I'm asked: "Can you separate M$ lip service from fact for us? "

by JoeStagner 10/16/2007 9:40:32 AM

I’ve received a great number of emails in response to my “Scoble Gap” post.

 

The first that has prompted me to white included this question.

 

“Can you separate M$ lip service from fact for us?  That has to be the toughest part of your future.”

 

By this I assume the poster is refereeing to Microsoft MARKETING.

I’m not a fan of most marketing, ours or anyone else’s. But, it’s a necessary part of business. Marketing’s role is to advise the consuming audience of the potential benefits and values of the product they represent or “market”.

As geeks, we often see most marketing “collateral” as too many words containing little or no information.

It’s a hard balance, at Microsoft we have marketing folks that are really non-technical, and then we have folks that work in marketing capacity that are very technically competent (Brian Goldfarb).

It’s not what our marketing says that worries me. It’s when our people, especially our executive management are fully buying our own “stuff”.

MS Haters probably see this as arrogance. I see it more like a parent as he/she looks at their own children and have to work to set aside personal bias and proactively look for “areas that could use improvement”.

I have “that type of discussion” frequently inside Microsoft, now I’m just committing to make most of those opinions public.

So, call us out on what you think is “lip service” by emailing me though my blog – I won’t shy away from topics. J

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10/16/2007 10:11:14 AM

Joe has always bee a straigt shooter. He tells it like it is!!!!!!
This is going to be the year for the Developer.
Microsoft is finally highlighting the Developer and his use of open source
and third party tools.

John J Ross

10/16/2007 11:19:47 AM

MS Lip Service? oh, that one is easy...

"The MS Internet Explorer development team is embracing Web Standards"

The term "embracing" suggests that they are incorporating, and going through with.

Developers in the real world, believe that "embracing" in the above statement, means:

"The MS Internet Explorer development team is{going to talk the talk, but walking it will only occur if/when IE loses significant market share as a result} in regards to Web Standards"

I'd love to be proven wrong.. but I highly doubt I will be.

Steve

10/16/2007 12:55:52 PM

Are you serious? Microsoft hasn't had an honest bone in its body since DOS days. Back then I could occasionally get an answer from someone on the phone. They might even call me back.

My guess is that Gates got his fill of the bullshit (both receiving and sending) so much, that he left the company to get back to a little reality.

Just today, I'm wrestling with this ASPX problem. So I go back to basics and discover demonstrations of 5 or more suggested "hello world" scripts and that's just in one language. One of them even talks about lack of top-down coding being a good thing! And, then there is the dotfuscator because there is not enough obsfucation in all the Microsoft languages already.

I wouldn't be surprised to discover that most of the push in the PHP world to have developers use object-oriented PHP is Microsoft driven. What better way to screw things up.

I've written in assembler, COBOL, APL, SNOBAL, Fortran, Visual Basic, PL/I, BAL, C variations, etc, (probably 20 languages all together) and my favorite by far is PHP. So since the fuckups at Microsoft can't beat the Open Source folks at their game, they call out the lawyers to claim the UNIX code Microsoft likely stole is now being stolen by the Linux folks. It is a bunch of bullshit and you know it. You can't patent or trademark software - there is a million ways to write code. Just because the government says you can does not mean it is true.

If I can help it, I'll never buy another piece of Microsoft software.

There is no way you can work at Microsoft and not do lip service. Ain't gonna happen.

Noone Nowhere

10/16/2007 9:55:46 PM

I think everyone agrees Microsoft pays lip services to 'cross platform', because they never include Linux, and they have on several occasions stopped support for Mac (Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, VBA in Office). Silverlight is supposed to be cross platform, but it doesn't run on Linux (if it does, it's not because of MS) and I fear they might drop the OS X version whenever they feel like it.

Mike

10/17/2007 5:42:33 AM

Microsoft is working with Novel's Miguel da Icaza and his MONO team on Cross Platform Apps. If it was not Microsoft & Apple we would all be using IBM proprietary equipment period.

John J Ross

10/17/2007 6:52:57 AM

Great post Joe.

I'll try to elaborate on my thoughts here. I'm probably heading into the wrong direction but maybe it might stir up some food for thought.

From one aspect its nearly impossible to seperate any corporate lip when talking about new products coming from the company you work for. Especially when you are a developer and you're talking about new tools and features that you are passionate about. Ofcourse you want to talk about it to get the word out, but the passion behind is the true geek coming out. This is especially true for Microsoft sadly.

For example, the company I work for recently launched a new service. From a developer standpoint I was completely and utterly stoked about it because I knew how useful it was to us geeks. However, trying to convey my thoughts about it while trying to remain in a "nuetral" ground (as in NO trying to promote it per se but really just talk about it and talk about it from a developer stance) was nearly impossible. I think as long as you're talking about a product or a service from the company you work for, it will be marketing.

I have to say Joe, good luck with this! It will be tough!

James

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