Webreakstuff's blog on design, development and strategy. Click here to subscribe.

Microsoft: not that evil, after all.

Fred Oliveira on January 30, 2006

Microsoft It’s a funny thing when you grow up hearing about one of the companies that started it all. You create expectations and formulate questions in your mind, about how the company works on the inside. About how their employees must be given small repetitive tasks to build their OS. About the reasons for their lack of acceptance of open source as a wide movement. About some of their weird choices.

And it was good, or rewarding in a weird sort of way, to have finally seen Microsoft from the inside, last week. Meeting the people and the projects. The buildings and the company store. Comparing my idea of Microsoft to what I was actually seeing of Microsoft. I was, to say the least, positively surprised.

Now, I still use a Mac. I still have connections to open-source projects. My default search engine is still Google (even though I’m starting to question whether it should stay that way). But my respect for the company and their attempts of creating good software has increased. They’re humans, after all, and it seems like there’s a lot of change going on in small sections of the (56.000 people) company. Like Scoble told me in a dinner at Berkeley once, it takes inhuman strength to move the huge machine that Microsoft has become. But some people are trying.

And that’s good to see. As I’ve said in a comment to a post by Brady Forrest (PM for MSN Search), I expect Microsoft to innovate instead of rewriting, and to surprise instead of disappointing. Their employees sure have the skills and the right mindset, so, there’s virtually nothing stopping them.


Comments on this post

Geof Harries

Too bad Microsoft spends so much needless money on ineffective marketing when it could really just benefit from cheaper grassroots, developer-friendly networking and communications instead. It would do wonders for their reputation if these human voices could be heard instead of just the marketing hype and pimpin’ we’re always hit with.

Terry Wray

Your sentence, “Their employees sure have the skills and the right mindset, so, there’s virtually nothing stopping them.”, reminded me of very recent blog entry from “Creating Passionate Users” (Kathy Sierra) called “Death by risk-aversion”

She states that management may stifle the creative worker-bees because, well, change is scary. What if they let the developers make “X”, but the market for “X” was only 1000 users. “X” may be a great product, but the market has to be there. Now, take “X” and add “Y” & “Z”, then homogenize some of the features of “X” and you’ve got a 1,000,000 user market. The original 1000 users will call it “almost useful” and “homogenized”. Which it is. But it sells. Companies make money. Organizations help people. Microsoft is a Company.

SeanMcb.com » IE7 Beta 2 is Out!

[...] I appreciated Fred’s post at WeBreakStuff about his recent visit to Microsoft. He claims that they’re not as evil as they seem, and that, large as the company is, there are people inside it working to move it in the right directions. Good. As Ben Parker once said in a movie, “With great power comes great responsibility.” [...]

Mario

Didn’t I say a while ago “Never Say Never” Fred if MS was discussed? So you see if things come closer, even maybe with age ;-) things becomes so relative. Glad you made your way finally into the MS Catacombes. I wonder what the idea was behind your visit, maybe that what started it all?

Mario Bali

Something to say?