Corporate Blogs -- Gradations of Value?
First, let me say once again, there has
been no corporate pressure whatsoever to cut short my previous posting
(Broken Windows Theory). Nobody has
said, or even implied, that I need to change anything about what I said. So conspiracy theorists, please rest assured
that The Man is not out there monitoring and censoring the blog world. Seriously.
I pulled the content of the posting
because productive discussion wasn’t happening. Of the 160+ comments, about five have
had any real value from an “open minds, open discussion” point of view. I also pulled the content (once again,
completely self-initiated with no pressure whatsoever from anybody) because
there is enough internal debate within Microsoft about the value and ethics
of blogging which I’d like resolved.
[Follow-up: I've restored the original post, after much internal discussion. Essentially, pulling the content was causing undue attention.]
Internal Debate
Many perspectives have been voiced to me,
both publicly and privately, debating the value and ethics of employee blogging. Here, by “employee blogging,” I mean “blog
entries that are openly identified as being written by Microsoft employees.” The rough gist of internal feedback from
Microsoft employees falls in these categories:
- Thank goodness someone is
talking about this.
“Kudos for having the courage to shed light on these critical
issues.” “It’s great that we’re
having open and insightful discussion about this.” - You need to put the entire post back up. Some folks are quite
concerned that, with Scoble leaving this week and what not, there will be
increased fervor behind conspiracy theories about how I’ve been silenced, shipped
to Siberia, etc. This sort of feedback is much more
concerned about posts staying up from a PR/media perspective, regardless
of the content of the post. (Let
me say here once again, for those who have deep-seated theories – my original
post was shortened unilaterally by me.
I was at no time pressured to remove any part of it.) - Employee blogs should be an
extension of the company message. Folks in this category would say that the
moment I identified myself as a Microsoft employee, my message should be
on target with the corporation’s message, building a positive image,
connecting positively with customers, etc.
Let’s Agree on Goals
From my perspective, it’s not a
free speech issue. I’m employed by
Microsoft, so there’s a valid discussion as to what sorts of posts are allowed
for me to make as an employee of the company.
Conditioned in my employment can indeed be restrictions on what I should
and shouldn’t say – I buy off on that 100%.
(For the last time, though, please remember: no one has pressured me to change anything.)
Second, the simple case that I think
everyone agrees on is that nothing confidential should ever be divulged. This is where Mini-Microsoft, as entertaining
of a read as it is, crosses a line. That’s
also the reason it can only remain up as long as it’s anonymous.
The more interesting debate I’d like to
have is not whether employees can or can’t post certain things, but should
they. I have no interest whatsoever in the
set of things that are clearly against company policy to post. I’m much more interested in the spectrum of
things where people, even internally in Microsoft, disagree.
So How Does It Net Out?
The bulk of the internal feedback I have
gotten falls on the side of encouraging posts like Broken Windows Theory. The vast majority of emails I’ve received
have to do with how the article has opened up important issues for
discussion. Folks in this camp say
that Scoble has given a human face to Microsoft, has made Microsoft more
accessible to the majority of customers.
The openness, and in some sense, the vulnerability, of both addressing
our strengths and discussing our weaknesses has been refreshing, these folks
would say.
Another camp would say that blogs are a
key part of how a company is perceived, and that they act as a megaphone
of both positive and negative opinion. Part
of an employee’s responsibility, then, is to at all times help build and
reinforce that positive image.
What’s most interesting to me is that
even within the company, we don’t quite agree on whether Broken Windows
Theory is a net positive or net negative.
If I take it purely based on numbers, the overwhelming majority of
employees writing in say that it’s a positive thing. But I see merits to both sides of the
discussion.
Thoughts?
Comments
Anonymous
June 15, 2006
PingBack from http://blogs.msdn.com/philipsu/archive/2006/06/14/631438.aspxAnonymous
June 15, 2006
Pleaes put it back -- I suspect that there are good lessons for many software companies, such as my own.
(This might be a better place for this comment)Anonymous
June 15, 2006
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June 15, 2006
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June 15, 2006
There's an old ("old" by our industry's standards) urban legend about irony that actually found its way...Anonymous
June 15, 2006
There's a cliche we're fond of around there that applies to the permanence of publishing information, either in print or online: You can't unring the bell. But Microsoft developer Philip Su, who yesterday posted an extensive blog entry on the...Anonymous
June 15, 2006
As another fellow software developer staring at Microsoft from afar, I find it somewhat comforting to see the imperfection in a company that can otherwise dictate the course of software development for years to come. Hopefully, this post and others like it remind developers everywhere that no one has The Plan for writing great software, or to do so ad infinitum without making mistakes.
Don't get me wrong, Vista is fraught with mistakes -- clearly many that were made at its inception that led to the eventual erosion of its idealistic goals -- leaving us with "XP-Pretty", or something far less than it was originally intended to be.
As a complete outsider, it's also easy to point to the simplest solution: drop legacy support. Apple pulled it off, and, yes, you would upset plenty of people... but it serves no purpose to continue on this path that will eventually lead them to alternatives anyway.
It's reminiscent (to me) of ASP+... the Faster, Better, Smarter version of ASP that would provide an ideal upgrade path for existing code while eliminating virtually every negative comparison of it against other web/scripted languages. What happened? The .NET Hype Machine turned it into ASP.NET, the over-engineered not-quite-ready-for-prime-time "web" version of Windows Forms. ASP.NET 2.0 was an improvement, but remains helplessly over-engineered. RAD is dead.
In the end, the purpose of the platform MUST be to invigorate growth in its child markets, thereby expanding and securing its value for /n/ years to come. Microsoft has lost sight of that, trying to make Windows the Best Thing, rather than allowing its (intended) transparency to facilitate the Next Great Thing.
-MattAnonymous
June 15, 2006
Congratulations for putting the original post back (Broken Windows Theory). It's a very interesting article (despite the annoying bold sentences). I regreted you having removed it, even more when anyone could get at the original text from Google's cache (that was my first move when I got here and saw that you had removed it).
Years ago, when MS employees started blogging, it really amazed me. It gives a human face to the company. I hope you don't shut such a great thing down.
MS has such a presence in everyone's life, blogging comming from inside the company is great to remove that 'IBM' feeling about it...
Regards and good luck.Anonymous
June 15, 2006
Phillip,
Why do we blog in the first place? Your reasons are probably not exactly the same as mine, but I'll bet they're not all that much different. I want to tell our story. I want to get more direct feedback from customers. I blog, because I want to improve the relationship we have with customers.
I can't see how to achieve that end without credibility, and I don't know how to establish and maintain credibility unless we tell it like it is.
Chris Mason hired me to work at Microsoft. One of my favorite quotes of his comes from one of the original "zero defects" docuiments, "Since human beings themselves are not fully debugged yet, there will be bugs in your code no matter what you do."
So, yeah, I think "Broken Windows Theory" is exactly the kind of post we should be making. It does two things. It acknowledgess that we, as human beings, "are not fully debugged yet," and it shows us debugging ourselves as we go along.
RickAnonymous
June 15, 2006
I'm happy to see you guys actually thinking about the bind you have gotten yourselves into. It gives the rest of us some idea of what scales are do-able, and those which aren't.Anonymous
June 15, 2006
(Commenting here since the last post is locked.)
I left Microsoft in 9/03 after working on a part of Windows Vista which went through the exact same Truthiness situation that Philip described in his post; an expectation from the program office, leadership across the company, etc. that we'd meet a mid-2004 (yes, mid-2004 for Vista) code complete date that everyone working on the program knew was ridiculous for us and assumed was ridiculous for others as well.
I could not believe it - perhaps I was still too naive - but I could not adjust to a world where I was clearly being asked to lie in order to keep our program from being in trouble. I could not fool myself and I did not want to fool anybody else, and so I had to do something else.
I would have hoped that after failure and failure and failure again, somebody - anybody - would have stepped up and said enough. Still, no enough.Anonymous
June 15, 2006
Why blog for MS? Yes it puts a human face on the Borg, but more importantly it puts "the owner" of a feature or a product in contact with the end user. It makes it harder, in fact, to lie if things are going badly, if a dialog is taking place between the owner and the client. It allows us outsiders to act as watchdogs, and as buffers between managers who want "yes" answers, and workers who, with a connection to their clients, have a stake in the consequences of being caught in the lie.Anonymous
June 15, 2006
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June 15, 2006
First of all, I believe that your original post ("Broken Windows Theory") didn't really bring anything new to the table. There has been rampant discussion around statements by Jim Allchin and others only a few months back, and it's no secret anymore that Microsoft has had, shall we say, "issues" with the size and complexity of Windows Vista.
Secondly - it's really good to see that Microsoft is finally "getting" what blogging is all about. If all you do is make your blogs into corporate-approved news-channels, noone is going to listen we have news.com, microsoft watch and anything ziff-davis makes for that. If you really, truly have a wish to engage and interact with your customers, you need to give the bloggers free reins. A blog is a personal avenue into the huge corporate body that is Microsoft. If you take away the personality, you also cut off the oxygen supply.Anonymous
June 15, 2006
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June 15, 2006
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June 15, 2006
Sorry for offtopic, but "shipping to Siberia" isn't that bad, and at Microsoft it is rather good i'd say: last year the region grew >150% and shows the same momentum. And working with the territory that covers some 10 France territories can be lots of fun too. As for bears, I just got a photo of one near Redmond - haven't seen any for 22 years spent in Siberia though :))Anonymous
June 16, 2006
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June 16, 2006
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June 16, 2006
Polish your resume and sell your stock. MS is going to diminish in both size and importance. I've been where you are and some huge adjustments in your life are inevitable. Your problems eminate from the top of the company and the longer those players are in charge, the longer and more painful the downward slide will be. It's time for a paradigm shift that only fresh leadership can visualize and implement. Good luck to you!Anonymous
June 16, 2006
The comment has been removedAnonymous
June 16, 2006
Thanks for putting the post back up--I'm glad I got to read it. Nicely done.
I'm curious if anybody knows how some of the factors in this analysis of the Windows team compare with Apple's OS development strategy. In particular--
1) 2000 developers in Windows right now. Anybody know how many on OSX?
2) 50 million lines of code for Vista. OSX?
3) Windows hierarchy 11 deep for Vista. OSX?
4) Action control vs. results control. How does that play out at Apple?
I don't mean to trigger a war among the ideologues. I'm just curious how the inner-workings of managing OS development compare. The outer workings are obviously different, with Apple prioritizing more rapid and incremental changes over the past 5 years. On the whole, it seems that people are generally less critical of Apple's strategy than Microsoft's. So why is Apple capable of this style of output, when it appears that there is nothing MS could possibly do to bring Vista to market more rapidly? I can think of lots of possible reasons, and I've read all sorts of explanations from various partisans, but I'm hoping maybe someone can offer a balanced perspective on this particular contrast between the companies.
Thanks!Anonymous
June 16, 2006
Thank you so much for the great article on Windows Vista development! This article actually gives me MORE confidence that Vista will be a solid product whenever it does ship. A lot of managers tend to forget that QUALITY software development is all about identifying, defining and solving problems. The author "gets it". This is exactly the type of pure unqualified dedication to quality that Microsoft has lost in recent years.
The author of this article should be given a promotion for his clear thinking and dedication to quality above petty corporate politics! If Microsoft were to put him/her in charge of Vista development I would run to buy stock in Microsoft!Anonymous
June 17, 2006
The author is apparently in Tablet PC group. I'd like to hear why aren't Tablet PC half or more of the new notebook market? Either the implementation is bad or the upper management hasn't done as much they could.
Tablet breakthrough strategy:
price $800-2000 (the spec suggested below is for higher end 1500-2000 range)
Many brands: Fujitsu,HP,Acer,Lenovo
Ensured display at consumer retail outlets.
Tablet PC 2007 spec expectation:
Core 2 Duo
1-1.5 kgram
11-14" 1600 or better resolution bright, vivid, S-IPS, no glare touch screen with button to turn touch off
1-2 GB Mem
80+ GB HDD 1.8"
ATI X1xxx
Remove any of the above requirements and I'm not interested.Anonymous
June 17, 2006
Further to my earlier post, and more thinking, I believe you have become the victims of "biteydog's law". Well, until I do some more maths (not my best aptitude, but good enough) better call it "biteydog's theorem".
BITEYDOG'S LAW
The time to completion of a software project is proportional to the cube of the number of lines of code.Anonymous
June 17, 2006
PingBack from http://www.michaeldolan.com/234Anonymous
June 17, 2006
First a disclaimer, i'm a mac fan. I think that part of the problem is that Microsoft in it's march to monopoly control of the software universe is putting too much stuff into the OS. They successfully used that tactic to crush Netscape and they probably view it as a winner.Anonymous
June 17, 2006
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June 17, 2006
By the way, you need to run system test IN PARALLEL with development...Anonymous
June 17, 2006
PingBack from http://www.bizwiki.cn/teamblog/?p=135Anonymous
June 17, 2006
Without getting into the "which OS is better" argument, I think that Apple has done one really interesting thing that Microsoft can't or won't do: they've shipped a new version of their OS every 24 months or so. The way they've done it is by doing their upgrades incrementally rather than stuffing so much new technology into each OS release.
Why won't Microsoft do this? I don't know the answer. They used to provide more functionality to the OS with Service Packs (like in NT 4.0 service packs - remember SP4 and the Option Pack?). And they seem to have done something similar with respun version of Windows 2003 Server. Why don't they do this with the Desktop OS? They could have done a lot of different things.
Maybe they've painted themselves into a corner with all of their legal problems? Consider IE 7.0? Why didn't they work on this separately and ship it a year ago for WinXP SP2? I am sure that it would have been well received. Why not an SP3 for XP? (probably because everyone is so busy on Vista). If MS had a schedule to ship SP's each year after an OS ships, they could have much more easily slipped in some of the Vista functionality (API's, etc) for developers to try ahead of time.
That's my take on this whole thing. For a project as large as an modern OS, you have to do things incrementally. Otherwise the complexity is overwhelming, even for Microsoft -- a company with the deepest OS engineering resources in the world.
Brian!Anonymous
June 19, 2006
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June 19, 2006
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June 21, 2006
Not that Philip needs rescuing, but Disappointed should also realize that Microsoft's non-shipping isn't just a gossip-mill nightmare, but an action that affects hundreds of thousands of outside IT staff, OEMs, and, most importantly, developers. The first PDC build of Vista was three years ago!
Now Microsoft is rushing its "partners" to provide Vista-friendly branded products (that leverage WinFX, meet the HW spec, etc.) in time for launch. Vista has had 5 years and an 8000-strong staff, and is turning out to be an incremental improvement (largely chrome) over XP. WinFS? Indigo? I won't even go back to the originally-promised specs. We (the outside world) have been chasing .NET for these past five years.
You're not the only one who's Disappointed.
-MattLAnonymous
June 21, 2006
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June 21, 2006
<i>"...I have shipped an OS. Actually I've shipped three. Tablet PC 1.0, Tablet PC Lonestar, and Mobile PC Beta 2..."</i>
You're joking, right? 'Nuf said...Anonymous
June 22, 2006
The comment has been removedAnonymous
June 23, 2006
PingBack from http://blog.munkywrench.co.nz/2006/06/24/throwing-stones/Anonymous
June 30, 2006
"...I have shipped an OS. Actually I've shipped three. Tablet PC 1.0, Tablet PC Lonestar, and Mobile PC Beta 2..."
Yes that has to be a joke.
That simply means Phillip got on the XPSP2 wagon. That does not count for "shipping an OS".Anonymous
July 02, 2006
PingBack from http://microsoft.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archives/2006/07/03/microsofts-virtual-drive-software-and-windows-developer-unloads/Anonymous
July 03, 2006
The comment has been removedAnonymous
July 05, 2006
philpsu,
I don't buy your story. I don't buy that it is a completely honest write up or that it is such a free (or carefree) and open expression.
Afterall, how hard can it be to implement blogs.msdn.com to keep entries internal within MS for a few minimum days or until some approval check before they are made public to the world? Afterall people are writing for the company blog, and about the company or its products. I believe such a check system would be in place and hence your dramatization about pressure, blah blah ..., seem moot.
Now for the goodness of me, what I don't figure out, is the marketing angle to why gobbledegook state of internal affairs dirty linen is being publicly washed? Is it for just more eyeballs, however they come, that you would bare whatever?
Would you comment on this?Anonymous
July 05, 2006
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October 04, 2006
Vista . The term stirs the imagination to conceive of beautiful possibilities just around the corner.Anonymous
August 14, 2007
PingBack from http://www.stephenmok.net/blog/2007/08/15/corporatecensorshipAnonymous
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