I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Had a couple of great articles forwarded to me over the weekend.
Mark Fowler sent me a Business Week article The Soul of the New Microsoft which profiles current MS star J Allard. It covers off my Vista thoughts nicely.
From the start, Vista has seemed like an anachronism–packaged software in a Web 2.0 era where ever more applications are moving off the PC and onto the Internet, some springing forth in a matter of weeks. Microsoft Chief Executive Steven A. Ballmer vows that this time-consuming process of cranking out code, which created complexity and bogged down development, will never be repeated.
The other article was forwarded to me of the NZ Web 2.0 List which covered life inside of Google isn’t as cool as you would imagine.
A key observation was (if anyone has a link I’ll credit the author Jason @ loveplum - subscribed) …
What’s far more impressive are the quickly increasing crop of small web companies (such as 37 Signals who have a little Chicago office and employees in multiple timezones/countries or Robot Co-Op who have a single room office in Seattle that consists of once large table in the center). The companies have put together < 10 person teams that make products they love and so do their users. All while everyone involved makes a better than good living with a much higher overall quality of life (both at and away from work).
This is our sweet spot. We know how to do small teams well. We have lifestyle. We understand real business problems. Putting that model together with moderate funding is where our software industry should shine.
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Joel Spolsky just wrote an interesting post (and subsequent followup that I’ve linked to) on Vista, and an ex-Microsoft employee then followed up with implementation details of what Joel was commenting on. Microsoft will definitely need to find a way of making things happen in a more fluid way, this design by committee stuff just doesn’t work.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/24.html
I’ve been running Vista RTM for the past week or so, and while it is nice (the GUI is very “pretty”), I honestly don’t understand what took five years. I still don’t see the compelling value.
It seems to me that Microsoft is lagging behind the times. More and more private software developers are releasing applications that are server based. These applications certainly don’t take five years to develop. In fact, the pace of software development is astonishng. Maybe the slow pace of Microsoft’s development is a function of its “monopoly”.