DenvilleSteve

Charles wrote:



As far as your Mundie comment, apparently you didn't actually listen to the interview? And for other execs, again, you must not listen very effectively?

just watched the Mundie interview.  Your right, Charles, I was off the mark with my comments. Mundie's comments are pretty substantial. 

I still stand by my sentiment that I enjoy very much programming MSFT products, but using the end products is very often a sub standard experience. 

It took me minutes to learn gmail. Vista desktop search is still a mystery to me. Outlook, excel, active directory - daunting all. 

The sentiment behind my post is that the higher level execs at MSFT have to be held accountable for the useability of their products. ( All they have to do is spend a few days trying to use the stuff. ) If their products dont work well, they should have to answer for it.  The leadership of Microsoft should not allow the google search engine to work better than search.live.com .

Your interviews are terrific.  thanks.

-Steve

You had Craig Mundie on c9 about a year ago. Eric Rudder is as high ranked as Mundie in MSFT?  My thoughts after listening to Rudder are the same as after the Mundie interview.  Where are the intelligent thoughts you would expect from people running what is arguably the smartest corporation in the world?  When C9 interviews Bill Gates I hear someone brimming with ideas and understanding of the still never ending potential of the software industry.  Eric Rudder sounded like someone too important to talk and with not much to say.

Some of Microsoft's products are pretty lousy.  gmail works much better than outlook. Vista desktop search never functions to my satisfaction.  Search for F# in google and live search for an example of how poorly live search compares to google.

I really dont want to write such a negative post. Just to complete the thought, after listening to the non thoughts of the MSFT exec, I understand better how some MSFT software can be as bad as it is.  ( I think Vista, VS2005, C# and .NET are outstanding. )

-Steve
   
p.s. Just listened to the Rudder interview a 2nd time.  Based on what he says I cant say he is a detached dummy or anything.  I dont understand why MSFT execs are rarely on C9. And when they do appear, they have very little to say.

well, I dont know. I think MSR is falling short in some ways.
 
VMWare has got the load balancing of their VMs working better than what MS has. Has MSR been doing VM research? 

Was MSR instrumental in  .NET and managed code? The C9 interviews with Anders imply that when he ( Anders ) arrived at the company in the late 1990s, MS had little in terms of knowing what the followup to COM should be.

Computer useability.  That is something MSR should be working on, no? As is it, as someone who is a programmer, I am terrified of having to config active directory, sql server, IIS, network connectivity on my home office network.  Where is the software agent I can dispatch onto my network with instructions to config things so that user X, working from PC Y, can have authority level whatever to the Z database? ( actually, I should be able to write that, so stand down  )

In practical terms, in .NET I can only code in C# or VB. If I like C# but would like to add 10 or so additional features, I have to go back to square one and write an entirely new language.  And then there is all the work for fitting your C-better language into VS and the interactive debugger. Is MSR working on a computer language that can be defined as a base class for a new language? Where the C-better langauge could be written by removing and adding features to the base C# language.

Back to VM, is MSR working on what I think is called grid computing? VM load balancing falls down in that the entire OS and all its running processes have to be moved enmass to the underutilized server.  Better to be able to move a single process to another server. Where the OS is running not just on multiple cores, but on multiple servers.  That would be one sophisticated thread pool! 

Check out this recent post on the framework.aspnet newsgroup: 
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet/browse_frm/thread/62463bd993e98333/?hl=en##

esp this message:
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet/msg/6452dab213d47e7a?hl=en&&

and the response:
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet/msg/de6f096d70c5fba8?hl=en&&

as I understand it, the experts were advising to run IIS on a different server than the domain controller. The OP said it is nuts that to host a secure website from his basement he should have to run at least two servers.  If the answer is multiple VMs running on a dual or quad core server, that addresses the need for excess hardware to run MSFT software.  But where is MSR in its basic OS research making it so that processes can be securely isolated from each other?  The task of configing multiple OSes, each in its own VM, seems more cumbersome than dealing with a single robust OS running all of your servers.

dont get me wrong. I enjoyed the interview. Where is our man Rory?

-Steve Richter

very well done Rory and Ricardo.

Can the web service wizard call into procedures exported from AS400 service programs?  ( a SRVPGM being the functional equivalent of a windows DLL )

and oh, you can drop the name iSeries. The name for the last few years is "System i5"

If it is true that MSFT is patenting the software methods used in the .NET framework, I will be very upset.   The thing I enjoy most about programming is that so often after coding applications, working out the problems, writing reuseable code, .... I feel like I have invented something new.  I am under no illusion that what I have created is unique or cant be duplicated.   But I do feel that I own what I have created and I can use it without having to get the permission of someone else who came up with the same idea and was able to obtain a software patent.

Do I have to submit the software that I create to MSFT to find out if I am entitled to use my own code?
 
Does channel 9 have any independence within MSFT?  How can you be celebrating developers and then turn around and tell them they cant use the code methods they create independent of others?

-Steve Richter

ok, I am getting less and less out of these interviews. There are the Anders Helsberg interviews which are great and I learn a lot. From that highpoint, 80% of the interviews dont put the subject matter in context with the wider software field and they quickly lose me.  Shouldnt the central question in the interview always be "what does this software creation of yours do that others dont"?

I think the people doing these interviews should have a lot of knowledge and experience with software. An aging programmer would work, there must be a lot of them around now a days.  

Here are the questions I would have liked to have asked:

Who was the other co inventor of COM and how did Tony work with him/her?

I always found COM books very difficult to understand.  Was that just me being dumb or thick? What were Tony's impression of the COM books and other education sources available to programmers.

Tony said .NET is not a replacement for COM. But COM is gone, no? Kind of confusing. I guess I would have liked Tony to elaborate on the subject of present day and future COM.

I understand the "draw your favorite data structure" is a standard of the show. I remember Anders Helsberg drawing an interesting one. But Tony did not appear into it at all. You should expand that to "draw your favorite flowchart or data struct". Then Tony could have drawn his favorite flow of events within the COM process.

I only watched 10-15 minutes of the Craig Mundie interview and saw no spark of intelligence or creativity in him.  I watched the entire Tony Williams interview and while he does not score low like Mundie, I did not see the brilliance he must exhibit for Bill Gates to put him in charge of such an important project.  The fair viewer must fault the inverviewer for this. 

Thank you for channel 9. honestly.

-Steve

I enjoyed the interview very much and liked the what is it like to work as a lawyer stuff best.

A few questions I would have liked to hear asked:

MSFT navigated a lot of legal challenges in its early and middle years ( first being accepted by IBM, then breaking with it. Adopting the windows GUI stuff from Xerox Parc and Apple. )  What was McGowan's opinion of that legal work and who were the lawyers most responsible for making all the right moves?  

From the accounts I have read  of Bill Gates on the witness stand in the early years he handled himself very well.  If MSFT had lost some of those cases it would be a different company today. How key was BG's testimony?

I heard a reference to MSFT developers having to watch what they say on their blogs. How closely do the lawyers monitor what the developers post to their blogs? Are the lawyers stifling what the developers want to say?

great job!

-Steve

ok, please dont get get upset at what I have to say, but I do like your interviews and I think Microsoft is doing stellar work lately. The woman doing the interviewing is very distracting.  The interview is not about her and the content is not so dull that she has to jazz it up somehow. She seems to be acting the role of someone who is interviewing people at Microsoft for channel 9! ( got the same impression when watching the interviews from Microsoft India. Maybe the two regular interviewers do such a great job that everyone else pales in comparison. )

Your interviews are terrific. You are capturing the creative essence of people who are on the leading edge of commercial computer science. Honestly, you should get an academy award or something.

-Steve