- serge2k 11y ago
  yeah, embarassing to want to work at companies doing innovative and interesting work. The whole side effect of probably getting a raise to go with a new job is terrible too.
fapjacks 11y ago
As someone who hasn't used an MS OS for at least ten years (though Star Citizen has forced me to), the open source thing going on is really starting to turn my head. Now, that being said, I feel like MS has a long way to go before I'll start to prefer it over *nix (I would love to see some of the kernel source, for example), but it's a direction I am very pleased to see Microsoft headed in. I have mad respect for the people at MS pushing this forward.
nemo44x 11y ago
I'm happy to hear the culture at your company has improved but I don't know if Microsoft is considered "cool" - or whatever that means. Anyone who has been around long enough (and not really that long all things considered) knows better than to ever trust Microsoft. Their whole model has been, and always will be: "Embrace, extend, extinguish". So Microsoft is opening some things up? They've had no choice as they are being left behind more and more. They know the modern developer is not as interested in an expensive IDE and MSDN account when there are many alternatives. We are creating so much more software than before and the top down model Microsoft sold has become niche after many years of dominance. Any open project Microsoft gets involved in and any open standard they get involved in should come with a warning label. Why? Because this is in their DNA.
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  Anyone who has been around long enough knows not to trust Google, Apple, Facebook, Oracle, ... Microsoft is not uniquely untrustworthy when it comes to big multi-faceted companies. As for DNA, I haven't seen any dodgy behavior in the OSS area for 5+ years, and nothing like EEE since I started working here in 2007.
  - arebop 11y ago
    No, Microsoft is a special case because they have always been at best amoral; they have been a cutthroat, even malicious company. Recently they've softened their behavior and image, but it's really a very recent shift and given their past treachery it's hard to trust them. These other companies may not always work together in harmony, but at least they aren't preoccupied with extinguishing their competitors and dominating ("owning") their users.
    - joshuapants 11y ago
      > at least they aren't preoccupied with extinguishing their competitors and dominating ("owning") their users. That's weird, because my perception of the companies listed above is that they are exactly preoccupied with that.
ExpiredLink 11y ago
> The stuff we're working on is exciting and the corporate culture is starting to get healthy. ... because the "positive" energy retired.
eva1984 11y ago
Microsoft is definitely, under the lead of Satya, becoming more open and friendly. But does it necessarily make it cooler? That is very much left to debate. The following claim might be a little generalized, but I believe Microsoft is still largely considered as an software company, who sells licenses and units of products for a living, and very much enterprise focused. This is quite different from the image that younger companies, especially those service-oriented ones, show or at least try to show to the public, something that is more ubiquitous and intimate.
- serge2k 11y ago
  Yes, Microsoft is cool again.
rwallace 11y ago
At the moment I'm looking at trying to compile some stuff on Windows, that has Visual Studio project files, with clang instead of Microsoft C++. This would involve making msbuild do things it wasn't exactly designed to do (assuming I don't want to spend a lot of time duplicating what it does from scratch). It occurred to me maybe what I really need to do is modify msbuild, but of course that's out of the question, right? But just for the heck of it I ran a Google search... ... and msbuild was recently open sourced. The code is right there on Github. Yeah, Microsoft of 2015 is very different from Microsoft of 1995, in good ways.
- com2kid 11y ago
  You actually can extend out MSBuild to use alternative compilers. It already comes with rules for C#, VB, C++, F#, etc. Replacing the rules for C++ with another command line and set of parameters of quite doable! :) (I happen to be using such a build system, unfortunately I wasn't the one who wrote it so I cannot provide any direct help, just encouragement!) It can actually all work from within VS as well.

by jjcm 11y ago

vidoc 11y ago

Was stack ranking already common practice when this article was written (2004) and is it actually over now (2015) ?

RyJones 11y ago
stack ranking had been going on for many review cycles at this point and I heard last night that it's gone for good (wink wink, nudge nudge) because they still have to allocate bonuses and stock.

tdicola 11y ago

Err, that's kinda greatly simplifying things. I'd say the last 10 years can be described as: - ~2005 to ~2009 was the Ray Ozzie era. Ozzie took over the role of Chief Software Architect from Bill Gates in 2006 and the company, internally and externally, was focused on very ambitious projects. Software 'architects' were common on every team and usually doing something the 'right' way trumped shipping quickly and iterating. There were lots of interesting ideas and cool tech, but turning that stuff into viable products and businesses proved to be difficult. - ~2009 to 2013 was the Steven Sinofsky era. Sinofsky took over as the head of the Windows division after Vista and helped recover with the Windows 7 release. His influence quickly spread and most of the company adopted his management structure (very strict separation of concerns between development, test, and product management). The role of software architect quickly disappeared (and Ray Ozzie left the company, leaving the CSA position to disappear entirely) and although research was still important it was definitely not the top priority. There was much less focus on building platforms, ideas, or other intangible things vs. shipping to customers in controlled and predictable ways. Post 2013 and Steve Ballmer stepping down I don't really know much since I left around that time.

smacktoward 11y ago
> 2009 to 2013 was the Steven Sinofsky era... There was much less focus on building platforms, ideas, or other intangible things vs. shipping to customers in controlled and predictable ways. For certain definitions of "controlled and predictable," yes. For others not so much. Sinofsky's tenure was also the era of the great push to turn Windows 8 into the one Windows to rule all devices, which resulted in it being the controversial, poorly-received product it has been. "Controlled and predictable" would have involved rolling out changes like moving to Modern/Metro/Windows-Style/etc. UI, removing the Start button, booting to the Start screen instead of the desktop, etc. slowly and incrementally, but Sinofsky bet instead on rolling them all out at once in a single "big bang" release. That was a big, risky bet that completely failed to pay off, and that MS has been retreating from step by step ever since his departure.
- dpark 11y ago
  From my perspective, "controlled and predictable" with Sinofsky was about managing the release cycle, hitting the dates. e.g. We said we're shipping in May, so we're shipping in May. That means careful planning and aggressive feature cuts if necessary. The goal was on time with high quality, where quality is measured in metrics like crash rate and bug count, not public opinion surveys. Incremental releases and minimizing controversial changes might make releases more "controlled" in different ways, but those weren't the target. [Edited for clarity]
  - serge2k 11y ago
    That sounds wonderful to me right now.
goalieca 11y ago
Sometimes I find "architects" curious folks. XAML was developed during the ray ozzie era right? That certainly has a "right way" with "Model-view-view-model" levels of abstraction insanity. Perhaps simpler is better.
- 11y ago

ddeklotz 11y ago

I just recently left my job at Microsoft, about 7 months ago. That said, I have nothing but mostly great things to say about my time there (2010-2014). By the time I got there, there was already the sense that even though we had huge market share on traditional desktop operating systems, that we were still far and away the underdog in many other respects that probably mattered more. Working on the dethroned Windows OS was an exciting and compelling thing. How do you stay relevant in a market that is rapidly changing without just outright copying the competition and while still giving it its own unique perspective? That's a really hard problem, and a really fun one to work on. Even though I know we didn't get it all right in 8/8.1, the excitement was all there and it was a really great ride. Ask yourself if you would rather work for a big software leader that is resting on its laurels or for a company that knows it has some ground to cover if it wants to stay relevant, and then you'll know if you prefer the old Microsoft or the new one.

InclinedPlane 11y ago

I love the way MS has smartened up in regards to open source and embracing developers in the modern era. However, I think they still have some very fundamental problems in terms of corporate culture. For a very, very long time the reviews system incentivized short-term, easily measurable work over more substantive work, with a fairly obvious impact on the products delivered by MS.

superiortoyou 11y ago

>Four or Five years ago, if you'd asked me what tech company I worked for, my answer would have probably been, "Microsoft, I know, it's a bummer. I'm trying to move to google". Now though people actually think MS is cool again. The stuff we're working on is exciting and the corporate culture is starting to get healthy. It's embarrassing how fickle the technology industry is... so much reliance on hype and trend-hopping.

serge2k 11y ago
yeah, embarassing to want to work at companies doing innovative and interesting work. The whole side effect of probably getting a raise to go with a new job is terrible too.

fapjacks 11y ago

As someone who hasn't used an MS OS for at least ten years (though Star Citizen has forced me to), the open source thing going on is really starting to turn my head. Now, that being said, I feel like MS has a long way to go before I'll start to prefer it over *nix (I would love to see some of the kernel source, for example), but it's a direction I am very pleased to see Microsoft headed in. I have mad respect for the people at MS pushing this forward.

nemo44x 11y ago

I'm happy to hear the culture at your company has improved but I don't know if Microsoft is considered "cool" - or whatever that means. Anyone who has been around long enough (and not really that long all things considered) knows better than to ever trust Microsoft. Their whole model has been, and always will be: "Embrace, extend, extinguish". So Microsoft is opening some things up? They've had no choice as they are being left behind more and more. They know the modern developer is not as interested in an expensive IDE and MSDN account when there are many alternatives. We are creating so much more software than before and the top down model Microsoft sold has become niche after many years of dominance. Any open project Microsoft gets involved in and any open standard they get involved in should come with a warning label. Why? Because this is in their DNA.

seanmcdirmid 11y ago
Anyone who has been around long enough knows not to trust Google, Apple, Facebook, Oracle, ... Microsoft is not uniquely untrustworthy when it comes to big multi-faceted companies. As for DNA, I haven't seen any dodgy behavior in the OSS area for 5+ years, and nothing like EEE since I started working here in 2007.
- arebop 11y ago
  No, Microsoft is a special case because they have always been at best amoral; they have been a cutthroat, even malicious company. Recently they've softened their behavior and image, but it's really a very recent shift and given their past treachery it's hard to trust them. These other companies may not always work together in harmony, but at least they aren't preoccupied with extinguishing their competitors and dominating ("owning") their users.
  - joshuapants 11y ago
    > at least they aren't preoccupied with extinguishing their competitors and dominating ("owning") their users. That's weird, because my perception of the companies listed above is that they are exactly preoccupied with that.

ExpiredLink 11y ago

> The stuff we're working on is exciting and the corporate culture is starting to get healthy. ... because the "positive" energy retired.

eva1984 11y ago

Microsoft is definitely, under the lead of Satya, becoming more open and friendly. But does it necessarily make it cooler? That is very much left to debate. The following claim might be a little generalized, but I believe Microsoft is still largely considered as an software company, who sells licenses and units of products for a living, and very much enterprise focused. This is quite different from the image that younger companies, especially those service-oriented ones, show or at least try to show to the public, something that is more ubiquitous and intimate.

serge2k 11y ago
Yes, Microsoft is cool again.

rwallace 11y ago

At the moment I'm looking at trying to compile some stuff on Windows, that has Visual Studio project files, with clang instead of Microsoft C++. This would involve making msbuild do things it wasn't exactly designed to do (assuming I don't want to spend a lot of time duplicating what it does from scratch). It occurred to me maybe what I really need to do is modify msbuild, but of course that's out of the question, right? But just for the heck of it I ran a Google search... ... and msbuild was recently open sourced. The code is right there on Github. Yeah, Microsoft of 2015 is very different from Microsoft of 1995, in good ways.

com2kid 11y ago
You actually can extend out MSBuild to use alternative compilers. It already comes with rules for C#, VB, C++, F#, etc. Replacing the rules for C++ with another command line and set of parameters of quite doable! :) (I happen to be using such a build system, unfortunately I wasn't the one who wrote it so I cannot provide any direct help, just encouragement!) It can actually all work from within VS as well.