151–160 of 283 posts
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I couldn't get over this masterpiece: We will allocate resources and build devices and services that provide compelling, integrated experiences across the many screens in our lives, with maximum return to shareholders.
Can you elaborate over what you find so wrong with that?
Hmmm, well, this seems to be some marvelous buzzword bingo / word salad. It's looking more and more like MS is well and truly clueless. They don't understand the market. They don't understand their strengths. They definitely don't understand their weaknesses. And Ballmer isn't going to leave until he has a heart attack or maybe two. Edit: fine, I'll add some useful details. What are Microsoft's actual biggest advanta…
Exactly, they are too big, and this reorg is going to make that worse, not better. I think they would have been better off actually spinning off their business units into separate companies, each with a clear product category and a clear organizational mission.
It wasn't immediately clear in Ballmer's statement, but is the Office division moving under the Cloud services group? It's interesting that they are putting their money-making operations (Office + Server&Tools) under Cloud with Satya Nadella instead of moving it over to Application Services under Qi Lu. Which, given the name, you would think Office would move under Applications.
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The Linux kernel is used in a lot of different devices, this is true, but it's also a lot leaner than the Windows one. Although efforts have been made to pare down what Windows is, it's still got a footprint gigantically bigger than Linux. Where Windows can squeeze on to an ARM system, Linux runs on embedded systems that are even smaller. The thing that's the most broken about Microsoft's strategy is it's not just th…
So, the Windows kernel probably is pound-for-pound as lightweight as the Linux kernel. Whenever people talk about Windows they always drag the UI and such along, whereas with Linux they seem to merrily ignore all the chrome. Any Windows kernel folks care to confirm/deny this?
The challenge is that it's difficult to get just the NT kernel and minimal support libraries. There was an internal project called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinWin#cite_ref-zheng2007_10-0 Without watching the entire video, Wikipedia mentions something like a 25MB footprint for a usable NT kernel.
Windows installed OS features are a lot more a' la carte these days. It annoys me that there's not a ntsd.exe or telnet.exe on every box by default, but I suppose it's worth it for the greater goal. There's a lot of focus on Windows Server Core, Hyper-V, and Azure. Cloud is bringing everybody back to thinking about OS footprint again.
I think the Windows-sans-(stuff not everyone needs) approach is only going to become more normal.
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The Linux kernel is used in a lot of different devices, this is true, but it's also a lot leaner than the Windows one. Although efforts have been made to pare down what Windows is, it's still got a footprint gigantically bigger than Linux. Where Windows can squeeze on to an ARM system, Linux runs on embedded systems that are even smaller. The thing that's the most broken about Microsoft's strategy is it's not just th…
So, the Windows kernel probably is pound-for-pound as lightweight as the Linux kernel. Whenever people talk about Windows they always drag the UI and such along, whereas with Linux they seem to merrily ignore all the chrome. Any Windows kernel folks care to confirm/deny this?
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Another way of interpreting this would be "Microsoft wants to get out of your way, it wants to be a (ubiquitous) platform so you can focus on what you're actually trying to do rather than on your OS or your device." Doesn't sound that awful to me.
...says the company who brought you the UAC popups :)
Unobtrusiveness FTW!
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How do you ensure that performance is rewarded fairly and consistently across an organization with tens of thousands of engineers? I'm not wild about the concept of stack ranking but I don't see any alternatives that don't have serious drawbacks of their own.
How about evaluating each engineer's job performance (based on sane productivity and code quality metrics) without forcing them to a curve, where even if your whole team is high-performing, someone will get a bad review and be marked for firing just because it's required that someone gets a bad review? Jack Welch-style rank-and-yank is cruel and wildly inappropriate for software developers (or any human workers, I'd…