111–120 of 177 posts
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> Apparently you've never used Visual Studio. It is amazing. I've used it heavily for years, and I disagree with this assessment. I avoid it whenever I have the option.
I think he meant Visual Studio Code. It truly is fantastic.
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> Exhorting the team to "crush the competition" I worked on a consumer product in a highly competitive space. Our competition released products that dropped frames and had laggy UIs. The discussion wasn't "We're going to make a smoother UI so our users have a wonderful and pleasant experience." it was "Hah, how the hell, they have literally 20x the CPU power, a GPU, over 1000x the RAM, and they are dropping frames? L…
I agree with this. Swears and cursing are an efficient and motivating way to communicate orders of magnitudes. Curious, what was the attitude like on the early Band team? I absolutely loved it, and was active on the beta, but didn't have a front-row seat to the early development.
I wasn't allowed to tell people I was interviewing what the job was for. (Most people figured out that an entire floor of HW and Firmware engineers were working on Hardware.)
I had to convince people to join me by telling them about the team and about why they wanted to work there.
I said things like
"this is a classic Microsoft team, we're going to take something that is elite and expensive and make it affordable for everyone, fuck elitism, Microsoft makes products everyone can use."
"We are understaffed and underfunded, this will be the hardest you've ever worked in your life, but we are making something that is fucking amazing and you'll be telling stories about this for years to come."
"Want to build an OS? How about an entire graphics system? Say yes and I'll have you at a desk next week doing stuff you never thought you could do."
The Band was critically under funded, I was told that it was under 60 million across all the years we were active. Apple Watch famously had a billion.
The energy was insane. We were a startup within MS, no one else knew we existed but the C-level leadership and maybe their directs. My team went to Ikea and got our own desks and put them together late one night. We stole (!) a TV from another team someplace in the building, wheeled it into our work area, and watched Twitch Plays Pokemon.
The firmware team wrote a runtime from scratch. Then my team took an off the shelf UI toolkit, rewrote almost all the drawing routines, rewrote the font rendering, and rewrote another ~60% or so of the remaining code, and made a butter smooth v-sync'd UI.
We had 96 MHz and 256 KB of RAM. 30 FPS locked, the UI could run at well over 60 but we had limited bandwidth to the display controller.
One day I read an article about touch latency on various mobile OSs. I said fuck it, we can do better than any of those. We optimized our touch system, max of 2 frame latency, min of 1. An amazing team from MSR came in and wrote us a machine learning gesture recognizer that also did motion estimation so that the screen tracked your finger almost 1 to 1 compensating for errors in the touch sensors.
Very understaffed, everyone did many things. Early on a bit of dead weight tried to attach itself to the project, it got cut eventually.
Lots of bad decisions. The team spun out of Xbox Accessories. No one there knew software except Firmware, I was hired on because I knew UI, all their other software engineers had no idea. UI was the green light on the Xbox 360 controller. Amazing firmware engineers though. Lots of issues around the cloud and mobile apps, they were started much later than the rest of the product and never had time to go through proper planning, esp. for the Band 1 launch.
Our design team was balls to the wall amazing. Our lead designer put so much thought and care into everything that was on the screen, it blew me away. It also taught me how much a real designer cares about their work. If I am lucky I'll get to work with a designer like that again in my life.
The battery life would've been a day longer on Band 2 but we had a shitty accelerometer chip that couldn't do step counting on its own (or maybe it could but it required a lot of programming to get it to that stage, I never was made 100% clear on that), so we had to take raw data and process it with the CPU. Horrible waste of power, I always was sad we never were given the time to add that extra 16-20 hours of battery life.
Everything we did we wanted to do better. We had very limited hardware, so everything had to be magic in code. The EE team did magic in hardware for sure, the screen portion of Band 2 was less than 2/3rds the thickness of the Apple Watch v1, so they had very little space to work with.
Every decision was "how can we do this better than anyone else?"
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> Exhorting the team to "crush the competition" I worked on a consumer product in a highly competitive space. Our competition released products that dropped frames and had laggy UIs. The discussion wasn't "We're going to make a smoother UI so our users have a wonderful and pleasant experience." it was "Hah, how the hell, they have literally 20x the CPU power, a GPU, over 1000x the RAM, and they are dropping frames? L…
> "I want every other free email provider out of business right asap. Lose money on it, I don't care, just make us the best!" Every single large company I've worked at has had mandatory training classes where lawyers explain why you never, ever say or send e-mail with anything like that. If that ever got out on the front page of the New York Times, or worse yet, as part of a discovery effort from the FTC or state att…
Yup, I went through the same training.
> as part of a discovery effort from the FTC or state attorneys generals investigating abuse of Monopoly power.... well, it would be bad.
It depends though, losing money to acquire customers is sometimes OK, sometimes not.
How many years did Google lose money on Youtube?
Sometimes making the best technology requires going in heads first, not worrying about profit, and deciding that if you make the best product, you will eventually find a way to make some money. After all, Google had no problem monetizing Gmail, and it doesn't take a genius to think "hey, storage prices keep dropping, offer users a gig now and we may lose money, but that'll stop as prices for storage keep going down."
It isn't like Yahoo in their heyday couldn't have made the same decision.
Also, I never suggested sending that in an email! But telling the team that they need to make a product so much better that the competition has 0 hope? Well now the team has a mission statement, and one that they can go use to attitude adjust anyone who is too complacent with the status quo.
If some executive wanted to start threatening data center providers or cut off network peering agreements, yup, line way too far.
But if someone wants to make a REALLY damn good product, to the point that it is so good by the time everyone else catches up it is too late, well, more power to them.
The desire to achieve market dominance by making an insanely better product is often the means by which technology progresses.
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> "I want every other free email provider out of business right asap. Lose money on it, I don't care, just make us the best!" Every single large company I've worked at has had mandatory training classes where lawyers explain why you never, ever say or send e-mail with anything like that. If that ever got out on the front page of the New York Times, or worse yet, as part of a discovery effort from the FTC or state att…
> Every single large company I've worked at has had mandatory training classes where lawyers explain why you never, ever say or send e-mail with anything like that. Yup, I went through the same training. > as part of a discovery effort from the FTC or state attorneys generals investigating abuse of Monopoly power.... well, it would be bad. It depends though, losing money to acquire customers is sometimes OK, sometime…
This is why it's so bad to say anthing like, "I want to drive the competition out of business", or "I want to dominate the market". Even if you don't send it in e-mail, suppose you say it at a department meeting, and someone takes a video of it? Now if they ever get disgruntled, they can take that video to the FTC, and now you're in a heap of trouble.
There are plenty of other ways of motivating a team than trash-talking the competition. If you have a team where the only way to really motivate them is to curse and use that kind of war-like language, I'd argue that such a company has a massive culture problem, and it's certainly not a company I would ever want to work at. Not because I think the stock is at risk of pluging after the FTC announces a anti-trust investigation (although that would be a real risk), but because I'd find such an atmosphere positively toxic. It's something I'd expect of the Uber "bro" culture, and no, I'd never want to work there.
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Believe it or not, on gender, it is actually possible for most of us (men) to verify this empirically. As a cis male, one way to do this is to represent yourself as female, and see how much more you get questioned. You don't have to go so far as to cross-dress -- you could simply sign an email with a majority-female name in the signature.
My experience of presenting as female online in video games is I got a lot more attention, help, and outright handouts. I want to see an actual study, because my anecdata doesn’t match the claimed experience.
First of all, this is a different demographic. Second, workplaces have a totally different dynamic.
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> Every single large company I've worked at has had mandatory training classes where lawyers explain why you never, ever say or send e-mail with anything like that. Yup, I went through the same training. > as part of a discovery effort from the FTC or state attorneys generals investigating abuse of Monopoly power.... well, it would be bad. It depends though, losing money to acquire customers is sometimes OK, sometime…
Many startups lose money when they are first started; and a new product may very well be losing money until it reaches a certain scale. That's not the problem. The question is what's the motivation. If the motivation is to predatory pricing, where you are deliberately holding the price below the marginal cost per unit in order to drive the competition out of business, you'll find that the FTC frowns on such behavior.…
Of course, but it is constantly debated line.
To go back to Email, "we'll be losing money until the price for storage drops" is that predatory?
"We're losing money because we haven't ramped up our partner ad program yet." Predatory?
There are many cases where a large pile of cash can help establish a business, and help create a higher quality user experience and a better product, precisely because there is the chance to not turn a profit money for awhile.
> but because I'd find such an atmosphere positively toxic. It's something I'd expect of the Uber "bro" culture, and no, I'd never want to work there.
I never encountered the Uber bro culture, but I have been lucky enough to work at teams where we wanted to do better than everyone else and where that was our mission day in and day out.
Part of that was looking at the competition and seeing how badly they were shafting users on price, and getting angry about it and funneling that anger into making a better product.
> This is why it's so bad to say anthing like, "I want to drive the competition out of business"
The goal is always to make a product so good that there is no possible competition, and that is of course perfectly legal to do, just so long as the competition is driven out of business solely because of consumer's making a free choice as to which product they want to buy.
> they can take that video to the FTC, and now you're in a heap of trouble.
My understanding is that the trouble only comes if the company has actually done something illegal. If the CEO says they want to dominate the market, and someone in sales goes and starts bribing people, huge problem. If the CEO says they want to dominate the market and the supply chain and engineering teams find a way to shave 30% off the product's price, or the software engineers and designers work together to make the product 10x more usable than anything else on the market, then there isn't a problem.
The issue that comes up of course is that if the CEO does say anything that might be seen as encouraging someone to win at "any cost", and any single employee takes those steps, then yeah, obvious legal problems.
But the overall fact is, in competitive winner-takes-all markets, the goal has to be winning big, and everyone needs to be aligned behind that goal, and everyone on the team has to believe in that goal.
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I agree with this. Swears and cursing are an efficient and motivating way to communicate orders of magnitudes. Curious, what was the attitude like on the early Band team? I absolutely loved it, and was active on the beta, but didn't have a front-row seat to the early development.
> Curious, what was the attitude like on the early Band team? I wasn't allowed to tell people I was interviewing what the job was for. (Most people figured out that an entire floor of HW and Firmware engineers were working on Hardware.) I had to convince people to join me by telling them about the team and about why they wanted to work there. I said things like "this is a classic Microsoft team, we're going to take s…
As a user it changed my life. I will never not wear them (on the Versa 2 now), and have years of actionable health data that has been life changing. And it's still so obvious to me that this is still the very, very early days of wearables and consumer biotech.
I was heartbroken when it was discontinued. I would love to read the high-level strategic thinking behind that. I understand perhaps the thought was Apple Watch would be tough to compete against, but the Band was years ahead of Apple (the first couple generations of Apple Watch completely missed the key point that the killer app for watches is health) so I like to think it had a chance, but more importantly I thought it was a fight worth fighting because of how much impact these things will have on people's health. It was also just inspiring that a new product like that could come out of Microsoft, and sad to see they didn't give it the 10+ years it deserved.
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I strongly agree on Office/Excel. Fantastic product suite (except maybe Outlook which is long in the tooth/essentially unimproved for the last ten years). Visual Studio I'll slightly disagree on. I resent it. When VSCode, an electron application, can run lag/stutter/micro-freeze free and Visual Studio an IDE written in C++ cannot you know the codebase has become unmaintainable. This isn't a recent phenomenon either.…
> Visual Studio I'll slightly disagree on. I resent it. I agree. Visual Studio has a tendency to make me actively angry.
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> Curious, what was the attitude like on the early Band team? I wasn't allowed to tell people I was interviewing what the job was for. (Most people figured out that an entire floor of HW and Firmware engineers were working on Hardware.) I had to convince people to join me by telling them about the team and about why they wanted to work there. I said things like "this is a classic Microsoft team, we're going to take s…
Nothing you said surprises me. It was fucking amazing. The v2 was a great leap over the v1, which was a leap over the other competitors. You could just tell how much effort went into those things. And you could tell that everyone was on board with making the best product possible, hunting for 10x+ leaps, and putting the user first. Thank you! As a user it changed my life. I will never not wear them (on the Versa 2 no…
1. It was the time of "One Windows". It didn't run Windows, and Windows wasn't going to ready to run on a wearable anytime soon.
2. It was expensive to manufacture. Curved screen, curved batteries, 2 rigid bodies. Everything about the industrial design was completely custom. It was amazing we even pulled it off at all.
3. Microsoft is afraid of entering new HW territories, HW tends to lose a lot of money.
4. Windows Phone died, which shouldn't have had an impact but it kinda did mentally. Users were actually evenly split between all three platforms, (which means Windows Phone users loved us!)
5. No one was willing to put in the actual engineering effort needed to do it properly. The entire team was burning out and we were bleeding people. Consumer hardware is not supposed to be at a 1 year cadence with only 1 team doing everything. Doing it that way also means you don't get a chance to make any dramatic changes, we had to only make small iterative improvements because if you only have 8-10 months to get boards up and running, get software ported over, and then finalize everything, well, you are working insane hours just pulling that off.