What do Microsoft employees think of Apple as an organization and their products? (This obviously requires quite a bit of generalization).
Wow, that’s the guy I used to work with. The table he’s using is the MERL (Mitsubishi) DiamondTouch. It’s been out for 2 or 3 years now and it’s quite a bit technically different to surface. Let me quote something I wrote in another forum about it:
Apologies for the hijack.
Exactly my position on it, Shal. The thing is, if there’s value in it, it’s going to get a lot less buggy a lot faster. And it’s not a hijack, cause it’s all about the Microsoft guy, and talking about neat stuff. And if you can’t talk about neat stuff and people you used to work with? What’s the point, eh?
As I understand it, one of the advantages of the MPX is that it has capability to handle multiple unique individuals at each table, while Surface can handle multiple cursors, but only one unique identifier. In theory, MPX can have four people buying drinks at once, while Surface will just bill the entire table. Am I missing something?
Course, the code’s not there yet.
Now, let’s see. The OS/2 story. Now, this is what was told to me by a friend, and it’s a while ago. But there it was, Bill and IBM, and the OS/2 2.0 launch.
Bill was bullish, publicly, as I recall. And it’s launch day, and the press conference is about to start… and the lead IBM guy just doesn’t show. Blew Bill off completely. The friend that was there said he saw Bill’s face when he realized that, and he said, pretty much that week, “OS/2 is dead. NT is going to take over the world, because that guy just got pissed off.”
Seems he was right, too.
Bill did a lot of things. Harsh things, kind things, questionable things, smart things, to do it, but frankly, compared to most businesses… not so bad. Course, there is the whole ‘convicted monopolist’ thing, so the company’s a bit tighter leashed than it could be.
Hm. Okay. Here’s one. What do you think of the internal revolt going on, with people pushing for a smaller Microsoft from within? Lot of noise from a few people, something that needs to be done, lot of noise from many people?
Oh I understand that, I am using an outdated one now as a matter of fact with no complaints about the os.
But you know Bill with his ephiphanies , the interweb and IE , gaming and the xbox ,and now jobs comes out with a cell phone of all things and the wheels sorta started spinning in my mind when you started this ask the microsoft employee thread.
It was more proactive feedback to send upstairs , if such a product were to be bandied about.
Declan
Mixed. As stated before, and of course this is a generalization, those of us who work strictly in the ‘business’ space (rather than consumer) kind of see apple as ‘cute’ with a lot of nice gadgets, but not a real competitor - I can’t think of any businesses that run Apple as their main desktop, although some of the media companies I work with have some Macintoshes in their estate.
I don’t work in consumer and haven’t for years, so can’t say much about how the consumer folks view them, though.
Ah, you must be speaking of Mini-microsoft and his rants. Fun to read, although I usually avoid the comments section because it’s a ton of froth.
My opinion - he’s wrong. He doesn’t understand that we’re not just a software development company anymore, and we can’t get by only with devs, testers, PMs, and sales. Without services, without support, you might get a business to buy our software once but they certainly won’t again, and Services can lead to massive opportunities - I’m talking custom development work worth millions to the company. We’re also a much more mature company now than even 5 years ago, and legal compliance alone eats up a huge number of people who just make sure we’re doing the right thing contractually to stay on the right side of the auditors. Do they add value? Not really; they’re loss-prevention. Finally, he just doesn’t get those of us who work outside Redmond. For a real impact, you need local resources on the ground, and you need people to manage them, and you need people to work with them to join them back up to Redmond.
Do we have some chaff? Yes. We’re 80,000 full-time employees all across the world and I’m sure there are a few that are just in it for the paycheck and don’t add much value. But compare our revenue, our profits, our impact, with any other company in the world and we’re still a lean mean machine.
I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one, but I appreciate your comments and understand where you’re coming from.
Not one I’m familiar with, sorry. I do know something about DRM, but not that much - as I warned before, I’m only semi-technical now, more on the business / services management side.
Trusted Computing is an incredibly important thing for us as a company. Partially it’s just doing the right thing, but it’s also the fact that we’re held liable (either through PR or through legal actions) for a whole bunch of things that ain’t our fault in any way. People get virii - they blame Microsoft, even though it still took user interaction to allow the infection. So we tightened up the code dramatically, we created or purchased new tools to further secure the OS, we created new protected mode offerings in IE, XP, and Vista, and now we’re locking down the user interface so that it absolutely has to be only through user interaction / authorisation that any sort of malware infections get onto a PC.
Well, the whole point is you wouldn’t need to depend on ‘your’ servers anymore; the docs could still be stored locally, and therefore hostage to nothing, but the tools to access the doc would be elsewhere and would not require any overhead in operations to maintain - just write a check every month. How is this a bad thing?
The .COM i worked for did digital music, and we had the same model. It was even legal according to the RIAA. But like I said, I won’t comment on the Zune.
That looks pretty cool, even for a rush job.
I’d say that about nearly every technology company. We’re just the biggest and baddest, so get the most blame. 
I’d like you to think deeply about what you just said here. Ignoring, for example, the potential for network failure for multiple months, and ignoring, for example, privacy issues. (That’s not a personal matter: medical records of individuals are also privacy matters.) And I’d also like you to ignore the implausibility of getting Purchasing to cut a check every month.
Tell me why this is a bad thing.
There would be obvious considerations as to SaaS including (but not limited to):
- Security (including privacy and data protection)
- Availability
- Usage
- Cost of SaS vs. cost of maintaining in-house systems
I’m not saying SaaS is a silver bullet; I’m saying for some small and mid-size businesses it will be a good thing, which will make their lives easier. It’s certainly not for everyone and it’s not a one-size-fits-all.
Then why is it a good idea to make an operating system that people paid for call home every six months or lock out?
Sodding pain in the ass for a system you want to install and forget. Not everything has to be connected to the internet.
Not your fault, but since we’re on the SaS tangent, turning the standalone stuff into SaS is a pain.
Not just the bundling, but the fact that MS made non-functionality-related changes to the browser and OS so that using Netscape on a Windows platform would provide the user with “a jarring experience”. This was all in the “Findings of Fact” section of judge Jackson’s decision in the anti-trust suit.
It must be pointed out, as always, that the appeals court that threw out Jackson’s decision based on his misconduct specifically upheld his Findings of Fact.
This was all before GomiBoy’s time there, though, which brings me to my first question:
Have you sensed any major changes in the corporate culture there during your tenure, either resulting from the anti-trust fallout, or Bill Gates decision to reduce his day-to-day role?
My second question:
I’m surprised to see you write that you think certain aspects of Vista still were half-cooked. What is the internal explanation of which changes in Windows and Office took three extra years to get out the door, and still (IYO), weren’t ready?
I confess this last one baffles me. I’ve had MS do Vista demos for me, and while it’s very pretty, I don’t see anything, either in the Aero interface or the ribbon menus in Office, that hasn’t been done similarly before by other makers, and should have been easy to copy. In the brief demos I’ve seen, there haven’t been any severe changes in functionality.
What took all that time and still isn’t really ready?
New file system, for one.
Two questions:
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When I was at a company with a near monopoly. we were all very careful not to diss competitors in any way. Given some of the emails found for the antirust suit, that was not the policy in Microsoft. Do you get training in not being anti-competitive, and is MS really serious about this?
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Now for something you might actually be directly involved with. The latest Computerworld had a column about Software Assurance. This was a program which, for a set monthly payment over a certain time period, gave access to maintenance and to upgrades. From the column, many who bought it bought it because they would get upgrades promised for the life of the contract. The many schedule slippages meant that people buying SA for this didn’t get their upgrades. Hayes calls them losers, I’d call them chumps for believing that the new software would get delivered on time. Are you getting grief about this? MS officially disputes it, saying the survey was only done for big customers
and of course everyone is as happy as a clam. If it were me, I’d be mighty pissed.
I don’t know about this personally, since we don’t use any MS products in my company.
Some background to this available here and here. Short version: they ripped Longhorn up in 2004 and started again.
Besides MacOffice, right? You forgot about MacOffice? Right? 
I know of many, many extremely large companies that do exactly that. We do have Enterprise customers, you know. There’s no way I can name them, but believe me, they exist.
It’s a good idea to make sure that people who actually pay for software get what they paid for and those who are using pirated copies get nothing.
It’s also a good idea for enterprises with hundreds / thousands of seats to be able to manage their user base so that they’re not paying for home installations of Vista as well.
To be honest, whilst Bill is (and I think always will be) a major presence and guiding light for Microsoft, he’d stepped down from day to day running of the business several years ago when Steve Ballmer became CEO. So not much change there.
WHoa. First of all, you’re putting words in my mouth - you say half-cooked, I say ‘a bit rushed’. Most of the stuff that could have been better was largely around driver and application patch availability, not something we necessarily didn’t get ready in time.
Second - THree years, considering the scope and breadth of changes, ain’t all that long. We were pushed by the market and our stockholders to get something out NOW, which was a big reason we did, but we had already slipped one major deadline so I honestly think if it was ‘half cooked’ as you claim, it wouldn’t have gone out the door. As I stated before - a ‘bad’ release is much worse for us than a late one, although either isn’t very nice.
Third - we didn’t just copy something someone else did, and many of the most dramatic changes in the OS are under the hood, not out where the users can see them. Yes, the UI is changed. Yes, the Office ribbon is changed. Did you demo include things like RMS and EFS? Or include things like Bitlocker? Major changes, transparent (or not very visible) to the end user. Or did they talk about ease of deployment and integration with System Centre for patching and montioring for large enterprises?
We get standards of business conduct training yearly, and this includes ethics training. For those of us in the field, we also get ad-hoc training in how not to be a monopoly, but to be totally honest most of those types of decisions are waaay above my level.
Do you have a link to the article?
You’re dramatically oversimplyfying SA. Software Assurance isn’t just paying to get patches - anyone who legally purchases our software gets patches up to and including Service Packs for free on all of our products. SA is effectively giving a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to a company who’s bought our software, and giving them support and tools to implement, deploy, and manage their software and it’s firmly targeted at big business so your explained response from Microsoft makes no sense at all. I’ve gotten no grief about it, and it’s absolutely in my patch.
Yes, sorry - didn’t mean to pee on your strawberries
I honestly don’t; I can only think of one customer I work with here in the UK who has Macs at all in their infrastructure, and they’re a media and communications company.