Re:Forbidden Fruit - Microsoft Workers Hide Their iPhones
by Retric on Saturday March 13, 2010 @10:28AM
(#1189014)
MS is so huge that different areas of the company can be vary different. Still, the basic problem IMO is an upper management culture focused on appearance. From an eat your own dog food concept a team should use their own products, but not to the exclusion of all others. The goal is to understand what users want and how the product is broken, not just to make people look good. I work with MS products on a regular basis and like them, yet basic problems can continue for way to long.
EX: Most people in our office want to add Excel Graphs and then edit them and on average PowerPoint crashes around 4-5 times a day. This is fairly basic functionality that most poeple using PowerPoint in the workplace actually want and it just fails randomly way to often. But, I am not talking about a new issue this is several years old and it's not getting any better.
I really like Visual Studio + C# but anything past the most basic windows features and you get into voodoo land where you just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. I know I am looking for the happy path and I know I can find it but sometimes it's in a vary strange place.
This is the type of things eat your own dog food is supposed to fix, yet for some reason that's not happening.
PS: I still think many MS products are the best option for a lot of things. But, often it's the surface that's great, it's easy to install, it does the basics just fine, and the deeper you go the worse things look.
EX: Most people in our office want to add Excel Graphs and then edit them and on average PowerPoint crashes around 4-5 times a day. This is fairly basic functionality that most poeple using PowerPoint in the workplace actually want and it just fails randomly way to often. But, I am not talking about a new issue this is several years old and it's not getting any better.
I really like Visual Studio + C# but anything past the most basic windows features and you get into voodoo land where you just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. I know I am looking for the happy path and I know I can find it but sometimes it's in a vary strange place.
This is the type of things eat your own dog food is supposed to fix, yet for some reason that's not happening.
PS: I still think many MS products are the best option for a lot of things. But, often it's the surface that's great, it's easy to install, it does the basics just fine, and the deeper you go the worse things look.