Birth and Death of Microsoft Bing

Perhaps a bit OT, but... The post seemed to be riddled with formatting and grammar errors. This rubbed my old-school English sensibilities at first, but then I began to enjoy its rough feel.

After all, it's a post about how people who worked tirelessly to bring a product to market were shipping things while the rest of Microsoft slept. The story very clearly describes a dichotomy in Microsoft's culture between process/rules/superficial quality on the one hand and relentlessly shortening the ship/fix cycle on the other.

This post is not just about shortened ship/fix cycles, it is itself an example of a shortened write/fix cycle.

When that struck me, the style of post suddenly "clicked:" It was as if I was reading an email that was furiously blasted out to Posterous while the author's compiler worked, and thereafter there was no time for extensive editing and proofing by a circle of reviewers. What mattered was to get the idea out and to start the conversation, editing and polish would follow later.

Great stuff!

It's one of those very, very scarce texts where mild swearing adds something. 99 out of 100 times, it's just deteriorating the post quality and signs of bad writership.

One of the most serious problems with modern "management" is that the incentives are all wrong. Imagine that I hire a programmer and pay him by the line of code. This idea has been so thoroughly debunked that it is nearly impossible to write out the consequences without sounding cliché. Yet it happens all the time: Companies promote "Architects" who are evaluated by the weight of their "architecture." The result is stultifying and demoralizing. The architect does not work to facilitate the programmer's work, he works to produce evidence of his contribution in the form of frameworks, standards, and software process.

So, how are most managers evaluated? By the amount of "managing" they do, as measured by the amount of process they impose on their team. Evaluating a manager by the amount of managing they do is exactly the same thing as evaluating a programmer by the amount of code they write. And it produces results like you describe, where the manager works to produce evidence of their management in the form of processes and decisions from the top down, rather than facilitating the work actually being done.

In a simplistic world, the answer would be to change the incentives and the behaviour would change itself. But as they say, "correlation does not equal causation." The incentives have to change, but so do the people. Results-oriented managers don't work in those kind of environments to begin with, and after a year or two in such a place they will already have left. You need to change the incentives and the culture and the people all together.

Speaking qualitatively, I disagree. I actually use them interchangeably. When I'm using IE (testing features), if I have to search, I just search from the location bar, which defaults to Bing.

I feel like the results are essentially the same and I never recall having trouble finding what I'm looking for in Bing. Though I suppose one huge omission is the date filter. I use that a lot on Google and certainly miss it sometimes on Bing.

Most importantly, Google was essentially stagnant for years until Bing came along. Since then they've really upped their game. They cloned Bing image search. They took the context summary in Bing that I loved from the beginning and one-upped it. And I've seen more natural answers in Google to match what Bing set to do from day one.

I use and support Bing and you should too. What Bing did to Google is like what Firefox did to IE. It reminded them that they should be innovating still!

Just thought I'd let you know your text rendered very small on my browser, and the light grey quotes were almost unreadable.