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Some Microsoft workers call for heads to roll
EETimes ^ | 3/24/2006 | Gregg Keizer

Posted on 03/26/2006 4:49:30 AM PST by twntaipan

TechWeb.com (03/24/2006 3:04 PM EST)

Microsoft employees writing to an anonymous blog are calling for the heads of high-level company executives -- including Steve Ballmer and Jim Allchin -- after the double delay debacle this week when the Redmond, Wash. developer shoved its two most profitable products into 2007.

On the Mini-Microsoft blog, which is maintained by someone who identifies himself as a Microsoft employee and goes by the nickname "Who da'Punk," an entry tagged "Vista 2007. Fire the leadership now!" has accumulated over 325 comments from in- and outsiders.

The blog was a response to the Tuesday announcement that Windows Vista would not ship in new PCs until January 2007. Thursday, Microsoft added Office 2007 to the delay train.

"Who da'Punk" got things rolling Tuesday with this entry:

"After Allchin's email went out I imagined all the L68+ partners from the Windows division gathered together and told, 'You are our leadership. When we succeed, it is directly because of how you lead and manage your teams. When we fail, it is directly because of how you lead and manage your teams. We've had enough of failure and we've had enough of you. Drop off your badge on the way out. Your personal belongings will be dropped off at your house. Now get out of my sight.'"

Others commenting on the blog quickly took up the cry.

"[steve] ballmer: fired!

[jim] allchin: fired!

[brian] valentine: fired!

we cannot ship our OS. this is not a joke. if we don't take some radical decisions, the company is over."

And:

"Ballmer has presided over the fall of Microsoft. [His] days are numbered."

And:

"Accountability should start at the top. My commitment was to deliver on my component. Allchin's commitment was to release Windows . . . . and he failed to deliver."

But while the Thursday reorganization of Microsoft's Platform & Services Division shuffled several executives -- notably Steve Sinofsky from a position in the Office arm to head the Windows and Windows Live group -- no one was handed their hat.

Or were they?

Jim Allchin, who broke the bad news Tuesday and was set to retire after Vista was delivered, seems to have been put out to pasture months earlier than expected, said a source close to Microsoft. "Read what Johnson said very carefully, " he said.

In a leaked memo sent to some Microsoft employees Thursday, Kevin Johnson, the co-president (with Allchin) of the Platforms & Services Division, wrote "As part of the next step of Jim's transition, we discussed when it was appropriate to move his direct reports to me, and decided that this organization change was the right time."

But even as some on the Mini-Microsoft blog wished for Maria Antoinette-style retribution, other employees defended the decision, if not the people who made it.

"Yes, it's painful. Yes, it's embarrassing," wrote Robert Scoble, a company technical evangelist, on his Scobelizer blog. "But I'd rather have a slipped date than a cruddy product."

"I certainly agree that lots of mistakes were made all the way up and down the chain," wrote another anonymous Microsoft worker. "But this is the right thing to do. In the longer view, 2, 3, 5 years from now...this will have been the right call.

"Put it to you this way. At the end of this year, do you want Vista? Or do you want XP SP2 ME? 'Cause it's god****** impossible to deliver Vista by August...but we sure as heck can give ya XP SP2 ME any time."

The internal reaction may grow even hotter if, as some analysts have predicted, Microsoft delays Vista and Office more than once.

"Microsoft's given itself some leeway," said Joe Wilcox, an analyst with JupiterResearch, on Friday. "As far as selling season, January might as well be July."

Thursday, Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, also bet that Vista will be delayed again, and that the second (or third) time, the pain would minimal. "The next delays won't hurt as much," said Cherry.

But by the venom let loose on Mini-Microsoft, that's not a done deal.


TOPICS: Front Page News; News/Current Events; Technical
KEYWORDS: blog; microsoft; vista
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To: PittsburghAfterDark
I don't ever expect Apple to be the dominant OS or even gain more than 10-15% market share.

I dunno. If MS does actually go belly up in some fashion...I can see hordes clamoring for Apple PCs and laptops.

I'm no expert in the field and don't suppose that a company with assets like MS could go under...but what if people just said, "Enough" and started buying Apple? Could happen.

21 posted on 03/26/2006 8:04:02 AM PST by Bloody Sam Roberts (Crime cannot be tolerated. Criminals thrive on the indulgences of society's understanding.)
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To: twntaipan
The problems at Microsoft are pretty amusing but no where near as funny as these threads where people who wouldn't know the difference between a Parameter Array and a If Else statement start jabbering away like 3L337 hX0RZ
22 posted on 03/26/2006 8:11:28 AM PST by Psycho_Bunny
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To: twntaipan

Why is everybody so anxious to be charged another $200 for a "new" operating system? Windows XP is near perfection and just fine by me if it stays the standard for years to come.


23 posted on 03/26/2006 8:15:33 AM PST by SamAdams76 (Need a tree census in Maine)
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To: Psycho_Bunny

Does that jabbering include delusions of Microsoft going belly up because it missed a ship date?

Last time I looked, Dell was shipping 250,000 PCs a day, and 99% of them will have Windows.

I remember just about every Microsoft release going back to DOS 1.0. The real stinkers, from a commercial point of view, were DOS 4.0 (and that was IBM) and ME.


24 posted on 03/26/2006 8:18:41 AM PST by js1138 (~()):~)>)
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To: Terpfen
I wouldn't exactly blame Vista's delays on the nationality of the programmers, though. This is a management issue, pure and simple. Good programmers are easy to come by--good management is not. Jim Alchin is retiring, so it's not as if Microsoft could fire him, but Ballmer at the least really should go.

Sorry, but I've done a fair amount of QA on Indian-provided code. The ones I happen to have worked with have been arrogant beyond their skills, and tend to try to tell lies to get out of scrapes, rather than to admit what they don't know.

Or they tend to blame other people for not doing what was explicitly given to them to perform.

Or (say) just a matter of following a process (on paper) even though the actual task performed does not fulfill the requirements of the process.

Maybe it's a cultural thing, or maybe it's the cash, but I have yet to see someone from India getting in trouble for misunderstanding and running a project into the ground or blowing a schedule--but I have seen US workers fired for the same transgressions.

Color me unconvinced.

25 posted on 03/26/2006 8:20:29 AM PST by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: twntaipan
> The best comment I read was this:
"Fedora Core released version 5 on March 20. It was developed at a cost of...zero."

Except that that statement is false.

I'm running Fedora Core 4 (on the machine I'm typing on) and love it. But "zero cost"? That's a joke, right? What's the value of the programmers' time, over the last 10 years and especially in the last two years, to produce the RedHat and FC series?

The "free" Linux distros were contributed by the community -- people's personal time -- and to some degree bankrolled by supporting companies. It's a beautiful thing. But no way was all that development done at zero cost. People still gotta eat, put gas in their cars, and companies were "investing".

For the blogger to call that process "zero cost" is ignorant.

26 posted on 03/26/2006 9:20:31 AM PST by dayglored (Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!)
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To: Terpfen

I get a little annoyed at the people who develop for Linux as well. Their software isn't always as "superior" as they claim. A lot of it is a downright sloppy attempt to copy Microsoft. With Wine, that's excuseable. With other packages though, there seems to be an emphasis on needless complexity, bloat and very little on adhering to standards, providing proper documentation, stability, and security. They don't seem to understand that Apple and Microsoft have a lock on the sort of the majority of users who are more interested in neat animation effects when opening and closing windows than real functionality.


27 posted on 03/26/2006 10:25:01 AM PST by dr_who_2
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To: twntaipan
I recently left "Redmond" after a short consulting gig associated with "dogfooding" (the process of internally implementing NEW, pre-release products) Vista/Longhorn.

I worked with the highest concentration of brilliant people I have ever been exposed to. Additionally, their dedication to the "mission" was total...to a person.

That said, I fear hubris has finally struck the fatal blow in "Redmond"...though it will take a decade or more to truly crush this company. The new OS is ENORMOUS and far more capable than any business or individual will need for many, many years. When combined with the pressure exerted by web-based services and the new (actually old) emerging model of putting the computing power in the datacenter and having a single, simple, universal client (Java-enabled browser)...and sufficient bandwidth everywhere..."Redmond" is in BIG TROUBLE.

Unfortunately, leadership is so invested in the "fat client" model they can't let go.

28 posted on 03/26/2006 12:29:37 PM PST by Mariner
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To: SamAdams76
Windows XP is near perfection and just fine by me if it stays the standard for years to come.

As far as I'm concerned 98SE runs fantastic for the home user and with a few tweaks could have easily been made even better. But why bother when you can keep shoving more OSs out the door that hog even greater resourses and demand ever increasing hardware requirements? There's too much in the way of profits both for Microsoft and the computer industry not to do otherwise.

29 posted on 03/26/2006 12:44:15 PM PST by Reaganwuzthebest
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To: twntaipan
Watching Microsoft trying to ship Windows Vista is like watching a slow-motion train wreck. It's a disaster.

The blame belongs to the Chief Software Architect - Bill Gates. It was his projects that doomed Vista, like his WinFS project that was ultimately removed from the OS.

When Vista finally ships, it will still be five years behind Mac OS X.

30 posted on 03/26/2006 2:09:10 PM PST by HAL9000 (Get a Mac - The Ultimate FReeping Machine)
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To: twntaipan
Mini-Microsoft blog: Vista 2007. Fire the leadership now!
31 posted on 03/26/2006 2:11:33 PM PST by HAL9000 (Get a Mac - The Ultimate FReeping Machine)
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To: twntaipan
Windows Vista would not ship in new PCs until January 2007

The smart computer user will use this reprieve to buy all the hardware and software he will ever conceivably need for his existing OS before the market switches to Vista and they are orphaned into incompatibility.

Who says Windows doesn't fork? It forks, it just refuses to support all but one branch... and barely that one.

32 posted on 03/26/2006 4:03:03 PM PST by impatient (The smarter computer user will realize there are other choices)
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To: PittsburghAfterDark

^^^^^^^^^^Everything I've seen of Vista is playing catch up with the last two interations of the Apple OS.^^^^^^^^^^^

Apparently you haven't been introduced to XGL.

Welcome to multiple desktops. And you'll need the plugin to view this.

Video:
http://www.freedesktop.org/~davidr/xgl-demo1.xvid.avi

Plugin:
http://www.xvidmovies.com/codec/

Or just download an OSS player for macos:(which is probably the easier option)
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html

http://www.videolan.org/


33 posted on 03/27/2006 6:04:43 AM PST by Halfmanhalfamazing (Linux, the #2 OS. Mac, the #3 OS. Apple's own numbers are hard to argue with.)
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To: Terpfen
Microsoft can't even finalize and ship a product that does little more than put their OS on par with OS X and Linux.

Uh, don't include Linux with OS X. Linux doesn't do hardware-accelerated desktop compositing.
34 posted on 03/27/2006 8:25:05 AM PST by DemosCrash
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To: Knitebane
How can you badmouth a Vega? Mine taught me how to wrench big time. I went through so many engines and head gaskets it's not funny.

I finally gave up when the frame cracked up front. I still can't believe people put small blocks in those things. There was room but you ended up twisting the frame after a while if you didn't reinforce it.

Funny how crap like a Vega or Pinto comes up in a Microsoft thread and I like Microsoft (at least XP and 2003).

Now I'm going to lay down in a fetal position...

35 posted on 03/27/2006 8:34:23 AM PST by Lx (Do you like it, do you like it. Scott? I call it Mr. and Mrs. Tennerman chili.)
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To: PittsburghAfterDark

MS doesn't have a OSX version of Project or Visio? Way to go to increase Apple's share in corporations. Maybe that's the idea.


36 posted on 03/27/2006 8:35:58 AM PST by Lx (Do you like it, do you like it. Scott? I call it Mr. and Mrs. Tennerman chili.)
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To: Knitebane
Well, when you got an exception on the original version of NT, you sometimes got OS/2 error messages. It was pretty funny considering how the IBM MS thing was going at the time.
37 posted on 03/27/2006 8:37:47 AM PST by Lx (Do you like it, do you like it. Scott? I call it Mr. and Mrs. Tennerman chili.)
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To: grey_whiskers
Sorry, but I've done a fair amount of QA on Indian-provided code. The ones I happen to have worked with have been arrogant beyond their skills, and tend to try to tell lies to get out of scrapes, rather than to admit what they don't know.

I have noticed this problem with some of the Indians I have dealt with. It must be a cultural thing. They know what they're doing but will never admit they don't know something and instead just try to cover it up. I've dealt with Indians from Novell and at least, a) They use their real name and b) They really knew what they were doing.

38 posted on 03/27/2006 8:41:27 AM PST by Lx (Do you like it, do you like it. Scott? I call it Mr. and Mrs. Tennerman chili.)
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To: twntaipan
Kevin Johnson, the co-president (with Allchin) of the Platforms & Services Division

Ding! Ding! We have found the problem. Has the 'Co-President' thing ever worked, anywhere? If you don't have the cajones to figure out who is actually in charge, than you have no chance of executing.
39 posted on 03/27/2006 8:43:34 AM PST by Daus
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To: twntaipan

Here's a link to the actual blog:

http://minimsft.blogspot.com/2006/03/vista-2007-fire-leadership-now.html


40 posted on 03/27/2006 8:44:22 AM PST by Petronski (I love Cyborg!)
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