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Steven Sinofsky to Leave Microsoft

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Re: Steven Sinofsky to Leave Microsoft

#171

Post by bitwize »

_delirium wrote: post #84
w1ntermute wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's Ballmer's letter about Sinofsky's departure: http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/12/3638174/steve-ballmers-le... Edit: Sources inside Microsoft say a clash of personalities led to Sinofsky's departure: http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/12/3638340/microsoft-steven-... Steven Sinofsky's letter to Microsoft employees explaining his departure: http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/12/3638770/steven-sinofskys-...

I don't have strong opinions on any of this, but that letter really reads weirdly. It has an almost-no-transition set of segues between "congrats for all the work you've done recently", "Sinofsky is leaving", and "so here is who's in charge now", with a conspicuous lack of explanation or connection between those points.

Welcome to corporate damage control 101.

A former co-worker of mine used to occasionally bring up the first company email he received: "Effective immediately, so-and-so (not my coworker, someone from a different department) is no longer employed at . There will be no further comment on this matter."

Re: Steven Sinofsky to Leave Microsoft

#172

Post by JanezStupar »

zizee wrote: post #163
cookingrobot wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vista wasn't a fiasco. It was a rushed, focused, and pragmatic fix to the fiasco that was Longhorn. Don't remember Windows Longhorn? That's because Vista was a success.

Windows Longhorn was the internal codename for Vista. I think that you are thinking of Windows 7 being rushed, focused, and pragmatic fix to the fiasco that was Vista. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista From the first paragraph of the article: Prior to its announcement on July 22, 2005, Windows Vista was known by its codename "Longhorn" edit: ref to wikipedia edit2: suggestion to parent.

Trivia. Longhorn was supposedly a completely new architecture. The filesystem was supposed to be SQL Server based plus other architectual astronautery. It was an executive dreamed clusterfuck with no technical merit. Quite similar to IBM's Workplace project, which also never came to fruition.

Both (Longhorn and Workplace) were the culmination of RDBMS hype, where companies left and right tried to solve every problem by using hammer as a tool of choice.

Back to Longhorn, it has been chronically late and finally the project got dumped and rebased upon NT stack. Thus Vista was indeed a rushed attempt of fixing the Longhorn fiasco and after that Win7 was a solution to the Vista fiasco.

Thus from the viewpoint of how bad it could (and indeed should) have been. Both Vista and Win7 were an exceptional success.

Also it made me really appreciate how nimble and agile Microsoft really is.

Re: Steven Sinofsky to Leave Microsoft

#173

Post by cookingrobot »

zizee wrote: post #163
cookingrobot wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vista wasn't a fiasco. It was a rushed, focused, and pragmatic fix to the fiasco that was Longhorn. Don't remember Windows Longhorn? That's because Vista was a success.

Windows Longhorn was the internal codename for Vista. I think that you are thinking of Windows 7 being rushed, focused, and pragmatic fix to the fiasco that was Vista. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista From the first paragraph of the article: Prior to its announcement on July 22, 2005, Windows Vista was known by its codename "Longhorn" edit: ref to wikipedia edit2: suggestion to parent.

Longhorn wasn't the codename for Vista - that was a lie we told to cover the truth :) Longhorn was a massively ambitious upgrade to Windows XP that had a whole new relational DB file system (WinFS), managed memory graphics stack comparable to Flash (Avalon), and abstracted network layer (Indigo). The project didn't converge.

In late 2004 we cancelled the project and scrapped all the code we'd written since 2001. We forked Windows Server 2003, and reworked the specs to get the most bang for the buck on a limited time budget. Compromises like using a search index instead of a relational db filesystem, the sidebar was rewritten for the 3rd time, etc. All in all, it was an ok release considering.

Re: Steven Sinofsky to Leave Microsoft

#174

Post by michaelf »

moe wrote: post #109
w1ntermute wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's Ballmer's letter about Sinofsky's departure: http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/12/3638174/steve-ballmers-le... Edit: Sources inside Microsoft say a clash of personalities led to Sinofsky's departure: http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/12/3638340/microsoft-steven-... Steven Sinofsky's letter to Microsoft employees explaining his departure: http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/12/3638770/steven-sinofskys-...

Anyone else had to pause when reading that line in the letter? Julie has been a stalwart leader of building compelling “experiences” from her time on Internet Explorer

Ditto.

It seems very weird to put the word "experiences" in quotes. It makes it seem as if the writer is using it sarcastically, or is in some way disclaiming what they are writing. What in the world justifies the quotes, and why wouldn't an editor get rid of them?

Re: Steven Sinofsky to Leave Microsoft

#175

Post by spion »

ygra wrote: post #159
zanny wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And 7 and 8. 9 and 10 are still strutting around non-standard implementations of half of everything require custom code work-arounds. They still don't have full html5 / css3 support either.

How do you fully support a mostly still-moving spec? Also what large points are missing now in IE 10 except for WebGL?

To answer the first question: The first step would probably be releasing more often than once every 1.5 years.

Re: Steven Sinofsky to Leave Microsoft

#176

Post by asveikau »

undergroundhero wrote: post #152
darrenkopp wrote: post #37

I hope this means that they start doing more .NET again, instead of going back to COM.

I hope so as well, the WinRT API is stripped bare. I was shocked to see how much of .NET's functionality they didn't port over to WinRT.

I'll agree that WinRT is not complete, but that's hardly COM's fault. The real story is that they thought they could replace decades of development platform evolution in a 3 year development cycle. And even in that 3 years, they didn't think things through very well, or make many attempts to learn from history. With that I would disagree that it's a good/bad, .NET/COM axis. Many programmers are productive with Win32 and COM in ways that they are not with WinRT.

Re: Steven Sinofsky to Leave Microsoft

#177

Post by mikevm »

volandovengo wrote: post #57

Reading between the lines here - for him to be fired, it must indicate that signs are pointing that Win 8 will be a dud release, similar to Vista. Sigh.

Vista wasn't a dud. It was mostly seen as a failure because a lot of incompatible software (mainly POORLY written software, but MS is probably partly to blame for that), and a few UX changes that forced to people to be a little more responsible (UAC).

Re: Steven Sinofsky to Leave Microsoft

#179

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

zizee wrote: post #163
cookingrobot wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vista wasn't a fiasco. It was a rushed, focused, and pragmatic fix to the fiasco that was Longhorn. Don't remember Windows Longhorn? That's because Vista was a success.

Windows Longhorn was the internal codename for Vista. I think that you are thinking of Windows 7 being rushed, focused, and pragmatic fix to the fiasco that was Vista. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista From the first paragraph of the article: Prior to its announcement on July 22, 2005, Windows Vista was known by its codename "Longhorn" edit: ref to wikipedia edit2: suggestion to parent.

> Windows Longhorn was the internal codename for Vista

That's a matter of perspective and spin. Vista is what was salvaged from Longhorn. The plans for Longhorn were much more ambitious.

> I think that you are thinking of Windows 7 being rushed, focused, and pragmatic fix to the fiasco that was Vista.

I doubt it, and it seems that cookingrobot knows what he's talking about here a lot more than you do. Windows 7 was the fix to the fix.

That Vista was a fiasco is debatable - the fact that with minor tweaks and smoothing out (Windows 7 is basically Vista Service pack 2) it was a hit suggests that despite the bad press that Vista got initially, it wasn't that bad.

Re: Steven Sinofsky to Leave Microsoft

#180

Post by josephlord »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #166
colmvp wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even as a Mac only guy, I don't see how Surface is thought to be underwhelming. I think the tablet gestures they have, especially using the edges, are steps beyond the iPad and iOS and I expect Apple to copy them at some point in time. And then the actual interface is pretty nice as well: distinct, clean, beautiful. Again, I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple riffing on them.

I think the gestures are cool, and in a world where everyone was really into "neat" interfaces it'd be the way to go. They score particularly high on efficiency. But designers tend to drastically underestimate discoverabity, particularly discoverabity by novice users. Many entire software companies exist purely because the market leader's product lacks discoverabity of a feature. Twitter, in some ways, exists because…

> But designers tend to drastically underestimate discoverabity, particularly discoverabity by novice users.

I think you either missed "the importance of" or meant "overestimate".

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