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Ballmer: Family Values vs. Employee iPods

I know Ballmer’s going to take a lot of flak for this comment from today’s CNN article:

Do you have an iPod?
No, I do not. Nor do my children. My children–in many dimensions
they’re as poorly behaved as many other children, but at least on this
dimension I’ve got my kids brainwashed: You don’t use Google, and you
don’t use an iPod.

Though perhaps an offhand comment, I assume it’s not a joke. 

I think Steve needs to step back and listen to some of his employees.  Maybe they really do know quite a bit that Steve doesn’t.  Let’s see…

Last February’s Wired article "Hide your iPod, Here Comes Bill" reveals that Steve Ballmer is in the minority:

"About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music
player have an iPod," said one source, a high-level manager who asked
to remain anonymous. "It’s pretty staggering."
…
So concerned is management, owning an iPod at Microsoft is beginning to
become impolitic, the manager said. Employees are hiding their iPods by
swapping the telltale white headphones for a less conspicuous pair.

A year later, it seems management is not only concerned, but positively paranoid.  Many Microsoft employees see things differently than Steve and Bill.  Tom Harpel, a Microsoft Employee who is not hiding his headphones, understands why understanding competing products can be empowering:

Yes, I use a Mac. I love using a Mac. Yes, I
carry an iPod. I don’t love it, but it works pretty well. I have a TiVo
today, but I’m sure I’ll be adding a Media Center to my living room
sometime in the next year.

I like toys. I like gadgets. Every
product out there tries to use technology to solve a problem. It’s fun
and enlightening to try stuff out, to try to understand how each
company approaches problem solving differently. Using competitor’s
products is one way to get at that understanding.

Today in Paul Kedrosky’s Blog, Robert Scoble also had no hesitation in his open-mindedness about the competition:

Windows Vista: Past Its Due Date Already

Windows has finally crossed the line, and there’s nothing Microsoft can do about it.  It’s the beginning of the end.  It’s a pattern that I’ve experienced first hand.  You start with something excellent, and in the service of your customers you try, try, try to keep it moving along.  It succeeds for a long time.  It becomes number one.  But, you become so involved in the idea of the product that you forget about what it’s like to be a customer.  You assume that it must be good because that’s what the market share tells you.

Then a line is crossed.  You know that something is wrong.  Your engineers can feel it.  There’s a malaise in the air.  But, nobody says anything.  At the lunch table, you read PC Week’s scathing criticism.  People stare around the room, some even laugh or scoff. Most say nothing.   You go back to your work, you immerse yourself in further enhancements to your product.  You convince yourself everything is OK.  You look at competitive products only for purposes of punching holes in their strategy.  You find the holes.  You reassure yourself.  Everyone smiles.

Repeat until fail.

I recognize the pattern.  That’s where Windows is right now.

I just figured that out.   I think it’s the Windows Vista slip that triggered my realization.  The NYT Why Is Windows So Slow? article almost literally describes the phenomenon.  It was also the Scoble debacle that seems to have finally ended with Robert’s Better Mail than Jail posting, where he realizes he shouldn’t have been so defensive.  That is the leak in the dike.  I see it on other Microsoft blogs too.  I don’t want to single Robert out, but I think Robert, as well as others, feel the malaise I described above.  The "unspoken truth" that something, though no one can say what, is wrong.

In 1988, I was fortunate to be the archtect of The dBASE Professional Compiler, a product that was never released.  Remember dBASE?
  From Ashton-Tate?  You don’t know what I’m talking about do you?

In 1988, dBASE had 63% market share of the database market.  That’s not just the PC database market, we’re talking about the entire database market.  Ashton-tate was on top of the world, and knew it.  My company was designing the compiler, so we weren’t part of Ashton-Tate, but we worked closely with all the developers.  They were motivated, interested in their product, their customers, and confident they had the best solution for everybody.  Just like Microsoft today feels about Windows.

But, we were a small company of innovative engineers.  We looked at dBASE more objectively and saw clearly that dBASE was a mish-mash of features which had been built up one layer at a time until the whole no longer made sense.  Sure, we were doing the compiler.  It was an important problem to solve, and there were many people in the market who needed it.  It was a good thing to do.  But we knew what we were doing.  We knew we were creating a compiler for a language that should, by all rights, be obsolete.  At Ashton-Tate, such words were heresy.  Only rarely did we mention how we felt, and when we did, we knew we had stepped on some emotions.

There were some brilliant people at Ashton-Tate, and I was fortunate to know many of them.  When talking about dBASE, they were proud of their product, and it was the size of the customer base that was the de facto definition of why dBASE was a good product.  This is part of the pattern.  We are number one!  Our product clearly must be the reason.

As I got to know people during that project, eventually there was more trust.  Engineers at Ashton-Tate knew something was wrong.  There was almost a sadness in discussions about how to fix it, as if they knew it was unfixable.  dBASE had become a huge albatross, a product that had years of features heaped on top of an architecture that was never designed to handle such a load.

By 1989, dBASE’s market share dropped to 43%.   That’s a 20% drop in just one year.  When Microsoft Access came out in 1992, dBASE was dead.  Crashed to the ground in no more than 4 years.

Compatibility.  That’s what killed them.

dBASE had to be upward compatible at any cost, even if it meant creating extremely bloated and arcane features to support such compatibility.  Why?  Because of the market.  The market was all Ashton-Tate had.  With over 60% of the database market, and with the hint that the product may be far from perfect, compatibility became the holy grail.  Compatibility assured Ashton-Tate that their market would "come along", that the effort to switch would remain higher than the effort to keep using the product.

Today, I saw the clear signs of the pattern in Microsoft’s behavior.  It’s clear that Vista is a struggle.  Regardless of whether the code rumors are true (they probably are not), the product is slipping.  Worse, as an engineer I can read between the lines in the New York Times article:

Several thousand engineers have labored to build and test Windows Vista, a sprawling, complex software construction project with 50 million lines of code, or more than 40 percent larger than Windows XP.

I can’t tell you the feeling of deja vu I had when I read that.  40 percent larger than Windows XP?  There is no possibility that Windows is in good health.  NONE.  They’re adding, but they’re not removing.  They’re not moving forward, they are stuck so deep in the muck that every step is painful.   Dan Farber at ZDNet sees the same desparate quandry for Microsoft.  Good engineering does not result in products such as this.

Every single aspect of this matches the dBASE experience.  Microsoft is defensive about new features, with Brad Goldberg saying "The perception that nothing new has come out of the Windows group since XP is just so far from the truth".  When they talk about things that are new, the list is almost laughable, consisting of "Tablet PC versions" as proof of Microsoft’s continuing "innovations".  I dug up an old review of the newly-released dBASE IV by John Pochodowicz.  It’s a kitchen sink of sad additions which lead to the unbelievably bloated dBASE IV product which really had only one thing to offer: Compatibility.

I’m expecting Vista to be close.

Can Microsoft maintain their lead with Windows?  I don’t think so, though it may be a slower death.  Microsoft isn’t as bad off Ashton-Tate was.  Their products are better-built than dBASE was, and Microsoft has more market-share, so, as a corporation, they can remain blind longer.  But the only answer for Microsoft will be to finally throw away the shackles of compatibility.  Microsoft has more time than Ashton-Tate did, and a lot depends whether they use it wisely.

Microsoft knows this.  NYT pointed to an internal memo by Ray Ozzie, chief technical officer, who said, "Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."

Mike Benson was Ashton-Tate’s most brilliant architect.  He knew what needed to be done, and talking to him at the time was a breath of fresh air.  But, Ashton-Tate had crippled his ability to act by isolating his thinking in a "new products" division.  His work never came to light.

So Ray Ozzie knows, just like Mike Benson did.  But, from the behavior of the company, the politics of compatibility is winning.  The flawed belief that compatibility will assure market share has been disproven time and time again.

I was just lucky enough to have been there once, and know the pattern.

tags: Microsoft

Pre-Crime Hits California

Remember how, in Minority Report, people who were about to commit crimes were arrested moments before they did?  Well, maybe MySpace is a good substitute for having precogs.  Today’s CNN headline "Sex crime suspect nabbed after boys’ Web prank" reveals that a 48-year-old man was arrested in Fontana California after arriving at a park to meet a 15-year-old "girl" fabricated by some boys on MySpace:

The five boys had created a fake profile of a girl on MySpace.com –
a social networking Web site — to cheer up a friend who had recently
broken up with his girlfriend.

But soon, a man began sending
messages to the "girl" and their conversations began to have sexual
overtones, said Fontana police Sgt. William Megenney.

The man
also sent the "girl" his picture and arranged to meet her at a public
park. The boys went to the park and, when the man arrived, they called
police.

Now, I don’t know what you think, but this seems pretty odd to me.  Talk about victimless crimes!  So, we’re arresting this man because he "had evil thoughts" about a fictional girl.  Maybe somebody who knows California law better than I do will explain this to me.

Or, is there more to this?  The next paragraph says:

Michael Ramos, 48, of Fontana, was booked into West Valley Detention
Center on Monday for investigation of felony attempted lewd and
lascivious conduct with a child and for an outstanding warrant,
Megenney said.

Maybe the folks at CNN are just sensationalizing?  Despite the entire article’s focus on the bizarre link between the MySpace "girl" and the arrest, perhaps the real facts of the case have been completely obscured.  The "outstanding warrant" sounds like this is a legitimate suspect for a crime unrelated to the one CNN is attempting to fabricate.

Anyone who argues that mainstream media has integrity, objectivity, and professionalism should really think twice.

Spider Crabs and Stenosing Tenosynovitis

I haven’t been writing for about two weeks because I just had surgery on my hand (for Trigger Finger).  It’s getting better now, which is good.  I can use it again, though need to be a bit careful, there is still some pain.

One thing I noticed is that despite my pithy and insightful comments about the tech industry (sarcasm intended), the number one thing people look at on my blog is the photos and movies of the Spider Crabs which invaded Rye Pier last year.  I also haven’t found any movies, and I have that creepy-looking movie.  Maybe that accounts for some of the popularity.

I noted that lots of searches for the crabs tend to come to my blog home page instead of the permalink.  So, I’ve created a new listing in the margin called "Popular Posts" and put the posts which get most of the regular hits over there as a convenience for people who are searching for things in Google or elsewhere and can’t find them on the home page.

Also, I have hundreds of excellent hi-resolution photos of those crabs.  Some are very detailed.  I am happy to contribute them to anybody who has a legitimate use for them, especially educational or scientific purposes.  Just email me and let me know.