“Oscar Wilde said that the only thing worse than people talking about you is people NOT talking about you, and it must have been with this in mind that Microsoft recently “leaked” two company-wide memos concerning the Redmond’s new strategic direction — its so-called Live strategy that I wrote about last week” says Cringely.
Microsoft Is Leaking Internal Documents on Purpose?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
IMO the Oscar Wilde quote at the front while nice is a bit misleading, Microsoft get their fair share of attention without leaking memos
. Or did the author have some knowledge we do not like a memo on memo leaking from Microsoft 
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Edited 2005-11-12 01:46
“We’ve created, in .NET, the most popular development platform in the world.”
Heavily presumptuous. Especially after the article recently about how people aren’t migrating to .Net as much as Microsoft hoped.
“The Xbox team has also built a huge user community and has demonstrated that internet-based “Live” interaction is a high-value, strong differentiator.”
No, EverQuest did that. Unreal tournament did that, hell, QuakeIII did that. And it was probably done before that as well. You just jumped on the band wagon before the other consoles.
This was definitely leaked intentionally, I can’t imagine they lie internally at this level. Their programmers are too intelligent to fall for this sort of marketint dribble.
“The power of the advertising-supported economic model.”
Don’t you guys own a chunk of NBC? You should know better than to think advertising is a good long term way to keep business in a crowded market. Google is successful with it because they are best of breed at it. Television is barely surviving it, they’re chasing away people left and right to buying DVD editions of television and more movies because they’re so sick of ads. How many internet advertisers died out when the dotcom bubble burst?
“A grassroots technology adoption pattern has emerged on the internet largely in parallel to the classic methods of selling software to the enterprise. Products are now discovered through a combination of blogs, search keyword-based advertising, online product marketing and word-of-mouth.”
You just don’t get it, still. That’s not grassroots. That’s the idea of the WWW.
“Set-top boxes, PVRs and game consoles are changing what and how we watch television.”
If you’re one of the 5-10% of people who use one of those things (not counting console users who only play games on it)… I’m sure someday we’ll all have a PVR, which brings me back to advertising: That’s not gonna do pretty things to TV advertising, or tv advertising will kill it.
This is so abstract, and such a clear demonstration of being “not with it” it absolutely has to be PR.
If you talk to a programmer this way, he’s likely to slap you for thinking he’s stupid and walk away.
Edited 2005-11-12 02:20
“The Xbox team has also built a huge user community and has demonstrated that internet-based “Live” interaction is a high-value, strong differentiator.”
No, EverQuest did that. Unreal tournament did that, hell, QuakeIII did that. And it was probably done before that as well. You just jumped on the band wagon before the other consoles.
He was obvoiusly talking about Xbox which was (AFAIK) the first to bring online play to consoles. Dreamcast tried it and failed miserably. So, yeah I would say that comment is correct. Take a look at what’s the most valuable feature of the Xbox 360. Bingo!
edit: “We’ve created, in .NET, the most popular development platform in the world.”
Heavily presumptuous. Especially after the article recently about how people aren’t migrating to .Net as much as Microsoft hoped.
I would agree on the “Heavily presumptuous” part, but when I think about it – what other development platform can match it? Probably Java, but I think Java development is dropping (don’t know, really).
Edited 2005-11-12 04:09
He was obvoiusly talking about Xbox which was (AFAIK) the first to bring online play to consoles. Dreamcast tried it and failed miserably.
I disagree. Dreamcast online worked pretty well, considering most people did not have a broadband adapter.
The Dreamcast died before its prime. If it hadn’t, then the online part would have expanded quite a bit beyond what we saw.
I’ll give you that MS has done much better than Sony with regards to online play so far.
C. C++. VB6. Probably even Python has as many developers using it as .Net.
I bet there are more people doing c++ without .net on Windows than there are doing .net (with similar things, I’m discluding asp.net).
PHP is certainly more popular than asp.net. I’m not convinced .net helped asp pick up anymore steam, just migrated people who were already using asp.
I think the only thing they’re going to do with .net, as far as developer mindshare is:
1.) Anger a lot of VB6 programmers.
I’m not anti-.net, I like it. But I don’t think it’s what their customers wanted. I think in the long run it may help them out. But right now I don’t think it’s done anything for them.
Java development is actually increasing. And it will pick up more pace as it’s now the fad language for introductory programming courses (so everyone coming out of college in the next couple of years will be experienced with Java more than anything else; before it was c++). Also, as non-sun implementations of Java improve, Java use is bound to increase.
.Net hasn’t come of age in the market yet. It irritates me when Microsoft pretends it’s a proven technology. It takes a *lot* more than 4 years for developers to consider something proven! Especially given Microsoft’s track record with solid systems. Be patient, soon enough you will help assure your continued dominance over developer mindshare, Microsoft.
“We’ve created, in .NET, the most popular development platform in the world.”
The word “popular” is probbaly to be interpreted in some relative terms, such as in term of growth rate, or on the Windows XP desktop platform.
I found a site (http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm) that builds a popularity index for all programming languages and their associated development environments. This month’s results seem to contradict Microsoft’s belief regarding the absolute popularity of .Net:
1: C/C++ = 29.17%
2: Java = 22.27%
3: PHP = 10.78%
4: VB6 = 7.58%
5: Perl = 7.13%
6: .Net = 4.15%
7: Python = 2.77%
8: JavaScript = 1.88%
9: Delphi = 1.46%
10: SAS = 1.18%
So although Python is probably not more popular than .Net, it is clear that .Net is less popular than heavyweights such as Perl, VB6, PHP, Java and C/C++.
Hope that helps,
wfpoulet
http://www.byssus.com
Edited 2005-11-12 12:43
Programming language popularity statistics are a bit like browser statistics, only they’re less accurate
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But yea, Python might not be as popular. I don’t think it’s gotten the industry adoption that .Net has.
Is it just me or you are really sad to acknowledge that MS beat the shyt out of Sony in Online Play?
Go MS Go….
Uh, no. Why did you get that idea? I have both an Xbox and a PS2, and I’ve worked on games for both consoles. I used to have a grudge against Sony because the PS2 hype is really what killed the Dreamcast, but since then I’ve become console agnostic. I can see you haven’t yourself… 🙂
As a matter of facts, a few minutes ago I was playing Psychonauts on the Xbox, and it’s a freakin’ brillant game.
That said, I’m still more excited about the PS3 than the Xbox360. If the Cell processor can fulfill its promise, we’re in for quite a ride…
P.S. You won’t be able to drag me into a console flamewar.
Thank you Cpt. Obvious. Actually a pretty good write-up
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The thing is, everything that is getting big these days is all about inter-operability, which company do we all know that does not do that, or cripples it? Can’t say I blame them too much, it’s what they have to do to try to keep their revenue stream where it’s at.
MS is getting scared, and rightfully so, no company can maintain the profit margins they do forever. MS just so happened to be in the right place at the right time, when computers sold every year outnumbered the entire installed base, it wasn’t hard for them to make money, times have chanegd tho.
If these memos weren’t intentionally released like most believe, then MS really is going down the tube faster than I thought. No-one in the positions of power there can really believe what is in those documents. I see these memos as a distraction from what they really intend to do… poorly executed subversion guys.
“Look at this shiny object in this hand, look! look!”, then *smack* in the back of the head from the other hand.
Over here in the UK, our esteemed {enter appropriate word here} leader Tony Blair (who seems to be a friend of BG) and is possee of bootlickers do this all the time.
A Government department floats an idea to the press to see what the public reaction is. If it is positive then it gets adopted as government policy. If it is not then minister after minister get paraded in front of the media to defent the indefensible until the media furore dies down and the policy (now discredited) gets quietly dropped.
A few weeks later an almost identical (but slightly watered down) policy is leaked again.
I wonder if the Marketing Drones in Microsoft have been getting lessons on “Spin” & “Leaking” from political aides. It sure sounde like it to me.
Hmmm, the smell of astroturf in the morning
It’s easy to see why this guy is hightly regarded. He has nothing to say, in truth, but being a real trooper he says it elegantly and at inordinate length. What does this article really tell us? That Microsoft is up to something, Something Big. Very Big. Very very Big. And what is this Big? Stare into the pool, dear reader, where these waters run deep. Very deep. Very very deep.
Apparently “more will be revealed” next week. Gee, thanks Mr Cringley.
No, the inordinately long way of saying things is just his righting style; I think it’s supposed to be humorous in some terribly dry Brittish way.
No, the inordinately long way of saying things is just his righting style; I think it’s supposed to be humorous in some terribly dry Brittish way.
I am British, and it’s not funny. I think he’ll have to go some way towards brushing up his comic routine befoe he makes Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Zeppo and Cringley. Or would that be “Bob the Talking Tanquilizer”. Being modded down to -2 by the the little dweebs of OS News is funnier.
What’s key here is Microsoft’s innate inability to do something right the first or even the second time.
What part of incrementally solving the problem as a strategy to maximize profit do you not understand, sir?
I wouldn’t be surprised if MS were most worried of Google’s patents, not the services. Google has hired MS employees including leading kernel developer and filed many operating system related patents that – of course – threat the core business of the MS.