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Microsoft Blogs

A few people have commented on the recent emergence of blogs written by Microsoft people. I think this one is a particularly nice example. He's talking about somebody filing a bug complaining about the milk in the cafeteria, which is something that might happen in many development teams. But there's something about the style of writing that is particularly Microsoftie. The explanation could have come straight from The Road Ahead:

This is a particularly software-oriented joke, because it highlights how hard it is to make bugfixes in software - by applying the software testing regimen to something that isn't software. You can't assume that a simple, local change like adjusting the amount of glue applied to the carton will result in a simple, local change in the final product (a more acceptable seal strength). Software is nonlinear. A simple change can have effects (some catastrophic, some subtle) far, far away from the point of change.

Further exhibits: simplegeek.com, winethirty.com.

Following on from there, autocode writes about syntax highlighting and related editor things in Visual Studio. I was just writing about emacs, so it's kind of interesting. And in a neat circularity, prolific Microsoft/XML author Don Box knows emacs is the finest editor.

Yet further on, somebody is complaining about performance problems with his blog. Certainly a common enough topic, since blogging is probably bringing more people into running little active web applications than ever before. But here it turns out that the problem is in fact that Windows XP's web server is limited to only 10 HTTP connections, even on hardware that could probably serve thousands. This is for "business model reasons" — Microsoft wants people to run a more expensive system for web servers. There may be a time and a place for proprietary licensing, but intentionally crippling software so that your customer's customers see error messages just seems very poor.

posted Sun 21 Sep 2003 in /meta | link

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