I've been in the Seattle area for a few months now, and I finally met a Microsoft employee. Tonight was the last class of the quarter, and we adjourned to a local brewpub for drinks afterwards with the instructor. One of the instructor's friends was there as well. We were talking with him, and he said that he was a software developer at a "large firm on the east side of town". AKA Microsoft. He works with the CRM development team:
http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/crm/product/default.mspxI learned a couple interesting things from him. First, pretty much the only language they use at Microsoft right now is C#. Second, just about everyone on the campus has an iPod or iPhone. Which led to an interesting discussion. We were talking about the iPhone, and how it is such an important product. Mainly because there are so many people who just love them to death. iPhone users won't hesitate to show off a neat little app to a complete stranger. Apple has really tapped into what people want in a device. We all admitted that Microsoft has had a hard time generating excitement for their software and products. I asked the MS guy what the company was planning to do about it, and he said "Hey, not my responsibility."
I know this is probably par for the course, but I think that sort of status-quo/eye-on-the-bureaucracy thing is one of Microsoft's biggest obstacles. It's a known fact that MS hires and pays "evangelists" who roam the blogs and forums and talk up MS products, often quite subtly. Which indicates to me that they have totally lost their core sensibility. I got the impression from this guy that he thinks of code and Microsoft as something that he does at his day job, and wouldn't be surprised at all if he uses iWork on an Apple to do his home computing. Maybe I'm just idealizing them, but I imagine that all Apple employees are fanboys both at the office and at home, even the ones who write low-level memory access code. Apple would never need to hire secret evangelists because the products and their users speak for themselves. For Apple, the computer is the toy of the new millenium, something that allows you to do neat and cool things that you couldn't do before. For Microsoft, the computer is a big-ass calculator that sits on your desk. Now that we have this digital paradigm in the office - that databases are more efficient than filing cabinets, and spreadsheets are more efficient than handwritten ledgers - Microsoft can just write some software and soak up the dollars. Nevermind that office digitalism is a total myth - most companies still keep paper records of everything and waste resources making sure analog and digital records are redundantly updated. From this perspective, it's easy to see why MS has been so commercially unsuccessful.
Well, that was probably just a rant, not really organized. It's hard to put impressions into words, so that's my excuse. The guy was cool and friendly, and I was careful to avoid being confrontational about Microsoft with him. After he left, though, some of us started talking about how lame Microsoft was, and I managed to pimp this site a little bit. One guy, who does maintenance database design at Boeing (in a Unix environment), told me that he has always hated Microsoft, but he thought he was the only one. It's funny how that works.
