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"You work for crooks, Jeremy"

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I got into an interesting discussion in the comments on Dan Gillmor’s column about Microsoft’s behavior.  Dan concludes that “Microsoft won’t reform itself.”  Because I like my job and don’t like sitting in depositions, I opted to not comment on any of the legal issues, but to contrast with Dan’s list of negatives, I did point out what I thought were some positive changes in the way Microsoft interacts with partners. (Other commenters on the article took on Dan’s point directly, eg: “the Lindows business plan has been to provoke Microsoft […] so they don't need to demonstrate usefulness of the product”)

 

I wrote:

But surely you've seen some positive changes in the last few years as well, no? The Rotor shared source implementation of .NET (https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/Dndotnet/html/mssharsourcecli.asp)? The broader Shared Source initiative (https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/mar04/03-15SSIOneMillionPR.asp)? The royalty-free license to the Office 2003 XML schemas (https://blogs.msdn.com/jmazner/archive/2004/02/23/78903.aspx)? The work with IBM, BEA and others to ensure interoperable web services implementations via WS-I (https://www.ws-i.org/)? The hundreds of Microsoft employees reaching out to the developer community via blogs (https://blogs.msdn.com/)? More frequent Visual Studio technology previews (https://weblogs.asp.net/jaybaz_ms/archive/2004/02/21/77796.aspx)?

 

In response, Ron Talbott said he’s seen no positive changes from MS, writing “The "changes" you've described have almost zero effect on the anti-competitive practices that are at the core of MS' business strategy” and concluded “You work for crooks, Jeremy”. Another commenter, Bobby, wrote “why are we supposed to applaud Microsoft's taking a step?”

 

I’m not the guy who sets Microsoft’s business strategy.  I’m not the guy who is in the meeting when all the execs discuss how to set business strategy.  I’m not even the guy who gets to see the notes from that meeting ;)  But from my perspective down in the trenches, as someone who’s spent most of the last 8 years building software for MS, the business strategy I see is “build good software that does what customers need, then sell it to them.”

 

Any meeting I’m in where product team folks are debating features, the discussion is always centered on what will be best for customers.  I’ve spent the last two years trying to make sure that the Longhorn platform offers the right set of functionality to developers.  Sometimes people make the wrong decision.  Sometimes they make a good decision, but it looks like a wrong decision.  But most of the time they make good decisions, and build a good product.  If they build a bad product that doesn’t satisfy customer needs, then no one uses it, and it either dies, or goes back to the drawing board for v2.

 

For a long time, none of the decision making process was exposed to the world outside of Redmond.  But now we have hundreds of employees writing about how and why we make these decisions every day.  And I think initiatives like Rotor, the Office schema licensing, and WSI show that we are increasingly making decisions to promote interoperability.  I don’t understand how, looking at these changes in the past few years, Ron sees them as indication that I work for crooks.

 

To Bobby’s point: I’m not asking you to applaud anything.  Just tell us “yes, this is good”, or “no, this is bad”.  We listen, and we adjust based on what our customers and partners tell us.  If the community tells us that WSI is a good thing, and you agree that interoperability with IBM and BEA is an admirable goal, then we’ll continue to work on that.  If you tell us that it’s a mistake and not meeting your needs, then we’ll adjust accordingly.  If you say nothing, we have no idea whether we’re meeting your needs or not.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2004
    As a developer, I absolutely love all the neat stuff Microsoft provides; it makes is easier to focus on adding value to the code I'm writing rather than reinventing the wheel. I'm looking forward to Visual Studio 2005 and Longhorn.

    What I think irks so many people is Microsoft's general attitude. Talking about Rotor being a positive step, but not supporting Linux is a good example. Microsoft gets to prove they're playing nice by making Roter available (good PR hype), oh, but the platform any non-Windows developer cares about (Linux) isn't supported.

    Microsoft needs to work (much) harder at separating the UI from the underlying framework (very) early in the process. For example, I'm happy with WMP9 and being able to use the various ActiveX controls in an application. But all I really care about is playing a MP3 (WMA) file in my app; I don't care about all the WMP9 UI. It needs to be easy for Real to plug their player into the infastructure; as developer I still can easily play music, but I'm not forcing anybody to use WMP9. IE is further along this path, but it would still be quite difficult to substitude Opera or Netscape rendering engines for MSHTML.

    Of course, from a pure Microsoft oriented business perspective, such things don't make any sense. And that's where the attitude comes in: Microsoft has to realize that it isn't just like any other company; it has a (near) monopoly position and must act accordingly.
  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2004
    "Keep doing what you are doing. You build awesome software and it supports a grea deal of the needs of your users. You will not be able to make everyone happy so don't try."

    Ditto.

    funny how folks "Anthomorphize" (sp?)
    a business like saying "Microsoft's attitude..." well If Ms had one it would be a lot NICER than many give it credit for....
    it's called BUSINESS FOlks....
    you are trying to make a deal thats good for your company to make a profit.
    some times hindsight beeing blessed with perfect 20/20 vision sees that some things you did may have not been the best ... short term profit and a long term legal battle....
    thats life, not an EVIL EMPIRE
    Get it?
  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2004
    Yes, Microsoft does indeed build awesome software, and I too think they should (more-or-less) keep doing what they are doing. I don't consider them to be the "Evil Empire".

    What Microsoft is being told is that they are not a run-of-mill business; being a monopoly they have to act differently. Clearly - and not surprisingly - they don't like that and disagree.

    Determining what's "best" for customers is tricky: for AT&T, it was "best" that everybody had a single phone company (them). And for some (probably many, in 1984) customers, that certainly was true: no picking a long-distance (or local) phone company, one number to call when there wasn't a dial-tone, no danger of "slamming" (no other phone company existed), etc. And AT&T had to give up much of it's property (IP or otherwise) when it was broken up.

    Analogies can have problems, so don't want to claim that Microsoft is like AT&T or that what was good for the phone system must be good for Windows. There certainly are many advantages to getting everything from a single company; one of Apple's strengths is that it controls both the hardware and the software so it can deliver a very seamless and integrated solution.

  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 28, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    April 01, 2004
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    April 19, 2004
    Interesting that you guys think that Microsoft (1) needs defending and (2) deserves defending ...

    The perception of Microsoft, from outside Microsoft, is that they have one main goal, and that is control. Any good software they produce is usually a side effect of their pursuit for control. In fact, some of their better software is produced when they actually have to compete. Once the competition is over, the question becomes, "how can this product be 'improved' to help our other products?"

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    August 01, 2004
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