Microsoft Culture

Dare has an interesting post on Microsoft culture where he states:

The Microsoft culture is about creating the newest, latest greatest thing that 'changes the world' not improving what is already out there and working for customers.

It's interesting to hear someone from within Microsoft share these feelings. If true at a global level, it could turn out to be one of the co's biggest problems.

He says all of this while commenting on the Spolsky-inspired debate about the different camps of developers: the MSDN camp (always focusing on radical changes, big chunks of code that no one can keep up with) and the Raymond Chen camp (focusing on maintaining 100% backwards compatibility forever, write once run anywhere). According to Dare, this debate has influenced the System.Xml team and caused them to rethink and change many of their API plans recently.

We've all seen MS influentials portray the “change the world“ attitude, but there still seems to be a pervading commitment towards “making things better“ for the developer, which cannot be lost. It has to be very difficult to rationalize radical improvements with existing commitments when you're on a product team. However, consider how much better things have become for developers since the radical shift towards .NET, and how much better they are becoming with the move towards XML, Web Services, and Service Orientation.

I know I wouldn't want to go back to the pre .NET days. And once Indigo ships, I doubt I'll want to stick around on ASMX.

I think SO has the potential to address this issue unlike before. SO will make it possible to design systems that last by allowing you to draw explicit lines from different pieces that may use radically different technologies. It will allow enterprises to leverage existing investments (avoiding the “rewrite everything” pit) while adopting the latest-and-greatest for new development needs. SO cannot be underestimated here. 

Dare goes on to say:

When I read various Microsoft blogs and MSDN headlines about how even though we've made paradigm shifts in developer technologies in the recent years we aren't satisfied and want to introduce radically new and different technologies all over again. This bothers me. I hate the fact that 'you have to rewrite a lot of your code' is a common answer to questions a customer might ask about how to leverage new or upcoming functionality in a developer technology.

After reading this, I wonder if part of the problem has to do with perception. In the past, you'd never hear about the radical top-secret changes until they were ready to go out the door. That has changed with more MS influentials on the blog-o-sphere today. As a result, more information about their thinking, motivation, and future plans is available for public consumption and critique. And they usually only want to talk about new and exciting stuff, not current (boring) matters that the real developers face. Human nature. However, I doublt this is representative of the co as a whole (hope not).